So Britain has joined France and other nations in announcing a definite final exit for the internal combustion engine. As from 2040, petrol and diesel cars will no longer be sold in this country. This means (presumably, based on current technology) the electric car will rule the roads. But who knows, before 2040 there could be entirely new forms of propulsion we haven’t yet thought of. Beam me up, SsangYong….
There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that driving an electric car is no hardship. In fact, it is positively fun. I leased a Nissan Leaf for eighteen months as part of a national market survey on the impact of car charging on the electricity infrastructure. I’m not sure what the infrastructure thought about this (or concluded at the end of the year and a half) but I had a whale of a time.
Did I mention range?
So why did I not buy another electric car? It wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm. Indeed, I almost persuaded myself it would be a good idea, so much did I like the Leaf. But the big problem, as everyone knows, is range.
At the time, the Leaf had a headline range of 85 miles but its real-world range was nearer to 50 miles. The full 85 miles was possible in ideal conditions, driving relatively slowly without air conditioning or heating (as appropriate) and eschewing the inherent accelerative delights of the electric motor.
At 75 mph on the highway the Nissan supped juice like a 1930s 15-litre racing car. The range is also calculated without taking into account the angst factor. With a petrol or diesel car there is a reserve where you are bombarded with dire warnings. But you don’t mind because you know you can pull into the next filling station and be back on the road in minutes.
Not so with the Leaf or other electric cars. You start worrying big time when the range gets to 25 miles. At 10 miles the angst is all pervading and images of a stranded Leaf by the side of the road remove all pleasure from driving. It was on one such occasion, driving back across London late one rainy night, that I finally realised that electric cars are not yet ready for the mainstream. I had to make an unexpected detour because of an accident and arrived home with the meter on zero. Phew! But never again. I went out and bought a polluting conveyance the next week.
Turning over a new Leaf
Later Leafs (Leaves?) have longer ranges and 130 miles is now commonplace. Tesla can stretch this to over 200 miles but you pay the penalty in having to drive a massive vehicle which has enough space for the batteries. Yet however long the range, when the music stops the prospect is not so rosy.
With the Leaf I did attempt a couple of longer journeys. After all, there are charging points at all motorway service stations and, at the time, fuel was free. At first it was fun: Roll up, plug in and go for a coffee. Thirty minutes later the car had an 80% top-up thanks to the rapid-charge technology and off I whisked again. Yet 50 miles later the angst set in once more. I soon came to realise that refuelling on the motorway wasn’t all that reliable. I began to find both the bays occupied. What a cheek! These damned electric vehicles were getting too popular! Sometimes a driver had gone off for a long lunch break, leaving his fully charged car blocking more needy applicants. Other times the chargers were out of order, leaving me up the M4 without a paddle as it were.
By 2040, no doubt, all these problems will be behind us. They’d better be. Service stations will sell no carbon fuel but will consist of several hundred pods where as-yet undeveloped rapid charging technology will have you on the road in ten or fifteen minutes. And ranges will have improved, perhaps to 400 or 500 miles. This has to happen if a country is going to be able to function on electric power alone.
Holy grails are needed
There is also the search for the holy grail of better battery technology. So far, despite lots of promises, there have been no big breakthroughs. Our phones still need charging every day and our cars continue to demand a top-up every 100 miles or so.
Make no mistake, though, given an extended range and better charging facilities, I would buy another electric car in a heartbeat. I’d buy a Tesla now if it weren’t such a monster around town (and, perhaps, were not quite so expensive).
The little Leaf, which was my introduction to electric cars, is decidedly fun to drive. Acceleration is impressive and the smooth linear transmission, sans gearbox, makes the car feel like a mini Porsche (although the on-paper figures don’t seem to support this impression). I’ve since driven the misbegotten Mercedes B-Class electric — an even more impressive car if it weren’t for one big glitch: It doesn’t support rapid charging, so that half-hour coffee break at the Membury Services would extend to a leisurely four hour slap-up gourmet meal — enough to ruin any journey and incense fellow electric car enthusiasts. Whatever were Mercedes thinking of? I didn’t buy it for that reason alone.
I’ve also considered hybrids with their typical electric-only range of 30 miles before the internal combustion engine need be used. A good idea, and that 30 miles would cover most of my regular trips. But the snag is the cost; they tend to be much more expensive than an equivalent petrol or diesel car and it is hard to justify for my style of motoring. No, given the right infrastructure, the all-electric car is something worth aiming for.
I’m currently running a small, economical petrol engined car but I will certainly be in the market for an electric replacement if technology continues to improve. It’s just that range that worries. Yet none of this seems to worry governments. It’s a case of legislate now and hope that the technology will be ready in time. On the other hand, it could be a case of wishful thinking.
Not to worry. By 2040 I’ll be past caring, so I shall not be losing any sleep over the transition.
More of my adventures with electric cars:
Batteries, batteries, batteries: Where to go from here?
____________
Hydrogen combustion is bsht!
All these electric car discussions are so useless, IMHO. As a mechanical engineer having learned to think like an engineer pretty early, this yakety-yak about abolishing some (still) vital technology without having a working alternative available, now or in the near future, is pretty stupid, IMHO. Lobby driven politicians are making laws that are pretty moot.
As you said Mike, range is and will remain the main problem with electric cars. The Tesla is an exotic luxury car and not practical or affordable for everyone. The only usable battery technology we currently have is lithium-based, but lithium is finite resource on this planet, plus it simply isn’t powerful enough for electric car usage because range is limited and "fueling-up" takes considerable time.
Imagine, in an electrified car world, taking a walk along a street in a residential area in the early evening, with all those parked cars along the sidewalks and hundreds of charging cables crossing your way, so that it is hard not to take a fall, or to keep your dog from getting strangled to death by a charging cable. Pretty bizarre… but thats the way the future will likely look like.
Most important, where does the electricity come from? Ideally it should come from solar panels or wind turbines. If there is dirty electricity used, even partially, electricity from nuclear power stations, natural gas or coal-fired power plants, the whole thing has no advantage any more, because the dirt is produced somewhere else and blown into the air or wandering around to be stored in some potentially insecure storage site. Then the efficiency of the electric car is down the drain. The combustion engine is better then.
To create charging stations, new and pretty thick cabling is required to convey the all electrical power that is needed. This infrastructure does not exist and will require tremendous amounts of effort and money to build. Just think of the residential street in a mid-sized town and multiply this by hundred thousands… in this town only. Practical? I doubt it.
Back in the mid-seventies, I think it was in 1974, I was away on a job in Munich at the BMW plant for a number of times. Our company provided supplies for the BMW foundries. Once during a lunch break I saw a modified type 5 BMW vehicle cruising around within the factory boundaries. It looked a bit diffenet than the regular type 5 BMW. Actually it was not a regular car from the showroom and it had a small lettering on it saying "Hydrogen Powered".
"Yes…" a colleague working at BMW said, "thats one of a number of other cars being tested here for quite a while. It has a combustion engine in it and uses hydrogen instead of gasoline. It’s just water vapor coming from the exhaust pipe!" "Holy smokes, thats science fiction!", I thought, but it will sure solve a huge part of the air pollution problem. Remember it was 1974!
In the following few years the hydrogen car and hydrogen tank security got perfected and was close to go into production. Then, all of a sudden all the hydrogen car plans mysteriously disappeared in some obscure drawers. Why? Hmm, I have a few ideas… 😉 The hydrogen powered combustion powered car had all the same advantages as a gasoline powered ones except the lack of poisonous exhaust fumes.
Until then here is a marvelous electric car alternative to look at;-) 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1tbf8muMc
Sorry, folks but I can’t see a future of the electric car the way it is now.
Frank,
I agree with you entirely on this. You make the point cogently and it is clear that governments are making optimistic promises. To a large extent, of course, they are intent on mollifying the green lobby which will never be satisfied until we are back to the 18th century in terms of transport infrastructure. Your point about car charging is so important. In a city such as London the majority of cars are parked in narrow streets outside houses. It is impossible to envisage a charging protocol that doesn’t involve streets lined with charging pods where residents will have to plug in when parking. It is a nightmare.
There is also the effect on the electricity infrastructure that has been totally downplayed. I had direct experience during the Nissan Leaf experiment. Our area was chosen by the government to run at least 10 Leafs (in fact, we had around 15) which had to be served by the same electricity sub-station. The start of the 18-month experiment was delayed because they discovered the local sub-station was inadequate. It had to be completely rebuilt before they could deliver the cars. Since then, although the experiment ended in 2015, I have heard nothing about the results. Perhaps they frightened themselves to death and began to realise the enormity of this vision of the future. I suspect the British and French governments have announced this ban, 23 years in advance, in the hope that something will turn up.
Your point about hydrogen is also well made. There was also LPG but I know there were safety issues attached to that. For instance, LPG cars are banned from the Channel Tunnel and, presumably, other sensitive areas. I don’t know how safe hydrogen propulsion is in relation to carbon fuels.
Clearly there will be developments, including road-based induction charging which is being used successfully for buses, but there is a long way to go. It is entirely possible that an alternative such as hydrogen (or some technology not yet envisaged) will come to the rescue before 2040.
One of the paradoxes when it comes to discouraging the use of undesirable means of propulsion is that it is the poorer people who suffer and end up paying more. Richer people are early adopters (Tesla, hybrids, newer rather than older IC vehicles) and it is the owners of inefficient ten-year-old vehicles who bear the brunt of the changes.
Also we cannot overlook the disastrous diesel scandal where the green lobby persuaded gullible legislators that diesel was the only future. I remember it started with the powerful green lobby in Germany and, within a decade, diesel was all the rage and the fuel was being sold at half the price of petrol. Now the experts have completely reversed their advice and we are told that diesel is the worst polluter and must be eradicated, preferably by imposition of taxes.
We are drawn to the conclusion that no one really knows the answer. In the meantime, pollution will continue because we are totally dependent on road transport. A bugger’s muddle indeed.
You are right Mike. To fully analyse this we could take up all of the webspace of Macfilos for the next 10 years. There are no absolute rights and wrongs here. One big social question is whether people will give up the independence of owning and using an automobile. It is certainly the case that, for city dwellers at least, owning and using an automobile will become less and less of a viable option. Younger people who live in major urban areas no longer have the desire or the means to be independently mobile. Will self driving cars ever become a reality and what kind of propulsion will they have? I have attended a talk in the last year at a policy institute of which I am a member where somebody predicted that by 2035 major urban centres would only allow self driving vehicles and there was a lot of talk about costs and traffic controls and elimination of traffic jams. I could go on, but already major city centres are becoming unpleasant to visit because of overcrowding due to cheap travel etc. See last week’s article in the Guardian (sorry!) about what is happening in Venice and Amsterdam etc. And while I am it, who in their right mind would want to be locked up on a cattle ship, sorry, cruise liner?
The changes to the planet, which are being caused by our increasing wealth and desire to move around, need to be addressed but not in ‘sound bite’ announcements about banning ‘hydrocarbon cars’ by 2040, but rather in having clearly worked out and staged strategies which make sense and are clearly signposted. Also incentives have to be provided to the public, including giving them something that they might actually like to use. Apple cars anyone?
Anyway, looking at the possible dates for all of this, the prediction of J.M. Keynes must take centre stage, for a lot of us.
William
Quite so. Unfortunately in today’s sound-bite form of government and the ill-informed pressures of mass social media it is difficult to think rationally and plan effectively. I won’t fret overmuch though, it is for another generation to worry about.
I have to mention two very curious things.
Some 5 years back an US company developed an AA prototype battery with aproximatively 45 seconds! carging time to full capacity. I dont remember the value. The prototype was bought by US army. Some 3 years back an Israelian company developed something very similar which also disappeared somewhere. On other hand a statistics sez that aproximatively 1 bilion (12 zeros) of Earth population income is depending on oil industry….
Where do you begin on this? There are so many aspects of this involving utilities, scientists, manufacturers, technology, environmental standards, legislation, infrastructure, international agreements and accepted societal and behavioural norms etc, etc , etc that it is impossible to know here to start. It is not as simple as just banning certain types of vehicle by 2040. A lot needs to be provided by Government, industry and others to make this work. One critical feature is the battery, or to give it a broader description the energy storage and recovery device, in cars. The present state of development does not really provide the type of device required for the 2040 strategy. The kind of energy recovery system that is to be found in some hybrid cars such as some expensive sports cars and F1 cars represents only a small step in the direction of the goal that needs to be reached by 2040. What is needed is a power device that charges itself after the initial charge or only needs charging every two years or so. The electricity generation industry not only needs to scale up for the challenge, it also needs to ensure that it produces its output by clean means. I’ll leave it at that as the scale of the challenge is enormous.
It will all cost a lot of money, but as Chuck Berry said, your dealer will offer you this for ‘No Money Down’. Chuck’s lyrics are below, better still listen to it on You Tube.
As I was motivatin’
Back in town
I saw a Cadillac sign
Sayin’ "No Money Down"
So I eased on my brakes
And I pulled in the drive
Gunned my motor twice
Then I walked inside
Dealer came to me
Said "Trade in you Ford
And I’ll put you in a car
That’ll eat up the road
Just tell me what you want
And then sign on that line
And I’ll have it brought down to you
In a hour’s time"
I’m gonna get me a car
And I’ll be headed on down the road
Then I won’t have to worry
About that broken – down, raggedy Ford
"Well Mister I want a yellow convertible
Four – door de Ville
With a Continental spare
And a wide chrome wheel
I want power steering
And power brakes
I want a powerful motor
With a jet off – take
I want air condition
I want automatic heat
And I want a full Murphy bed
In my back seat
I want short – wave radio
I want TV and a phone
You know I gotta talk to my baby
When I’m ridin’ alone"
Yes I’m gonna get that car
And I’m gonna head on down the road
Yeah, then I won’t have to worry
About that broken – down, raggedy Ford
"I want four carburetors
And two straight exhausts
I’m burnin’ aviation fuel
No matter what the cost
I want railroad air horns
And a military spark
And I want a five – year guarantee
On everything I got
I want ten – dollar deductible
I want twenty dollar notes
I want thirty thousand liability"
That’s all she wrote
I got me a car
And I’m headed on down the road
No money down
I don’t have to worry
About that broken – down, raggedy Ford
William
The problem with Electric autos is you will never see Chuck Berry with his Red Ragtop Caddy singing Maybellene, orBruce the Boss sing Pink Cadillac, or Beach Boys Little deuce coupe, nor Wilson Pickett Mustang Sally, or Johnny Bond original or more current Johnny Cash sing Hot Rod Lincoln! I don’t care what Guitar Riffs you can conjure you will never sell those cars to the masses! Serious now when I bought my bucket list last car (I sent you pics) I looked at General Motors equivalent for Leaf and I asked the dealership owner if it came with a fly swatter? Why I bought my car because I am advancing in age, and know my reaction time will , probably has, slowed down. The collision system on this car front and rear cameras side mirror alerts for blind spots, lane reminder alert if I stray, and if distance coming head on at me or if I too close I get blastof noise that makes me think of ww2 movies with klaxon going off and somebody yelling Dive Dive! I appreciate these features and many others built in so my hands stay on steering wheel not putting around with wipers headlights(mine are auto) or using my voice to change radio station. Imagine the juice this takes to operate I can not see that being run by battery. Which in a crazy round about way leads me to Leica T, the more I read about them maybe with out glasses I should serious think about obtaining one to try back camera composing! Looking forward to your review when you get your mits on TL2.