The message from Roland Perry contains these words:
Can't see how you get Stranraer on the line. AFAICT the half way point is somewhere near the centre of the Isle of Man and a more careful check of the split than my first attempt puts the land element at 250, my line going overland in Cornwall (marginal), Pembroke (St David's head) and IOM.
In message , at 21:08:07 on Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Roger remarked:
It's the nearest big town to the landfall in western Scotland, north of the Isle of Man.
Middle of Minnesota (moved out here from Cambridge area late last year, hence the cam.misc connection). I'm never quite sure whether to say where 'here' is or wheter regulars know - maybe I should stuff that in a message sig or something :-)
cheers
Jules
Jules gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
I'm not reading this in cam.misc...
OK so...
That isn't the power train dying, not with 30,000 on the clock.
Andy
Not really.
You can use a pretty large cross sectional area.
The packs don't need THAT much cooling anyway.
Worst case would be toiling up a long hill.
There tends to be an exponenential decay to scrap value, with the percentage rates falling in the first few years much more: this is particularly true of certain makes where the luxury element is high. Jaguars are particularly fierce.
I suppose if you want a Jag, and can afford the maintenance and tax and fuel, you can afford a new one.
Still the scrap value of a 3 year old BEV with a still usable battery would be much higher if the battery could be slotted into someone else's high mileage one that needed it.
In message , at 02:42:30 on Fri, 6 Jun 2008, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
Perhaps someone will find a way to make them look pretty
Not while charging?
No doubt going slowly so reduced ram air available so cooling fans required, yet more drain on the battery...
In message , at 02:47:14 on Fri, 6 Jun 2008, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
That's complete nonsense. Just look at all the old Range Rovers that people can afford to run, and yet could never afford to buy new.
Given the lack of interchangeability of laptop batteries, I wouldn't hold out much hope for car manufacturers making it easy to mix and match. And they'd be losing valuable revenue from forcing people to buy new batteries.
You're probably right, but it's a shame. If they could, and could make it a quick automated process to swap the battery pack out, you wouldn't have any of this hassle of installing lots of places to plug cars in, or any of the range issues.
You'd just have to replace existing petrol filling stations with swap-the-battery-pack stations. They'd take your flat batteries out, install a fully charged set, charge the flat ones and put them in another car later in the day. The manufacturer would own the batteries, so it doesn't matter to you whether you get ones that are brand new or a year or two old, you'd just be billed for the usable electricity they contain plus a little to cover the cost of replacing them as they wear out. Site the battery replacing stations next to a substation and a lot of the local grid problems go away too. Given enough space and enough batteries they could be charged at times of low demand, making the grid suppliers' jobs easier. It has lots of advantages, but two big "ifs" I mentioned at the start.
For early adopters, before the network of battery replacing stations is wide enough to be useful, you'd still need to be able to plug in to recharge, but given the far fewer numbers of early adopters this should be an easier problem to engineer a solution to. I.e. you wouldn't need every space in the car park with a socket; you wouldn't need to upgrade the local grid as only a few houses would be overnight charging their cars.
Kieran
It's a nice idea *but*, how many cars (with a range of at least 300 miles) fill up at any one petrol station every day? Now consider how many battery packs you'd need given the smaller range and charging time. I think you'd need a huge amount of space for storing battery packs. I suspect that because of this, home charging will be the main method.
Tim
The message from Roland Perry contains these words:
Depends what you mean by big. Wigtown and Kirkcudbright are both much closer.
The line from Lands End to Stranraer doesn't pass over any land at all and the line through Stranraer and Elgin doesn't doesn't meet any land again until Norway or Ireland at the closest or just possibly much further afield. (I don't have a globe to play with so can't be sure whether it is a glancing blow or a complete miss where Ireland and Norway are concerned).
Roland Perry gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
Not even just Range-Rovers. I'm driving an 18yo Saab 900, properly maintained - to the point where the car's actually being improved rapidly since I bought it.
Could I afford a new 9-3? No. Would I _want_ a new 9-3? No.
In message , at
09:52:49 >Duracell launched some "universal" rechargeable batteries for laptops in the mid-90's, but no manufacturers built machines to take them (afaict).
The Calor Gas business model.
In message , at 10:13:40 on Fri, 6 Jun 2008, Tim Downie remarked:
A good point. Whenever there's a whiff of a petrol shortage, people who wouldn't normally fill their car up crawl out of the woodwork. Enough to cause huge queues. Now imagine people filling up daily.
In message , at 10:14:09 on Fri, 6 Jun 2008, Roger remarked:
Big enough to be marked on the Atlas that I was using.
You are making an issue where none exists. The directions are not for a pilot who needs to fly the course with only my usenet posting to go on. It's to describe roughly which part of Scotland is involved (ie not Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen etc)
range rover has utility beyind luxury.
They'd be losing even mor erevenue if no one bought the cars.
You keep coming up wit ridiculou asertions.
Who is goiung to SEE them?
When was the last time you drove along saying 'what an ugly air intake that car has got?
Yet all cats have them.
They don't need cooling while charging.
A fan has always been part of the equation. I suppose it might use as much as 100W..slightly less than .1% of the cars output power.
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