Tim Streater wrote:
In article , Bob Minchin
wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

What you're saying is a car where the main motive force is the
battery/motor with a small petrol engine to recharge efficiently as you
go along (range increaser). That doesn't seem to be the main focus of
manufacturers at the minute.

Yes that is about it Tim.
Maybe manufacturers will take more of an interest as the fossil fuel
only vehicle ban becomes more definite unless a battery swap or near
instant charge method can approach what we are used to at a filling
station.
Eg 5 minute pause off the road extends range by 500 miles.

There's all these folk touting electric cars but without examining the
charging requirements. There was one such on Twitter I saw yesterday.
What was amusing was the response (which unfortunately I didn't keep)
of a sensible person. He was talking about next gen cars with 700 mile
range. Unfortunately that would take 3.5 days to charge up at home
using an ordinary 13A connection. Or faster at a station, but you'd be
plugging in a cable that had 1000V or more on it, or at a lower voltage
a cable which would have to pass 400A which you'd have trouble lifting.

I could pump 50 litres of diesel into my old C4 in about a couple of
minutes. The 50 litres is about 500KWh of energy. At 10 amps I'd need
50kV for an hour. Even at 100A I'd need 50kV for 6 minutes.

There's no magic here, what is being exposed is the reason why the
internal combustion engine for personal transport has been where it's
at for the last 100 years and electric power nowhere.


As an earlier poster commented: "we have not progressed an enormous
amount" - and the limitation is battery technology.

However the imperatives to minimise pollution and reduce reliance on
fossil fuels will give the incentive to alter the way we use cars.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/...ars-says-study

.... this indicates that a large proportion of journeys are very short -
to quote: "95 percent of them travelled less than 40 miles to work, with
the average commute distance being 13.6 miles". Earlier in the same
piece: "The average single-trip distance? Just 5.95 miles".

An all-electric car is ideally suited to such distances. Further,
charging can be either at home or the place of work. The non-continuous
nature of renewable sources such as solar, wind, and tide can be
accommodated because the car already contains the necessary storage battery.

What this doesn't address is congestion. Mass transit can help with
that but the long-term solution will be to remove the need for travel.

Longer journeys are more of a challenge. Trains are good for one person
travelling, and the the option would be to have an electric vehicle to
hire at the destination station. But the electricity for trains is more
likely to come from fossil sources. Here again the solution will be to
remove the need for travel. The concept of commuting long distances to
work is silly, anyway.

--
Graham J