Or if there is a very strong tailwind.
"Two sources of power" is stretching the physics a bit. I presume they are referring to regenerative braking charging the batteries a bit when the car is going downhill. I wonder how much power is put back when going down a given steep hill compared with the power used when the car goes up the same hill.
But the chanced are that you would be driving either up north rather than down south - not both.
Always looks to me that they are saying on the one hand a petrol engine, on the other, a battery. And they go on about being able to drive it on battery power 50% of the time.
I think the 'two sources of power' thing (which I haven't seen) is because, when you put your foot down, you get power from both petrol engine and battery. That means the car accelerates faster than with a petrol engine alone. The electric motor handles parts of the torque curve where the engine is lacking, providing better responsiveness overall.
Obviously at some point the battery runs out of puff and you're just on the petrol engine and, there being no other sources of energy, that engine has to recharge the battery (either while braking or gradually while driving along).
That's why I'd class non-plugin hybrids as just a different kind of automatic transmission. They're just petrol cars, but ones that deliver power differently across the driving range.
Theo
The people who charge electric cars at public charging points, yes. Just like the people who fill up petrol cars pay for petrol stations, calibration of fuel pumps, mitigating forecourt fuel spills, etc.
It needs people to change their mindset, along with a working charging infrastructure (which they have in other countries but not here, evidently).
Cite for when that happened?
Theo
The vast majority of car trips are well within the 100 mile range, ie the 10 miles shopping or 30 mile communte (round trips). Coronavirus may affect that, when all you are doing is shuffling (electronic) bits of paper that, as has been shown, can be done from home.
What has this got to do with LA's? It's critical national infrastructure.
Is that 11,600 public charging points in total or 11,600 from InstaVolt?
There are about 8,400 petrol stations (average 6 pumps/station? ~
50,000 pumps) in the UK so 11,600 public charge points isn't good. How many fast chargers would be required to replace a single supermarket forecourt?Say 8 fuel pumps on an average forecourt. For a lot of the day there is a queue so 8 pumps working. Say 10 mins per car = 6 per hour per pump. 8 pumps = 48 "fillups" per hour. This is the capacity required. If it takes an hour to charge a car you need 48 fast chargers. Each one pulling say 100 kW from the grid, so the incomer needs to be capable of 4.8 MW. 4.8 MW @ 11 kV = 436 A ...!
Ah the beauty of the free market. The wonderful things about standards is there are so many to choose from.
13p/mile "fuel". My not exactly frugal (37.7 mpg long term average) diesel costs 14p/mile for the diesel. OK, *at the moment* electricity at home is about half the cost of that fast public charger but for how long? Not only is the VAT on domestic fuel only 5% instead of 20%, there is no fuel duty which contributes *HUGE* amounts of money to the treasury. Either *everyone*, from old Mrs Miggens up pays considerablly more for their domestic electricity or some other means of raising revenue from car use has to be found.Except we are out of Europe in just over 30 days time.
"Out of date" HTF can that happen? The thing must have some form of 'net connection for validation of payment, be that for DC, CC or operators own method. If the thing can't supply a charge it must "know" that so WTF can't it phone home and say so? Net connection down? Well that can be covered by "home" asking for a status report every hour, one failure raises a warning flag, two and it's marked as "non-functional" and a technician is summoned to go and fix it.
The government seems to dump on LAs the responsibility for things it doesn't really care about.
Road pricing is coming...
Which will make not one jot of difference. We're hardly going to be fitting different charging sockets just because we can. Cars are not designed specifically for the UK market. It would be a nightmare for anyone who took their car on a ferry anyway, let alone people who have the temerity to drive across the Irish border.
I think some of them aren't very well connected. For example, a pub installs a charging point for their customers. It's just an EVSE hooked off the regular CU. It's either free to use, or a 'pay at the bar' type arrangement. Something trips, the bar staff don't know how to reset it, and of course you've already driven there.
I imagine the fast chargers are better in this respect. But it still doesn't cover the situation where you search for a working charger, start driving to it, and then it locks itself out before you get there.
There can also be issues where the charger can't successfully negotiate with your car. Charger thinks it's working, car thinks it's working, they just can't talk - which you only find out when you get there. It seems like some of the networks are not well engineered in that respect:
No, we are out of the CU and SM. Were already out of the EU (not Europe).
Well quite. Just as petrol pump nozzles are standardised too.
I had an experience where the charger wasn't working and when phoning the help line was told the system was unable to make a connection to that particular station. S*it happens
Which is fine if the nearby ones are working. But when 90% of them aren't and not reliably indicating that on some "app"...
But evidently not very well.
Car has a range of 250 miles. They charged it at home. They did 130 miles there. They did N miles doing whatever they did when they got there. They needed to do 130 miles to get home. Hence they needed to charge.
Which is what they tried to do on their return journey.
Theo
OK, my mistake. However, I would certainly make sure that there was somewhere to charge my electric vehicle if I were to embark on such an epic excursion. One has to be awestruck by the vast distances that can be traversed by electric cars available today. Certainly superior to horses.
but in the case of most uses,
that's electric from the battery that they have charged up from the ICE
So no improvement in emissions whatsoever
That's why they are also scheduled to be banned
but why are these things breaking in the first place
They aren't fundamentally difficult technology
and why are they out of use for the weeks reported in the article. It should be possible to diagnose errors remotely and schedule a man to fix them within a small number of days
at least you can still get home if your electric bike runs out of juice
One has to be awestruck at how small the range of electric cars is (with a many-hours delay to recharge again) compared with the far superior range and rapid "recharge" time of a petrol or diesel car. And I don't see how the recharge time can be improved much, given the power needed to add the necessary range within a similar time to that taken to refuel a petrol car.
You have to change your lifestyle dramatically to factor in long recharge stops.
Chargers aren't currently everywhere. It's quite likely whatever their destination was, it didn't have a charger within walking distance. Given that you take a trip somewhere for a reason, you go to whatever it is you're doing - you don't instead go to spend the day in Bournemouth Starbucks so you can recharge for the trip back.
Just like a driver of a petrol car would.
Theo
so you check up first, find out what your options are, and work around them
Buying an electric car inevitably leads you down a path of having to think differently
not doing so is just dumb
I do. but its a total infrastructure overhaul and a new generation of
0-full charge in 5 minutes batteries. It is feasible, but look at what is involved...even for a family car thats 12 times the capacity in terms of peak charge power. So an 80kwh battery needs a megawatt for 5 minutes. a big service station on a motorway probably needs 20 charging points so that is a peak capacity of 20MW.Requiring a pretty hefty substation and overhead wires, which will be idle at 3 a m ...
It will happen, partially, I think· My early cars had 200 mile range - its a nuisance but not too bad. waiting an hour to fill the tank is not really on. And you still need just as much power in te service staion, but spread not over 20 charge points but over 200...
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