On 21/05/2021 09:06, Tim+ wrote:
Of course they have their downsides (as trumpeted here ad nauseum) and
definitely wont suit everyones usage needs but Ive done 10,000 miles of
stress free motoring since last September.

I would love an electric car that had the range and performance and
capital cost of what I have now, but it doesn't exist.

If it did I would have bought it already.

Oddly enough, the reason I bought what I did, was to meet my personal
requirements for transport. Not to save the planet, or virtue signal my
Greenness (and wet-behind-the-ears-ness)

Its all very well to say 'hire a fuel car for a long trip' but that's a
hassle. And as one gets older, increasingly difficult.

The fact remains that whilst many of the ducks are in the row for
electric, not all are, and not all look like they ever *can* be, let
alone *will* be.

As with nuclear fusion, in principle its simple. Just create a small sun
in a bottle. Just develop a cheap lightweight high capacity electrical
energy store out of common materials.

If we had been able to do that - and batteries preceded internal
combustion engines - we would never have developed those IC engines in
the first place.

Everything about electric cars is right - except for the batteries. Too
expensive, too heavy, too material intensive, and made out of scarce
materials at that.

What we need is 'cold fission' so we can stick a lump of plutonium in a
car and make it produce 150,000 miles of electricity...

I would say that is more likely than BEVS, in future

I am saying all this because *most* of the reasons that people object to
BEVs are in fact perfectly soluble technically and at reasonable price.
There is no problem ultimately building enough nuclear plant and a big
enough grid to provide perfectly safe rapid charging points at every
motorway stop and supermarket. Nor the batteries capable of being
charged that fast, technically.

But there is probably not enough lithium in the world to do it. And
anyway lithium is simply too heavy, and its the lightest battery there is.


--
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over
the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that
authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat