Safe Speed Forums

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

What a completely pointless exercise and what a waste of life for those who take part - I'd rather have an electric bicycle.
Even my scooter goes far better and far further ! £8m to provide a few hook up's - I wonder how many of those will be overtaken by Campervan use for a fast charge ! Just all seems far too soon to be launching it into the public arena frankly !

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

They seem to be going about the whole thing in completely the wrong way, they need to have "charging points" as widespread as petrol stations, and in order to make the recharge as quick as fuelling they need to have a stock of common batteries, conditioned and fully recharged to hot-swap into the vehicles, otherwise it will never rival high-energy-density liquid fuels for convenience.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

It is instructive to convert the energy used by an internal combustion engine into electrical units. Then calculate the rate at which energy is replaced at the filling station. I calculate that in filling a ten gallon tank in two minutes you are transferring energy at almost 10 MegaWatts. A very thick cable would be needed to do that for an electrical car. As you say, that rate can only be equalled by swapping batteries. Even then the "charging points" would need a very substantial feed to top up all their batteries.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

I'm getting dizzie with all this SPIN .OK,on the face of it ,electric cars are green - the don't spew out any nasty stuff on the way . But , then - how much non green stuff goes into the battery manufacture ( and getting rid of the battery once it's done) . What is the greenness co efficient of charging a battery vs a tank of unleaded/diesel ? Then there's charge time - I've got a cordless drill - with a one hour charge time - great for drills ,I can discharge it ,then do other jobs till it's charged -but with a car ,even if they got the charge time down to one hour ( think of the massive charge rate) , would we be willing to sit around waiting . Then ,again ,what would be the inherrent loss whilst the vehicle is sitting overnight . I can park my little diesel , and know tomorrow it'll still have the same fuel capacity as today .Today's battery technology - about as reliable as a Toyota throttle assembly

And as an afterthought - how much heavier are the brakes to compensate for the dead weight of the batteries( and how much more kit will our fire crews have to carry in the event of a battery car crash?)

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Those who have posted on here for a while will know that I am involved with battery manufacture. I can tell you that there are extremely strict regulations applied to the transport of Lithium batteries by land, sea and especially air.

Now, if these are so dangerous to transport, how come everyone thinks that it is safe to put lots of them in cars?

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

How much energy is used to refine petrol or diesel into usable fuel and how does it compare in efficiency and environmental damage compared to a battery powered car? The easy interim solution is the hybrid like the prius which has a normal engine, batteries and a way on the car to recharge them as you go so don't have the range worries but can get some of the benefits of less tail pipe pollution in a city centre.

All electric vehicles do is transfer where the pollution occurs.

When you have an electric car with a range of 300 miles that you can recharge in 20-30 minutes then you'll have a product worth the effort. And it needs to cost max £15k for a focus sized car. And completely replacing the batteries shouldn't cost more than a few hundred pounds and should only be needed rarely in the car's life time (like an exhaust or similar)

The idea of swapping batteries is a non starter to me as they weigh a lot and who'd want to pay for a battery which could potentially be faulty or inferior to the one that was in the car already?

Li-on batteries are used in mobile phones, laptops cameras, mp3 players which we carry around with us all the time. Let's hope Sony don't build electric car batteries

Hence my remarks ,in a previous post "and how much more kit will our fire crews have to carry in the event of a battery car crash?"

I had a chat with a fire officer a few years ago when we looked at the problems of car fires - and this was looking at a petrol car on fire, horrendous ,without looking at the potential of hazards from a a battery car on fire .

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Ok, I'm peripherally involved in a few battery-electric car projects and whilst I agree with most of the criticisms so far, it's not ALL bad news!

First of all, fire safety, well, there are different Litium ion chemistries and they're not all susceptible to the "thermal runaway" problems that Sony had with the laptop batteries. This is where they generate enough heat to set themselves on fire and then carry on burning as they contain everything they need to support the combustion process. The vehicles I'm involved in don't use that particular cell chemistry. Also worth remembering that as DCB pointed out, a tank full of petrol has an incredible amount of stored energy - MUCH more (orders of magnitude more) than any electric vehicle battery!

As far as "hot-swapping" goes, Renault plan to try this. I don't know how successful they will be. The vehicles I'm involved with are fairly large and the battery pack weighs 600kg! Also, this is such new technology that there's little chance of battery packs being interchangeable between different manufacturers - hell, the industry haven't even agreed on a standard for charging plugs and sockets yet! Also, "fast-charge" has a lot of problems infrastructure-wise. If you've got a vehicle battery that holds (say) 50kWh of electrickery, and you want to take it to 80% charged in (say) 20 minutes, that's one HELL of a current. We normally charge for 8 hours from a 3-phase supply! It would be longer from a domestic 13A supply!

As for the "green-ness", well, it's true that they just move the pollution from the tailpipe to the power station, but it's not that simple. The electric motor is much more efficient at turning battery energy into vehicle motion than the IC engine is at turning fossil fuel into motion. We also get a greater variety of ways of making the electricity. In addition, an electric powertrain can recover some of it's braking energy and use it later for driving the car. It's much harder to do it on an IC engined vehicle (though not impossible, the F1 cars use Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems). Unfortunately, you can't store the recovered energy in a KERS for as long as you can store electrical energy from regenerative braking. Also on the subject of green-ness, the National Grid wastes a fair bit of it's energy overnight if demand is low because they can't shut down a conventional thermal power station, so a lot of the "surplus" energy gets dumped as heat in the cooling towers. If we could use that "waste" energy at night, we'd clearly be managing our power consumption much more efficiently.

Yes, the batteries are eye-wateringly expensive and like laptops, Li-ion batteries loose a percentage of their capacity each year. IF you have 100 mile range when the car is new, you might only have an 80 mile range when it is 5 years old. At present, the batteries cost as much as the car! The industry optimists reckon the price of batteries will come right down as the volumes go up. The pessimists just think the price of Lithium will go up with demand and we'll end up fighting wars over lithium instead of oil...

Put it any way we like, we're going to have to make some hard choices over the next few decades, and we might find ourselves with little option but to start liking electric vehicles (and using them sparingly)!

Agreed, but the efficiency that really matters is the full-cycle efficiency, from extraction to generation to consumption. That's completely aside from production/disposal costs for the vehicle/energy storage.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

Understood, but it's getting a like-for-like comparison that's difficult. DEFRA currently quote the electricity coming out of the wall socket as about 0.5kg of CO2 per kWH. This is the national combined average of coal, wind, nuclear etc. Based on that and some very rough preliminary tests, we're seeing something like 160g/km from a vehicle that would otherwise have done about 200g/km as a diesel. I'll be the first to admit that it's not great, but on the other hand, when we calculate the CO2 emissions of our cars, do we add a bit for the CO2 that the tanker puked out whilst delivering it to the forecourt? The energy that the petrol station itself uses? The transport of the crude to the refinery and the refining process? No we don't! What I don't know is how far back down the chain does the DEFRA figure for electricity go. Does it, for example, include the mining and transport of the coal to the power station?

The whole life emission/energy usage figures for activities should be calculated.

Do stats on cycling include the whole life accountability for lycra and extra food consumed?!

I'd assume there are stats out there but they'll be for separate bits eg energy need to extract 1 ton of this. Then you'll find elsewhere something buried in an obscure report about how much energy a company will use to convert the 1 ton of that into whatever it sells.

These I found are quite interesting:

http://www.rogerco.org.uk/articles/57-t ... -of-energy

surely you'd be unlikely to sign up for an EV trial scheme if you thought you'd be likely to need to upush the range limits on a regular basis.... so the fact that the trials users don't is hardly very surprising !

(good reply mole... and if people think Li batteries in cars is frightening they should see the hydrogen tank i saw the other day )

i did see extraction to consumption in an article for petrol v diesel v electric (maybe in 'the engineer', or the IET mag)...... and the electric figure varied massively depending on the blend of power stations used in the grid.

err, what about the capacity of the National Grid? We keep getting told their is an energy crisis and that the National Grid can hardly keep up now and that is before it closes down a load of worn out power stations. Then "they" want to add a big pile of Gigawatt/hrs of demand from the transport sector.

Mole mentioned a 600kg battery pack. Our combine harvester has a 750 litre tank so it's fuel load is only slightly more to keep a 360hp motor under full load for 10 hours or more.

The grid is vastly underutilised at night which is when most EVs would be require recharging. The generating companies would love to have enough night-time load to keep their big sets running at rated capacity (= maximum efficiency).

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

As DCB says, the trick is somming out the demand and using what we already have more efficiently. In some countries, they're even experimenting with vehicle-to-grid infrastructure whereby they use the batteries in loads of EVs as "reservoirs" for power. The idea is that you leave your EV plugged-in all the time you're not using it. When there's a big demand for power (half time in the cup final) the grid can "nick" some electricity out of your EV battery and "pay you back" at some time when there is spare capacity. Needless to say, it would only work if there were a lot of EVs!

As for the "range anxiety" issue, well, we had that with petrol powered cars many years ago before we had an infrastructure. "...Yes but of your hourse gets hungry, you can always find it some grass..." was what people used to say about the "infrenal automobile"! I appreciate there are loads of problems just now and I wouldn't much fancy one living where I do, but in other ways they make a lot of sense. I can get about 100 miles for £2 in one of the EVs - how far does £2 get you in anything bigger than a moped?

As for battery pack weights, these EVs have a 60kW motor (about 80 horse), and will NOT run for 10 hours non-stop! Your combine would probably need rather more than it's own weight in batteries! (So it's all your fault, this global warming, you should go back to using scythes!

I don't suppose that mentioning the approaching shortage and high price of Lithium is a good idea ?

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

It is worth mentioning in order to highlight the fact that Lithium-ion isn't the only battery technology known to mankind. Look up Zinc-Air fuel cells.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

They weren't exactly giving diesel away last time I filled up, either! We have to face up to the fact that we're going to have to use something other than oil to power our vehicles at some point. Yes, if Lithium became the new "oil", then I'd be very worried, but as DCB says, it's a technology pretty much in its infancy and cell chemistry is likely to be very different 5 years from now. Don't get me wrong, I don't like driving a "milk float" - I like the sound of a big V8 as much as the next yellow-blooded petrolhead, but I'm also realsitic about what we have left. I'd like to see hydrogen-fuelled conventional cars but we need to crack the problem of making enough of the stuff first!

when petrol was in it's infancy, would people have not just chucked a couple of jerry cans in the back of the car?

I'm not against electrical power, we have 2 electric forklifts at work. They are great, quite, no smoke, dead reliable, hardly any maintenance, instant grunt. We just need to get the battery technology to compete with our current hydrocarbon power sources and stop kidding ourselves that they are pollution free.

If in a few decades electric power becomes the norm, or at least a good competitor, I'd still expect that the cost per mile would still be about 11-12p/mile for fuel like it is now. The Chancellor in 2060 isn't going to let that revenue supply go to waste.