"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
reenews.net...
"nightjar .uk.com" nightjar@insert my surname here wrote in message
...
....
Most would buy one if they had the chance, having the range and speed.

I seriously doubt that.

They would. Quiet, smooth, highly reliable, buttons to service.

You really should learn to understand that other people do not necessarily
share your tastes.

Once they experience the smoothness
and silence that wins them over.

You get smooth and silent with
a good quality automatic car

Nonsense. Get an electric car and the difference is marked. After 15
years
an electric car will still be quiet and smooth while ICs are rough.

As I rarely keep a car for more than three years, that is entirely
irrelevant to any choise I would make.

and they have
the additional advantage that the
soundproofing stops tyre noise as well as
engine noise.

What are you on about? An electric doesn't need bolt on stuff to make it
quiet.

The motor may be quieter than an IC engine, but the tyres will still make
the same noise and that is a significant proportion of the noise produced by
modern cars.

People all
like eco things. If there are two products, both the same price, one
eco
one not, they will go for the eco product.

You do like using unsupported generalisations
as if they were fact.

What you are saying is eco products are lies.

What I am saying is that, contrary to what you claim, a lot of people don't
care about whether something as an eco product or not.

My original point was that I doubt that
many people really care either way. I
would expect people to be more likely
to buy on whether they like something
like the colour or the shape.

Not so. If a car has a reputation of complexity and high service bills yet
was brilliant to look at people will not buy (Citroens come to mind,
although not deserved) .

That is not a contradiction of the point I made. It is simply an example of
the same sort of consideration being given as to why not to buy.

When did you last spend 5 minutes,
or even 2 minutes, standing in a petrol
station filling up?

I wish it was that fast. 15 mins yesterday.

Standing and filling a vehicle for 15 minutes would require a fuel tank with
at least 1050 litres capacity.

Colin Bignell

The message
from "nightjar" nightjar@insert my surname here.uk.com contains
these words:

I wish it was that fast. 15 mins yesterday.

Standing and filling a vehicle for 15 minutes would require a fuel
tank with
at least 1050 litres capacity.

Or a complete moron attempting to fill an average sized tank. :-)

--
Roger Chapman

Now I accept that they were probably driving in the sort of way that those
idiots trying to 60mpg out of skoda diesels drive..but its still a data
point.

Hey, I resent that!

I own a large Skoda diesel and it keeps track of the mpg figure for
each trip and since bought. The overall figure is just a little under
60mpg and that includes quite a bit of bat-out-of-hell style driving as
well as pootling around the shops and some long motorway trips. A few
times I have tried to see what sort of figure I can get on a single
trip and have managed 70-80mpg over about 30 miles.

"Roger" wrote in message
k...
The message
from "nightjar" nightjar@insert my surname here.uk.com contains
these words:

I wish it was that fast. 15 mins yesterday.

Standing and filling a vehicle for 15 minutes would require a fuel
tank with
at least 1050 litres capacity.

Or a complete moron attempting to fill an average sized tank. :-)

There is that, although I had visions of him opening the car door and
getting drenched as a wave of petrol swept out.

Colin Bignell

"Roger" wrote Rogerness in message
k...
The message
from "nightjar" nightjar@insert my surname here.uk.com contains
these words:

I wish it was that fast. 15 mins yesterday.

Standing and filling a vehicle for 15 minutes would require a fuel
tank with
at least 1050 litres capacity.

Or a complete moron attempting to fill an average sized tank. :-)

Yes, that was Rogerness.

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:59:57 +0000, Matt wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:57:34 -0000, "Doctor Drivel"
wrote:

Steel is not good enough. It is heavy. When energy becomes more expensive
steel will be dropped.

I thnk you will find that from steel is extremely cheap to process
compared to aluminium.

It is, without huge cheap electricity supplies, and as long as huge cheap
coal supplies exist.

Once again, the balance of materials to use is a function of what is
plentiful cheap and good enough...

In a nuclear electric age, aluminium might well be cheaper...

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:36:26 +0000, Matt wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:02:51 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Same aplies to any car. You don;t need more than 500w or so to heat a car.

Heating it for an hour is thes ame fuel used as travelling two miles.

The output from a typical A/B class car heater is in the order of
5-10kW although that output is not going to be needed it is sometimes
required for extended periods in winter conditions.

Wellin winter I heat my WHOLE HOUSE - 2000 sq ft, using a 10KW boiler.

So don't tell me a car needs the same.

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:09:16 +0000 (GMT), Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Even on an expensive sports car where they go to all sorts of lengths to
save weight? And then there's the problem that many of these 'new'
batteries simply don't work at low temperatures. Fine in California, but
not in whole chunks of the rest of the world...

I don't think yiou apprecaute how teh car manufacturing business works
Dave.

It is not hallowed ground of hitech development

It is seedy men in suits in te marketing and accounts departments.

Every component is costed and every component has its function.

So you can rule out electric cars?

Not quite.
Electric cars are mechanically simpler than IC ones. There are less parts
and less moving parts.

They should be less in need of servicing, and have a higher life
expectancy.

They are intriniscally clean at the point of use, so even though issues of
what to burn where for the lecetricirty etc are relevant, in ternms of
local pollyion, they are 100% clean.

The fuel costs at CURRENT TAXATION LEVELS makes them extremely low cost to
run.

The ONLY downsides are

- current extremely high cost of batteries of suitable specification
- current extremely high development costs to get to mass production
- without non fossil fuel power stations, no overall carbon footprint
reduction.Or only marginal.
- some issues of safety.
- recharge times

Apart from those specific issues, they are *better in almost every way * to
any normal road going car. I can't yet see an electric car winning leMans
tho...:-)

However if you peek into the future, to a world where fossil fuel is 3-10
times the price it is now..but non fossil fuel electricity - especiallly
off peak - is actually similar to now...you see a very different picture.
Disreagrde te Prius - its a crap gimmick - and look to situations where teh
adavantages o battery electric outweigh the disdvantages.

We have always had milk floats. Short range urban delivery vehicles. Thats
negates the charging disadvantages, and the quiet clean bit is good for a
delivery vehicle, as is the stop startt nature of the usage profile.

I would say that 'second car' - the parent-and-child supermarket car, that
does maybe 20-100 miles in a day, is also a candidate.

I'd say urban ranspirt iof many sorts - scooters, taxis, buses - s alos a
place where the low power requirements or general stop strat nature of te
driving favour electric.

BUT its all dependant on what the whole country thinks is the right energy
policy. I am convinced that it should be a mix of nuclear electric, wind
and other aletrnaticve power, and biofuels. If the government (and Europe)
taxes fossil fuels, to weigh against the essential pollution costs that
they engender, then we have a situtuation where te electric battery car
cbecomes teh prime and most cost effective way to get persponal short
distance transport..with biodiesels taking up the load on longer hauls.


Have a look here

http://www.efcf.com/reports/E17.pdf

for some more opinions as well.

On 30 Nov 2005 11:06:45 -0800, wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

The batteries are expensive because mass production techniques have not
been applied to them: They are currently moderate vloume items with large
investments in R & D and factory tooling to pay back.

You say theyre expensive not because of energy use, but because of R&D,
the need to tool up anew, and the fact that theyre produced on a small
scale. Well, all these things mean energy use. R&D equals energy use,

I beg your pardon? R & D does NOT equal energy use. R & D is very small
scale production by a few expensive individuals. Expensive not because THEY
use energym but because they are probably taking out orivate pebnsions,


tooling up equals energy use, and smal scale production equals not
getting the efficiencies of mass production, equals greater energy use
per item produced.


Utter rubbish., I take it you are not in any sense an engineer.

The high cost of R&D is labour cost. Labour does not equal energy use.
Especually foossil fuel use. Humans live on biofuels mainly, and wheter or
not they are siting at computers spouting rubbish they have no
understanding of, or working in a lab fiddling with plates of alumnnium and
organic solvents, they still have to be fed.

If you want to save energy, as YOU would have it described, I suggest you
hang yourself now.


When things are expensive it simply means they need a lot of our
resources to get them.

How little you understand of market forces. Things are expensive because
they do something so specal that people are willing to pay a premium, and
too few people know how to make them to satisfy demand.

How come someone can sell a 200 quid Dysion vaccum cleaner that is not as
effectivce as one costing 50 quid?

As well.

Everything is available, its all a question of
what does it take to get it. And the reality is it currently takes huge
expenditures of human and fossil energy to get Lithium batteries. All
goods come down to energy: all raw materials are available, just a
question of energy to get them. Both directly in terms of digging them
up and processing them, and indirectly in terms of the energy needed to
run the humans that do it, the legal/political games needed, and so on.

If Li batteries really didnt need much to produce, yet were temporarily
selling at a high price, capitalists would be diving into Li battery
production, and prices would drop heavily and quickly.

They are.


I already showed that theyt are in fuel terms similar to a diesel
overall if diesel is what you burn at the power station. That is not where
I am coming from.

A purchase cost of 3 mill does not make them similar in terms of energy
use. Road fuel use may be comparable, but with EVs that is the least of
one's worries.


Energy use is not te same as energy of manufacture for one thing. Lifetime
comes into it as well.

The fisrt computers cost several million to deliver less processing power
than you could get out of a mobile phone today.


Atre you really telling me that te first IBM mainframe took a few hundred
thousand barrels of oil to priduce? I hink not.

NT

On 30 Nov 2005 11:24:03 -0800, wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:45:15 GMT, Roger wrote:

With hub mounted electric motors recovery of any waste heat would be a
problem and unsprung weight is traditionally considered undesirable so
why are hub motors the obvious choice?

They aren't that heavy. I am not decided as to whether they are better or
worse.

To an extend its possible to integrate them with the wheel rims. IN a
typical multipole 3 phase motor the magnets are arranged inside a drum
whilst the stator comprises a bunch of interlinked coils. The chief weight
is the magnets on the rim, and the actual ironwork of the stator.

This is a simple arrangement..and easily allows one motor per wheel which
provides excellent traction..whether or not a more complce and heavy system
with a centrally mounted motor and shafts and maybe a reduction gear -
probably more efficient in terms of the motor - is worth the added weight
and complexity - is a moot point.

Motors in the wheels mean considerable unsprung weight in the wheels.

Look at te poiwer to weight ratio of electric motors, and come back and say
that again with facts to back it up.

And look at the many many cars and vans that do not employ IRS, even today.


This in turn means much poorer road holding. Its fine for city buses,
but used as a general runaround youre going to sacrifice a good bit of
road handling ability. It'll be like going from a car to a commercial
in terms of handling / roadholding.

Not that thats really a big problem, but public perception might be,
after being used to cars of such high performance today. People will
need to go back to the once universal ways of driving cars to their
limits at normal travel speeds much of the time. Those without the
brain to do that, and there are certainly some, will come acropper from
their failure, so in short, poorer handling equals lower safety levels
and higher death rates specific to your new design.

If public perception of such a cloudy issue as roadholding were a real
factor in car purcahsing, no one woyld ever buy a McPherson strut car ever
again.

However, its probably the most common front suspension in use today.


NT

On Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:22:00 +0100, AJH wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 01:57:15 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:51:48 +0100, AJH wrote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:48:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

They got - at an average speed of 50mph - a figure of 217Wh per mile

This is three times the consumption you posted in the other thread.

That means to achieve 500 miles range they would need just 10KWh.

I make it 10 times that.

Oh. Lets go over the figures again.

I guess too much time has passed since but I said I'd revisit it.

I take the view that wealth and energy consumption go hand in hand,
Peter Parry has pointed out that learning to use a resource more
efficiently has not, so far, conserved it in any way, simply it
becomes more available for use.

So the bit of the thread I was interested in was the relative "fuel
efficiency" of centrally generated electricity verses burning the fuel
at point of use.

I had calculated a figure of 0.63kWhr(t)/km for a diesel car achieving
50MPG, you had suggested that a battery-electric vehicle might achieve
0.062kWhr(e)/km. Your later post worked out at 0.217kWhr(e)/km. If the
diesel had a similar loss per km then it suggests the ic conversion
efficiency would be about 34%! Interesting to me is whether this is
because the battery powered vehicle is inefficient, has too much mass
or lacks regenerative charging as we had both assumed the diesel would
be about 15% overall conversion of fuel to distance.

AJH

Yup. The 217Wh per MILE (not kilometer) figure was actual test data.

If you followed all the posts, the answer I finally came out with is that a
good diesel - probably around 15% average thermodynaic efficinecy, peaking
at best at 40% on long low throttle cruises, was very comparable to a
50-60% efficient power station, with transmission and charge/recharge and
motor losses in a battery powered car.

I.e. from the eco point of view, in fuel efficiency there is not a lot in
it.

Of course if you can solidify te carbon dioxide emmissions from the power
ations and bury them, that may be easier from a global warming piiunt of
view.

I apologise for all the mistakes in the calculations...all done on the back
of an envelope in spare minutes...

...the overriding concluions are that if we had non fossil fuel electrical
power, and cheap lithium batteries, we could indeed build a car that would
equal in every respect a decent diesel, out perform a petrol, and
contribute no C02 to the atmosphere.

As long as we are stuck with burning fossil fuels though, it has little
advantage over a diesel except in niche areas.

[apologies if this appears twice]

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:49:15 +0000, Nick Finnigan wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:


of 62mpg...on an economy run. So overallI reckon there is nothing to
choose.


Until you want to heat the car, and have more than two people in it.



Same aplies to any car.


Nope.

You don;t need more than 500w or so to heat a car.


Yes you do. How powerful is the heat exchanger on your Jaguar?

Heating it for an hour is thes ame fuel used as travelling two miles.


How long does/did your Landrover take to heat up in winter?

Its on-street pollution would be zero,


No, it wouldn't be.


Why not?


Because it can't possibly be.

Why aren't peole doing it?


Because there are no advantages over similar cars with IC engines.



At least you have that partly right. There is no overall cost benefit to
the user at this point, because the cost saved in diesel tax is used
up in
the capital cost of batteries.

But you obviously didn't want to read what I write carefully, merely
offer
snide comments.


I read what you carelessly typed: no cost benefit, nor range, nor
weight, nor CO2 nor any pollution benefit. Where is there an advantage?

On Fri, 2 Dec 2005 16:14:00 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:36:26 +0000, Matt wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:02:51 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Same aplies to any car. You don;t need more than 500w or so to heat a car.

Heating it for an hour is thes ame fuel used as travelling two miles.

The output from a typical A/B class car heater is in the order of
5-10kW although that output is not going to be needed it is sometimes
required for extended periods in winter conditions.

Wellin winter I heat my WHOLE HOUSE - 2000 sq ft, using a 10KW boiler.

So don't tell me a car needs the same.

Whether you choose to believe it or not, that is the typical output.
Remember that most of the time in a car without the benefit of air
conditioning (to remove moisture) that unless the humidity level is
very low recirculation cannot be used without steaming up the windows.
So the heater has to be capable of taking in air that could be sub
zero and heating it up to 20+ deg C in a single pass, many
manufacturers heating systems are designed to work down to extremely
low temperatures (-30 deg C is not unusual) Obviously in a climate
like Southern California you fit a tiny heater to your electric car
and get away with it. Move to the Great Lakes and when it comes to
winter you have big problems. Just casual observation would show that
the heating matrix used on a car is many times bigger than that fitted
to a 2kW kickspace for instance, and running with an inlet temperature
of around 95 deg C.

Also have you ever looked at the heat losses in a car? even Prescott's
Jags would struggle to meet the "building regs" of 100 years ago :-)


--

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Wellin winter I heat my WHOLE HOUSE - 2000 sq ft, using a 10KW boiler.

So don't tell me a car needs the same.

The heat losses in a car are great. Haven't you noticed just how fast they
cool down when you stop them on a cold day? Also, there's the need to get
them up to a comfortable temperature quickly - your house could take an
hour or so in the morning starting from a much higher temperature. The
inside of a car will be at ambient temperature after an overnight stop.

--
*The most wasted day of all is one in which we have not laughed.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
And look at the many many cars and vans that do not employ IRS, even
today.

Which cars?

--
*Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:22:00 +0100, AJH wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 01:57:15 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:51:48 +0100, AJH wrote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:48:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

They got - at an average speed of 50mph - a figure of 217Wh per mile

This is three times the consumption you posted in the other thread.

That means to achieve 500 miles range they would need just 10KWh.

I make it 10 times that.

Oh. Lets go over the figures again.

I guess too much time has passed since but I said I'd revisit it.

I take the view that wealth and energy consumption go hand in hand,
Peter Parry has pointed out that learning to use a resource more
efficiently has not, so far, conserved it in any way, simply it
becomes more available for use.

So the bit of the thread I was interested in was the relative "fuel
efficiency" of centrally generated electricity verses burning the fuel
at point of use.

I had calculated a figure of 0.63kWhr(t)/km for a diesel car achieving
50MPG, you had suggested that a battery-electric vehicle might achieve
0.062kWhr(e)/km. Your later post worked out at 0.217kWhr(e)/km. If the
diesel had a similar loss per km then it suggests the ic conversion
efficiency would be about 34%! Interesting to me is whether this is
because the battery powered vehicle is inefficient, has too much mass
or lacks regenerative charging as we had both assumed the diesel would
be about 15% overall conversion of fuel to distance.

AJH

Yup. The 217Wh per MILE (not kilometer) figure was actual test data.

If you followed all the posts, the answer I finally came out with is that
a
good diesel - probably around 15% average thermodynaic efficinecy, peaking
at best at 40% on long low throttle cruises, was very comparable to a
50-60% efficient power station, with transmission and charge/recharge and
motor losses in a battery powered car.

I.e. from the eco point of view, in fuel efficiency there is not a lot in
it.

Of course if you can solidify te carbon dioxide emmissions from the power
ations and bury them, that may be easier from a global warming piiunt of
view.

I apologise for all the mistakes in the calculations...all done on the
back
of an envelope in spare minutes...

..the overriding concluions are that if we had non fossil fuel electrical
power, and cheap lithium batteries, we could indeed build a car that would
equal in every respect a decent diesel, out perform a petrol, and
contribute no C02 to the atmosphere.

The performance is also the sound, vibration and harshness, which equals
smoothness. Less stress on drivers. Diesels are very noisy inside and out,
being an environmental problem. Then the reliability and simplicaity of an
eelctric, beats any IC engine hands down.

As long as we are stuck with burning fossil fuels though, it has little
advantage over a diesel except in niche areas.

It has an endless list of advantages over an agricultural sounding and
feeling diesel. An electric car product, one designed to take advantage of
the small mechanicals, is vastly superior to an IC diesel car product.

In article ews.net,
Doctor Drivel wrote:
Diesels are very noisy inside and out,

I take it the last diesel you drove was a Fergie tractor?

I've driven a new BMW 535. Nobody inside could tell it's a diesel on the
move. And you wouldn't even when it was starting from cold.

--
*If you don't like the news, go out and make some.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ews.net,
Doctor Drivel wrote:
It has an endless list of advantages over an agricultural sounding and
feeling diesel. An electric car product, one designed to take advantage
of the small mechanicals, is vastly superior to an IC diesel car
product.

Don't the milk bottles rattling on yours put you off?

--
*I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" through a haze of senile
flatulence wrote in message ...
In article ews.net,
Doctor Drivel wrote:

It has an endless list of advantages over an agricultural sounding and
feeling diesel. An electric car product, one designed to take advantage
of the small mechanicals, is vastly superior to an IC diesel car
product.

Don't

** snip Richard senility **

"Dave Plowman (News)" through a haze of senile
flatulence wrote in message ...
In article ews.net,
Doctor Drivel wrote:

Diesels are very noisy inside and out,

I take it the last diesel you drove was a Fergie tractor?

All diesel cars are like them.

** snip senility **

On 2 Dec 2005 04:53:20 -0800, "Matt Beard" wrote:

Now I accept that they were probably driving in the sort of way that those
idiots trying to 60mpg out of skoda diesels drive..but its still a data
point.

Hey, I resent that!

I own a large Skoda diesel and it keeps track of the mpg figure for
each trip and since bought. The overall figure is just a little under
60mpg and that includes quite a bit of bat-out-of-hell style driving as
well as pootling around the shops and some long motorway trips. A few
times I have tried to see what sort of figure I can get on a single
trip and have managed 70-80mpg over about 30 miles.

I understand that the on board computers for consumption are very
unreliable. Have you checked the consumption by direct measurement
over say 1000 miles?

On Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:43:45 +0000 (GMT), Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
And look at the many many cars and vans that do not employ IRS, even
today.

Which cars?

Can't remember off hand, but a lot of them still use a beam across the back
- usually small hatches done on the cheap. IIRC Novas were like that.

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
And look at the many many cars and vans that do not employ IRS, even
today.

Which cars?

Can't remember off hand, but a lot of them still use a beam across the
back - usually small hatches done on the cheap. IIRC Novas were like
that.

It's a flexible beam, though. So more like a De Dion.

--
*Pentium wise, pen and paper foolish *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Edward W. Thompson wrote:
I understand that the on board computers for consumption are very
unreliable. Have you checked the consumption by direct measurement
over say 1000 miles?

I haven't done any detailed checks, but the number of miles it claims
is pretty reliable and when I fill up the fuel it claims has been used
seems to match what I put in pretty closely.

"Edward W. Thompson" wrote in message
...
On 2 Dec 2005 04:53:20 -0800, "Matt Beard" wrote:

Now I accept that they were probably driving in the sort of way that
those
idiots trying to 60mpg out of skoda diesels drive..but its still a data
point.

Hey, I resent that!

I own a large Skoda diesel and it keeps track of the mpg figure for
each trip and since bought. The overall figure is just a little under
60mpg and that includes quite a bit of bat-out-of-hell style driving as
well as pootling around the shops and some long motorway trips. A few
times I have tried to see what sort of figure I can get on a single
trip and have managed 70-80mpg over about 30 miles.

I understand that the on board computers for consumption are very
unreliable. Have you checked the consumption by direct measurement
over say 1000 miles?

The computers in modern cars count the fuel injection pulses and are very
accurate