Electric Vehicle Thread!

Its a greenhouse gas and contributes to climate change.

Climate change. There's a loaded phrase if there ever was one. The climate is going to change regardless of what humans do.

The AGW/Global Cooling proponents have learned from their past mistakes. The earth's climate is unpredictable which makes it difficult to do proper fear mongering. So instead of Global cooling in the 70's and 80's and then changing their minds to Global Warming in the 90's and 00's (same people behind both public fear mongering) it's been changed to Climate Change.

Can't be proven wrong then. Oh it got colder? Climate Change. Oh it got warmer? Climate Change. They're right no matter what happens.

Yup. Sketchy to the extreme.

Regards,
SB
 
SB, who are you talking about specifically. You are discussing "AGW/Global Cooling proponents", who are these people exactly?
 
it's been changed to Climate Change.
yes because idiots dont know the difference between climate and weather and we get u.s senators bringing snowballs into congress and saying look I've just proved global warming isnt true.
plus climate change is actually a better label although global warming as a term is not wrong the earth as a whole is getting warmer

Edit: forgot to mention DO NOT PUT A PLASTIC BAG OVER YOUR HEAD I know you think you will be perfectly fine but please trust me on this you will die

From Wiki
"The properties of carbon dioxide were studied more thoroughly in the 1750s by the Scottish physician Joseph Black. He found that limestone (calcium carbonate) could be heated or treated with acids to yield a gas he called "fixed air." He observed that the fixed air was denser than air and supported neither flame nor animal life."
 
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Granted but turning a generator requires a lot less torque than powering the wheels of a car and we have cars with 1 litre engines so the size of an engine needed just to rotate coils will be smaller than that, would a 500cc engine be enough ? how about a 50cc engine like mopeds have ?
You can't get more power out of the electrical connections of a generator than (at least) the power applied to turning the generator shaft. You can't therefore get 1000ccs worth of power out of a generator turned by a 500cc engine (simply speaking). 2nd law of thermodynamics and whatnot... :)

Also, ICE vehicles have gearboxes, for the purpose of increasing torque. Most car engines have far too little torque from the crankshaft itself to power the vehicle directly, save for a hypercar like the Koenigsegg Regera for example. (The regera actually has a gearbox too, although at a single, fixed gear ratio...)
 
I know all that, what i dont know is how small can an engine be if all it has to do is generate electricity at 50% of the rate it is being used
so doing some incredibly rough calculations a ford fiesta has a 1 litre engine and a top speed of 122mph the speed limit in the u.s is 55mph
so a 0.5 litre engine should be good for 55mph and if it takes the same power to power a car either directly or via electricity then a 0.5 litre engine would provide enough power for 55mph
and an engine half the size would provide half that speed or half the charge hence be good enough to extend the range by 50%
(yes i know its very shaky maths and there are losses through imperfect efficiency ect)
 
Why a carbon tax when carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant?
This red herring of a strawman argument has been debunked countless times. Please don't ever use it in a serious debate, because it makes you look like an infantile moron...

The periods of greatest bio-diversity on the planet were also the periods of greatest carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
That was quite literally millions of years ago, when life on this planet was adapted to high CO2 levels. Also, when the energy output of our sun was markedly lower than it is today.

There has been no conclusive proof that an increase in carbon dioxide is in any way harmful to life on earth.
Nonsense. Simple example why: pull a hose from the exhaust pipe of an ICE car to the air intake of the engine. What happens?

Anyhow, greenhouse gas properties of CO2 are more than well established in any way you care to mention. There's also ocean acidification to consider.

And when the proponents of AGW use "consensus" as their proof, that raises a lot of red flags.
This ludicrous nonsense has also been debunked countless times. You got hit on the head recently, or what the hell happened to you? Consensus is built upon quite literally mountains of peer-reviewed research. That's why they call it "science", laddie!

Petrol is a vastly more efficient storage medium for energy than any battery in existence.
Yeah, so what? Petrol will also run out at some point. Petrol engines are inefficient, heavy, noisy, complex and expensive, maintenance-heavy, and polluting. The point is to GET AWAY from them, not find ridiculously contorted reasons to cling onto them.

Btw, turbines are costly, extremely noisy, hot-running, polluting and inefficient. You really don't want them as a powerplant in a car. The only reason they're used at all is that they're very light compared to their power output and comparatively reliable/low maintenance to any other alternative - piston engine would be the only one, realistically, as the idea of nuclear reactor-powered aircraft never really caught on, for whatever ridiculous reason... :LOL: Btw, very high-power piston engines were abandoned in the 1950s due to them being unreliable, thirsty and incredibly heavy for their power output.

The political backlash means that R&D into an ICE driven electric vehicle isn't encouraged.
It's not encouraged because it would be stupid. Again, the point is to get rid of burning petroleum, not invent more ways to continue doing it.

In many ways similar to how R&D into hydrogen powered vehicles are currently Politically discouraged.
I'm unaware of any such political discouragement. Anyway, hydrogen is not much of an improvement on energy density compared to batteries (if at all really), and also rather volatile. Fuelling millions of vehicles daily with a wildly explosive gas would be problematic from a safety point of view, as would distributing hydrogen across entire nations for the sake of powering automobiles be. Trrrsts for example could hijack a hydrogen tanker truck and effectively turn it into a very large bomb on wheels. Armed escorts for all transports would be financially unfeasible, as would armed guards at all gas stations be to prevent them getting blown up.

But the currently administration will not tolerate anything except R&D into full EV.
Citation Needed...
Btw, tinfoil hat alert here, but you really don't need Obama's permission to further research into whatever kind of automotive fuel you care to choose.

Well, for antimatter, you might. I dunno. But other than that...
 
pull a hose from the exhaust pipe of an ICE car to the air intake of the engine. What happens?
Er the engine stops working ?
I think my put a plastic bag over your head is a better example (apart from the slight death inconvenience)
 
From my point of view, the biggest reason to move to EV would be the logical move away from a non-renewable resource like oil. Of course you still have to generate the electricity to charge the vehicle which brings us around to power generation on a larger scale and how to shift efficiently to other "free" energies like wind, water and sun. But to me that's the goal long-term for countries.
 
I think that's the best aspect of an EV - you are now much less dependent on how the electricity is produced.

I think the range and recharge time are going to be solved eventually. I think there is scope for the capacity of batteries to increase 100x, witnessing various research breakthroughs. 300km is already half of what many gas based cars do, and the industry is only just relatively recently started being interested (motivated by laws/tax breaks) in moving this forward. Of course there are also various other advantages - the company I work for just recently started an experiment where they purchased a small fleet of EVs and a number of colleagues are trying them out to see if they are now practical. Certainly a country like the Netherlands is relatively well suited for experiments like these and also benefits from the advantages sooner.


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An interesting notion that someone may have raised or not is self driving cars have good probability of increasing emissions and congestion. If you get to sit in car recreating you don't care so much about traffic jams. If parking is expensive you two car to dive away and come back later. Anyway I personally always liked phevs. Full electric are mostly pointless IMO. You cat an enormously heavy battery pack around that you rarely use or you match range to your come and sell after battery degrades, or you get a 30%bigger battery than you need so it will function with degradation, but then you cannot move or change jobs without replacing your car if you range changes. There have been battery swap suggestions in the past but those were mainly about using tax payer money to enrich the swapper (via using the extra batteries as regulation for electricity grid) plus given that batteries were the barrier to entry why make the need greater than one per vehicle. Anyway given the actual decrease in price of batteries it is sort of shocking that we don't see more PHEVs being sold. They are more complex of course and far more difficult to engineer than an EV but they get around many of the issues surrounding an EV. My driving profile is vastly different than typical though. I dive 1000 miles of less in city and 8000 on the highway so an EV would be stupid for me. I do see a lot of rich people driving Tesla's in town while I ride my bike though. I see a lot of middle class people driving Chevy volts and Nissan leafs.
 
Remember me banging on about having a petrol engine just to charge the batteries
turns out the fisker karma does that
 
I wonder about using the simplest and smallest, puniest petrol/etc. engine you can get away with, but tuned for generating electric power only (might be free piston engine, external combustion etc.). Make the car small, lightweight, awfully underpowered and the top speed around 45 mph.
Slow most of the roads down (this becomes the top speed on all non-highway roads and for semi-autonomous vehicles, save on some motorways)

I wonder if by turning the car into a dog (a veal, in my language) that way, or into a faster road legal golf cart or enclosed bumper car, the energy use can be kept very low.
Basically, like the debate on page 4 about making it small, but cave in and make it as slow as a Ford T, and as a collective punishment make everyone go slow to so as to support the slower, less safe vehicles (including bicycles and why not a new class of e-bikes). Half joking about the punishment thing.
Electrical range would be low, but charging would be survivable on 230V and fast on EV-grade voltage, then finding a petrol/gas station to go farther isn't exactly hard.
 
Eh. Who'd want to putter along at 45 mph for any longer distance? Anyhow, internal combustion engines can never be particularly efficient to begin with (carnot cycle and whatnot), plus they make the vehicle heavier, noisier, and polluting. Hybrid cars are not the end of things, they're currently a means to an end, because we can't make fully electric vehicles affordable - yet! And this mainly because of the established auto industry's reluctance to invest in the neccessary R&D and infrastructure. Now their hand is being forced by Tesla (and Google, Apple; corps with more money squirreled away than they know what to do with.)

If established auto industry doesn't want to get their collective lunches eaten by newcomers, they'll have to hop on the E-train. It's as simple as that.
 
If established auto industry doesn't want to get their collective lunches eaten by newcomers, they'll have to hop on the E-train. It's as simple as that.

Most probably by chinese manufacturers who see this as THE opportunity to break into the world wide market.
 
Aah. Top Gear - or as it's better known as: Bottom Rung. Still as hammy and crap as always. Never understood the appeal of that pile of dreck, tbh.

Worst TV I ever saw was when they (IIRC) pretended to shoot a missile at a car, which was nothing but terrible digital SFX, and at no time did they ever admit the entire thing was nothing but a complete sham and lies. Awful. Just awful.
 
They needed to admit it was fake ?
It wasn't obvious to you especially as Clarkson was killed in that clip yet was strangely alive enough
to introduce it, did that not give you a tiny hint his death may not be real,
should Clarkson have issued a press statement saying he wasn't really dead. If he did would people have beleived him ?
I'm just wondering how long after seeing the show did it take you to realise Clarkson hadn't actually died ?
 
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