Will electric vehicles become the 'dieselgate' of 2050?

[Tonibe63]

I remember 10 or 15 years ago we were 'encouraged' to sell our old vehicles and buy new ones via the scrappage scheme etc, then all of a sudden VW were caught cheating the emotions testing and diesels have become the source of all evil.
Now we are being 'encouraged' to buy electric vehicles with road tax/company car tax as the carrot. The difference is that with diesels we had existing technology, infrastructure and knew how to recycle them ...... with the electric car scenario we don't have the technology, infrastructure or supply of energy and even worse we don't know how to recycle them.
IMO it's driven by politics rather than solid engineering ...... and we all know how that political wind can change direction.

[Richard Simpson Mark II]

I was talking to a mate last night who had done 320 miles round trip for a meeting in his Mitsubishi Outlander hybrid, it was using the 2.2 litre petrol engine for all but 30 miles of that trip.
His normal daily commute is 40 miles round trip including motorway/dual carriageway and if he goes above 60 mph he doesn't have the battery range to get there and back on a single charge so has to plug in or run the engine to recharge.
He thinks he's saving the planet because his Company car tax is so little.

I know someone with the same car...it uses more petrol than my old 1.6 Focus. something to do with running on electric for a few slow miles, then lugging a bloody great flat battery about for the rest of it.

I saw a story from a vehicle leasing company which said many of these cars are returned from lease with the electric charging lead still in its factory wrapping: that's how good they are!

[Richard Simpson Mark II]

A little while ago I used to lecture at MSc level and did one course module entitled "Energy Conversion Engineering"--and being RN based did all kinds of odd battery material combinations like sodium/sulphur, solar, small nuclear heat sources, external combustion Stirling Cycle engines, wave power, fuel cells and so on--and a couple of points
1) Always look at the "Well to Wheel " pathway and implications of your chosen prime mover--from destroying a mountain in Africa, the energy involved in shipping and refining the materials (and of course its "remote" environmental impact --NO NIMBY stuff allowed!), to disposing of the precious metals etc in used fuel cells and batteries.
2) on Hydrogen specifically--its a bitch to store and transport-apart from it being a very reactive substance its a small molecule and will permeate through steel containers and also cause embrittlement ("Embrittlement is a loss of ductility of a material, making it brittle. Various materials have different mechanisms of embrittlement. Hydrogen embrittlement is the effect of hydrogen absorption on some metals and alloys. Sulfide stress cracking is the embrittlement caused by absorption of hydrogen sulfide. "

I honestly believe, because there is a physical limit on energy storage (Kwh/m3) that we are pretty close to with Lithium iron, that "electric" cars will have a limited use only , and we will still need diesel etc to transport large quantities of goods over distance--and modern diesels are not the polluters that knee jerk politicians make out (deNOX plus particulate filters plus oxidation catalysts--look up a modern truck tailpipe and spot the soot!)

Modern trucks and buses produce less NOx per vehcile km than many modern diesels. And some of the smallest diesel car engines are the worst offenders.

[catcitrus]

on that last point about small diesels producing more NOx be careful--it depends whether or not they have the adbleu system--if not that will come--and NOx is a legislated emission (which caught VW out!) so there is no reason why diesels can't be super clean. The NOx "problem" that VW skirted around was due to the way NOx is formed in the engine--its a high temperature "bonding" that occurs in the peak temperatures of the combustion process (and diesels have higher CRs and thus higher temps than petrols--but we won't get into homogeneous versus stratified charge and the fact that petrols are controlled to give no excess oxygen in the exhaust so that a 3 way catalyst can work and "deNOx"--not possible with a diesel due to excess air/oxygen)--anyway , back to diesels and VW. The best efficiency (fuel economy) and power is produced if you can release all your fuel energy at TDC--but that creates these high temperatures. So you have to start with phased pilot, close coupled pilot, shaped main and post injections just to keep the temperature/time profile, and therefore NOx production, down--but that doesn't help either fuel efficiency or power and engine response--so VW taught the very complex mapping of the injection shape and timing to recognise where it was and get back to "normal" driving when jo public got behind the wheel. This has unfortunately knee jerked the muppet politicians into thinking that diesel was bad without any view of the future possibilities--and the fact that we are an island , get stuff by sea, and deliver stuff in trucks. We are solving these latter issues pretty well simply because there is no real alternative if you have to do decent distance (although coastal electric ships are being trialled and Elon Musk is trying electric trucks--but both have problems previously mentioned in "Well to Wheel"). Diesel cars WILL get super clean if given the chance and we won't be giving up our reliance on fossil fuels any time soon--people forget the energy and process involved in making Li iron batteries and the like. Hope you stayed awake--my old brain is starting to hurt to!

[Richard Simpson Mark II]

All very true.

I suspect the Tesla semi was just wheeled out to get the share price up.

Musk was happy to quote a 0-60 time, but the payload was a secret.

I asked the question via an intermediary ...was told its 80,000 lb. Given that that's the legal weight limit for Class 8 (18-wheeler) trucks in North America, it would suggest that either the truck itself is lighter than air, they took it up into space and weighed it, or the engineers who designed it didn't read the American equivalent of the C&U regs very carefully.

An independent engineer calculated that the battery alone probably weighs 12 tonnes if it meets the claimed performance figures. A top-of-the line UK tractor unit weighs around 8 tonnes, and that's with an additional axle.

Add to that the range/recharge problem and I think Mr Musk will probably not mention it again. But it did what it was built to do, which was keep the share price up so he can continue to spend other people's money.

[WIBO]

If you can be bothered to watch this........ some very good points made.







This is for nerds too.....



Live consumption gauges for all types of energy.

http://gridwatch.co.uk/









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[Tonibe63]

If you can be bothered to watch this........ some very good points made.







This is for nerds too.....



Live consumption gauges for all types of energy.

http://gridwatch.co.uk/









.

So there isn't the generation capacity for the World's needs today, it's going to get worse over the remaining years many of us have left on the planet and that's without us rushing head long into electric vehicles. The reality is there are too many people on the planet ......... volunteers to check out early? .... there could be a financial incentive .
I predict a massive increase in sales of thermal underwear, candles and scrabble .

[herman]

"I predict a massive increase in sales of thermal underwear, candles and scrabble " but that would lead to a population explosion!! With reference to a few posts ago PV on new build does not sell houses ..yet. It has been tried but as with most large businesses it was done badly with cheap systems which are already failing just to get grants. The only sector that is really making inroads as far as I can tell is Housing associations and the like that can take a longer term view on their properties , three generations payback for example. As usual our politicians are running around knee jerk reacting to the media then quietly cutting the grants and incentives when they realise the coffers are being hit.