{"id":3130,"date":"2020-02-25T12:09:41","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T11:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/outsidethebubble.net\/?p=3130"},"modified":"2020-02-25T16:38:05","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T15:38:05","slug":"electric-vehicles-too-much-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/2020\/02\/25\/electric-vehicles-too-much-hype\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric Vehicles: Too Much Hype?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Renault all-electric 2020 Twingo Z.E. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Summary: The importance of achieving zero carbon is accepted to be\ncritical.  One area where we can see how to\nachieve that is by eliminating fossil fuels from transportation.  Unfortunately the reality is very different\nfrom what government and particularly manufacturers are planning.  There is widespread unreality about what has\nto happen and the timescales and costs of achieving the necessary goals.  The move to electric vehicles, and hybrids\nmust not count, will happen far too slowly with present plans and the emphasis\non large heavy SUV type electric vehicles completely misses the point.  The approach to battery charging also needs\nto change since most people will not have access to charging points in\nhigh-density housing areas.  Only by\nrestricting the use of heavy vehicles in urban areas can we hope to move in the\nright direction.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electric vehicle sales\nare booming in the UK.  The government\nhas announced that internal combustion vehicles (ICV’s) will no longer be sold\nin the UK after 2035 and possibly not after 2032.  Within a few years all vehicles on our roads\nwill be electric.  Job done!  Unfortunately it’s a little bit more\ncomplicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s start with\naffordability.  At present the cheapest\nICVs cost under \u00a310,000.  The cheapest\nall electric vehicles cost about \u00a325,000 even with the government grant.  Prices of EV’s are high as manufacturers\ncater to the demand for SUVs rather than city cars.  Keeping the prices high helps while demand\noutstrips manufacturing capacity.  An\nelectric car is dramatically simpler than ICV. \nYou don’t need to have any of an exhaust system, petroleum delivery,\ninternal combustion engine, radiator and cooling system, gearbox, petrol tank\netc. You need a battery and you need an electric motor and brakes but not much\nmore.  The 100% premium is clearly good\nfor the manufacturers if not for the public and certainly not if you want to go\ngreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headline sales of\nelectric vehicles are dominated by plug-in hybrids, the great majority of which\nare run solely on petrol or diesel. \nGarages report that at their first service most hybrids have their\ncharging cable pack unopened in the boot. \nPure electric vehicles only account for 2.3% of car sales. Hybrids are\neven less efficient than ICVs being heavier and more expensive to build and\nworse polluters than their purer ICV cousins. \nIf you really care about the environment the only choice is pure\nelectric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The average car in the\nUK is over 8 years old, and new ICVs are dramatically more reliable than they\nwere.  Indeed a recent Which?  report remarked that the least reliable cars\nin that report were more reliable than the most reliable cars 10 years\nearlier.  We must expect current new-car\npurchases to last long after the 2035 deadline. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lack of significant\ngrowth in personal income means that the average car age in the UK is likely to\nincrease and by 2035 may well be in excess of 10 years.  This means the average car in 2035 will have\nbeen manufactured in 2025 and with present growth rates that will be a very\nsmall fraction of the total car sales in the car sales in the UK. With 31.5\nmillion cars (82.5%), 4 million vans (10.5%) and 0.5 million heavy goods\nvehicles (1.3%) in the UK, by 2035 we must expect the vast majority of vehicles\nnot to be electric and the 120 million tonnes of CO2 <\/sub>per annum\ngenerated now to be only somewhat reduced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Current EVs are\nexpensive but above all big and heavy. \nBasic physics shows that cars driven identically in terms of speed and\nacceleration etc. have double the energy consumption of a vehicle half that wait,\nirrespective of the fuel, petrol or electric. \nGreat strides have been made in the efficiency of ICV’s in recent years\nbut that has now been largely lost by the move towards bigger and heavier\nvehicles.  Many British villages, towns\nand cities with their origins in the Middle Ages have narrow streets made\nnarrower by car parking.  The move to\nSUVs is difficult to justify for the vast majority of users and causes\nincreased congestion, increased pollution including from tyre wear and tear and\nreduced parking space because of their size. \nAgain, if you really care about the environment, the only choice is\nsmaller, lighter cars and always pure electric, not the great electric\njuggernauts favoured by the relatively wealthy who can afford them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone thinking about\ngoing electric will worry about battery charging.  If you are relatively wealthy or live\nout-of-town then you are much more likely to have a garage or at least a\ndriveway to park your car and charge it. \nA great number of British houses however are terraced or multi-storey\nflats.  Reserved parking for your car is\nout of the question.  If you can’t park\nnear a charger you’re done for.  Despite\nthe hype about high-speed charging, most vehicles need to be charged for a time\ncomparable with the time they are driven between charges.  Five minutes filling up your ICV now makes an\nEV much less appealing.  Fast charging\npoints are expensive, and the risk of running out of power away from home is a\nserious disincentive if you drive a good distance at all regularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One interesting\napproach which does not appear to have been taken seriously by manufacturers is\ndesigning an electric vehicle to have easily replaceable batteries.  Garages could offer pre-charged batteries\nwhich could be slotted in in just a few minutes with the right design of\ncar.  The batteries are heavy, up to half\na ton, and the cost to the motorist would be a combination of the electric\ncharge plus a daily rental rate for the battery.  Batteries should last at least 10 years and\ncost several thousand pounds each, depending on their size.  Cars with rapid-replacement batteries could\nuse smaller ones if that was all that was needed and that was all that was\navailable.  Such an arrangement would\nallow a car to have an effective recharge time of only a few minutes.  This would also provide a  role for garages otherwise  facing redundancy as the 2035-2050 window  approaches. \nThe nearest to this ideal was Renault who offered their Zoe vehicle with\na battery rental, but that approach has been removed at the end of 2019.  The Zoe did not have a rapid exchange battery\ndesign but the principle was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going green\nproperly  will only really get going once\nmanufacturers reduce the price of their vehicles,  and concentrate on smaller lighter vehicles.\nThey must  become dramatically easier to\nrecharge, probably by having rapid replacement batteries supported by\ngarages.  In the meantime we have to\nappreciate that progress is currently very slow and not all of it moving in the\nright direction.  Hybrids need to be\ndiscouraged now as do large and heavy vehicles of all sorts.  Only then can we honestly hope to reduce our\nenergy demands for personal transport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: The importance of achieving zero carbon is accepted to be critical.  One area where we can see how to achieve that is by eliminating fossil fuels from transportation.  Unfortunately the reality is very different from what government and particularly manufacturers are planning.  There is widespread unreality about what has to happen and the timescales<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3137,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3130\/revisions\/3137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/home-5009482728.webspace-host.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}