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Post by steppenwolf on Feb 5, 2024 7:37:50 GMT
Apparently Paris has TRIPLED the parking charges on "SUVs" to about £15/hour. They say it's for SUVs but apparently it's for cars that are over 1.6 metric tons - which, amusingly, includes almost every BEV that I can think of (except the Ami). Even the electric Mini weighs 1.8 metric tons.
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Post by Pacifico on Feb 5, 2024 7:58:24 GMT
The weight limit for EV's is 2 tonnes - all other vehicles it's 1.6. At 2 tonnes it rules out the larger EV's like the Audi and BMW. So the effect is to reduce demand for cars produced in Europe and increase demand for cheap, small lightweight cars made in China. Way to go!..  |
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Post by Pacifico on Feb 6, 2024 7:51:06 GMT
Concerted effort in today's papers to demand more subsidies for EV's to combat the stalling sales - they even want second hand EV's subsidised by the taxpayer.
Is there no end to the demands for extra taxation to support this unwanted technology?
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Post by Dan Dare on Feb 6, 2024 14:26:30 GMT
With the exception of two large multi-passengers vans, all BEVs produced by Citroen/DS, Peugeot/Opel and Renault/Dacia have empty weights well under two tonnes.
As does the Mini-Cooper SEe which weighs in at 1440 kg.
Source: Autokauf.de
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 6, 2024 15:03:42 GMT
I had a genius solution to this intermittent energy problem. It's so bloody simple I can't believe anyone has not thought of it. There are 40 million licensed cars in the UK. Now lets suppose when you park your car and leave it, you plug it in. At any one time there will be a the equivalent of a giant battery which if every car which was in use but not currently being driven say, 30 million times about 50kWh of capacity. That is a whopping amount of storage, so the idea is the cable keep the battery almost topped up, but in times of peak demand it takes a bit of energy from every battery plugged in, which would only be a small percentage if it is on that scale. Not only is this capacity free, but it is highly distributed, so gets power to where it is used, as per an intelligent grid network. It's called V2G BvL and even the govt thought of that many years ago. I'm not sure everyone will like their car batteries being used to fill in for energy shortfalls of the grid but even if they did it will require massive updating of the Grid. And the problem with renewables is "Intermittency" as many people have said. But I don't know quite how often this problem has to be pointed out before the greens understand it. It CANNOT be relied on. And the other problem is that the cost of storing electricity in batteries is absolutely huge. To give you some small idea of how useless battery storage is, I have a small 4k solar array on my double garage. On an average summer day this will generate about 20kWh of energy - which isn't very much. But the cost of storing this small amount of energy is at least £10k. And it's bulky and heavy. The other problem, when you get into providing large backup for big charging stations is that you need a lot of room and you need cooling facilities. You can't just set up rows of batteries without plenty of ventilation and you need to get approval for this kind of thing because when they go up in flames they can't be put out and the toxic fumes are highly dangerous - so you need to be away from built up areas. None of this has been thought through. Yet if we adopted HFC it could be rolled out on the model of LPG which is used in many European countries. You could just convert petrol pumps over to hhdrogen as/and/when the number of HFC cars increased. There's no environmental damage (because of toxic rare metals) and no recycling problems. They're light and efficient and can be filled up in the same time as a petrol car. Also the hydrogen also serves as convenient and cheap way to store captured renewable energy. This is the way that Toyota thought it should be done - but the politicians knew better.. There is a huge amount of research going into batteries right now and one of the problems they are trying to solve is to make batteries last longer. You seem to think science will stop dead in its tracks. Maybe so in baby Britain, but you should keep up with R and D over in the Far East. They know what they are doing and are highly competent. My view is they will at some point lick the problem. There are now solar cells in development which they believe will last over 100 years. It's all about complicated chemistry. The intermittency problem can be reduced in millions of ways, many of which involve using less energy in the first place. The ideas keep coming. I believe no one solution will fix it, but rather it will be the combination of many. |
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Post by Orac on Feb 6, 2024 15:09:14 GMT
It's called V2G BvL and even the govt thought of that many years ago. I'm not sure everyone will like their car batteries being used to fill in for energy shortfalls of the grid but even if they did it will require massive updating of the Grid. And the problem with renewables is "Intermittency" as many people have said. But I don't know quite how often this problem has to be pointed out before the greens understand it. It CANNOT be relied on. And the other problem is that the cost of storing electricity in batteries is absolutely huge. To give you some small idea of how useless battery storage is, I have a small 4k solar array on my double garage. On an average summer day this will generate about 20kWh of energy - which isn't very much. But the cost of storing this small amount of energy is at least £10k. And it's bulky and heavy. The other problem, when you get into providing large backup for big charging stations is that you need a lot of room and you need cooling facilities. You can't just set up rows of batteries without plenty of ventilation and you need to get approval for this kind of thing because when they go up in flames they can't be put out and the toxic fumes are highly dangerous - so you need to be away from built up areas. None of this has been thought through. Yet if we adopted HFC it could be rolled out on the model of LPG which is used in many European countries. You could just convert petrol pumps over to hhdrogen as/and/when the number of HFC cars increased. There's no environmental damage (because of toxic rare metals) and no recycling problems. They're light and efficient and can be filled up in the same time as a petrol car. Also the hydrogen also serves as convenient and cheap way to store captured renewable energy. This is the way that Toyota thought it should be done - but the politicians knew better.. There is a huge amount of research going into batteries right now and one of the problems they are trying to solve is to make batteries last longer. You seem to think science will stop dead in its tracks. There are good reasons to think that battery technology will not get remarkably better in the foreseeable future. There may well be small, hard-won improvements, but nothing like the orders of magnitude transformation that is needed to make a BEV as useful as an ICE car. Additionally, the battery itself is not the only problem. It's better to have this conversation before we end up i a cul-de-sac and with no easy way back |
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Post by Dan Dare on Feb 6, 2024 15:37:35 GMT
'Orders of magnitude' better is overegging the pudding.
As example my current Audi diesel with its 58 litre tank has a full tank range of around 950km. Real-life BEV ranges are now in the 500km+ range.
I don't see this as dramatically more or less useful in a real-world sense for most owners and fully expect the gap to be closed well before the 2035 shut-off date for petroleum-powered ICE vehicles.
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Post by Orac on Feb 6, 2024 16:02:29 GMT
'Orders of magnitude' better is overegging the pudding. As example my current Audi diesel with its 58 litre tank has a full tank range of around 950km. Real-life BEV ranges are now in the 500km+ range. 'low Range' is how the problem is popularly presented, but the real problem is rather 'range related' or 'range amplified'. If you compare the ratio of range to time refueling for ICE vs BEV the difference is well over an order of magnitude. For a BEV to be as a convenient as an ICe is this respect it would either need to have a range of several thousand miles or a recharge time of about 1 or 2 minutes. If BEVs only had a range of 150 miles, this weakness wouldn't matter nearly as much if you could recharge them in a minute or two. Unfortunately, it's the recharging problem that is the most intractable - not that range is likely to be solved either (at least to the degree that would make the overall improvement significant) |
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Post by Dan Dare on Feb 6, 2024 16:19:04 GMT
For most normal users the 'range problem' is surely overstated. Even if there's a daily commute of 50km a user of one of the current generation of BEVs may need a full charge only once every couple of weeks. Most I imagine will use overnight charging at home or at work if available to top up the battery between full recharges.
For longer journeys which will be infrequent unless you're a sales rep charging up and down the M6 every day a little bit of planning is certainly necessary but it's not rocket science. If you're a Tesla owner or sign up for a Tesla account you can get an 80% charge in half an hour or so at one of their Supercharger locations. Other providers are following in Tesla's footprints and I expect the charging infrastructure to radically different in less than five years from now.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 6, 2024 16:20:55 GMT
'Orders of magnitude' better is overegging the pudding. As example my current Audi diesel with its 58 litre tank has a full tank range of around 950km. Real-life BEV ranges are now in the 500km+ range. 'low Range' is how the problem is popularly presented, but the real problem is rather 'range related' or 'range amplified'. If you compare the ratio of range to time refueling for ICE vs BEV the difference is well over an order of magnitude. For a BEV to be as a convenient as an ICe is this respect it would either need to have a range of several thousand miles or a recharge time of about 1 or 2 minutes. If BEVs only had a range of 150 miles, this weakness wouldn't matter nearly as much if you could recharge them in a minute or two. Unfortunately, it's the recharging problem that is the most intractable - not that range is likely to be solved either (at least to the degree that would make the overall improvement significant) Charge it when you are asleep. CATL batteries can get you 1000km of range. Me personally, I can't really hack more than 300m driving in a day. There is also battery swap technology for the professional delivery driver but recall the EU law about only 8hrs driving per day. How many miles are you going to do in 8hrs driving? |
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Post by Red Rackham on Feb 6, 2024 16:30:13 GMT
I watched an old episode of Top Gear the other evening, the proper version of TG with Clarkson, Hammond & May, anyhoo. Clarkson took an EV out onto the Top Gear test track, for the life of me I cant remember what make it was, but it did less than half the stated range. After 4 miles the car's computer said 9 miles of battery power had been used, and it wasn't a cold day.
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Post by Orac on Feb 6, 2024 16:30:26 GMT
For most normal users the 'range problem' is surely overstated. Even if there's a daily commute of 50km a user of one of the current generation of BEVs may need a full charge only once every couple of weeks. Most I imagine will use overnight charging at home or at work if available to top up the battery between full recharges. I don't know what you mean by 'over-stated'. The problem is exactly what it is. An electric car is fine if you have predictable circular journey (within its abilities) and a home charging facility that allows you to charge it over-night. Saying that most journeys are of this nature is not the same as saying most car users do not require the missing functionality. |
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Post by Red Rackham on Feb 6, 2024 16:39:31 GMT
I occasionally drive down to Dorset, it's more or less a 400 mile return trip which I can easilly do without refuelling and that's in a 3.6 V8. No range anxiety no stopping. But if I did need to stop for fuel, it would take five minutes not two hours for a part charge.
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Post by Dan Dare on Feb 6, 2024 16:42:32 GMT
Of course many if not most users will need the 'missing functionality', which I take to mean the ability to make occasional longer trips.
I believe I dealt with that scenario in my second paragraph above.
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Post by Orac on Feb 6, 2024 16:43:39 GMT
I occasionally drive down to Dorset, it's more or less a 400 mile return trip which I can easilly do without refuelling and that's in a 3.6 V8. No range anxiety no stopping. But if I did need to stop for fuel, it would take five minutes not two hours for a part charge. Yes. ICE means that for any journey you can just jump in your car and go and check the fuel gauge when you are on the motorway (or whatever) You don't have to plan it like a military operation and spend the whole time crossing your fingers and hoping you are lucky. |
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