Are we being forced to go electric?

[Pale Rider]

I’d also ban Honda Jazz’s driving at 65mph in the middle lane on an empty motorway

I'd shoot anyone driving anything in the middle lane of an empty motorway.

 

[Gunk]

I'd shoot anyone driving anything in the middle lane of an empty motorway.

You’d need a lot of ammunition

 

[classic33]

But oil is terrible for energy delivery. So much of the energy is lost to heat etc. The only limit to solar and wind is defined by the sun and the winds. We need to make better solar panels - and many are. That's why Tesla bought SolarCIty.

And then we invented Nuclear which gave us lots of energy for far less source material but at the cost of radioactivity. Solar and wind will soon be providing vast amounts of energy because massive amounts of research are now being done.

Our National Grid is largely renewables, Gas and Nuclear. No oil.

Sounds awful. I vote for batteries.

This Solar City?
Now no longer trading.

As for solar panels, most are 15 - 20% efficient, with a maximum possible of just shy of 34%.
How much land are you willing to cover to keep your car.

 

[biggs682]

Usually nissan leaf's!!

Hang on a minute i normally set the cruise control at 65 mph in our Nissan Note as doing 70 doesn't get you there much quicker but uses a fair bit more fuel .

Driving huge distances to work or whatever sounds awful to me. I'd rather have a lower salary at a job I can walk or ride to (which is what I did).
Keeping fit and healthy is more important than a bank balance.

Here here it took me till about 20 years to realise this

 

[Rusty Nails]

I take your point but the specific example given was from the Lake District to Headingly, a journey of about 80 miles or so each way. Achievable in a Zoe but probably requiring one stop for a top up on the way back.

I believe that electric is a better long-term bet than ICE, once the infrastructure hiccups that many people are concerned about have been sorted out. But the sort of conditions you outline for the above trip in the Zoe, like it or not, are not attractive or even acceptable to many. I could do that trip at least three times in my ICE dinosaur without stopping, and without doing any homework on where I could possibly stop for five minutes to refuel without any worry about availability. Last week I spent four days on a break in Bath touring the West Country from South Wales doing 400+ miles without refuelling. I will be doing something similar in Mid Wales in a couple of weeks with no worries because I know my car will do 600 miles on a full tank.
I believe these areas do not yet have the recharging infrastructure that London and the SE, or even the larger cities have.

At some stage the infrastructure will be sorted and, like many others, I will get an electric car then, but it is not for me at this time.

Who knows, something even better might emerge in the foreseeable future

 

[icowden]

This Solar City?
Now no longer trading.

You missed the small print:-

Since the acquisition in 2016, the SolarCity brand has no longer been used; it now operates as Tesla Solar. SolarCity’s technology has evolved into the products we see offered by Tesla today. The most notable products include solar panels, EV chargers, the Tesla Solar Roof and the Tesla Powerwall 2.

They purchased Solar City for a knock down price and took the tech.

As for solar panels, most are 15 - 20% efficient, with a maximum possible of just shy of 34%.
How much land are you willing to cover to keep your car.

Physics says different:-
https://physicsworld.com/a/sunny-superpower-solar-cells-close-in-on-50-efficiency/

 

[icowden]

I'd rather have a lower salary at a job I can walk or ride to (which is what I did).

I just benefitted from a global pandemic which means my commute now involves the staircase! The car is used for family visits / holidays, to ferry children (dad cabs) and take my wife to work.

 

[FishFright]

I've absolutely no interest in a 500 mile range battery that charges in minutes. Ridiculously over specced for more than 0.01% of users.

I don't have a TV.

 

[Alex321]

I'm not sure about the quality of life thing.

I am.

If we carry on without a care in the world we will basically kill off the planet so not much quality of life for the cute grandkids.

I'm not talking about the QoL of grandkids, most people think of their own QoL, not that of the grandkids.

You are of course right, that if we don't take that QoL hit fairly soon, the grandkids are likely to be hit with a bigger one in a few years time.

Driving huge distances to work or whatever sounds awful to me. I'd rather have a lower salary at a job I can walk or ride to (which is what I did).
Keeping fit and healthy is more important than a bank balance.

It isn't necessarily about money, it is about having a job you like, while also living somewhere you like.

I've been lucky to do jobs I enjoy pretty well all my life, but the offices I have worked in have all been in cities or sizeable towns, and I don't want to live there - my wife even more so, as she was brought up as the daughter of a forester living and working in rural mid Wales. We have never lived anywhere that we couldn't be in open countryside within a 5 minute walk.

Now I do currently commute by bike(15 miles each way) on the two days a week I'm in the office, but if we didn't have access to at least one car, we would be pretty stuffed, since my wife is 73 with distinct mobility problems (and she can't ride a bike). We would have to move to somewhere with much better public transport (we currently have one bus every two hours in each direction with the last one leaving/arriving here at 19:25 and none on Sunday, and the nearest train station (3 miles away along a major road with no pavements) has one train per hour in each direction. Shopping would have to be done daily, or have it delivered, as we couldn't carry the week's worth we normally do without a car. Two of my main hobbies (Morris dancing and Sealed Knot) just wouldn't be practical using public transport, even after moving to somewhere with much better provision.

I don't think the required change in lifestyle or degradation of QoL we would suffer is particularly atypical for those who don't live in major towns now.

 

[Alex321]

This Solar City?
Now no longer trading.

As for solar panels, most are 15 - 20% efficient, with a maximum possible of just shy of 34%.
How much land are you willing to cover to keep your car.

That efficiency is meaningless really though, it isn't like oil which is burned up as you drive using it ( and which are less efficient than the figures you quote anyhow, by the time you include the energy used to refine and transport the fuel). Any solar energy which is not harvetsed by solar panels is just wasted unless it is being used to grow things.

And it doesn't take all that many panels to provide enough energy to keep a car recharged, at least in the summer. Covering our roof has given us a nominal output of 10.14kW (max actually achieved is about 9.8kW), and our 16kWH battery hasn't dropped below 70% charge since early May. We would struggle to keep an EV charged between November and February, but the rest of the year would have little problem.

 

[Chislenko]

Has anybody else noticed that when you put up a cogent argument about why you can't have an EV you never get a reply.

 

[cougie uk]

Has anybody else noticed that when you put up a cogent argument about why you can't have an EV you never get a reply.

Is it not more to the point that most people could have an EV albeit you might have to do things a bit differently?

 

[Punkawallah]

Yup. Got to keep those African child miners in employment :-)

 

[CXRAndy]

I can assume you have never travelled the A470 / A483 up from Cardiff after a night match! Trust me the only place you will find to relieve yourself is the side of the road. Service stations etc are very few on the ground during the day but at night you have no hope!! It is many miles of nothing!

Has anybody else noticed that when you put up a cogent argument about why you can't have an EV you never get a reply.

Just being helpful, but looking at ZapMap-live https://www.zap-map.com/live/

The route along the roads mentioned there are plenty of rapid chargers >50kWatts. Google maps says its 140 miles from Wrexham to Cardiff. A 200+ mile range EV would be able to do that journey either with a recharge before you get to Cardiff (probably better option) or on the return.

Granted Chargers aren't as common as in England, but with Wales being a back water, what do you expect

 

[Gunk]

I just benefitted from a global pandemic which means my commute now involves the staircase!

is that really a benefit? Not much of a future where all workers are in their own little cells and all interactivity is via Zoom. I do one day a week from home and that is enough, I like the intellectual stimulus of actually working with people.