Ban on new petrol and diesel cars in UK from 2030 under PM's green plan

[Gingerbrews]

Why can't we have a halfway position: hybrid petrol/diesel/ electric vehicles using fossil fuel for longer/rural journeys and electricity in towns and cities?
Or is that too sensible a suggestion?

 

[Clint]

Wonder who will be awarding battery contracts to who?

 

[Shirley Bassett]

Last time I looked the UK couldn‘t generate enough electricity to meet demand, and has been a net importer of electricity from France, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands since early 2010.

Even during lockdown 1 when commercial demand was down and the weather was unusually warm the UK imported 4.5TWh of electricity.

If Europe follows suit, then you have to ask will they have the capacity to export to the UK.

With plans to remove gas boilers from housing and go over to electrical ground and air source heat pumps, then you also have to question do we have the infrastructure to generate enough electricity for heating and charging cars.

 

[Gerryjo]

It's a load of arsebiscuits...the next lot in will change their minds..

I bet they taste like sh!! 3

 

[Cwrw666]

In the future we won't own our cars. We will all be using companies like uber to get about. Driverless cars taking us from a to b. The government make try to nationalise it or just tax the **** out of it.

I think not. Driverless cars would need a complete restructuring of the road system to work in much of the country. What happens when 2 driverless cars meet on a single track road. That's right, they stop and hand over control to the occupants who haven't actually driven a car in years. That's going to work well.

 

[foxy]

I read this years ago. This guy invented a manure-powered car ... in 1971
I also had a book about free energy from methane, and a farmer in America who ran a diesel generator for 8 years on methane from animal ****.
Inspired I built a gasometer using two barrels, one inverted into the other which I had loaded with chicken **** straw water and dried leaves. To build up pressure I loaded the top barrel with bricks. It came to an end when I set a balloon full of methane under the bonnet of my dads car, I had read about that trick, but using a balloon full of acetylene.
Needless to say I got a damn good hiding and was made to dismantle the gasometer.

https://www.sciencealert.com/world-...-internationally-from-australia-under-the-sea

 

[Leon103]

I think not. Driverless cars would need a complete restructuring of the road system to work in much of the country. What happens when 2 driverless cars meet on a single track road. That's right, they stop and hand over control to the occupants who haven't actually driven a car in years. That's going to work well.

Simply develop tech that as the highway code embedded so the computer follows that. The onboard camera will record when the last passing place was and calculates distances and safety aspects. Both cars do the same and communicate. The safest option is taken.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

No, Sandbach. Warrington is a metropolis by comparison. Cable TV, Deliveroo and everything! :)

I live in Appleton about 3 miles from Warrington town centre. Buses are every two hours and stop a 16:00. Taxis are expensive if they turn up at all. In general the bus service in Warrington is useless and even though I've a bus pass I never use it here.

 

[terrym]

I read this years ago. This guy invented a manure-powered car ... in 1971
I also had a book about free energy from methane, and a farmer in America who ran a diesel generator for 8 years on methane from animal s**t.
Inspired I built a gasometer using two barrels, one inverted into the other which I had loaded with chicken s**t straw water and dried leaves. To build up pressure I loaded the top barrel with bricks. It came to an end when I set a balloon full of methane under the bonnet of my dads car, I had read about that trick, but using a balloon full of acetylene.
Needless to say I got a damn good hiding and was made to dismantle the gasometer.

https://www.sciencealert.com/world-...-internationally-from-australia-under-the-sea

There are quite a few videos on Youtube where people run cars on 'wood gas' which became very popular in Europe in WW2 due to the shortage of motor fuel. And at the same time in the UK many vehicles ran on coal gas fed from large bags carried on the roof. The cars in the photos I posted earlier were actually driven by coal gas. It would be interesting to know how many explosions were caused by accidental ignition of the gas.
Collection of methane from decomposing organic matter is commonplace, especially biofermenters specifically designed for that. Further some full landfill sites are sealed and capped, and methane collected from the decomposition processes. And the methane is of course burned for heat, say for district heating, or for power generation.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I’m going for a Fred Flintstone car

 

[Northern_Brewer]

People have been talking about hydrogen as the future ever since electric vehicle meant a milk float. The basic problem is that either you're making hydrogen out of hydrocarbons - which means that you're producing about half the CO2 of burning petrol, which is useful but not going to appease the environmentalists and won't attract subsidies - or you're using electrolysis which reduces CO2 emissions (if using renewable electricity) but which is too inefficient to be competitive with cars. The best electrolysis is about 80% efficient - it may be possible to get it up to 85% but that's about the limit. The Toyota Mirai is the only mass-market hydrogen car we can use as a benchmark - it's 61.8% efficient on an urban cycle, 48.1% efficient on a highway cycle. Call it 55% efficient on average - that means that only 0.8 x 0.55 = 44% of the original electricity gets used for moving that car.

Compare that with modern electric cars which are getting battery-to-wheel efficiencies over 90% thanks to things like regenerative braking. So the electric car will need half the electricity to go a given distance - if you're worried "where does the electricity come from?" for electric cars, you have to ask the same question of hydrogen.

And we already have an infrastructure that can produce large quantities of electricity with lots of spare capacity overnight, which at least gives you a starting point for fueling the initial uptake of electric cars - the hydrogen infrastructure has to start from scratch, which will need capex, which will need paying for. So if the hydrogen car needs twice as much fuel, plus that fuel will need a whole bunch of capex, then the hydrogen car is always going to be 3+ times as expensive to run.

Right now they cost a bit more than a petrol car to go the same distance, even with the huge taxes on petrol, so there's not much reason for ordinary people to buy them and get the hydrogen economy rolling in the way that's happened for electric. For instance, a relative was spending around £200 a month on petrol through a combination of a longish commute and the school run before leasing a Leaf for about the same cost. Yes there was some leccy on top of that but not much, it just made financial sense regardless of the green arguments. The Leaf worked fine as a mum taxi, she actually went back to petrol because she's not doing the same mileage and the Leaf is now so popular that the deals aren't as good. As an aside, she only recharged away from home three times in two years, partly just out of curiosity to see how it worked - the battery life of an early-model Leaf was fine for a hard-worked mum taxi even if she was limping home a few times!

By comparison, the only mass-market hydrogen car is the Toyota Mirai which costs £66k and is completely dependent on a rudimentary refuelling network. Yes the price will come down, but electric vehicles are so far ahead on the economies of scale that it's unlikely hydrogen will ever compete. There will be a few niche cases where people will be prepared to pay the extra costs of hydrogen, but electric will be good enough for most people - Norway is now up to 60% of new cars being electric.

The range problem is overstated - there's been studies in the US that even there, where people tend to drive more, something like 85% of people never drive more than 200 miles in a day. And personally I think it would have been better if Carrie - sorry, Johnson - had gone for 15% petrol by an earlier date rather than 0% petrol by 2030 - those last few niche uses will always take a long time to sort out.

Ditto the battery life problem - the average British car is scrapped after 14 years and around 100,000 miles. Tesla is currently quoting battery lives of 300-500,000 miles, mainstream manufacturers around half that. Battery life is not an issue for normal cars, although Tesla are aiming for million-mile batteries for bus and truck use. It's more a question of what to do with perfectly good battery packs with 80+% of their capacity left, once the cars around them wear out - it looks like they'll be used in homes/offices for storing cheap nighttime electricity. Also the batteries don't stop working, they just slowly lose capacity - but that actually suits how cars are used, the demanding users tend to buy newish cars, whereas the 10+ cars tend to do rather lower mileages so a battery with 80-90% capacity is less of an issue.

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

Unless the electricity used to power these cars is green energy you are only moving the pollution somewhere else anyway. I’d also like to know the environmental impact in producing the batteries!

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Why can't we have a halfway position: hybrid petrol/diesel/ electric vehicles using fossil fuel for longer/rural journeys and electricity in towns and cities?

Its a little more complicated than that there are a few different types of hybrids the basic ones only boost the petrol/diesel engine to help boost economy, my mate had a Toyota Hybrid that could be used electric only but he got a very small range (i think no more than10 miles) and if he went over 30 mph the engine kicked in.

Looks like EREVs are the way forward they have a small engine that doesn't drive the wheels its only purpose is to recharge the battery when its needed.

I wonder why they are not advertised and discussed more.



THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HYBRIDS, PHEVS, EVS & EXTENDED RANGE EVS (EREVS)

When it comes to the fairly new world of EVs and hybrids, there’s already more jargon than you can shake a stick at. Any vehicle that has two different types of motor can be called a hybrid, so we have mild hybrids, full-hybrids and plug-in hybrids, as well as EVs and EREVs; understanding the differences between them will help to determine the best fit for your lifestyle and driving needs.

Mild hybrid cars have a regular petrol combustion engine as well as an electric battery, with the engine being the primary source of power and the car having the ability to charge its own battery when driving using the petrol engine. The electric power in this type of hybrid is not used to actually power the car’s motion, but instead to assist the engine, giving it additional power when accelerating, for example. It improves fuel economy but does not offer any zero emissions driving at all.

Full hybrids have a larger capacity battery and an electric motor that can power the vehicle alone over very short distances, and usually only at fairly low speeds e.g. busy city driving or in traffic jams. The combustion engine in a full hybrid car does most of the work, and will kick in as soon as the car speeds up or travels as far as the battery power can take it. The battery will then recharge itself for the next time the vehicle slows down or stops. Again, fuel economy is usually the main motivation for drivers buying this type of hybrid, as it only offers a small amount of zero emissions driving.

PHEVs are hybrids that have a larger battery alongside their petrol engine; too large a battery to be recharged by the engine and regenerative braking alone, so they need to be plugged in, hence the name. The larger battery gives the PHEV the ability to travel much further and faster than a full hybrid on the electric motor alone. The 100% electric powered range in a PHEV will vary, depending on the model of car, but is usually under 30 miles, at a max speed of 70mph, at which point the petrol engine will take over and the vehicle then acts in a similar way to a full hybrid. Not only making a huge difference to petrol economy, PHEVs also offer significantly more zero emission driving than full hybrids.

EREVs are essentially another type of plug-in hybrid, although the combustion engine plays a smaller part in the process than in other types of hybrid cars. The engine can’t actually drive the wheels, but is purely there to recharge the car’s battery when needed. It is the electric motor that actually powers the car’s motion. Until the battery runs low, this type of vehicle acts just like an EV. When the battery needs additional help, the small petrol engine kicks in to recharge it as you drive, extending the range before needing to plug in again. EREVs offer considerably more zero emissions driving than the other types of hybrid and can have an electric-only range of up to 125 miles, depending on the model. Therefore, shorter journeys could be completely powered by electricity alone.
EVs only have an electric motor and their single source of power is their battery pack; thus, they offer zero emission driving 100% of the time.

https://www.jojusolar.co.uk/ev-charging/plug-in-hybrid-versus-full-electric/

 

[MmmBeer]

People have been talking about hydrogen as the future ever since electric vehicle meant a milk float. The basic problem is that either you're making hydrogen out of hydrocarbons - which means that you're producing about half the CO2 of burning petrol, which is useful but not going to appease the environmentalists and won't attract subsidies - or you're using electrolysis which reduces CO2 emissions (if using renewable electricity) but which is too inefficient to be competitive with cars. The best electrolysis is about 80% efficient - it may be possible to get it up to 85% but that's about the limit. The Toyota Mirai is the only mass-market hydrogen car we can use as a benchmark - it's 61.8% efficient on an urban cycle, 48.1% efficient on a highway cycle. Call it 55% efficient on average - that means that only 0.8 x 0.55 = 44% of the original electricity gets used for moving that car.

Compare that with modern electric cars which are getting battery-to-wheel efficiencies over 90% thanks to things like regenerative braking. So the electric car will need half the electricity to go a given distance - if you're worried "where does the electricity come from?" for electric cars, you have to ask the same question of hydrogen.

And we already have an infrastructure that can produce large quantities of electricity with lots of spare capacity overnight, which at least gives you a starting point for fueling the initial uptake of electric cars - the hydrogen infrastructure has to start from scratch, which will need capex, which will need paying for. So if the hydrogen car needs twice as much fuel, plus that fuel will need a whole bunch of capex, then the hydrogen car is always going to be 3+ times as expensive to run.

Right now they cost a bit more than a petrol car to go the same distance, even with the huge taxes on petrol, so there's not much reason for ordinary people to buy them and get the hydrogen economy rolling in the way that's happened for electric. For instance, a relative was spending around £200 a month on petrol through a combination of a longish commute and the school run before leasing a Leaf for about the same cost. Yes there was some leccy on top of that but not much, it just made financial sense regardless of the green arguments. The Leaf worked fine as a mum taxi, she actually went back to petrol because she's not doing the same mileage and the Leaf is now so popular that the deals aren't as good. As an aside, she only recharged away from home three times in two years, partly just out of curiosity to see how it worked - the battery life of an early-model Leaf was fine for a hard-worked mum taxi even if she was limping home a few times!

By comparison, the only mass-market hydrogen car is the Toyota Mirai which costs £66k and is completely dependent on a rudimentary refuelling network. Yes the price will come down, but electric vehicles are so far ahead on the economies of scale that it's unlikely hydrogen will ever compete. There will be a few niche cases where people will be prepared to pay the extra costs of hydrogen, but electric will be good enough for most people - Norway is now up to 60% of new cars being electric.

The range problem is overstated - there's been studies in the US that even there, where people tend to drive more, something like 85% of people never drive more than 200 miles in a day. And personally I think it would have been better if Carrie - sorry, Johnson - had gone for 15% petrol by an earlier date rather than 0% petrol by 2030 - those last few niche uses will always take a long time to sort out.

Ditto the battery life problem - the average British car is scrapped after 14 years and around 100,000 miles. Tesla is currently quoting battery lives of 300-500,000 miles, mainstream manufacturers around half that. Battery life is not an issue for normal cars, although Tesla are aiming for million-mile batteries for bus and truck use. It's more a question of what to do with perfectly good battery packs with 80+% of their capacity left, once the cars around them wear out - it looks like they'll be used in homes/offices for storing cheap nighttime electricity. Also the batteries don't stop working, they just slowly lose capacity - but that actually suits how cars are used, the demanding users tend to buy newish cars, whereas the 10+ cars tend to do rather lower mileages so a battery with 80-90% capacity is less of an issue.

Like petrol and diesel, a hydrogen car can be refuelled from empty in about 5 minutes.

A 200 mile range sounds fine until you need to make a 201 mile trip, or find that you have been heavy footed on a 180 mile trip. I used to have to attend a monthly meeting in a place near Edinburgh, a round trip of 650 miles. It would take about 12 hours, but I could manage it on one tank of diesel. Hydrogen might need a few minutes longer for an extra stop or two, electric would take at least three days.

 

[terrym]

Like petrol and diesel, a hydrogen car can be refuelled from empty in about 5 minutes.

A 200 mile range sounds fine until you need to make a 201 mile trip, or find that you have been heavy footed on a 180 mile trip. I used to have to attend a monthly meeting in a place near Edinburgh, a round trip of 650 miles. It would take about 12 hours, but I could manage it on one tank of diesel. Hydrogen might need a few minutes longer for an extra stop or two, electric would take at least three days.

I am surprised your company allowed you drive to 650 miles on a business trip. Trips like that were discouraged by the last two companies I worked for, company car or not, and you were positively encouraged to use public transport. I regularly used to use the train to travel long distances and I could work on the train, and then I hired a car at the other end for travelling short distances. And I wasn't knackered when I went into my business meeting. That said I hope many companies now realize that travelling 100s of miles for a meeting may often be unnecessary given how online meetings have had to be accepted as part of a Covid rethink.

 

[MmmBeer]

I am surprised your company allowed you drive to 650 miles on a business trip. Trips like that were discouraged by the last two companies I worked for, company car or not, and you were positively encouraged to use public transport. I regularly used to use the train to travel long distances and I could work on the train, and then I hired a car at the other end for travelling short distances. And I wasn't knackered when I went into my business meeting. That said I hope many companies now realize that travelling 100s of miles for a meeting may often be unnecessary given how online meetings have had to be accepted as part of a Covid rethink.

There were usually two or three of us in the car to share the driving (including the health & safety manager), so the cost of train tickets, taxis, station parking etc. would vastly outweigh a tank of diesel and a pool vehicle.

It was a very traditional area of business, where physical meetings were expected. The attitude 'Its Thursdsay, so we must have a meeting' prevailed.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Like petrol and diesel, a hydrogen car can be refuelled from empty in about 5 minutes.

A 200 mile range sounds fine until you need to make a 201 mile trip, or find that you have been heavy footed on a 180 mile trip. I used to have to attend a monthly meeting in a place near Edinburgh, a round trip of 650 miles. It would take about 12 hours, but I could manage it on one tank of diesel. Hydrogen might need a few minutes longer for an extra stop or two, electric would take at least three days.

You realise that placed you in a very small minority though, right? As I say, the vast majority of people never drive more than 200 miles in a day - I regularly have to make 250-mile journeys that are at the edge of what current cars are capable of - the biggest battery version of the ID3 claims a 340-mile range so even with knocking 10-15% off it would be OK - not particularly cheap but still much cheaper than a Mirai. So if the company is still making people waste a full day travelling, then noone's forcing them to switch from diesel today, and technology is changing rapidly.

And you do realise where electric charging is at? Rapid charging can now deliver 80% charge in 30 minutes or so, there's various systems at the prototype stage that could do a full charge in 5 minutes. It won't be the main way that electric cars get their juice, but it will be an option if you're prepared to pay for it.

 

[Rodcx500z]

We import electricity from France and Ireland to name 2 even over the summer because we don't have enough capacity, so millions of electric cars will only increase demand on an already knackered system

 

[Rodcx500z]

21.4 tws in 2019 UK: 10% rise in electricity imports

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I think the biggest thing holding EV's back (apart form those already mentioned) is the cost if the battery fails, i doubt many of us could afford to go out tomorrow and trade our elderly car for a new EV so it would be the second hand market if you picked up an average mileage 5 years old car tomorrow how long would it be before you start to worry about the battery i have seen quotes of £6000 - £12000 for replacements that isn't going to in the plus column on many potential buyers list.