Electric vehicles - again

[Ozi]

I'm going to stick my head over the parapet one more time.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/video/is-the-world-ready-for-tiny-evs/vi-AASvYE9
Step by step these get more practical, 80 mph and 100 mile range single seat transport on a motorbike license with some of the creature comforts of a car, charges from a 13amp socket. If solid state batteries come along we are getting close to the point where if you need to charge up it will take less time than filling a petrol tank, although not at 13amps. Only 60 sold so far but give them some incentives like free parking at the station car park, zero congestion charge etc. Tax transport by weight (damage to roads), give employers tax breaks if employees can charge at work and who knows. For those like me who commute <20miles each way and have a driveway, charge 3 times a week on cheep rate power. Not for everybody I realize but this and a small family car with the option to hire a hydrogen powered van when I need one and I might never buy petrol again.

 

[heimlaga]

The problem is still that the lifespan of all car batteries is very short. Around 6 years they say.
A car that is affordable for an ordinary worker is normally quite a bit older than that. New batteries are generally nor affordable.
This means that a commoner's electric car will be powered by a Perkins P4.212 out of a scrapped combine harvester mounted onto a purpose built trailer with it's adjoining home built generator feeding the towing car with electricity through a cable.
Electric cars are uncomplicated and don't emit carbon dioxide...... so they say.

This super lightweight car has the adwantage that is can be powered by a Perkins P4.107 which uses a good bit less fuel than the larger P4.212. The rest is the same.

 

[GweithdyDU]

The problem is still that the lifespan of all car batteries is very short. Around 6 years they say.
A car that is affordable for an ordinary worker is normally quite a bit older than that. New batteries are generally nor affordable.
This means that a commoner's electric car will be powered by a Perkins P4.212 out of a scrapped combine harvester mounted onto a purpose built trailer with it's adjoining home built generator feeding the towing car with electricity through a cable.
Electric cars are uncomplicated and don't emit carbon dioxide...... so they say.

This super lightweight car has the adwantage that is can be powered by a Perkins P4.107 which uses a good bit less fuel than the larger P4.212. The rest is the same.

Well laugh! That is such a comical, and likely prophetic image and had me guffawing for ages.

Not only that, but we'll be running said Perkins on recycled/re-purposed animal fat!!

I'm not anti-change, it has to happen and happen soon but the point is well made. I fear that 'the system' is slowly but surely binding me and us all to it more and more as tech moves on. I'm not even anti-system and am a proud public-sector worker and volunteer but I want the ability to not have to be rich, or even well-off, to survive. I can currently run my 300-pound small car that runs on LPG (low-carbon and great MPG) and emits less carbon than a brand-new petrol car, but just don't see how that kind of motoring will survive in the 'battery-age'. I don't have the kind of regular income that could commit to a 'plan' or 'agreement' for batteries and live in a rural area so I'll be stuffed. Something will happen hopefully!

 

[heimlaga]

For running on animal fat I rekon a hot bulb engine will be more appropriate. The problem being that hot bulb engines and spare parts for them are in short supply theese days and that unlike the aforementioned Perkins diesels few hot bulb engines have reliable governors.

Woodgas would be another option. A modern downdraft wood gasifyer can be home built and the common VolvoB20 engine has been proven to run well on woodgas though at only about half it's rated horsepowers. Unfortunately this motor also lacks a governor. Another problem being that motorways must be equipped with a standstill lane where electic cars can stop any time to clear out blockages and rake out ash from the wood gasifiers that feed the combustion engines that power the generators that feed the electric motors.

 

[Doris]

The problem is still that the lifespan of all car batteries is very short. Around 6 years they say.

My Toyota hybrid is 6 years old and the batteries are still going strong according to my mechanic

 

[Cabinetman]

We seem to be going round in circles here, this one has a roof as well as two! seats.

 

[chris.s]

$18,500*

I like it but a bit pricy as a cheapskate I'm on the list for first go with the Citroën Ami, as a quadracycle limited performance and range but it will tow easily behind my dirty diesel Rapido MH and save on having to purchase an invalid buggy in the coming years.

.

 

[Geoff_S]

My Toyota hybrid is 6 years old and the batteries are still going strong according to my mechanic

New batteries then, according to the "they sayers".

 

[Ozi]

This area of engineering is developing faster than people realize, six year battery life was a thing, currently we are looking at ten and that's not the end of the battery they can be reconditioned and or repurposed. Most of us on this site will remember the first cordless screwdrivers, personally I rated them as utterly pointless now I think my Makita is probably my most used tool. The Citroen above has a top speed around 30 mph, good luck on the duel carriageway the Solo (Electramachanica - two vehicles with the same name) tops out at 80 mph with a max range of 100 miles. That's 18 months later. The costs are dropping as volumes improve. IF and it's far from a done deal solid state batteries make it to production we will be looking at double the energy density and true rapid charging. At that point fit this with two batteries and you would be able to carry them indoors to charge - good buy to much of the infrastructure issues if you had the option to charge at a station in similar time to filling with petrol or at home overnight, even keep one set on charge and swap as needed.

Electric vehicles will not do everything but for years we have run both petrol and diesel without people saying petrol's rubbish it's no good for lorries. Volvo published a paper recently that attracted huge criticism from people who missed the point comparing the full life emissions of petrol, hybrid and full electric cars. 70,000 km to brake even on CO2! NOT because the car has an intrinsic problem. Their point was we in the automotive industry cannot solve this problem alone. They were using European average electricity generation. Poland and Germany still burn huge amounts of coal, smelt the aluminum with hydro, generate the power to charge the car in the UK or better still France and you can halve that figure.

The Toyota mentioned above is a self charging hybrid with a 177 volt battery charged from the engine and by recovering braking energy, it's batteries last so well because the management system looks after them, charges them at the correct time and rate, they will probably out last the car. By charging from the engine you can keep the engine running at it's most efficient power output for more of the time which more than makes up for the inefficiency of charging then discharging. The battery is small enough to fit under the back seat. As soon as we get to the point where small vehicles like the solo can run on a pare of batteries that weigh the same each as a bag of shopping smart charging becomes a possibility for fully electric vehicles and on one will be talking about battery life.

 

[chris.s]

Agree with Ozi about the batteries and also with the way they are managed I have a couple of e-bikes both with Bosch drives because when you see what is in a Bosch battery in the way of management electronics you can believe their claim that they should last 9 years and never had a problem with them as before purchasing the second Bosch e-bike a cheaper AEG/Samson system e-bike was replaced and that replacement returned as both devolped faults almost instantly.
Not planning on using an Ami on dual carriageways as none near me but as I've seen the french use quadracycles in rural districts it's worth a test drive to see how they cope will country lanes and hills. years ago had my name down as interested in a Cree SAM but looks like mass production never got going. Cree SAM - Wikipedia

 

[Ozi]

Agree with Ozi about the batteries and also with the way they are managed I have a couple of e-bikes both with Bosch drives because when you see what is in a Bosch battery in the way of management electronics you can believe their claim that they should last 9 years and never had a problem with them as before purchasing the second Bosch e-bike a cheaper AEG/Samson system e-bike was replaced and that replacement returned as both devolped faults almost instantly.
Not planning on using an Ami on dual carriageways as none near me but as I've seen the french use quadracycles in rural districts it's worth a test drive to see how they cope will country lanes and hills. years ago had my name down as interested in a Cree SAM but looks like mass production never got going. Cree SAM - WikipediaView attachment 126375

Interesting little vehicle (looks remarkably like a grasshopper from the front), probably killed by the batteries of the day and massive cost of low volume production. We desperately need incentives to get things like this into general use and bring the costs down to where the average person can not only afford them but saves money in the process. It's a bit like seat belts, everyone knew they should use them but usage hovered around 10 - 15% because we all know we are good drivers and other people have accidents, a fifty pound fine people believed in and usage reach 90%, massive cut to death and serious injury on the roads.

People are going to hate this idea but if all new drivers were limited to vehicles with 2 seats and performance like the car I started this thread with we would soon have low cost minimalist vehicles on the roads. I don't like laws that are inflexible, if it was down to me rules like that would be the basic assumption but people would be able to apply for exemptions, ie. young mum with two kids needs a four seater. Same principle all new houses should be assumed to have some form of renewable energy supply and rain water harvesting, there will be instances where that doesn't make sense, if your roof is in shadow or the local infrastructure cannot cope with the added generation the builder should be able to apply for an exemption license.

Can I ask what e-bikes you have.

 

[Spectric]

That Citroen Ami looks like it has it's origins with postman Pat's van and Noddys car, but looks more asian than french. The near future will be hybrids, if it is the way Toyota are going then they realise batteries are still not yet good enough. Long term there will be far less personal transport in the way of cars, public transport will become the norm and the biggest problem, that of the daily comute to work will hopefully be resolved so people in one town do not pass others coming from where they are heading to work in the town they live in. Even further ahead we will need amphibious vehicles once the sea levels rise and cut swathes through our road networks.

 

[chris.s]

Can I ask what e-bikes you have.

an Ortler Montreux from 2015 like this but with hub dynamo for lights which now feed off drive battery,
and a Lombardo Mio which has been modified with folding pedals and headstock to make it store easily in my motorhome.

 

[D_W]

My Toyota hybrid is 6 years old and the batteries are still going strong according to my mechanic

I've never heard the battery argument from someone who actually has BEVs or HEVs or PHEVs.

The battery isn't what makes the cars risky to own when they're 10 years old (as in, if you go shopping for one that's 10 years old - if you have a car already for 10 years and it works well, it's probably already done its shift), it's the whole charging system.

This was an argument against prius vehicles (which were NiMH) that never made sense. The batteries were conditioned by the car and I recall someone who sold batteries being quizzed..."of the batteries last so well, then who are you selling batteries to?"

The answer from the guy "mostly batteries damaged in accidents, not to replace batteries that stopped working". I don't think most cars can outlast batteries (including teslas - if a tesla lasts several hundred thousand miles before its battery is between 80 and 90%, I think the rest of the car will be failing more than the batteries.

 

[heimlaga]

Still with 10 or 15 years battery life there will be a problem for many of us.

My fist car was 16 years old when I took it over. I drove it for 21 years. Had to quit because the supply of spare parts is too depleted. The car itself is technically good for 10 more years of everyday use.
My new car which I recently bought is also 16 years old. I hope I can keep it running for at least 10 preferably 20 years.

The alternative to this sort of car ownership would be no car at all. Which in turn would imply no work at all. A life on benefits.
If they want me to spend more money on cars than this absolute minimum wages must rise significantly.

 

[Jameshow]

EV cars have been both high end and quite niche... When the market matures prices will fall and choice will increase.

The infrastructure needs to catch up imho for people to readily move over to ev.

However I'm concerned that the is enough power produced to supply both EV and heat pumps - all the eggs in one basket comes to mind!

 

[Doris]

I don't think most cars can outlast batteries (including teslas - if a tesla lasts several hundred thousand miles before its battery is between 80 and 90%, I think the rest of the car will be failing more than the batteries.

That's if the batteries haven't caught fire beforehand. There's a few YouTube videos floating around of them catching fire quite spectacularly

My fist car was 16 years old when I took it over. I drove it for 21 years. Had to quit because the supply of spare parts is too depleted. The car itself is technically good for 10 more years of everyday use.

This was my plan also. My previous car (also a Toyota) was 2 months away from its 21st birthday. I bought it 3 years ago as my first car and it was mechanically sound still, 80,000 miles on the clock and still going strong. I replaced a few parts (mostly fixtures like a sunroof and misty headlights) but the car itself still ran perfectly.

But then, one day in September I was asked to park it in the street while work was being done on the front of our house and my beloved car was stolen. Handbrake cable cut and winched away on a recovery truck (this was at 11am I should add and was even filmed by a neighbor on his mobile phone). The car the police told me, that I thought would go on for quite a few more years, was stolen for scrap and would probably be in bits now. The greenest thing to do I was advised was to keep the car going for as long as possible, even though it did consume more fuel, but when my car was stolen I was advised to get a self charging hybrid.

I should of added that my Toyota hybrid is 6 years old but with only 20k on the clock, but my mechanic who used to work at Toyota, assured me that it had at least 100k if not more in it. I don't drive huge miles and so I'm hoping this car will last me a lot longer than my previous one (I don't intend to park it on the street anymore)

 

[D_W]

That's if the batteries haven't caught fire beforehand. There's a few YouTube videos floating around of them catching fire quite spectacularly

That stuff is a little overbaked (the pushing of "battery cars burn!").

They do. They have fires at a lower rate than regular gasoline I/C cars per mile driven, though (about 1/10th as often. I guess it's fair to say that the average tesla is newer, but that's a rate per mile driven given by the US DOT.)

I think a lot of the fire started in internal combustion engine cars are also electrical in nature (counting fires not caused by accidents). I've had about an average of one recall per car in the US replacing switches or controllers identified as fire sources or potential fire sources.

 

[clogs]

said it before...
to replace my TD Kombi for the equiv electric vehicle is £60,000....
not on ur nelly.....
it's done 400,000klms and has a new engine so will go a lot further.....
that is the green way to go....new cars are just to expensive in everyway...

 

[Jameshow]

said it before...
to replace my TD Kombi for the equiv electric vehicle is £60,000....
not on ur nelly.....
it's done 400,000klms and has a new engine so will go a lot further.....
that is the green way to go....new cars are just to expensive in everyway...

Would I replace our T5 transporter no way, would I replace my transit oh yea!!

The new transit EV looks really good good range and they have increased the weight to 4.25t which is great too.