How practical is an electric car in London? If you revel in the independence a car gives you, then electric is not for you. The quoted range of 100 miles (161km) sounds fine, but that's a bit like a quoted ADSL speed. Your mileage may vary. The truth is that if and when the car goes flat, you are in deep doo-doo. Run out of petrol and you can walk to a petrol station, …
Just to point out that the 'shrinking fuel tank' happens with old ICE cars as well because the engine wears and the fuel economy drops. Can you honestly believe a 5 year old Diesel achieves the same mpg as a new one of the same model?
Evidently you know little of modern engines.
Provided the oil and filter are changed after every winter, and 6-7k whichever is sooner, a modern engine is good for more than 250,000 miles. 5 years would be about 50k, and there'd be almost no engine wear at all.
Changes are good that because the engine is ran in properly that both power output and mpg will have improved.
I beleive it can take up to 20 000km for a modern Diesel engine and gearbox fully to run in. Less for a car, but the detailed records I kept over several years of a 46 miles daily commute suggest that for a VW 1.9l lump of the period, it was around 10 000 miles. The difference wasn't great - from 43 to 46mpg - but when I sold it at 60 000 miles it was still doing around 45.
The battery pack on the Zoe is ~ £7000 but you rent it rather than buy it so it is replaced when needed in the rental cost.
For the Leaf you do have the option to buy it. The Leaf battery is slightly cheaper at ~ £5500 but that's only if you need a whole new one. Cells wear unevenly so in almost all cases you can re-condition the battery by replacing a few cells rather than the whole thing. This is a much cheaper option that depends on the number of cells replaced but averages only a few hundred pounds rather than £5500.
Where are you getting your $15K figure from? A 16kWh pack for the Volt is $3K. That's the same size as the i-MiEV. The LEAF is 1.5 times larger, so make that $4.5K. There are LEAF drivers with over 100,000 miles on their cars and they haven't had to replace their battery. Stop spreading FUD.
There is a partial solution to congestion sitting at hand, and it isn't this crazy electric car thing. Most commuting is done solo, so why not require 1 or 2 person sized vehicles. These would be super-compact, gas efficient, but most importantly, you can park at least 50 percent more cars in the same spaces, and they will effectively reduce traffic by around 30 percent, just by taking up less space on the road. They'd be cheap to manufacture, too.
If you are having that many problem with your battery going flat, the problem isn't the car nor the infrastructure. IT'S YOUR INABILITY TO PLAN YOUR ROUTE EFFECTIVELY.
I have never run out of power, nor even come close, in a Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Why? Because I plan my route. I don't drive farther than I know the car can go.
I thought this was The Reg, not Top Gear.
I presume that the law you would need passed is "the gas laws are hereby suspended and the Carnot cycle equation will be replaced with one to be issued as a Statutory Instrument".
The capacity of the engine isn't important; to reduce friction, use fewer cylinders. If the cylinders are too small it is difficult to get thermodynamic efficiency. The optimum for a petrol engine is around 300-450cc, and for Diesels rather bigger, so a 3 cylinder 1500cc Diesel is a good starting point.
Well, we have those, and with all the turbocharger gubbins and the rest they can achieve a government rating of around 72mpg in a supermini, and a real world rating more like 60.
Hybrids are actually a bit better when you take the higher density of Diesel versus petrol into account. In real world conditions the Yaris Diesel gets 61mpg, and the hybrid gets 57 on petrol.
Now consider that my perfectly ordinary, normally aspirated small MPV gets a real 45mpg, and you can see that the benefits of all that advanced technology, hybrid or Diesel, has only reduced consumption by about 20%. And you want to reduce it by twice as much again. In a few months.
Believe me, with the amount of money spent by Toyota, Ford, BMW and Mercedes on engine efficiency, if 100mpg on either fuel was possible in a practical urban vehicle, it would have happened long ago. But the law of diminishing returns has been in action for a long time now. In fact, with all the technology in modern Diesels, an engine fault can already cost far more than the savings from any possible efficiency gains.
The capacity of the engine isn't important; to reduce friction, use fewer cylinders.
Or use some exotic materials...
My old Chemistry teacher had great tales to tell about his previous life as an industrial chemist. He'd worked on a ceramic with a negative coefficient of expansion such that it could be combined with the alloy used in an engine to create zero-expansion parts. The resulttant engine was far more stable with temperature, and so could be run very much hotter (with the corresponding gain in efficiency).
Cheap it was not, though :-)
Vic.
This is what was behind the Japanese Kei car concept. It produced some amazing little cars like teh Honda Beat, S-cargo, and the Suzuki Cappuccino. I had a Cappuccino but really lusted after an Autozam AZ-1.
If we had a car industry where the factories were British owned there would be more incentive for regulation which as closed in the same kind of way.
Self driving cars that wander off to charge themselves as required during off peak usage times seem a more likely future to me. This not just an energy issue but also as much to do with the unreliability of human drivers and the ability to use the transit time doing something more enjoyable than swearing out your cortisol at other drivers. All right, what could be more enjoyable than that but you know what I mean. Supply and demand can be balanced in part with peak charging. Seriously, if there is no parking why would you want to own a car that you aren't using it 95% of the time? Currently, we own cars for two main reasons, firstly, car manufacturers want us to and devote a massive resources to normalise the idea, and secondly, and soon historically, paying for a driver is very expensive so we supply this component ourselves.
No one seems to have considered Hydrogen Cycle engines and I wonder why, when this discourse has by definition to be carried out by folk who are interested in "new technology". It is already embryonic if you take a look at
http://www.hyundai.co.uk/about-us/environment/hydrogen-fuel-cell?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Hydrogen%20Cars_BRD_EXT-BMM&utm_term=%20+hydrogen%20+engines
(an advertisement admittedly) you can see that there seems to have been quite a bit of progress on that front.
Going by Wikipedia, the energy efficiency of a Hydrogen fuel cell can currently be around 60% with theoretical potential significantly higher. It also gives an efficiency for an internal combustion engine of about 25% in a modern car. I would love to see hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars take over. Wikipedia also gives energy densities of 46MJ/Kg for petrol and 142MJ/Kg for Hydrogen. Given petrol is already more energy dense than lithium-ion batteries by a considerable margin and hydrogen is way more energy dense than petrol, it seems to me to make massive sense to be pursuing Hydrogen. Why aren't we?
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