not round ere no
The end house in each row has a garage.
Some other houses have an allocated space round the back in some communal parking area.
The rest of us, including all flat occupiers (me) park on the street (in marked unallocated spaces)
tim
Or till we actually build more nukes or find a genuinely green way of generating electricity (not the bogus green 'solutions' we have now that are neither green (create more pollution than they will ever save) nor solutions (can't be relied on 24/7), all they will actually do is move the pollution away from the kerbside but may actually be creating more of it overall (transmission / conversion / storage losses).
So, as and when we are able (as in do, not just talk about) to actually collect energy in a truly green way and more of it than we can use in industry and then our homes, maybe then we will be ready to use it in electric vehicles and it really will be a real 'solution', not just creating another problem.
This is coming from someone who has probably had a road going plug-in EV longer than anyone here.
Cheers, T i m
no disability considerations here
tim
The problem with council supplied charging points is that some pillock parks to charge and then walks off and leaves his car there using it as a free parking spot. or more egregriously, non electric vehicles clog them
That assumes that you won't want to travel more than 250 miles in a day or that the place where you stop for lunch (which may be a country layby) will have recharging facilities. If you stop in a motorway service station, you'll probably be fine, but not if you stop somewhere more scenic - or if you want to do the whole journey in one go. I've driven from Southampton to York in one go, and wouldn't want to have to stop for longer than a loo break in a service station. I certainly wouldn't want to have to go out of my way to find somewhere for a long stop. Nor would I want get stranded anywhere by letting the charge get too depleted - it's not like walking to the nearest garage for a can of fuel and then being on my way again.
Ah, I think you might be onto something there ... if you already have an electric car but you need to go further than the batteries will allow, I had this crazy idea of suspending voltage carrying wires over the motorway and have some sort of device that allows your car to make contact with the wire (let's call it a 'pantograph') and then you could go as far as you like. ;-)
To make it safer and more automated we could run the cars on guides (let's call them 'rails'), maybe grouping them together in a chain (we could call that a 'train').
Joking aside, an inter-city Roll On Roll Off service that was quick to load and unload (and with charging en-route?) and cheaper than driving directly might do it for many?
Cheers, T i m
Good thinking!
Two charging points, and free parking surrounding them. Obviously only works at the minute because there is only one electric vehicle in the village :-)
Owain
Whenever I go London to Newcastle (I actually live on the other side of the Dartford crossing), I expect to do that in one go.
300 miles, 5 hours driving, I see no normal need for more than a 10 minute loo/refill [1] break and I would consist anything else an unreasonable imposition.Under real world conditions - 4 up, extra power usage: high speed driving, uphill, for lights and heating, would need a quoted range of 400 miles (which will be based on one occupant, low sped driving) to do that.
any range less than that is useless as a utilitarian car IMHO.
tim
[1] I can make the trip on a full tank, but that assume that the car sits on my drive full the day before, often it wont have
Similar around here, though the hybrids haven't been replaced. NXWM has a couple of them on fleet, but all the latest buses are diesel with stop-start. The logic of the stop-start seems a bit odd: it kills the engine at every bus stop, no matter how short- it seems to be linked to the doors- but the bus can sit in traffic or at traffic lights for several minutes idling.
I'd have thought a hybrid drivetrain would work very well on an urban bus with lots of stops, myself.
They tend not to use the same starter motor system as the non stop start cars. The only one I have driven didn't have a starter motor at all! It used a modified alternator that could start the car. It means there is no gear to engage and disengage each time you start the engine. They should wear less and have less parts but that may not make them more reliable (or cheaper!).
Chris Bartram formulated on Thursday :
I didn't notice that, I will pay more attention next time.
I agree, it seemed a very sensible system, but they must have had their reasons. The hybrid then its newer replacement, seem to be the only ones I have seen around here - odd we keep getting the latest new buses, the other routes seem to have the much older buses, with other companies running some really old ones.
a few months ago, I went on one of the new London buses. Single deck , no engine sounds at all, so possibly battery powered. Each seat had a USB charge point in front of it - or parhaps it was a data sucker?
So you don't actually do it in one go? If you stop for a loo break/ re-fuel, etc recharging in not that much longer may well be possible in the future.
The range you get with any car depends on how it is loaded/driven.
Plenty cars around that don't have a 400 mile range.
You may not have noticed, but lots of filling stations have closed in the past few years.
Rather obviously, an electric vehicle depends on being able to re-fuel just as easily as a petrol or diesel. And that may well come to be.
dennis@home explained on 27/07/2017 :
I got a feeling that the hybrid, when it started the engine as it went
1st to 2nd gear, might have used the speed of the bus to start itself rather than use the starter motor. Remember it used electric to pull away in 1st gear, upto the point of engaging 2nd gear.The engine also always stopped when the bus came to a stop, even if it was just a traffic stop. The engine would only seem to start when not moving, I assume when it needed to keep the batteries topped up.
York got some battery-electric (not hybrid) single decker buses on its Park and Ride routes (and maybe elsewhere). They are quiet and have tremendous acceleration from rest, but I wouldn't describe them as "no engine sounds" because there is the characteristic rising tone which drops back and then rises again as the electronics supplies a varying frequency to the induction motors and switches different windings in to play at each "gear change". The same "singing" can be heard on some of the more modern (eg Class 465) electric trains - eg those that operate out of Victoria and London Bridge in London.
There are special cables available which only have +5V and ground pins connected (ie no data connection) for this sort of situation.
Yes these new stop start double deckers around here have the USB charge sockets and both the hybrid plus the new stop starts have free wifi.
True - larger and/or older petrol-engined cars. My first car, a Renault 5, had a range of about 300 miles, probably due to a combination of inefficient engine and small tank. It was great when I got my first diesel car and had a range of about 600 miles between fillings: a change from 33 mpg in a 1.8 petrol Golf to 50 mpg in a 1.9 diesel Pug 306.
However even cars with well below 400 mile range can still be refuelled in a couple of minutes. It's the refuelling time rather than the range which is the really killer at present with electric cars.
It may change over time, but physics imposes a limit. A petrol/diesel pump delivers fuel at about 2 MW, and it only takes a small amount of inefficiency in the charging process at that sort of power delivery rate and you are producing serious amounts of heat.
In the same vein, and picking up on Owain's suggestion of burying the cables in the road, if you arranged them properly you could create an induction loop, so with a pick-up in the car to power the motor, you'd do away with the need for batteries at all. ;-)
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