Surely the inland revenue wouldn't be too chuffed if the majotiry of cars were plug-in regargeables as it would seem to make tax collection a nightmare.
Much better to have convenient units of hydrogen which can be used with a fuel cell?
Just a passing thought, please edumacate me of my errors.
Not really. Easy enough to change to being taxed on road usage. You don't display a VED disc anymore because cameras pick up untaxed vehicles via their number plates. So the same idea can work out how much they're driven.
It doesn't help Tesla promoting free fill-ups. Even though the company is paying for the electricity and (hopefully) tax, it's going to change and accelerate consumer behaviour in such a way that we will need to start building proper power stations pretty soon.
Actually, if we lost about half of fossil fuelled cars to electric equivalents, would there be enough national grid power in the UK to charge them?
In London the government already tracks vehicle use by APNR cameras. Some insurance companies have tracking devices fitted to cars. There is a push to integrate accident breakdown systems inside engine managment. The future seems to be us having our purchases and usage tracked.
See that smart meter in your gas/electric cupboard?
According to National Grid each electric car adds 50% to a household's average electricity consumption. That means the local infrastructure is as much in need of upgrading as the generating capacity. They estimate the latter will have to rise from around 70GW today to 100GW by 2025 (rather than 80GW if there weren't electric cars).
00:57:18 on Thu, 23 Jun 2016, snipped-for-privacy@gowanhill.com remarked:
Those are a public relations exercise. Two charging points in a five hundred space car park is a classic example of something that doesn't scale.
I've only *ever* seen one electric car charging - be that in a car park, at a motorway services, or on in the street. A few yards away from Russell Square tube station.
How much energy (in kWhr) does an electric car typically take in when it's being charged - assuming the worst case when the battery is almost flat and the battery is charged to full capacity. In other words, how much would it cost to charge a battery on a normal household tariff.
Its around 25-50Kwh with current batteries. To get sane range it should be in the 100-200kwh.
Its easy to calculate. A litre of diesel is ~10Kwh, and the efficiency of a diesel engine is around 27%, whereas the battery electric is leasts
80%, and adding in regenerative braking, you end up with about a third as much leccy power as diesel power needed.
So a litre of diesel in output terms comes about 3Kwh
So a 30kwh battery is about 10 litres of diesel. Small range. To get the sort of 60-70 litres of diesel equivalent is around 200-250Kwh
That's the holy grail of BEV. to get a battery that will last longer than the average human being can drive in a day. that weighs less than say half a tonne, and costs less than £5000. Currently we are out by a factor of around 4 on all of that!
I did. It seemed to surprise a few 'petrol heads'. ;-)
I like the fact that he didn't push the 'green' trump card and was honest re 'burning rain forests or puppies' etc.
In an ideal world you could flatten the country and start afresh with sufficient transport infrastructure but when you try and fit it all in around old towns and following roads built by the Romans (in many cases) and railways built by Brunel when the country wasn't as busy as it is now, it's bound to be tricky.
I wonder if ... by the time the fuel runs out or we have poisoned enough of us to realise something has to change we will have really found a viable / acceptable replacement to the ICE (as considered by the majority)?
BEVS should overall use a bit less fuel in the power station than they would on the road if not electric.
And diesel is a bit more expensive than gas...
So leccys should in theory be a bit cheaper.
Using the example I worked earlier, that 3KWh = 1 litre of raid fuel, heating oil is around 30p a litre, which equates to around 10p/Kwh ignoring VAT
Actual wholesale price of fossil or nuclear electricity is around 4p.
And if we did start to use far more electricity and built gas or nukes to supply it, the distribution costs would come down in proration, so it would be cheaper overall to use leccy.
TAX of course is the largest part of the cost of road fuel.
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