[Closed] How close are electric cars?

How close are electric cars?

They end up a LOT further away when you put your foot down!
😉

[i]They end up a LOT further away when you put your foot down![/i]

Not according to the article - that made them break

I think for 90% of people 250 miles/2 hr recharge would do fine 90% of the time. It'll come though, and people are looking into the renting/swapping out battery thing I think.

One of the problems that appears to me is that electric cars seem to be being desigend for or targetted at mainly urban users. Surely these are the people for whom a car is more used to drive long distances outside of town? That 250m range was probably with one person on board and hyper-miling it, not "real world" driving of four people, luggage, dog and needing to stop for an ice cream.

I think that there's more milage (sorry!) to be had from hydrogen fuel cells as a future fuel source.

The mileage actually went up with slower stoppy/starty journeys.

bikemonkey - Member
The mileage actually went up with slower stoppy/starty journeys.

Interesting. I stand (partially!) corrected.

I think the main problem with electric cars so far is that manufacturers keep deciding to make them look like they're futuristic or different and end up making them look silly.

Make it look like a focus and they'll start selling a whole lot better.

A car with a 250mile, even 150 mile range would be fine for my and I guess most peoples commutes but I'd still need the other car to go camping, visiting etc.

Electric cars will only be popular once they are using fuel cells for power rather than batteries. The energy density of any current battery technology is just too low to be of use to anyone other than city drivers.

What we need is some sort of chemical storage system, whereby millions of years worth of solar energy is used to convert carbon in the atmosphere into a highly combustible liquid form in the ground with a very high energy density, which would be very easy to transport and could easily be used to power engines.

Oh wait... we've done that and it's nearly all gone. We're knackered then.

I'd say in the near future series-hybrid is where we should be heading, you use a fuel source of whatever you fancy, petrol in a Stirling engine would be a good start for now as you can run it at very high efficiencies, convert the output to electricty and then use that to supply a relatively small back of batteries, and then an electric motor...

The [url= http://www.evo.co.uk/news/evonews/234516/frazernash_namir.html ]Frazer-Nash Namir[/url] is a good example of this...

😀

I think the breakthrough will come when batteries are smaller and can be replaced instantly (like camera batteries/bbq gas canisters).

I'm sure such a breakthrough is only weeks away

Maybe it's not so far away

[url= http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19car-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ]Replaceable battery stations[/url]

Electric cars are very close.
Telsa
Chevy Volt (if it gets built)
BMW MINI E1
and several others coming through.
Whether they are actually better than a combustion engine is very dubious.
Totally unsubstantiated, but car combustion engines are possibly the most efficient way of burning fuels (save for these new flue-less fireplaces).
Electric cars are just taking advantage of peoples eco guilt. Where does the power come from? Unefficient mass production power stations mostly.
People are un-aware of just how much energy is embodied within these cars. I'm siding with Clarkson here. Buy smaller engined cars and drive less/more efficiantly if you are feeling guilty.

Electric sucks as it relies on coal-burning stations (as already stated).
Aren't hydrogen cells the way forward? What're the environmental impacts of hydrogen powered vehicles?

Hydrogen impact: f*ck all. Generate it using solar, store it pressurised, transport to 'petrol stations', fill and go the same (well, similar) to now. All you get out the back is water vapour.

Whay aren't we doign it already - dunno. Oh, yes, hang on, I do - cause the oil compaines either develop/patent/hide the technologies so it can't be used without huge licenses equivalent to their current income, or buy out/surpress others workign in the area. It will happen, but the politics means the oil will have to nearly run out first 🙁

Generate it using solar

aracer - the problem with solar at the moment is feeding the electricity to the grid for domestic use where you need to have a constant supply. Same argument with wind. If you use the solar to generate hydrogen when there is sunshine you effectively generate a "storage phase" to the system (like a battery), so assuming there is enough electricy generating capacity overall, you get a more consistent supply of hydrogen, even though there may be vast daily fluctuations in the rate at which it is generated (clouds day/wind stops blowing).

As an aside, tidal would be great for this, as over a day the energy that can be harvested from a given site is fixed, but there are two peaks in energy density and two troughs over any given day.

Whay aren't we doign it already - dunno. Oh, yes, hang on, I do - cause the oil compaines either develop/patent/hide the technologies so it can't be used without huge licenses equivalent to their current income, or buy out/surpress others workign in the area. It will happen, but the politics means the oil will have to nearly run out first

Care to back that up with any evidence, or are you jsut ana ageing hippy convinced that "the man" has it in for you and the environment?

google HPAD, ill give you a clue the first two words are hydrogen power, and the second two are an oil rich arab country.

That supercar is awesome, but more importantly somone somewhere is building one with family car dimensions and performance, cant remember who, but the figures were staggering!

All forms of energy generation have side effects.
[b]Fossil[/b] - pollution
[b]Wind[/b] - noise/eyesore(eye of the beholder) nad who knows what effect it has further down the line.
[b]Solar[/b] - lower thermal impact on the ground (cooling and devegitation) but its probably the least directly effecting.
[b]Tidal[/b] - changes to the coastline
The only real answer is to lower our overall usage which is admittedly going to be a difficult thing to do optionally.
Getting off topic a bit now. Sorry.
eh!?! 🙄 RIDE YOUR BIKE MORE!!! 😀

[url= http://www.eccplc.com/ ]I like these.[/url]

No hippie - 30 (something 😉 year old mechanical engineer with a PhD, specialising in lightweight materials for such things.

I have nothing in writing - but do have a friend at the patent office who has told me that this is the case (it's nothing new - it's quite common place in pharamceuticals (sic), but with different economic drivers) and another two friends who work for a tidal power generation company that was a spin-off from my Uni dept. They find themselves in the situation where their demonstrator project has been shown to be very successful, so they took some investment capital from the energy division of a large company (best known for making expensive cars and big aero engines) in exchange to access to help with the man power for production engineer the system and some 'management assistance'. Last time I spoke to them, the company was being driven in a direction that was the polar opposite to the direction they wanted it to go in (i.e. - set up to generate cheap tidal power as effectively as possible) on the grounds that the market is not yet ready for such ambitious technologies - effectively the company will be treated as 'technology on the shelf' until such time as it is deemed "ready for market". You can read that as you like, but they are considering their positions as can't see any way to fight it from within.....

EDIT: Agreed, drifting off-topic. Sorry.

get yer facts right RR the car company has had nothing to do with RR the engin builder for a very long time.

I'm guessing the fact that their entire industry has gone to the shitter won't have had any impact on their ability to put effort into environmental side projects? And how would tidal energy be in competition with their main business?

I'm aware of the facts - my day job involves working on on- and off-shore projects for RR energy. I only mentioned the cars as it the area that many people know. The energy division is one of only two (marine being the other) that is actually making money for the RR group at the moment.

I't not that they can't put the effort in - they very much have the resource to do it - they simply don't want to. Obviously, all of this is reading between the lines, but energy division uses gas turbines built by/based on the aero engines, so there is a commercial driver to carry on using oil/gas powered turbines rather than branching out into new areas(this is mainly as the maintenance contracts on the turbines is FAR more lucrative than the up-front sale and will run on into the future as a revenuw stream for 10+ years).

Another area of my day job involves helping design/optimise oil drill bits and software tools to optimise their use, which has given me an insight into the drivers on the supply-side of the oil business, and the practises that go on there, as well. The more I see, the more it boils my pi$$.... and the more I think I should get out of it and help the guys with the tidal power project.... but it doesn;t pay as well.... so I proabaly won't.... which just makes me even more depressed 🙁

Hydrogen generation. One of the small scottish islands is using a wind/ elec / hydrogen / generater cycle to provide green(ish) energy with the fluctuations smoothed out. One of the issues with this is the insufficiency as you have 3 stages of conversion. Someone on her quoted the efficiency but IIRC its around 10 % for that set up. Ie 10 % of the wind energy collected ends up as elecy

Issues with Hydrogen are mainly around the difficulties with transporting and storing it if you ignore the fact that most of our capacity for electricity generation is not renewable and the only practical way to generate hydrogen is electrolysis of water

Hydrogen may be the fuel of the future but until we can get it direct from solar ( and I believe research is being done on this) it will remain expensive and inefficient and most importantly still polluting

Fuel cells also use rare metals IIRC to generate elec from hu#ydrogen - hardly g#reen.

How about this:

<

I've not much time, but...

The link above is a review for the Honda Clarity, a hydrogen fuel cell powered car, on sale now, in California, U.S.A. So theres your electric car !.

Oh, one small consideration, the cost to re-kit our entire planets fuel handling infrastructure to deal with the creation, transportation, distribution of hydrogen so that it can be made available at the pump, as petrol is today, would be phenominal.

Therefore, I seriously doubt that anyone is going to stump up the dosh to convert their entire fuel handling infrastructure to deal with hydrogen.

So don't rush out and buy your Honda Clarity just yet.

But even if, for arguements sake, we had a liquid Hydrogen handling infrastructure available. Would you like to drive around with a hydrogen tank under the second row of seats in your car ?.

Its only my opinion, so don't tear my head off, but batteries are not the answer. Any idea how hot these batts get ?, I've some knowledge of current manufacturuers attempts to put batteries in current and up-coming cars. Its a mare, they can't package them, they can't cool them, the batts are heavy, the cabling required for them would be out of place as your local substation, and as for sliding them in and out of your car, at replacement stations up and down the motorways. Not practical.

I offer for consideration, genetically modified bacteria used to produce bio-methanol, from resources that won't have the potential to pressurize global food prices. Handling the methanol can be done with most of the equipement we already use for petrol/diesel. The only other minor techinical hurdle is that its flame is not visible, but an additive to the fuel would permit the flame to be seen, should there be an methanol fire.
Its a liquid at normal atmospherical pressure, so it can just slosh around in the tank like the fuel we already use.

Finally, I like the point that James May makes at the end of the Honda review, which goes something like this:

"I believe this is the car of the future, because its just like the car of today".

Bye.

Solo.
🙂

10 years away...u can quote me in 10 years when it happens...

As someone who works in the forklift industry there really is some grade A boll*cks spouted on here about batteries, the cells(the correct term) of today are very lightweight compared with a few years ago and getting lighter at a very fast rate,my company also is the only major player in the industry that uses hybrid forklifts using a gas engine to power electric traction motor there are very fuel effciant compared with a dieseland the wiring on these forklifts is no bigger than household wiring so nowhere near substation size.

yes, but RR's energy division is tiny compared to their aero sector. And it tends to be places like refinaries that use them, i.e. cheep pleitiful fuel, and a massive energy demand. For everywhere else theres conventional steam turbines driven by nuclear/coal/oil/gas power.

I still think whatever decision made to stop/postpone/canel their project mayhave more to do with the redundancies they'r making imply there aren't realy the resources to spare?

Anyway, more sources of energy = cheeper energy = cheeper air fares = more air travel = more money for RR in the long run? I'd say RR have a vested intrest in bringing the cost of fuel down!

the cells(the correct term) of today are very lightweight compared with a few years ago

and getting lighter at a very fast rate

You see battery technology isn't actually progressing that fast at all. Looking at state of the art LiIon/LiPo batteries as used in laptops, mobile phones etc., the energy density is very little (<20%) improved fro what it was a few years ago, and it's not getting better any quicker now than it was.

I'd like to buy a BMW 5 series and chuck in an electric engine 😀

I'll buy a Mustang or Corvette before any form of a souped-up golf-course cart.

hydrogen fuel cells as a future fuel source

Hydrogen is NOT a fuel source. It can be a means of energy storage but it is not, nor will it ever be, a source of fuel. You can't mine hydrogen.

The transportation and storage of hydrogen it not a trivial matter and requires the use of rather specialised materials as molecular hyrdrogen can escape through the crystal lattice of some metals. As for driving around with a "tank" full of the stuff well overall it would be a lot less dangerous than driving round with LPG or Petrol as the likely storage mechanism would be in the interstities of a block of metal rather than the traditional view of a tank so explosions would be a minimal risk, certainly several orders of magnitude less than those currently taken with modern cars.

Batteries are however not the way forward either as there isn't enough Li to make all the batteries that we actually need, which is a bit of problem.

As for oil companies developing a patenting stuff, well first off if you patent something you have to make it public. THAT'S HOW PATENTS WORK.

As for them wanting to suppress knowledge, well from my 15 or so years in the industry, no one I've seen has the wit to pull something like that off and in any case you know all those people working in the industry they are actually human beings, not robots. Do you really think that they all conspire to keep this sort of technology secret? Sorry but that is just too fanciful for words and makes the claims that the moon landings were faked seem reasonable by comparison.

The future is going to be hydrogen - I am almost certain of that! Most the big car manufacturers are designing such vehicles, and showing em off every so often... that pretty much seals it IMO. Batteries are just too compromised with both weight, energy density and charge times (though I like the idea of being able to swap em out... but you just know that someone will get all Apple on us and make a unique battery for it's vehicle that you can only get from their special licenced sources).

Solar/Wind/Wave/Tidal all offer potential for splitting sea water to make hydrogen, and the nature of renewable energy sources being as it is (ie not convinient enough to kick in when we need it) means that additional capacity at periods of low load on the grid (which would be pretty common) would up the efficiencies of a renewable generation grid, and provide us with the portable energy we require to boot.

Admitably in the short - medium term it will probably come from fossil fuels and nuke, but I can actually live with that if it brings the technology to market and starts to bring the oil based economy to an end (and lets face it, BP and their ilk will be making, transporting, storing and selling the stuff anyway so it isn't going to hit their bottom line too much once they shift production from oil to hydrogen!)

Bed now - too late for this stuff 😉

If they can make an electric car that weighs less than 100kgs, runs off locally produced renewable energy and would last 100 years....I could be interested.
Until then cars are just too self-indulgent. I can't justify it. I'll have to stick to my bike 🙁

closer than you think because you can;t hear the damn things coming

ooOOoo - that is a decent point. Most of these solutions are answering the wrong question. what is needed is cars that use less energy - both the embodied energy and the energy in use. smaller / lighter / simpler with long life and so on. think 2cv that doesn't rust not Mondeo that has an electric motor

I only skim read the thread but I read elsewhere 2014-2015 before they're widely available on the forecort.

I am really worried about the no sound element!

Most of these solutions are answering the wrong question. what is needed is cars that use less energy - both the embodied energy and the energy in use.

What's needed more is less dependence on cars in general (although obviously they're not going to go away).

Indeed MrSalmon

Very true.
But cars are too slick. The designers have spent 100 years disguising the internals and making them like white goods.

The noise issue of cars is almost irrelevent. Apart from the more cheaper diesel models, modern engines are so quite at urban speeds that they are un-audible over the din that typically HUGE tyres make on the road.
However elec cars focus on economy and efficiency so I suppose will have smaller tyres. Oh dear, they will to sneak up on cyclists/pedestrians with their stealthy approach! 🙂

how long befre a chav fits one of those fake dump valves to an electric car?