Well sort if. Perhaps your memory doesn't stretch back to the days when road vehicles - motorised road vehicles - were quite rare, and te milk train and the post express rand overnight on the steam railways to get stuff to where it was needed in the mornings, and the coal train delivered coal to your local station, which is where the coal sales were. And every village had a butcher and a baker and a grocer and a green grocer and so on, because you needed to shop fresh every day locally because no one had a car to drive to town, or a refrigerator.
we still had 100% transport availability, it just wasn't the same transport.
And there we no supermarkets of any scale, because without cars, who would get to them?
Instead we had market towns and a high street. THAT was the supermarket.
If we HAD to ditch fossil fuel cars we COULD, but we would have to get used to a different way of travelling. And indeed living.
I suspect we would live at home, work at home and get stuff delivered to home, and not commute or make big journeys, and those would be via hired staged driverless vehicle - ring up 'jeeves' and order a car to go to Aberdeen - no problem. Car turns up, travels to depot, gets battery exchanged, travels to trains station, gets loaded on to car-train, where it gets charged as it whizzes up a 500 miles at high speed, car trundles off at other end, and you stop watching telly, and realise you are now in fact not off the edge of the world, but merely in Scotland...and it just feels that way.
Supermarkets now either dead or integrated with railway stations and driverless car depots.
*shrug* the Victorians would be gob-smacked at the way we live now. No doubt we would be gob-smacked if we correctly second guessed the way economics will drive society, if or when fossil fuel gets too expensive to waste on just burning it for fuel.
There are many many ways in which all electric transport could be made to work, but none are currently remotely competitive with a fuel car, unless heavily subsidised, and even then they have severe disadvantages.
But then the same can be true of many things. It is an inherent fact of systems in a relatively free economy that choices tend to be almost binary. The moment cars were more cost effective than horses, horses vanished in only about 20 years at the most.
Coal powered railways destroyed the canals in a similar timescale.
The jet engine replaced piston engines for aircraft in probably less than 15 years.
In every case not completely, but in such a large majority of cases it became the 'standard'.
At a given point fossil fuel will start to get so scarce that the cost of a lovely ubiquitous car will exceed the cost of renting or hiring a driverless electric car, and people will just stop buying fuel cars.
Or maybe the Internet and robotics and virtual reality will be so advanced we don't need to travel anywhere, just log into work from our bedrooms...
I am sure a Victorian would ask us 'why we need to get to Aberdeen in a day in our own vehicle?' They didn't. The world did not stop.
New technology is disruptive. Always. the history of industrial society is the replacement of whole ways of life with new ways of life. I dont think our car owning road based lifestyle will last another hundred years.
On my particular car (Mitsubishi I-MIEV) the regen is adjustable by means of a lever. This is for hilly. town or open road driving. The regen slows the car and puts power backin to the battery. In practice, if you have the right lever position you never need touch the brakes except for completely stopping. Lifting off the pedal progressively slows the car by regenerative braking.
So I reckonI will never have to change the brake pads, they awere barely bedded in after 10.000 miles
The electric traction/control system part of the car is wonderful. The from rest acceleration is excellent, few car can keep up with it.
It's a pretty shit handling car and I dislike the electric power steering. The interior is cheap and nasty. Is has a very nice radio. Very manouverable in confined spaces. Not a car for motorways.
I'm guessing we (the tax payers?) gave you the full five thousand pounds towards it's (£25+k) purchase (along with paying for the electricity you use in it of course)?
I expect we paid for or towards your home charging point as well (75% / £900)? ;-)
Where you might have some gravity induced, stop start or higher speed deceleration to take advantage (although I don't suppose the stop-start bit does much).
I know. ;-)
Ok.
You just mean 'lifting off', not 'lifting up past the std up position'? So is there a dead band when you apply the accelerator that would be the regen part (proportionally up to whatever is set on the other lever)?
Ok.
Having no gears and loads of torque low down, so it should be.
Even my Moke was pretty quick off the mark if you wanted (at the cost of some range of course).
I think the focus would have been 'making it run the best they can for a shopping car'. There are electric sport and even racing cars of course.
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Or even electric dragster motorbikes:
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Maybe cars come with that these days I think.
Shopping car.
A battery powered radio in fact. ;-)
Shopping car.
Shopping car (Not that there is anything wrong with that of course).
I did notice that both the spaces in a council operated car park that are allocated for electric cars to connect up to the charge point installed last year were both in use. Can't be too long before somebody has to wait. Then I suppose there will be calls for more charge points and allocated spaces so that will be less space for normally fuelled vehicles.
In Glasgow the parking and electricity was free until they had a problem with folk abusing the free parking and leaving their cars in the bays all day. They're now charged city centre rates for the parking but the electricity is still "free".
I think there are four charging rates offered and whilst most places could support a few 13A / 3kW points, I think many would need a supply upgrade to be able to support more than one or two of the higher level ones (~50kW).
Then that leads to an increase of demand for electricity in times when supply isn't great anyway? ;-(
e in winter. How do you heat the car up and demist windows, I should imagin e it reduces your mileage considerably if it has to done electrically? I be lieve the batteries give off some heat and perhaps some heat from the motor /s can be harvested but I cannot see it compares to using the coolant syste m in a petrol or diesel car. Heat as opposed to sound insulation might help . Is it a case of wrap up well and stick your flying helmet on?
Just got an email rgarding this. Self-heating Li-Ion battery
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