The motoring supplement in some paper or another today, had an article on how Gordon Brown wants everyone to be running electric cars in 10 years...
But with electricity prices rising so rapidly, will electric cars really be cheaper to run? and more environmentally friendly? (considering the reliance on unenvironmentally friendly sources such as coal power, nuclear power, etc)
With Ford releasing a diesel capable of 76.3mpg (tne new fiesta 1.6 tdci) - do we really need altenative fuels?
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In the short term, I think we will see a lot of different alternative energy vehicles.
There may be a lot of technologies that become redundant before we settle on one that will last a significant amount of time.
Personally I believe that pure electric cars will eventually be the future. The huge long term advantage of electric cars is you are breaking the link between the original source of the energy and the consumption. With an electric car you don't care how the electricity is generated, it all works the same. This could be fossel in the near term, wind or solar in the medium term or nuclear fusion in the long term (if they eventually figure that one out).
I think 10 years is extremely ambitious, and very unlikely. But i do think it will happen at some point.
Of course. Oil is running out, perhaps not as quickly as we believed 10 years ago, but it is a finite resource. And as it runs out, prices will continue to rise. Oil is used for a lot more than for vehicle fuel, it would be really sensible to convert transport to use other sources of energy so what remaining oil there is can be used for things such as plastics, petro chemicals etc.Originally Posted by joshwa
Last edited by Funkstar; 26-07-2008 at 07:37 PM.
All this ecomentalist stuff is fine by me. Green power is available and the technology has developed quickly for electric and hybrid vehicles. Looking forward to driving a cheap reliable electric car at some point and making a saving on fuel costs while I'm at it. They dont need to be slow either. I seem to remember someone made an electric dragster recently.
Electric cars will be the way forward once they sort out the range issue. A lot of current gen electric cars will do something daft like 60 - 70 miles on a charge and for a lot of people that simply is not enough. A daily commute of about 65 miles (round trip) for myself would mean I'd be pushing the range limit and constantly sticking the car on charge as soon as I got in!
Electric cars might be more environmentally friendly than hydrocarbon fuelled ones, but that doesn't mean they're "clean". First, you've still got the energy and materials used in the manufacture, so unless the factory uses "clean" power, even they leave a footprint. And of course, even if the car plant does use clean (wind or solar) for example, you've still got the impact of their suppliers. Can we see a car design in the near future with no plastics? Nope. And where do plastics come from? And you've also got an impact from manufacturing the infrastructure for solar or wind generation, and from maintaining and repairing it. Let's face it - modern societies are power hogs, and it ain't changing anytime soon.
So, scrapping our current hydrocarbon cars to buy shiny new electric ones implies a large carbon hit because of manufacture. Keeping your old hydro-carbon car will, for some time, imply less pollution from running that the manufacture of the new one will. So, there's a trade-off there for a start.
But even if we ignore all that and just stick to actually running the thing, an all-electric car implies a lot of battery power, unless they crack micro-generation technology. Making those extra batteries has a pollution price, too.
And then you've got to get the power to keep recharging them. Given the current rises in electricity prices, and given how susceptible this country currently is to power, especially with the impending closure of several existing power stations, our power demand is pretty precarious right now, without millions of us requiring huge power levels to recharge our cars. The power industry is already worried about the lights going out because of lack of investment, or even clarity from government over infrastructure investment, without a huge rise in demand from electric cars.
And if, as joshwa said, Gordon Brown wants us all in electric cars within 10 years, I'd suggest that at the very least, someone slipped some LSD in his cocoa, because it's obvious he's hallucinating again .... like he did when he thought that 10p tax band cut was a good idea.
Unless some radical technological breakthroughs occur, which is, I grant, quite possible, it's looking like we've all got the face the very real possibility that the era of relatively cheap personal transportation is over, and that from here on in, we're all either going to have a lot less freedom of movement, or it's going to be a great deal more expensive. And, environmentally, maybe that's no bad thing.
But if we do lose that personal freedom of movement, we must also face the notion that losing all our small, local high shops for the few, giant (and often, out-of-town) supermarkets is also a mistake, and a business model that needs to change. But if it does, cost of living is likely to rise from that alone, let alone energy or food prices from international pressures.
Maybe they should try and develop a car that runs off a product of all the crap and waste us humans dispose of every day, month, year!! Would be a good way to use the rubbish and save the planet at the same time!!
Hypothetically yes, but you run into the problem of efficiency.
This is the same problem you have with traditional hydrocarbons. Road going vehicles are horibly in efficient, container chips on the other hand are amazingly efficient in comparison, same goes for power stations. Both of these manage to extract far more energy from every tonne of fuel than a car, van or truck does. There is also the added advantage that they can cope with pretty heavy oils, so they don't need much refining (or any if it is nice light crude from west Africa for instance, just a little bit of filtering), so you have reduced the amout of energy required to produce that fuel in the first place.
If there was a car that could run on banana peel and potato skins, it would have to do at least as good a job at converting that to energy as an industrial grade furnace. A furnace which would not produce very much polutants because of the efficiency of its combustion/conversion process.
This is why I believe electric cars are the long term end point for personal transport. You can use any technology to produce electricity, and you can produce it far more efficiently on a large scale and they distribute it (we do already have a nice distribution network of course).
Electic cars could actually help the national grid in the long run as well. At the moment there are massive spikes in demand at certain times of the day. With a plug in electric car, you effectively have a massive capacitor in your drive way (companies are actually looking at capacitors instead of batteries for future cars too). If managed right, your house could pull electricity from the car when consumption spikes and then replace it when there is a lul in activity, such as at night when you are asleep.
Saracen hit the nail on the head, there was a piece on pistonheads not long back about an independent study being done on how our electricity infrastructure would hold up if everyone had electric cars. Put simply, It can't. There would need to be massive developments made, meaning every increasing costs I'm sure and it will simply sprial out of control.
You need a viable alternative fuel. Methanol and derivitives would be a start but ideally we need something along the lines of hydrogen full cell cars. Once we have an infrastructure in place for that we might get somewhere. Burning money on electric cars now just seems like shooting ourselves in the foot.
Battery operated electric cars are a short sighted mans answer for me, Hybrid cars even more so due to the massive amount of energy being put into disposing of the batteries.
Cars run on filtered poo!
Well there's thermal depolymerisation which can covert biomass waste products into light crude oil. I'm not sure how practical it is on a large scale - but it certainly seems like it might be useful if we run out of natural oil for producing plastics and the like.
i do like the ability to be able to run on electric, because whilst oil price is rising heavily other energy sources are becoming more and more effecient.
check out this:
http://www.fiskerautomotive.com/
a 50 mile range on the electric, before using the power train to go so much further. 0-60 in 5.8seconds.
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If anyone is going to the motorshow this year you can't miss the big focus by a lot of companies on electric / hybrid cars. A few companies are demonstrating there take on electric cars, my favorite of which was an electric fiat 500. You can also drive the g - wiz on a taster test drive to see just how bad it is.
Electric cars have some very good technology and a lot of good research, but they are flawed. They are starting to take off, but the people buying them will not benifit in the long term.
Secondly I dont care about the green aspects.. or the politics... for good resons that I wont go into here. But the technology is very interesting. See above for green flaws
The first fail is batterys. They cost too much, they dont last long and they take far too long to charge. they cant store that much power, and lastly they eat several times more power than you get out of them in a single charge. They are not efficient, and I doubt they could have anywhere near the 5-10 year life of a car battery when being stressed so much further to drive the car.
Batterys = fail.
Super capacitors are on the same level of fail.. same problems.
Hydrogen is the next tech. I dont know how fuel cells will turn out, but I can imagine they will stay very expensive for a long time, possibly forever? due to the materials and manufacturing involved.
Hydrogen can be burnt in a *normal* engine. I say normal but it needs to be specially designed or modified... Please ignore the fact that hydrogen is highly explosive and unsafe for a second.. Using this method would be cheapest and easyest for our economy, we can use existing cars and designs and just swap engines over.
Hydrogen could be split at home, from the grid power using electrolysis, it would be just like charging a battery except probably more efficient. It would allow you to use cheap nighttime rate power to charge/fill your tank.
Two major problems with this:
1) hydrogen takes a lot of space to store, about twice that of a normal fuel tank for the same milage range..
2) its explosive and not really safe to store in a car, or split at home.
but another interesting bit of tech is companys researching chemicals to safely store hydrogen. One of which adding water releases the hydrogen so it can be burnt. These are safe and also can store hydrogen in a much higher density, removing the above problems.
Regenerative braking is an interesting bit of tech but currently there is *no* storage method that can actually capture a significant amount of the energy regenerated. Hydrogen splitting could work but then to keep it safe it would need to be stored in a safe chemical.
I think these two could possibly be next, however not much research is being done on them compared to the others.
With todays technology and infrastructure of course they're not the answer. But I really can't see any major obstacles that won't be overcome in the future. Generation of electricity is relatively well understood and I'm confident that in the future we will have a sustainable supply that can meet transport (and construction) needs. Raw materials might be a bigger concern, but again people are already demonstrating quite nice cars made largely of sustainable materials and if all else fails we can create plastics from plant oils.
The biggest obstacle for which the solution isn't yet clear to me is how we transport the energy itself. That is ultimately what a car is - a portable energy source which you tap into to accelerate your movement. Rare metals aren't the answer, but again I'm sure we will develop sustainable means of energy storage/release. The hydrogen fuel cell is already one such method but nature already uses a far more effective version of this and I'd predict that one day we will have an effecient means to extract protons from most hydrocarbon sources and use them to generate movement.
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