Electric vehicles and alternate fuel sources

Many cities in the UK, no doubt other parts of Europe too, are charging older, pre Euro V or Vl vehicles for access, trying to force people into buying new vehicles.
My car is 18 years old, approaching 200k km and runs perfectly. It has been maintained better than advised by the manufacturer and has never required any major repairs yet.
Surely retaining this car and rebuilding the major components when necessary, to double it's lifespan has to be more considerate of the planet's finite resources than replacing a vehicle every five years.
My car has a reputation for its ability to accomplish 500,000 km without an engine rebuild. Considering the age and mileage, my car will be viable for another thirty years, give or take.
That's pretty economical use of the earth's resources and will very comfortably see me out, before it needs a rebuild. Who cares if it's only Eu lll!

Sounds like another good reason to avoid the city to me

Paul

Don't forget to have one for the country, especially if your happy to pay for it. Just let the love shine lol.

Yeh I tend not to try and work it out these days. All sides make sense, all sides have spin, all sides are chasing the money, power, or position. I don't care to be labeled or associated with one side or another anymore. Besides, knowing the "truth" only last till the next accusation.

I find it hard to imagine these days I almost stepped off because I was to involved in being right over humanities banter. Spent some time getting a tune and worked out do I want to be right, or happy. Not much fazes me anymore. I highly recommend a tune if your rough. Don't worry if it takes one or two goes to find a tuner that fits and feels right. One life....live it. It is worth it.

I have always found peace and comfort in nature. Be in out in the silence of desert dunes, or wet mist moving through a saddle on the way to some peak, or letting the sea bath me while as I wash like sea weed on the sand. Funny for a whitie as it comes naturally to me and feels like home every time regardless of the mood. I also appreciate however the house and car I use, the life and services around me which all have been created by the minerals that mining provides. Meshing the two has never been easy if you appreciate for both. I can't live without both.

Just look after you own back yard the wife says. If we all did that things would be much better....
Trouble is where does that ends and who else is affected by doing so is an endless debate. So think it best to leave this thread alone for me.

I planted 2000 8m+ trees in the back yard to offset my families pollution and habitat loss from its consumption. I have room for another 2000 if an EV ever comes to be in my circumstances. Maybe that is enough. That'll do pig, that'll do.

I think hydrogen is the way to go, but there seems to be more money in EV's for the major players. Does anyone have any idea of the overall cost differences between producing electricity and hydrogen ?
ED, don't give up on us, you make some good points that I had not thought about. I have solar with 9.6 kw batteries which almost make us self sufficient.
I was involved in the oil industry for over 30 years and nothing would please me more than seeing our dependence diminish to where we only use it for lubricants, then all the OPEC countries that like to flaunt the wealth they have accumulated by ripping us off can go and bath in the excess production.

It would appear to me that all this change is quite doable, as is almost anything you can think of. The real question is at what cost both financial and social. Just getting the cobalt required would turn the most dysfunctional country in the world , the Congo, into the new Saudi Arabia.

The Netherlands Government just released a report saying if their tiny country suddenly went to their 2030 target it would require almost the entire world production at current rates of a number of the rare earth minerals.

Lots more to think of than what is coming out of power station stacks and car exhaust pipes.

I am glad I will be dead and gone by the time it gets really hard and I suspect we should be ironing the brims of our slouch hats ready for the 'discussions' that will arise from control over production and supply by various desperate parties.

Lang

I have been told by someone who should know, as they are in federal government. Russa's oil is just being channeled though Saudi back to Europe.

We are drug addicts addicted to the dealers wares' while Ukraine families die for us. In many ways Australia is the dealer of coal to various counties that are addicts. So who's the bad guy. To say China are terrible users so why should Australia do anything as we are such a small contributor, kind if changes the focus if we see ourselves as the dealer. We are also part of the reason China needs so much energy.

Its very difficult and takes time to get off the drugs, and find something positive to replace it with. This is Australia's and the globes problem effectively.

Nuclear is a fair option HOWEVER it extremely expansive, slow to implement, and when it goes wrong we still have no answer. So in reality its not such great alternative either. Cold Fusion may be a winner, but that's almost like saying lets fly to Mars. Still war time efforts saw amazing things accomplished. Not sure how many weather events the world has to witness to realise maybe the scientist of the 70's may have been onto something. Getting the drugies to give up their shit is a very long and hard road littered with misery and countless attempts. .

Toyota comments on EVs

A Dose of Reality Depending how and when you count, Japan's Toyota is the world's largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world's largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That's including Volkswagen's inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota's four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, SEAT, Skoda and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.



GM, America's largest automaker, is about half Toyota's size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you're driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn't been afraid to change the car game.



All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn't grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn't undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.



When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it's probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.



Toyota's head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: "If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”



Wimmer's remarks come on the heels of GM's announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.



Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world's largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.



Wimmer noted that while manufacturers have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world's cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that's even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.



The scale of the switch hasn't even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to Finances Online, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota's RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda's CR-V in second. GM's top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.



Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren't there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That's about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.



Simply put, we are gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids , a WHOLE LOT bigger.



But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn't exist yet.



We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we're all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we're charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in "as little as 30 minutes," according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas' experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn't even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.



Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It's about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That's for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn't reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won't come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we're currently generating if we go electric. He's not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.



Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota's addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.



Toyota isn't saying none of this can be done, by the way. It's just saying that so far, the conversation isn't anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

No doubt the bloke who bought the first motor car or truck did well. I bet however service stations, roads to, and oil refineries where not just all there waiting. To comprehend how that would all pan out was probably beyond the imagination of most if not all. Evolution just kept rolling. Also bet conservatives back then are still the same now, find it hard to embrace change even though they use it.

When LED lights were invented in 1962, most could see the upside but they where not as good as existing, or perhaps people struggled to see application. Now you would not buy old school for 99% of the time given the choice.

Its easy to discourage if we compare technology in its infancy stage to well established, and this truck is still not anywhere it needs to be but its a start. See Toyota are on board it seems with EVs, and I know they are working on Hydrogen also with Kenworth.

Also Governments (Australian) have been happy paying the bill with coal sales for 100 years now. Its understanbable there has been little interest in doing anything different regardless of what change science is suggesting is in the wind. The electrical grid has just done the same. The wind of change however is now being taken seriously by many established companied (global) making goods slowly evolving but generally doing the same for decades. Is that just chasing sales, natural evolution, or something else. Probably a good part of the first two, but if science has it right no home or stable planet to grow food will be a much bigger issue than the grids capability. We are struggling with insurance costs, rebuild times, housing, supplies, and food production to namet a few and that is from a few regular fires and floods in recent times.

Many of us have solar, even the conservatives I know who don't favour renewables. Again this technology is really the start, not the be all end. To power the house in day light from the sun makes simple sense even if its only for 8 of the 24hrs available to us. They will be working on moon light or who knows. Back to the LED however, efficiency in products is where its at. If energy required can be significantly reduced than its demands also follow. Cost of running declines which makes it attractive to buy.

Have a mate who was involved in making the gadget that takes power out of your EV while parked at work, or shopping etc and feeds it into the grid. If the car has ? charge but you only need 1/4 of its energy to get to work and back, then why not sell the rest. The full picture is you charge while driving or when you get home from you solar charged house. All hard to fathom but a 4 lane hi-way was also hard to see when a dirt track past the front door.

Who remembers "peak oil". According to the pundits 15 years ago we would be well and truly running out of fuel right now. All the stuff published on the internet back then seems to be a bit samish to the articles Lang is bringing our attention to. Logical arguments based on statistics.

Here is an adventure bike. Really great power and torque but once again range and charge times make it absolutely useless for the purpose for which it is designed.

expeditionportal.com/zero-emissions-and-...r-quiet-performance/