Electric Cars Are A Dead End!
When you introduce any product to the general population, you must think of all the consequences.
I found these statistics on the RAC Foundation web site.
There were 33.2 million cars (81.3 per cent), 4.63 million LGVs (11.3 per cent), 0.54 million HGVs (1.3 per cent), 1.46 million motorcycles (3.6 per cent), 0.15 million buses & coaches (0.4 per cent) and 0.84 million other vehicles (2 per cent) licensed at the end of September 2022.
Could anybody please tell me how the average guy or gal, who owns one of those 33.2 million cars is going to be able to afford to replace it, find a convenient place to park and charge it and go and visit their mum in say Scunthorpe from Plymouth?
We are going down a massive dead end!
The only sensible alternative is internal combustion engines running on hydrogen, many of which could be converted from existing diesel engines.
But only a few councils have a hydrogen policy, with the biggest disgrace being London, where the Mayor’s hydrogen policy, is to ignore it and hope it will go away.London has an air quality problem, which is not helped by large numbers of HGVs in the centre.
The technology exists to convert HGVs to hydrogen and it would be possible to insist that all vehicles over a certain weight were zero-carbon. But as London has no plans for hydrogen, it can’t happen.
Vote Hydrogen for Mayor in May 2024, to improve London’s air quality.
Notes.
- To replace 33.2 million cars with electric ones would cost 1660 billion pounds, assuming each electric car costs fifty grand.
- As most electric cars are not made in the UK, what would happen to our balance of payments?
- On average an electric car needs 63 kilos of lithium for its battery, so 33.2 million will need over two million tonnes of lithium.
The Anonymous Widower 
The other issue with electric cars is that a lot of people have nowhere to put the charging point. We do not have a driveway, and we can’t convert our front garden to a drive because there is a bus stop in front of part of it, so that we can’t get a charging point installed. Neighbours who have tried to convert their front gardens to drives in our part of the road have not been allowed to. There are very few charging places in our area as well, so we can’t use a public charging place. Our daughter and her partner are in the same position.
I don’t know much about hydrogen as a fuel – would a car be able to hold a lot of it – I have a vague memory of a very old episode of Dad’s Army in which a van was converted to “gas” and there was a huge balloon-like thing, larger than the van it was on.
Liz
Comment by nosnikrapzil | March 26, 2023 |
Frankly I wouldn’t buy an EV until I was convinced that the charging infrastructure was sorted out and the connecting plugs had been harmonised, which at the moment are still in a state of flux.
I don’t know if we’re lucky but Surrey County Council are going to spend £60 million of our local taxes over the next seven years installing a mixture of 10000 kerbside standard as well as fast chargers.
This company connectedKerb have been contracted to supply and install.
https://www.connectedkerb.com/stories
Comment by fammorris | March 26, 2023 |
Forget to tell system to send me copies of comments
Comment by nosnikrapzil | March 26, 2023 |
There is an item in the news about a couple who are going to drive from North to South Poles crossing Canada through the U.S. to Tierra del Due to on on to Antarctica in an electric car. The one thing that wasn’t mentioned was where would they charge the damned thing up? In the frozen wastes of the arctic and Canada they will be lucky to get maybe 120 miles on a full charge. And, where in Central & South America will they charge it?
Another thing is the weight of electric cars. Multi-storey car parks built in the 1960’s & 70’s were designed to take the weights of typical cars, around 3/4 ton. Electric cars weigh over twice this amount so a car park full of them could suffer fractures in the concrete.
Hydrogen must be the way to proceed.
Comment by MauriceGReed | March 26, 2023 |
nosnikrapzil:
No driveway/lamppost? Charge while you do your weekly shop.
Insufficient chargers? A plug socket is easier to install than a hydrogen or petrol station.
Hydrogen car range? A non issue – hundreds of miles is very feasible.
MauriceGReed:
That they’re driving to the Poles for real is evidence your fears are unfounded.
Unless that’s something you also need to do regularly those aren’t relevant criticisms of “damned” electric cars.
Both – electric (EV) weight:
Forcing the market towards SUVs has already added way more weight to cars (and structures) than batteries would have.
Both Hydrogen and electric cars tend to be a few percent heavier than diesels, although optimised designs can be lighter
Eg Tesla Model 3 1617kg (long-range 1779kg) Vs BMW 3-series starting at 1845kg.
Comment by bbuuttlleerr | March 26, 2023 |