Westministenders: Canada Plus and the Transition Phase

[RedToothBrush]

As we approach the 31st January, we slowly tick towards exit and transition.

Things are not yet signed off though the No Deal planning has quietly been stood down with no press release and the government have said they won't talk about trade deals post 31st Jan because the public are bored of them and don't understand.

The new EU president has said that the UK doesn't have time to make a full deal with the EU before 31st December with a deadline which isn't flexible.

We still have no idea what the government plans are. We still have many EU citizens feeling very vulnerable.

Perhaps we should start talking about this rather than Royals for a couple of weeks...

In my social circle, people are telling me about how they belong to schemes to hire electric vehicles or electric bicycles as needed for a day / week / month ...

Handy pick-up and drop-off stations
Some lease e-cars

I live in a village, so such systems have spread out from the main cities
Still a long way to go before this is across the entire country though

HIE link is here:

www.hie.co.uk/our-region/our-growth-sectors/finance-and-business-services/homeworking/

ONS Labour data comparing 2008 and 2018 is here:

www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/adhocs/009913homeworkersbyukregion2008comparedto2018/regionalhomeworkers0818.xls

Are you suggesting that the car's range is not as shown when you get in to said vehicle, but externally manipulated by Tesla?

Tesla manipulates the range available on a battery through software - so different models can have the same battery but have different ranges controlled by software. Want more range? Pay a premium to have the software controlled limit removed.

I drive an electric car (not a Tesla). It works perfectly for me as I only drive short distances, have off-road parking and WFH, so it can charge during the day when the solar panels are doing their thing (weather permitting, so not now). I can see that it isn’t for everyone, but electric cars would suit a lot more people than have them. In Norway, it’s a social pressure thing - not driving electric is frowned upon (did I read that here?). It’s a shame that we don’t have the same attitudes over here

There is still a government subsidy on the purchase of new electric cars, plus they contribute to your charging point installation. There are a lot of new models appearing this year, with improved ranges, so hopefully those will appeal to a wider range of people.

Until you have the electrical equivalent of filling a tank - that is putting about 500KWh - in about 2-3 minutes, then you may as well give up trying to replace ICE cars with electric.

For the hard of science (or is it engineering) 500KWh in 3 minutes at (say) 240V is a staggering 2000 amps. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of copper needed to carry that current.

Even if you play around with factors of 10, you still end up needing 200 amps to charge in 30 minutes.

It's when you get to the more manageable 20 amps, that you see charging times of c. 300 minutes.

If there was an environment crisis, it would have made sense for all the milk float electric car manufacturers to have worked together on some form of exchangeable battery, so that rather than recharge in hours, you swap in seconds. However since there's no climate crisis, there's no point is there ?

I can easily imagine a future where families have two cars. An electric for short hops, and an ICE for the grunt work.

The real problem is that electric power and chemical power are not, have never been, and will never be equivalent. And nothing will change that. The same way email and telephone aren't equivalent, or vinyl and cassettes were not equivalent.

I fail to see why @Clavinova cannot accept that building a new car plant in a non EU european country makes zero sense.

The UK may or may not have won out over Germany but with the future uncertain over SM access, inevitable trading friction and the predicted loss of GDP.... the UK moves lower down the list.

I fail to see why @Clavinova cannot accept that building a new car plant in a non EU european country makes zero sense.

Because it's all they have ?

There's going to be a lot of sour grapes in the next few months. Any negative stories about cancelled or reduced or missed investment will be accompanied with loads of "well we didn't really need/want that anyway ...". We'll also see a slightly unhinged approach from some Brexiteers who will insist that even if the reason given in print and set to a tune by Andrew Lloyd Webber is because of Brexit that the person is somehow lying/mistaken or doesn't understand the question.

I don't know about the UK as a whole, but the electric charging structure seems to be quite good where I live - at the railway station, in a town centre car park and at a local garden centre, and I think in a hotel car park, among others.

It all seems quite easy if you live in a house with a drive and can install a rapid charge plug (an old work colleague of mine installs them). I am still unclear on how you do it when you have to park your car on the street though. Surely every time someone walks by there is the risk that they'll either trip over the cable or think it's very funny to unplug it?

I have a self-charge hybrid which works well in town (not so great when I need the fan on when it uses the petrol engine, so not good this time of year) but the MPG isn't great on longer journeys. So not ideal but i am using about 1/3 less petrol which isn't to be sniffed at.

We have a climate emergency (declared by Parliament then forgotten)
We either change what we are doing or climate change will do it for us and if the latter then it will be far more painful than being constrained by the range of an electric vehicle.

The former means drastic reduction in travelling, food production and global movement of goods - in our lifetimes. Only 100 years ago movement outside of home town was minimal - that's going to return.

Yes remote conference/conversation doesn't cut it today for some use cases - but thats because the pressure isn't there to make it better.

Yes remote conference/conversation doesn't cut it today for some use cases - but thats because the pressure isn't there to make it better.

I guarantee that if we started a thread on MN - which I think it's safe to say is the best tech the 1990s has to offer, with just a few posters from this thread alone, within 3 hours we could have knocked up a serviceable tax regime that would foster much more environmentally friendly policies than the previous 10 years of government.

We would then spend the next 30 years having to battle against every person who suddenly finds why saving the planet "doesn't work for me".

By which time I pray I will be dead.

The heavy battery-driven electric car is a technological dead end akin to the steam car. It is a fad for the rich and trendy. There can never be a Model T of battery cars because there is not enough lithium in the world to produce them at such levels.

It would be better to look at ways to store Hydrogen safely so you could burn it in an internal combustion engine.

More realistically, society must change. People need to work out where they want to be and then stay there.

On electric cars I've for a long time thought charging infrastructure would be what held them back and the cost of purchases, particularly if subsidy incentives become less generous.

I've also wondered whether "charging" as a substitute for refuelling an internal combustion car is actually the right strategy? My technical knowledge on this is zero, as will rapidly become clear! but I offer these thoughts...

Some battery powered things you can use and charge at the same time, tablet, phone etc. Some, when the battery runs are useless until recharging or replacement of batteries, a TV remote for example. A car seems to be in the latter group to me, unless you get into F1 style "harvesting" tech but that doesn't provide all the power, nothing like.

When a battery runs out on a home appliance that cannot be used and charged simultaneously, I don't think people charge the batteries, they change them.

My (probably hopelessly naïve) view is that this could be a better option for cars. If all car designers standardized on a single "battery pack" design and placement within the vehicle, e.g. where the engine is now and designed in such a way as to allow quick removal and replacement of the "battery pack" by the driver.

Then, service stations instead of/as well as having charging points hold huge stocks of replacement "battery packs" permanently on charge so a ready supply is usually available. Driver drives onto forecourt, removes dead/dying battery pack, replaces with a charged one for a flat fee = Driver drives on in a matter of minutes, far quicker than it takes to charge.

Driver drives onto forecourt, removes dead/dying battery pack, replaces with a charged one for a flat fee = Driver drives on in a matter of minutes, far quicker than it takes to charge.

I could certainly see that as being an option for people who need to park their cars on the street.

I cannot but help think of the early days when personal computing was catching on. At first the keen techy types wrote their own software, but it wasn't very convenient for the majority of people. Then spotting the need, things like Word and Excel and other commercial software came along, plus the Windows interface instead of the Dos prompt. Even the Dos prompt interface was a big step up from the old punched card days. But this all took place over something like a 20 year period.

When some as professed non-techy as Louise can spot the flaw in electric cars, you have to ask how big the bungs politicians have taken are ...

I've also wondered whether "charging" as a substitute for refuelling an internal combustion car is actually the right strategy?

It isn't as my back of a vape-packet run through above showed.

My (probably hopelessly naïve) view is that this could be a better option for cars. If all car designers standardized on a single "battery pack" design and placement within the vehicle, e.g. where the engine is now and designed in such a way as to allow quick removal and replacement of the "battery pack" by the driver

That would have been a much batter starting point. With the caveat that you'd hit a lot of security problems. I can see a single battery pack being easily £1-2K, so the gains for robbing a service station - or just stealing them from parked cars - would be too attractive.

It would be better to look at ways to store Hydrogen safely so you could burn it in an internal combustion engine

I'm struggling to think of a worse fuel than hydrogen. Quite apart from the fact that being the smallest molecule in the world makes it hard to contain, a leak can ignite without visible flame (like alcohol) makes it double trouble.

Of course there is a really well tried way of storing and transporting hydrogen. You link it to some carbon and maybe some oxygen and turn it into methane, ethane, propane, butane ... or if you are feeling really flash benzene, or methanol or ethanol.

Charging or otherwise fuelling alternative-fuel vehicles is just an infrastructure question really. In towns, and especially for vehicles which travel set routes or return to a depot (buses, delivery vehicles), it's not complicated. It's just a question of cost. For vehicles which require more range there are alternatives to conventional batteries (eg fuel cells).

The bigger question is where the electricity (or alternative fuel) comes from and how low carbon it is.

When the media talk about electrification of the fleet they usually fail to realise that in the short to medium term, much electrification will be alongside (not instead of) the internal combustion engine eg various degrees of hybridisation from mild hybrids to plug-in hybrids.

Disclaimer: I work on this stuff (the mineral economics implications thereof).

Re hydrogen, storage really isn't an issue. You can already buy a fuel cell electric vehicle (with a hydrogen tank on board). Refuelling infrastructure is the hurdle, which is why you can only buy fuel cell vehicles in a small number of markets atm.

www.toyota-europe.com/new-cars/mirai/

If you have got £60k and live somewhere with reasonable refuelling structure you can have a hydrogen car right now. Range about 500km, takes 3 mins to refill. Honda and Hyundai also sell hydrogen cars (possibly not in the U.K. though).

I suspect that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to the transport problem because people have such varying needs.

For example, our family solution has been to live within walking distance of the city centre, shops, work and school (with the added bonus of good public transport links and car share scheme, these things being commonly found near city centres these days) and getting rid of our car.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that our solution isn’t going to work if you’re disabled, or live/work rurally, etc. So what would help the planet the most, probably, is more people doing what they can however imperfectly, rather than fewer people accomplishing theoretical eco-perfection.

Yes exactly elements, the market is becoming far more fragmented.

On hydrogen. You can already buy boilers which are compatible with transfer from gas to hydrogen for domestic use. Article on BBC recently on trials to mix hdrogen in to current supply with no need for conversion.

Problem then becomes one of economics of hydrogen supply at scale.

On hydrogen. You can already buy boilers which are compatible with transfer from gas to hydrogen for domestic use. Article on BBC recently on trials to mix hdrogen in to current supply with no need for conversion.

Aren't we scrapping gas boilers ?

Another non-expert, and I know about the fallacy of the perpetual motion machine, but it seems to me that if you can extract hydrgen from seawater, then you could use that hydrogen to power the extraction of more hydrogen until you had all the hydrogen you needed.

As stated, the problem is safe and portable storage. See the Hindenburg.

if you can extract hydrogen from seawater

You can. You just need energy to do it. Electrolysis is probably the most efficient. But there's various chemicals you could use - although you'd need to use energy to make those.

If the fusion power we were promised 50 years ago could come through sometime in the next 5 years, it would be awfully **ing handy.

Aren't we scrapping gas boilers ?

That's why I thought it interesting. No need to scrap a gas boiler if it is hydrogen it is burning.

I naively assumed everyone would be going all electric with central production of clean energy but no indication of this to date. Weird dislocation in the social discourse given this is the proposed solution for driving.