Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
It's a 'concept' which has been around for a long long time. The holy
grail really.


I think you are not being quite fair or realistic.

Two things make the BEV a proposition these days, when it wasn't before.

One is the advanced electronics we can use to get the efficiency out of
the controllers and so on, and the other is the lithium in the batteries.

Both of which are only small advances on the scale of things.


No. Lithium batteries are about 3 times lighter than NiCd, and about
half the weight of NiMh.

And if regenerative braking nets you 25% more miles, you are up to a
potential improvement in power and range for a given weight of maybe 300%.

If that is a small advance, Id like to know what a big one is..


Its always been possible to develop automotive batteries but with cheap
fuel, there was no commercial incentive. Its been the laptop palmtop and
mobile phone that has driven LIPO development.

But with energy at the price levels we have seen, BEV's suddenly make
sense commercially, as well as ecologically.

Err - you're assuming electricity will be cheap. My bet is as fossil fuels
become rarer electricity costs will rise in step. The investment required
to produce electricity from non fossil sources will require vast
investment - and that can only be recovered in one way.

We've been over this time and again. Discounting windmills, the actual
lifetime cost of a nuclear unit of electricity is around 3p. Even if
sold at 5p...

With 50Kwh being about the same sort of energy as around 50 liters of
fuel *burned in an engine*, you have a relative fuel cost of nuclear
around £2.50 a half tank, or road diesel around £50.

Now thats not the whole story, because the battery costs, has a limited
lifetime, and takes energy to make, but it gives some idea..




If you think about it, there is a potential for the car battery business
to be an industry on the scale of the oil industry. Not as big, but
getting on that way.

Of course the potential exists. If only people would stop talking crap
about battery powered cars with the same range and performance as we're
used to.

Once Ford, GM and Chrysler are in Chapter 11, that should clear the dead
wood out..

All of those are spending billions on research.


Spending money is not directl correlated wit results.
They are not spending billions on electrc cars anyway. They are spending
billions on ways to leverage the technology they know. Liquid fuel cars.

Remember that a BEV makes about 85% of all investment in existing car
plant totally redundant. Its cheaper to start from scratch.
Tesla have done more than anyone else with very little investment.




There are HUGE returns to be made from the company that does indeed
develop and patent the battery of the future.

As I said - the holy grail.

Not really. There are theoretical limits on lithium batteries: they will
never have the range of a fuel car but they will be good *enough*, and
the crossover point at which they become cheaper to run overall than IC
cars is by my crude estimation, a couple of years away.



And world economic conditions are actually highly favourable.


I think we are about 18 months away from usable batteries..at
affordable prices.
I've heard that one before...


The batteries exist, but they are expensive and fragile. They can be
made safer by adjusting the chemistry, and they can be made cheaper by
going into serious volume production. There is probably less in an
electric motor, controller and battery (in labour content`) than an IC
car power train.

There are always 'principles' that exist waiting only for some way of
making production a reality. Far more than ever see the light of day.


But everythig already exists.

Its like sitting there in 1975 saying 'well we have these micro chips,
and Ram chips and CMOS chips, in principle we could probably make a
computer for less than £100 using a TV as monitor in two years time' and
having people like you scoff at the very idea...

Technological progrss happens because a lot of small things come
together at a certan pont in time.

If te eleisabethans had had IC engines, which were probably withing
their abilities to amke, they could have probably constructed an aircraft.

Frank Whittles gas turbine engine was practical at inception in the late
20's; what it needed was advances in metallurgy.

You an take a 1925 Rolls Royce engine, dynamically balance it, and
double its power output.

Electric cars have been here since the last century. All they needed as
a decent battery.And for liquid fuel costs to rise substantially above
electricity.

Today, those conditions exist.