More on MOT exemption

[Anglefire]

57 minutes ago, AidanT said:

And we would all live in cities 2 minutes from work so there would be no need for them or everywhere would have transport like central London.....hold on a minute.... oh yes of course I could cycle to work only 50 miles.... each way! By the time I got there I'd  have to start home.... who's idea was this?

Another rant over ?

Aidan 

I work from home sometimes as I can remote into the servers that I’m working on. But other times I have to go to site.  Like tomorrow when I’ll be in Enfield - about 125miles away. So not practical in an “affordable “ electric car. So I’ll be going in my gas gussling diesel polluter. Actually it will do something like 45mpg and emit almost nothing. And still could do 155mph given I could legally do so. 

[Bordfunker]

A few years back when I worked for M&S we had a head office move from Baker St to Paddington, and as proof of our green credentials there was a push to get as many people as possible either walking, cycling or using public transport.

All very plausible and laudable when you live in London and work in Paddington, not so viable for those in the IT group stuck out on a business park on the edge of Heathrow, most of whom worked outside of the M25.

So we all got an interview with the transport consultants to discuss alternative travel arrangements.

TC: Have you thought about alternate travel arrangements?

Me: No

TC: Well how about cycling?

Me: (guffaw followed by) God no!

TC: What about public transport?

Me: Definitely not!

TC: You don’t seem open to alternate arrangements!

Me: I live 55 miles away so cycling is a non-starter. I live in Oxfordshire so would need to take at least 3 trains and 2 busses, taking me at least 3 hours, or I can drive here in an hour!

TC: Oh! Carry on driving then!

Karl

[Colin Lindsay]

16 hours ago, dave.vitesse said:

I think I need a padded room!

Dave

Make sure the padding is eco-friendly and not that nasty Chinese stuff that's eroding the atmosphere... again. Just when we had the ozone layer patched over...

...and on a slightly different note: all new homes are to be legally required to have an electric car charging point when built. I thought they already had them? Just unplug the TV first... or the kettle, as the BIRO electric cars I was looking at recently have a standard 3-pin connection on the back...

[dave.vitesse]

True Colin, I understand the present capacity of the National Grid and power stations is insufficient to support the mass switch to electric vehicles.

We can't go back to using horses as they are said to produce unwanted gases.

So I guess Fred Flintstone vehicles are the way forward or was that backwards.

Dave  

[Gully]

8 hours ago, Colin Lindsay said:

Make sure the padding is eco-friendly and not that nasty Chinese stuff that's eroding the atmosphere... again. Just when we had the ozone layer patched over...

...and on a slightly different note: all new homes are to be legally required to have an electric car charging point when built. I thought they already had them? Just unplug the TV first... or the kettle, as the BIRO electric cars I was looking at recently have a standard 3-pin connection on the back...

Depends on how rapidly you want / need to charge the vehicle. One of the developments I worked on recently had a requirement for bollard-based chargers (no allocated parking) - depending on the speed of the charging points, we either needed to spend £100k on a new substation, or not. The slower charge points were decided upon by our client...

Gully

[Anglefire]

Slow charging points have there advantages - batteries will last longer, but doesn't solve the problem of time to get going again.

The whole EV thing is a bit of an unknown in my view - the whole life cycle environmental cost I don't think has been addressed properly. 

Having said that, my next car will mostly likely be hybrid. ?

[dave.vitesse]

Yes, slow charge and not everybody charging at the same time - Diversification was the term/policy used for most service based supply system to keep the cost of plant down. The dread was advert time in the winter.

The cost of disposing of the batteries has also to be factored in to the whole life costs of any electric based vehicle. Though I guess hybrid will be the way to go in the future.

Dave  

[Anglefire]

 The new 18th edition regs bring in raft of questions to think about when it comes to EV charging- mostly around earthing. A mindfield by the sounds of it. 

[ShaunW]

The greenest thing you can do is to drive an old car. The environmental cost of producing even the 'greenest' new car is vast compared to the ongoing inefficiency of running the old one. 

EV and hybrid drivers need to look at the amount of rare earth metals they're sat on and energy it took to make it, let alone the acres of fish strangling plastic. 

Without doubt we, ladies and gentlemen, are a shining example of environmental mindfulness and recycling. Make do and mend eh? Come and visit any of our garages. 

 

 

[mpbarrett]

we have recently sold our old Rover 75 diesel and brought a Golf GTE. This is a hybrid with a range of ~30miles. 
If we use around town or locally we do so mostly on battery power. I set it up to charge over night but as the weather has been so sunny been charging in day time from our solar panels.
Great car nice combination of motive technology and very very quick! Range is optimistic, if you put the A/C on the range drops by 4miles!

The technology is amazing, in hybrid mode you cant tell when it is starting and stopping the petrol engine. In GTE mode it uses everything and goes like any Golf GTI.

Is it the future? probably but there are problems. We can charge it in our drive but the rest of our road the cars all park in the road, so that's lots of extension cables! And all you are doing is moving the pollution from the car to the power station (and yes there is a real problem whether there is enough capacity in the system to recharge lots of cars..).
I cant believe the car will last more than5 years as there is so much technology in it will become impossible to maintain it (electronics become obsolete very quickly).
So you can have a fun hybrid car but from an overall environmental lifetime pollution  point of view it  does not make sense.

mike

[dave.vitesse]

I agree Mike, the lack of hardware and software support as technology moves on will limit the life of vehicles. This is starting to effect the 1980/90's cars.

Bring back steam!

Dave  

[Anglefire]

Not more so as proven by the recent grounding of the last flying Vulcan bomber due to both a lack of usable engines and the electronics being hard to maintain. (And costly) whereas you still have the likes of WW1 and WW2 aircraft flying with no sign of that changing anytime soon.

As will be proven no doubt this afternoon when they celebrate 100years of the RAF with a flypast!

[dave.vitesse]

At the Greenham Air Show in 1983 a Vulcan do a barrel roll. An American next to me said "Gee if we did that with a B52 the wings would fall off"

The Victor was also there and looked like something from outer space. Fantastic aircraft.

Dave 

[Anglefire]

I remember seeing the Vulcan when I was a kid at an airshow and it was so loud it was untrue - probably did the roll too - I just don't remember!

I was also fortunate to see it fly at RAIT in the last few it did before retiring. The best pictures I took of it probably in 2012 before they really turned it down. https://www.mark.colston-online.co.uk/Days Out/RIAT 2012/index.html

 

 

[Colin Lindsay]

22 hours ago, Anglefire said:

The whole EV thing is a bit of an unknown in my view - the whole life cycle environmental cost I don't think has been addressed properly. 

Early days in this technology to be rushing it in as the next big thing especially if you're banning all other forms of transport and hoping that a solution will be found before 2040. Remember Space 1999? THAT was set 19 years ago... and was a supposed vision of the future twenty-odd years on from when it was made. Is this what the EV camp are hoping for - a future with matter-transmission or some amazing new form of drive that will make cars obsolete before we need to really worry, but by bringing in these daft ideas now they can be seen as trendy and caring, even if it never becomes a reality?

Anyway, as it's chronic overcrowding that cause many of our pollution problems, perhaps the idea is that if, in a few years time, it's standing room only in the UK - there won't be any room to drive...

 

[dave.vitesse]

Colin, Matter-transmission could end up with even more headless chickens.?

Dave 

[Colin Lindsay]

Watch 'The Fly'.... I think she lives down our road already....

 

[Colin Lindsay]

Just been watching the dreary "Classic Car Show" with Quentin Wilson, where Jennifer Saunders drives the Fiat 500... and all she kept repeating was: "If only it was electric... if only they'd make it electric..." If they'd bin her everyday-drive Range Rover you could put ten Fiat 500s on the road and still have less pollution...

[ShaunW]

It's 'greener' to drive a 2nd hand range rover than it is to drive a brand new fiat 500 especially if like us you only do about 5000 miles a year. 

It's the whole manufacturing process that's the problem. Everything from the mining and refining of materials for the vehicle to turning a tree in Canada into a leaflet to sit in the dealers showroom. 

 

[dave.vitesse]

The first practical electric car was around 1890. The oil propelled car was at the time more promising, this was mainly because of the limited amount of power that could be stored in the batteries. Not a lot has changed.

I can remember the trolley buses in a number of towns. An electric bus powered from overhead lines. They were clean, with a smooth drive and quite. A lot better than the noisy smelly diesel buses that replaced them. The extra cost of maintaining the overhead lines was offset by the lower costs maintaining an electric power bus.

We need Colin's  Matter-transmission, but don't watch the fly film.

Dave

[NonMember]

19 minutes ago, dave.vitesse said:

I can remember the trolley buses in a number of towns. An electric bus powered from overhead lines. They were clean, with a smooth drive and quite.

Last year, we visited San Franciso and Seattle. Both cities have a mix of public transport.

SF has the famous cable cars, where all the motive power is in the central building and the "driver" (technically the "brake man") operates a lever that grabs the big loop of moving cable. Ingenious and superb on the steep hills but lacks some flexibility!

Both cities have diesel buses, and hybrid ones.

Both cities also have electric trams, on rails.

Both cities also have electric trolley buses, built this century. The principle is still sound and more environmentally friendly than battery-based systems.

[dougbgt6]

23 hours ago, ShaunW said:

It's 'greener' to drive a 2nd hand range rover than it is to drive a brand new fiat 500

Yes, much. I first heard the blues singer Seasick Steve say this. He drives a 9th hand 5 litre gas guzzler, but it's economically cheaper than a brand new eco friendly electric. And how is the electric being generated, exactly? 

Doug

[rlubikey]

Well Doug, at least we have the option to generate electricity in a low/zero-carbon way.

Based on what we know at the moment, battery technology will never approach the energy density of fossil fuels. Lithium I think is about 300 Watt-hours/litre, whereas petrol is 13 killo-Watt-hours/litre. The reason for this is that the battery is a nice reversible electro-chemical process but fuel going "bang" in a cylinder is a one-way reaction! Actually, the difference in energy density isn't as bad as 40:1 because, whereas electric motors can be 80% or 90% efficient, the petrol engine is, I believe, about 35%. Put an idiot (sorry) human behind the wheel and that can drops to 20% to 25%, something like that. That's still a 10:1 difference in energy compared to batteries!

I think that hybrid cars with electric motors driving the wheels directly, run from batteries you charge when you can - over night, at work, etc. plus a fossil fuel engine running a generator to power the motors either on long runs or when you forget (sorry again) couldn't find a charger, gives us the best vehicle (that isn't a Triumph) for our future needs. The engine in such a vehicle no longer needs to be chosen for "driveability", but instead would be chosen for efficiency, such as an Atkinson-cycle or even a turbine.

Of course, we've all adjusted our life styles to take advantage of the motor car. Well, if the car as we know it is being phased out, maybe we will have to change our life styles back to something more "local", like it used to be in the horse and cart or Shanks' pony days? Maybe we'd all be much happier then? No? Oh well.

As for cars (and other things) only lasting a few years, a friend who used to be in Ford told me how much money they spent designing things *down* so they would work perfectly for just 10 years and break soon after. How many of us ask how long things are designed to last and availability of spares before making our purchasing decision? Maybe we should be doing more - a lot more - of this than we do already! "Our" cars should all be long gone by now. It's only that they are so repairable and also that we love them so much that keeps them on the road. I totally agree, by the way, that manufacturers obfuscate the carbon overhead of *making* new vehicles - far greener to keep old ones going!

That concludes today's lecture.

Cheers, Richard

[dave.vitesse]

Being born in the 1940's I support keeping old things going! Though I am not to sure if my carbon footprint is better or worse than somebody younger than me.?

Dave

[NonMember]

7 hours ago, rlubikey said:

Actually, the difference in energy density isn't as bad as 40:1 because, whereas electric motors can be 80% or 90% efficient, the petrol engine is, I believe, about 35%. Put an idiot (sorry) human behind the wheel and that can drops to 20% to 25%, something like that.

The 80% claim for electric motors is a bit "ideal world" and not really representative, while modern diesel or GDI petrol engines can achieve rather more than 35%. Also, the electric system suffers much poorer transmission efficiency at medium load. The real benefit is in traffic, where internal combustion engines drop to their worst economy zone, while electric cars are at their peak.