Green number plates and benefits for electric cars

[Baron von Lotsov]

It's mostly image these days though. A lot of new cars seem to me to look like they will go like a bullet, but are actually poxy things which rev like mad just to get up a steep hill. The bodywork is also much thinner. I've seen how you can make a dent in a car just with your thumb. Have you seen the cars in China though? The same poxy things are far cheaper over there. We are being ripped badly, and the tech is not that much better. You know graphene is 200 times the strength of steel and six times lighter.

[Wiggles]

I had a look at this racing car, all electric, with a price tag of a million quid. It was built and designed by a  startup firm of young engineers in one of those newly liberated Eastern bloc counties. The question was of course, how did it go. They had it spinning around a racetrack and it was clear that it would beat the pants off anything else, no matter however Formula 1 mega sponsored it might be. It was all to do with computer control of the drives to the wheels and a load of sensors measuring acceleration and so on. It could compute the optimum method of taking the corner it was about to go around, so corners were to it, like straight road.

I own a Vauxhall Meriva 1.4 Life. I believe the performance is much the same. Hang on a minute, I also own a 1954 Austin A30, which may not be quite as fast, but has a lot more character

https://i.imgur.com/dXsQ76q.jpg">



Whoops, I forgot the wife's car, still not as fast, but still a lot of fun

https://i.imgur.com/9olphcZ.jpg">

[Baron von Lotsov]

Yeah, that's called a wife. In seriousness though I have been driven in an electric car and it was impressive. Once we have sorted out the battery problem it is certainly the way forward. I can't help feeling though that our present battery powered cars are Model T Fords to our modern day petrol cars. If I were buying a car tomorrow I would certainly consider a hybrid, but I certainly wouldn't consider an all electric car. I believe the vast amount of owners use them as a second car, making the owners pretty well off.

I had a look at this racing car, all electric, with a price tag of a million quid. It was built and designed by a  startup firm of young engineers in one of those newly liberated Eastern bloc counties. The question was of course, how did it go. They had it spinning around a racetrack and it was clear that it would beat the pants off anything else, no matter however Formula 1 mega sponsored it might be. It was all to do with computer control of the drives to the wheels and a load of sensors measuring acceleration and so on. It could compute the optimum method of taking the corner it was about to go around, so corners were to it, like straight road.

[Wiggles]

For these reasons it is clear that in the future this is what the car will look like, and it won't have a steering wheel either. You just get in it and tell it where you want to go and then relax and read a book or something.

Yeah, that's called a wife. In seriousness though I have been driven in an electric car and it was impressive. Once we have sorted out the battery problem it is certainly the way forward. I can't help feeling though that our present battery powered cars are Model T Fords to our modern day petrol cars. If I were buying a car tomorrow I would certainly consider a hybrid, but I certainly wouldn't consider an all electric car. I believe the vast amount of owners use them as a second car, making the owners pretty well off.

[Baron von Lotsov]

Alternatively we could have a motor so efficient it could travel 1000 miles on a pair of triple A batteries, or is that out of the question ?

The one thing you can say about electric motors is they are almost 100% efficient as they are. An internal combustion engine is about 30-40% ish. That's 2/3rds heat. The hotter it gets the more inefficient it is. Internal combustion engines have to have water cooling and large radiators to get rid of the heat. An electric motor might have a few fins on it to increase air cooling but it is a tiny amount of heat.



However if the range and battery problem are sorted out, then they outperform in nearly every other way. They have much higher bhp, faster acceleration, less weight (excluding battery weight) less components and cost, making for higher reliability and longer life expectancy. Each wheel can be driven independently and computer controlled to give handling unheard of with conventional drives. You can alter the power to the wheels in milliseconds, so cornering would be far smoother and far safer, i.e. less likely to lose traction. Also because you don't have thousands of chemical explosions going off all the time under your bonnet the level of noise is close to zero. Think what a relief that would be for city dwellers living on main roads - no smell, no noise.



For these reasons it is clear that in the future this is what the car will look like, and it won't have a steering wheel either. You just get in it and tell it where you want to go and then relax and read a book or something.

[Wiggles]

I think the most promising are these batteries which are actually capacitors. Using nanotechnology they can now produce batteries with the same power as Li ion but will charge in one second. They have increased the capacity 20 times by reducing the distance between plates and increasing the surface area of the plates. They believe that they can go further as it is a new technology where Li ion has been worked on for decades to squeeze as much performance as possible. Lithium is not a very abundant element and will rocket in price as electric cars go mass market, so it is brewing a serious and insoluble problem, much like fuel cells requiring platinum , an even rarer element.



Anyhow supposing they do get these things to work. The charging current would be huge. How you do it is drive into a recharging station, then the power through the grid charges up the station's own capacitors and then they are capable of delivering huge currents, and these would have to be connected by very large and very safe connectors or it would go bang. I suppose you would probably drive into a bay and a robotic arm would connect the cables automatically whilst instructing the car's computer to keep its brakes on and stay put. Realistically speaking i would expect the charging time to be no more than 5 minutes, possibly even a minute as they perfect the technology. If we had this at every petrol station then the range would not matter so much. Even if the range were 50 miles, who really cares if the charging takes 5 - 10 seconds. Li ion can't do this, and another thing is the cell lifetime. Capacitors do not degrade like chemical cells do. You would never have to replace the batteries and if you had an old car you wanted to update then you could use your old batteries if they were standardised.

Alternatively we could have a motor so efficient it could travel 1000 miles on a pair of triple A batteries, or is that out of the question ?

[Baron von Lotsov]

You appear to know what you are talking about, This confirms that where we are at present isn't where we need to be. I want to be able to drive 400 miles non stop. When I am out of power I want to be able stop off at a station for ten minutes and fuel up, what I don't want to do is search for somewhere to get energy, and wait for four hours for the batteries to charge. For the millions of houses that don't have private driveways, do we just lay cables across the paths in order we can charge our cars? Has anyone thought about the eventual destruction of billions of batteries, and the effect they will have on the planet? Honestly, as well as the enormous cost of an electric car, we are so far from getting rid of the internal combustion engine it's unreal.

I think the most promising are these batteries which are actually capacitors. Using nanotechnology they can now produce batteries with the same power as Li ion but will charge in one second. They have increased the capacity 20 times by reducing the distance between plates and increasing the surface area of the plates. They believe that they can go further as it is a new technology where Li ion has been worked on for decades to squeeze as much performance as possible. Lithium is not a very abundant element and will rocket in price as electric cars go mass market, so it is brewing a serious and insoluble problem, much like fuel cells requiring platinum , an even rarer element.



Anyhow supposing they do get these things to work. The charging current would be huge. How you do it is drive into a recharging station, then the power through the grid charges up the station's own capacitors and then they are capable of delivering huge currents, and these would have to be connected by very large and very safe connectors or it would go bang. I suppose you would probably drive into a bay and a robotic arm would connect the cables automatically whilst instructing the car's computer to keep its brakes on and stay put. Realistically speaking i would expect the charging time to be no more than 5 minutes, possibly even a minute as they perfect the technology. If we had this at every petrol station then the range would not matter so much. Even if the range were 50 miles, who really cares if the charging takes 5 - 10 seconds. Li ion can't do this, and another thing is the cell lifetime. Capacitors do not degrade like chemical cells do. You would never have to replace the batteries and if you had an old car you wanted to update then you could use your old batteries if they were standardised.

[papasmurf]

 I want to be able to drive 400 miles non stop.

That is a very unsafe thing to do.

[Wiggles]

Samsung are in the process of developing graphene batteries. They are supposed to charge five times as fast and hold 50% more power. The other technology is lithium metal batteries. They have problems at the moment in they deteriorate on recharging, but there are ways around this and it is being worked on. It looks like we could double the energy with lithium metal. There's a very neat trick which has been sussed out at MIT to solve it.



So in the foreseeable future it looks like energy/range could double, but not go much further with lithium because there is a theoretical limit. We do not have a better element than lithium, so other technologies will have to replace it, where two contenders are capacitors and nuclear power. The greens won't like nuclear power and the capacitors are only 1/20 of the power of lead acid, but by using nanotechnology they have equalled lithium ion in research labs, (the current best technology). Whether they can go much further I do not know.



If they can, like if we can get 5 times the energy density, then we can have electric airliners. There's a lot of dosh riding on this, but man can not do the physically impossible.

You appear to know what you are talking about, This confirms that where we are at present isn't where we need to be. I want to be able to drive 400 miles non stop. When I am out of power I want to be able stop off at a station for ten minutes and fuel up, what I don't want to do is search for somewhere to get energy, and wait for four hours for the batteries to charge. For the millions of houses that don't have private driveways, do we just lay cables across the paths in order we can charge our cars? Has anyone thought about the eventual destruction of billions of batteries, and the effect they will have on the planet? Honestly, as well as the enormous cost of an electric car, we are so far from getting rid of the internal combustion engine it's unreal.

[Baron von Lotsov]

OK, so hydrogen faces a lot of problems. Expense seems to be one, but scales of economy? Will they ever be possible? Infrastructure is another issue as JoG points out. Or is hydrogen basically dead in the water?



I know battery tech is changing the whole time, but are there enough materials to change all over to electric cars? Rare earths, nickel, cadmium or whatever is needed??

The price of lithium carbonate has increased 76% in one year alone. It's found at the bottom of various lakes. One is in Canada and another in Tibet.



Lithium is the only element which has the power to make chemical batteries for the job. One can not expand the periodic table.



By the way, still keep in mind hydrogen is an excellent fuel with 3X the energy density of petrol and entirely is non-polluting. If we had an industrial way to generate large amounts of energy cheaply , e.g. nuclear fusion, or even fission, we could make hydrogen and use it in cars simply as a medium to store energy in.

[boggart]

OK, so hydrogen faces a lot of problems. Expense seems to be one, but scales of economy? Will they ever be possible? Infrastructure is another issue as JoG points out. Or is hydrogen basically dead in the water?



I know battery tech is changing the whole time, but are there enough materials to change all over to electric cars? Rare earths, nickel, cadmium or whatever is needed??

[Baron von Lotsov]

What ever happened to fuel cell?

They are prohibitively expensive. Rolls Royce had them and the cells were a hundred grand I think they said. They use platinum.

[johnofgwent]

What ever happened to fuel cell?

You mean the hydrogen powered vehicle ?



Remember the Olympics, and the green taxis and the hydrogen fuel they ran on....



They were about to install the refuelling stations, when someone in my line of work happenned to mention the desirability of a whole ready made dozen Graf Zeppelins not 200 yards from a curiously twisted metal structure......



Right where ISIS would love to have it as a way to incinerate a whole load of infidels.



That put the kybosh on that.



So



To keep up appearances, every morning a fleet of super green taxis rocked up to ferry people wherever they desired.



And as the gates closed at the venue, every one was loaded onto a whole fleet of diesel powered car transporters....  Who trucked them about a hundred miles to Swindon, where they were all refuelled at Honda of the UK Manufacturing's hydrogen fuelling station, loaded back onto the transporters, and trucked back.



This went on every day of the Olympics



How green was that !!!

[johnofgwent]

Probably not that easy with ANPR — which is used for Congestion and Ulez zones. Primary purpose of Green plates will most likely be to nudge trendy motoring plebs into buying EVs, and help local authority parking attendants quickly decide charges.  Infringements will probably be generated by ANPR...

So clone a green car plates ...

[Barry]

Maybe they could paint them with that radioactive green paint they used to use on watch faces. No number plate light would be necessary!  :mrgreen: