"Nightjar" wrote in message
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On 26-Jul-17 8:38 PM, newshound wrote:
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But it seems to me self evident that electric vehicles are *not* a dead
end. My wife and I have just gone down from four to three road vehicles,
and actually pretty much the most basic electric would be fine for at
least 90% of our journeys. It's just the capital cost which stops me from
getting one at the moment.

My car has a range of around 500-600 miles on a single tank, refills in a
few minutes and can carry five people with luggage, or a lot of luggage
for two people. I don't need all of those every trip, but I do need them
from time to time and only have the one car. All electric cars are a long
way from giving me what I need.

If the manufacturers were given a free hand as how to achieve set
pollution levels, they could, for example, choose to make hybrids that
only ran on electricity in the areas where air quality is an issue; easily
done with GPS. Jaguar did a concept hybrid, using miniature gas turbines
to run the generators, which are far more efficient and cleaner than ICEs,
however that still needed fossil fuel to run. By planning to ban new
petrol and diesel cars, the government is preventing developments of that
sort.

As a matter of interest, are most hybrid cars propelled entirely by electric
motors, with the power coming from either batteries or
petrol/diesel-electric generator? Or does the engine drive the wheels
*mechanically* (as in a conventional car) when you no longer need
low-pollution electric propulsion. If it's the former, you have the
advantages of the extra control (eg automatic acceleration profile) and of
single gear ratio, with none of the discontinuities that auto/manual
gearboxes cause as you change ratio and the dreaded surge of power when an
auto box unexpectedly changes down as you call for more power in a situation
where in a manual car I'd hold onto my present gear and simply press the
accelerator a bit further - it is this thing that I find hardest to adjust
to when driving an auto car: gauging the accelerator pressure to give me the
acceleration that I want, neither too little in a higher gear nor too much
in a lower gear.