On 27-Jul-17 3:16 PM, dennis@home wrote:
On 27/07/2017 09:36, Nightjar wrote:
On 26-Jul-17 8:38 PM, newshound wrote:
...
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.



We have seen what the manufacturers do when given emissions targets to
achieve, aka VW.

It is very unlikely that anybody would get away with something similar
again.


They can't do that with a zero target.

However, it is only in certain urban areas, where a zero target is
necessary, hence my suggestion that hybrids that use only their electric
drives in those areas, is a much more viable alternative solution.

Of course, post Brexit, the government won't be bound to adopt the EU
air quality standards, which were the basis of the Supreme Court ruling.

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Colin Bignell