Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Autowirral Battery cars

Has anyone any experience of these vehicles? Are they as hopeless as I suspect them to be?

I notice that M&S in Ellesmere port has provided a couple of bays for charging them in their car park, but I've never seen anyone using them.

We used to call them milk floats when I was a lad.

Asda Wallasey has a couple charging points and yes I've seen on or two cars plugged in, but Iv'e seen them same spaces use as car park spaces, when a single charge can take 5mins and they have a 400 mile range then I suppose they will be worth getting, there's always someone needed as the guinea pig.

Spot on !!

Doing a few simple sums I think they are a disaster. You need at least 25kW to run even a small car at 50 mph. If you want 400 miles range at that speed, you'll be running for 8 hours so you will need at least 200kWh in your battery.

Getting that into the car in five minutes (even if the battery would stand it) implies a power level of 2.4 Megawatts. Maybe 100 Amps at 24,000 volts! Believe me, you don't want to be anywhere near that sort of power!

However if you want to compete with the performance and comfort of a conventional large car, and expect to have the heater on whilst you're driving, you can easily multiply these figures by three or four, so the charging point will have to supply maybe 10 MegaWatts.

The filling station which might have - say - 12 charging points would require 120 MegaWatts. The cabling and generating infrastructure to supply this rules out any possibility of electric cars. You'd need a new power station just to supply the filling stations in Birkenhead!

Look at it another way. There are 30 milllion cars on uk roads, and they do an average of 40 miles a day each. to supply each with its 25KWh needed to do this, run the heater etc needs 750 GigaWatt hours. If this is supplied over a ten hour period during daylight, the demand would be 75 GW.

Currently, the total UK electricity consumption is about half this! In other words we'd need to treble our electricity supply!

Battery cars are a ridiculous joke!

Another good case for fracking then, we will need to get the juice from somewhere. All the objectors just don't want it where they are, get it somewhere else. We really must think things thru. I was on diesel boats and the batteries being topped up was a constant pain in the arris but had to be done. Wouldn't fancy an electric car myself.

Another problem with them is that when the batteries wear out it will cost more than the original cost of the car to replace them. Things will improve if / when hydrogen cells come along:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/214129-the-coming-fuel-cell-revolution-what-you-need-to-know

Used a battery forklift truck years ago. Great but one main problem you could drive up behind some one and they where unaware you where there, until you blow your horn.

I think it's important to separate oil as a very energy dense source of power from its origin in petrochemicals.

You can make oil, given electrical energy or heat or even light, using as feedstock, water and carbon dioxide.

My bet is that we will continue to use the internal combustion engine for the foreseeable future, but to synthesize the fuel. Diesel in the UK contains quite a high percentage of biodiesel. I think its about 30% but could be wrong.

One of the most interesting approaches in my opinion is by a company called Joule ( http://www.jouleunlimited.com/ ) which is using genetically engineered bacteria to produce ethanol, diesel, jet fuel etc from carbon dioxide and water. (It doesn't even have to be particularly clean water) The energy source is sunlight.

scalectrix

Hydrogen is the way forward, no expensive batteries to wear out, easy to produce, very high energy density.

Batteries are slow to charge and nobody seems to be going down the cassette route (replace battery with charged ones), hydrogen is faster than petrol to re-fuel.

How long until lithium starts going up in price again because of shortages?

Initially hydrogen has to used in combustion engines but fuel cells are progressing very fast and so it can't be far off the day that we have electric motors powered by hydrogen.

Battery cars are being promoted because they are expensive and so profit margins generates better returns.

My goodness, how many misinformed answers can a single post receive?
Every single point raised so far is hearsay, Top Gear, Clarkson clap trap.

None of the respondents have even sat in one I guess, let alone driven an electric car.

To answer the original question.
Have driven a few EV's.
Owned one since March.
Far from hopeless, my wife and I battle over who gets the short straw and takes the "other" car. BTW the other car is a brand new car, prior to that it was a different brand new car so its not like we are slumming it in an old banger.
I have used the charger (for free) at M&S Cheshire Oaks.
I have been to Abersoch and Shrewsbury and Nottingham in the EV using the (free) Ecotricity rapid chargers on motorways and major A roads.

Milk float? if I choose to it can beat pretty much any normal car away at the lights. BMWs Audi Mercs left behind.
Instant power from zero, loads of torque.
Have a look at a Tesla P85D, eats Ferraris for acceleration. Unbeatable over the quarter mile.
Asda Wallasey, don't think you will have seen anyone charging there as they have been switched off not long after installation. Problem with the earthing on the supply I am told. No plans to fix them.
Battery reliability? There are several taxi companies that use Nissan Leafs, some have done over 100000 miles with no loss of battery endurance. They are guaranteed not to lose beyond a certain capacity for up to 8 years or they will be replaced or repaired.
How on earth can a replacement battery cost more than the original car cost? How ridiculous does that sound. IF you were buying one (why would you) is about £5K.
Hydrogen is the way forward? Hydrogen is here now. Toyota Marai is £56000. Good luck with getting to one of the 14 hydrogen stations in the UK. Hydrogen so you have no batteries? Hydrogen creates electricity to charge a battery to run what is basically an EV. The electricity required to make hydrogen massively outweighs the electricity generated when it converts back so if there is not enough capacity to power electric vehicles how on earth will there be enough to create all that hydrogen?
To create 1 kg of hydrogen requires 56kwh electricity.
Hydrogen pumps are taking 30 mins to fill a vehicle as the connectors are freezing due to the high pressure i.e. 10000psi.
As to EVs being pushed due to being expensive? Renault Zoe is around £13000 similar if not cheaper than a Clio and pennies to run. Especially if you have solar panels.

That is as much here now as public space travel, its very early days.



The battery is there for ancillaries that need continuous power and also to store regenerated power, they are equivalent power to a caravan leisure battery and are pretty cheap.



But it can a classic use of surplus/off-peak electricity, electrolysis also produces oxygen at the same time which offsets the cost somewhat. Production of Hydrogen by electrolysis can be done very efficiently, the inefficient part of the process is the compression but some of that energy could be made recoverable and has been demonstrated.

Most Hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis at the moment anyway. There are also solar methods of producing hydrogen in the pipeline.



That's a minor technical issue, there are ways round it eg by initially filling the receiver with water, that way there doesn't need to be any significant decompression and hence no freezing. In any case they have already got filling down to 3 minutes, the technology is already around in NASA etc, they shove far greater amounts of liquid gas around pretty fast.



£13000 doesn't include the batteries, you have to lease the batteries separately which costs up to about £11,000 over 8 years.

The great advantage of hydrogen is its energy density (way over 200 times greater than lithium batteries) and as the weight depletes with usage it that makes it the equivalent of 400 times greater than lithium. So you could have a range 400 times bigger the EV for the same weight, or trade it off with a much lighter vehicle.

Hydrogen could be used to drive a stirling engine and avoid the need for fuel cells, that would be a neat combination.

Well that's the hydrogen part of my answer challenged.
The Marai IS here, now, available. Public space travel is still quite some way off.
Nope, battery is still there to be charged from the hydrogen 1.5kwh in the Marai to run the electric drive motor, the Hyundai ix35 has a 24kwh battery.
Now I agree that hydrogen can be used as a method to store the off peak/excess electricity. Pretty much like all the EVs that charge on Economy 7 at night. Still a huge and inefficient use of electricity.

Range is still the deal breaker for most. But the Tesla Model S has a better range than the Marai or ix35 with unbelievable performance.
The Hyundai does about 100kms from 1kg of hydrogen cost about £12.
So 56kwh for 62miles @ £12. My car uses about 15kwh for the same distance costs £2 in electricity from grid at full rate. Solar or Economy 7 is less.
Correct about the battery rental with the £13k Zoe. But offset against fuel costs. Alternatively get the iZoe for £18K. My diesel Clio list price is £17K.

Good to hear you enjoy using it Blueskier. I'm surprised you took it as far as Nottingham. How long did it take?

I am interested in how effective the heater or aircon is and how much using either reduces the range.

And I think you can expect a slow degredation in the range as the battery ages. Particularly if you use fast chargers a lot.

I don't really think a hydrogen fuel cell powered car is likely, although a number of manufacturers favour this approach. If you are going to use hydrogen, the best way to contain it is as part of a long hydrocarbon chain molecule as is done in conventional fuel and burn it in an IC engine. Amazingly, a litre of diesel contains more hydrogen molecules than a litre of liquid hydrogen! Raw liquid hydrogen is really nasty stuff.

The most practical approach, it seems to me, is to replace oil refineries with synthetic fuel factories, using atmospheric CO2 and water as feedstocks. Energy to do this could come from the rapidly growing renewable sources like wind, tide and solar. Already places like Denmark produce more electricity than they can use at times. It seems sensible to divert it into making road transport fuel.

The chemistry required to do this is well understood, tried and tested. The Germans in the last war made diesel fuel from coal! It has the advantage that it would render existing road vehicles carbon neutral, and save us the trouble and expense of constructing a new supply infrastructure to keep them in fuel. Hybrid technology - an IC engine supplying a battery and an electric drive - would help this by improving the mileage.

But battery cars, it seems to me, have no future. Despite much trumpeted advances in battery technology, the energy density of these things remains around 1 or 2 percent of a fuel tank. and costs a great deal more. Far more than can be saved on buying fuel.

I like the hybrid idea: McLaren P1 anyone?

F1 double deck trolley buses. THAT's the way to go electric.........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnRrN3QhgE

Wiki peeps of a certain age will also remember the sound track!

A lot of Arriva buses are now electric

Electric or electric assisted? I thought they had standard diesel engines which switch off when stopped but the starting procedure also drives the wheels for a smooth set-off, but there were problems when they first introduced them.

I think only the little dinky buses were fully electric used on some special service?

Excoriator, I also enjoy saving money. I am not a green eco warrior, I am just tight.
Nottingham is not too far, 125 miles each way. Stop at Keele services for a rapid charge. A lot of it is slow on the M6 due to traffic and then the A50 cross country. Maybe 3 hours.
The Leaf has a new heat pump heater which is very efficient, and heated seats and heated steering wheel. Air con probably affects range more than heating. Range is obviously affected but not by any great degree. Maybe 5%?
The evidence is rapid charges do not impact on battery life, see here http://www.solwayrenewables.com/nissan-leaf-taxis-surely/ This is the taxi company that have hit over 100000 miles in a Leaf with their own rapid charger with no degradation. They run nearly a full EV fleet now. There is also a taxi firm in Blackpool with something like 30 Leafs.
I believe hydrogen is more of a dead end, no infrastructure, extremely expensive answer to a problem that BMW have solved with the i3. An electric car with a small engine to generate extra electricity for further range using a fuel that is relatively cheap and can be purchased pretty much anywhere.
EV is not for everyone. If I didn't have a second vehicle I doubt I would have taken the step. Now I have I wont go back. My 2 best mates have also bought EVs on the strength of my experience.
What annoyed me about most of the respondents to your original question was they were totally dismissive of EV cars, having no experience of them, but were praising hydrogen. So they wont even consider an EV which has an infrastructure bigger than petrol, the grid! I cant put diesel in my car at work, or home, or a campsite or friends houses but I can charge my EV.
But they cant wait for this magical hydrogen. If they want to keep forking out for fuel which is taxed to death crack on. I will power my car from the sun and some grid electricity at a reasonable rate or the free chargers that are available.
Not for everyone but the sheep will carry on being sheep fooled by horror stories fed to them.

"Most"??? There was only me advocating hydrogen and I have not stated my experience nor inexperience of electric vehicles.

If I want to drive from here to London and back in one day which is fairly normal in a petrol/diesel vehicle its just not practical in an EV, there are finite limits to battery technology and we are very close to those limits.

Winter traffic jams are going to be a concern in EVs, I guess there will be a market for little generators to help in emergencies. I think the RAC or AA have a small topup capability from some of their vans to get you to the nearest charging point but that won't help you get out of a traffic jam while you are watching your "fuel" gauge deplete if you have the heaters on - take some warm clothing.

It would be very feasible in a hydrogen vehicle.

Around town and relatively local journeys an EV is great but there will also be a requirement for longer range vehicles, while both could sit beside each other, in my opinion, once hydrogen becomes commonplace then it will become dominant.

There are other stored power solutions and primary power solutions which are possible but hydrogen is the far more feasible within the near future.

I have driven three electric vehicles and couldn't particularly fault them apart from price, range and at the time, size and battery life which are now less of a problem. I love electric vehicles, I have costed up replacing one of my petrol engines with electric, annoyingly its the cost of the motor that made it infeasible.

I also have concern over the safety of lithium batteries, there is nothing you can do to stop an explosion once thermal runaway or an internal short starts, they need to be physically and thermally shielded, I've not looked at what levels they employ at the moment but I suspect they are inadequate for the amount of energy stored that can be released extremely quickly.

Hydrogen is very dangerous but the specifications for physical shielding has been long established, leak detection and shut off is relatively easy and cheap.

There also could be supply problems for EVs:- Lithium, graphite and rare earths are essential. Lithium is not in shortage at the moment but it could be eaten up quite fast, the other two are far more uncertain.

Well the infrastructure for EVs exist only until they become popular. Then huge problems emerge. How long is a 'fast' charge, by the way? 30 minutes?

You are unlikely to make up the cost of a leaf - twice that of a conventional vehicle even with a government subsidy - unless you do a truly phenomenal mileage. The average car does about 40 miles a day! Savings might amount to £1. Are you going to keep the car for 10,000 days, or 27 years - the break even point?

That you have to stop every hour and a half for 30 minutes would make any long journey a misery for me, and I believe for most people. I can make it to london and back on a single tanks of diesel.

You evidently like the car, and that is the main thing. But it is never going to be a good choice for most of us. I notice that in the USA, sales of EVs - which only became briefly popular in California - are now on the wane, despite a lot more models coming onto the market. See http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

I can't see hydrogen ever becoming popular. The platinum catalysts are expensive, so are high pressure tanks, and I don't know how they would tolerate a crash.

As to lithium it is not a particularly rare element, and neither are rare earths like Neodymium despite their name. They are needed to make magnets for in the motors which are used in both battery and hydrogen fuel cell cars.

I own a narrowboat, powered by Diesel. I would love to convert that to all electric. The weight of batteries is not a problem there, and it would be quite feasible to do it. What kills it, however, is the lack of infrastructure. When Telford and Brunel built the canal network they foolishly neglected to include charging points at frequent intervals along them!

Rare earths aren't rare but almost all production is in one country - China with small amounts from Australia and America and maybe others in yet smaller amounts.

Lead-in time for new mines and production facilities are estimated as 5 to 10 years and not many are trying because of China's cheap labour rates.

Graphite is similar with China being the main producer by far and despite numerous mines (over 200) they are not keeping up with demands.

Having so much reliance on one country makes graphite and rare earths to be classed as a high risk of supply.

Hydrogen tanks have specified crash tests etc, I believe the tanks are now carbon fibre. If you are in a crash severe enough to crack the tanks then you would be highly unlikely to survive the same crash even if the tanks weren't there.

Hydrogen is not trusted because of the Hindenburg disaster but most of the damage was caused by the diesel fuel and the flammable skin of the airship, the hydrogen burn went straight up in the air almost immediately because it is so much lighter than air.

Solar panels are great on narrow boats

DD, accepted you and Phil were advocating hydrogen.
I made the assumption you had no experience of EVs because that was the original question and you never said you had any. So now I know you have driven 3 EV's and you reservations are currently range and price. Price is coming down and range is going up and it is still relatively early days. Price is surprisingly low when fuel costs are factored in (or should that be factored out?)
There is a place for all types of vehicles and power sources and if in the future hydrogen is a cheap workable option then great I may well be an early adopter there as well.
However, I have a need for a vehicle today. I have a short commute as does my wife. I also have access to an ICE car. I can get a free ICE car from Nissan for 14 days a year. I have solar panels. I do only occasional longer journeys but since having the Leaf only once have I chickened out and took the Captur. That was a trip to Lincolnshire which is a wasteland of rapid chargers.

Excoriator
Using the 40 mile a day trip is spot on. About a gallon of unleaded. £5 at the moment.
In my EV that would be about £1.30 from the grid, free from my solar. Free from a lot of public charge points. In reality a mix of both so call it 80 pence to err on the pessimistic side. So about £4 per day saving.
Each and every day. Do more miles make a bigger saving.
My top spec Leaf Tekna was £17500 invoice price. Leather, roomy, lovely drive, satnav, internet controlled heating and cooling, 360 cameras. Its a nice place to be.
I haven't bought it, I have it on a PCP, no deposit, £190 a month for 2 years. Hand it back, get next generation or go back to an ICE.
I will never convince you guys. Okay. You will never convince me. If it doesn't suit your needs an EV is not for you, it does require a change of mindset. I will continue to enjoy my choice.

I couldn't careless if lithium and other elements are rare expensive or damaging to the environment. My actions wont save or destroy the planet.

Final point, my 2 mates got exactly the same car and same deal. We are not all internet geeks.
One works the line at Jag, its paid for itself in fuel savings on his commute. The other has been in the motor trade for 25 years. His saving comes from his trips to his caravan in North Wales which are effectively free from fuel cost. It simply fits in to our usage.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, Blueskier. It evidently suits your requirements very well and it was not my intention to criticise you for it. Continue to enjoy it.

It would not suit mine well at all, and I feel that in many - if not most cases - it would not. One reason is that not everyone in this country lives in a house with room for parking and charging. If you live in a terraced house for instance, you would have to run a lead through a window across the pavement, and flat dwellers would face similar difficulties!

I feel that ICEs working in hybrid vehicles remains the way forward and fuel produced from renewable sources is probably the most environmentally sensible way of running them.

Far from it Excoriator. I believe we do agree. An Ev is a cheap usable option for some people but not the majority......yet.
A REX linked to a battery pack is a solution available now that makes an EV workable for all but a few although an expensive option. Excluding the Outlander which costs the same as the diesel version. Audi etron and Golf GTE. Choice and competition will improve things at a pace now the likes of VAG are in the field.

The reduction in oil price has had an impact on sales of EVs recently, especially the US. ALthough their fuel is so much cheaper they react much more strongly to fluctuations.
So even in California sales are down.
Not sure where i read it but i think Tesla still sold more cars last year worldwide than Jaguar. Not bad for a little start up (backed by billions of dollars of private and corporate investment).
No off road parking no EV is right. OLEV wont fund your free home charge point unless you have off road parking.
Some do but not for me. The woman who bought the one featured in the top gear debacle has no home charging, there is a Robert LLwelyn video of it her from his fully charged youtube channel. Makes interesting viewing, https://www.youtube.com/user/fullychargedshow the whole series not just that one.
Home refuelling convenience is an unexpected bonus, pull up and plug in in seconds. Come out in the morning with 100+ miles, a preheated defrosted car unplug in seconds and off we go.

I think EVs only really sold well in California, and I suspect the market is now pretty well saturated there. Diesels are, at last, beginning to grow in popularity there now I notice.

Tesla is backed by a huge publicity effort, and I think they are so expensive that they are unlikely to change the world of driving. I notice that Mr Musk has realised that he will be stuck with warehouses full of batteries churned out by his 'megafactory' as the cars have not increased their sales quite as well as expected, and is now pushing them in domestic storage batteries. A much more sensible applications in my opinion, but I think they too are overpriced. Far better to store power at grid level as pumped heat as is being done by http://www.isentropic.co.uk/. This is a much cheaper and more elegant solution.

I'm afraid I don't think much of Mr LLewellyn. His grasp of engineering is tenuous and it shows. He ignores real problems and presents only the good side of EVs. Perhaps his grasp of funding from the EV industry is firmer.

As to wanting to go to a pre-heated car on a frosty morning, this is something I have never felt a particularly strong desire for. I quite like running the engine for a few minutes and feeling the car warm up. Both front and rear screens are electrically heated anyway, and it takes only a minute or two for them to clear. It is a fairly rare event nowadays anyway, and I like having 500 plus miles of range far more than getting into a warm car. I suspect this feature has been included to disguise the fact that the heaters on EVs tend to be only just adequate in order to preserve the range. In an ICE engined cars normally have very powerful heaters and I reckon they chuck out about four or five kW or more.

As for 'range extenders' I think they are a hilarious admission of the failure of the EV concept!

Oh Excoriator i thought we had reached a common ground where we could agree to disagree.
Okay the preheated car is not the deal breaker but a nice feature.

Now please answer honestly, how many times in the last year have you done more than 100 miles a day before getting home?

You like having 500 miles of range. So would i. But again honestly how often do you need it?

If you do 500 miles often then great a diesel is your wagon. However i suspect you generally do less than 80 miles a day.

Of course an ICE heater kicks out 4KW but you seem like an intelligent person who must realise that that 4kw is not free energy, it comes from burning either petrol or diesel and the inefficiencies of that process.

I dare you all to have a test drive. You can have a Leaf for four days or a Zoe for for two days.
Come back and give your opinion.

The GIGA factory is struggling to keep up with demand.
Power wall sounds good.
Come on, stop being so negative.

Well, I do over 100 miles most weekends, going to the narrowboat and back. The marina is about 60 miles away.

The reason I like having 500 miles range is that it means I don't have to think about filling the car with diesel every time I want to go more than 50 miles away. Also, on the occasions when I travel to London, I can fill the car at ASDA, and avoid having to stop for fuel on the motorways and pay through the nose for it. For local journeys, I use a petrol picanto which manages about 50mpg.

Yes I know that the heating cost money, but it is good to know that heat which would otherwise be dumped into the environment is put to good use keeping me warm! As far as I can make out in terms of thermal efficiency, both cars are utilising about 40% of the energy in the fuel. The reason you have the 'preheating feature' is not so much for your convenience, but because the manufacturer knows that without it, you would be shivering far longer in your car on a cold morning due to an inadequate heater!

Both Diesel and Petrol contain about 12.5kWh per kg. By contrast, I doubt Lithium batteries manage more than about 150 Wh per kg. The energy density of the EV's 'tank' is therefore about 1.2% that of a diesel. Efficiency in an EV is therefore a dominant design parameter, and there is as little as possible waste heat, and the heaters/coolers are designed with range in mind.

I would much prefer to pay more for the convenience of having as much range and heat as I want than to have to worry about whether I can afford to switch on the heater or manage to get home.

The other claimed advantage of an EV is that they are 'zero emission'. They certainly are not! Looking at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ I note that at the moment, 66% of the electricity being generated comes from gas or coal. This is notoriously inefficient, and I estimate about 50% for them. The means that the overall efficiency is comparable with that of an EV. This may change as renewables take over, but sadly our government seems bent on discouraging all forms of 'green' investment.

I have no doubt the cars are fine to drive. Most cars are these days.

I am negative about EVs because batteries remain inadequate, and are likely to remain so for the foreeable future. Also these deficiencies involve more hassle to the unfortunate driver. I am however a supporter of hybrids. It is not electric cars that I dislike so much as the pretence that they are a viable alternative. They are not. They remain incapable of supplying the needs of the vast majority of motorists. Even in the US, they managed, last month, under 9,000 sold out of a total of well over half a million cars and light vehicles. Sales are stuck at about 0.6%.

Perhaps he would have been more credible in his alter ego: Kryten.

Not for you then. But a viable solution for many. Maybe if you also had a second car as an alternative.......oh you do.
I am happy to take £5000 off the British taxpayer to fund my cheap transport and another £1000 to install my home charge point so i can do cheap miles from my free solar.

This is becoming like Clarkson anti EV bingo.
All your arguments are getting batted back so you move onto the next one. Until you end up just with range. Range will never compete as your rightly say due to energy density PER KG.
That in itself is disingenuous as you dont just carry 1 litre of fuel around and burn it to get your 12.5kwh of power. You carry 60-70 litres and an engine to burn it and a transmission to convert it to motion at the wheel.
Efficiency of an ICE is about 35% so you are down to 4kwh actual useful power.
Next, the zero emissions argument. Not one i am bothered about but i will answer it. Sure there are emissions elsewhere to generate the electricity (if not from solar or wind) but to refine your diesel or petrol requires about 6kwh per gallon of electricity. Never mind the energy used to extract, transport to refinery, transport to fuel station. If emissions are your thing you could switch to Ecotricity who emit 8 grams of CO2 per KWH whereas coal is 837 grams.

Whatever the sales figures are really dont come into whether they are a viable alternative. I didnt buy it because it was popular. I bought it because it was a cheap way to provide a second car, the refinement is a bonus. Most cars are nice to drive, this is another level in my opinion, although i have only had mainstream cars not high end ones.

So lets get back to the range!

He was!

I got so fed up with a smartphone that needed charging every day, I replaced it with the simplest one I could find which I charge every two weeks or so.

This does its job well, doesn't have cameras, tell me where I am, direct me to the nearest Starbucks and is smaller to shove into my pocket. The gain in convenience outweighs the loss of gimmickry many times over.

The same is true of charging a car. I do not want the hassle of having to plug it in every other night. And I want a car that - if necessary - is capable of taking me on perhaps a long journey, ANY time I want to.

If Electric cars took 24 hours to recharge once every three months or so, I'd be very happy to adopt them, but they increase hassle rather than reduce it. A car that is out of commission for hours at a time every couple of days cannot be considered an improvement.

As to using solar power to recharge it, this is only possible if you can leave it plugged in during the day. Whilst this is obviously possible, it means that the out-of-commission time is during daylight when you are more likely to be using it.

Most people find them unattractive for this reason. And it is just as well that they ARE so unpopular. We would have have great difficulty supplying the extra power needed for 30 million cars to get the 12kWh a day needed for their daily 40 miles. It comes to an extra 360GWh a day or 15GW continuous extra load if spread evenly through oput the 24 hours. Given the total UK demand is only around 30GW, massive infrastructure would be needed to support this.

Not for you then.
I like having top tech.
It really does take seconds to plug in, much preferable than visiting a petrol station in my opinion.
A car out of action for hours at a time? What like when you sleep or park up at work or park up shopping.
All that electricity that would be saved from refining the fuel could power the cars.
I work shifts so day solar charging works FOR ME.

If you feel that plugging something in is more hassle than going to a petrol station and pumping that fuel and giving the seller £60 i am amazed. Plugging something in! Thats all it takes. Just plugging in.

So lets get back to the range. You win.
On one aspect of the argument. You win.

You are also ignoring the power supply problem were these cars to ever become universal. The demand would not be uniform over the day. It would peak, sometime in the evening I expect, meaning that you would have to at least double the UK's generating capacity as well as beefing up the transmission capability.

Someone would have to pay for all that. Changing oil refineries over to power stations is probably infeasible as they are not generally close to major demand. Converting them to synthesise fuel is still a chemical process and it seems to me that if we ever are to get off oil, a sensible approach is to leave cars as they are, and slowly increase the synthetic/biological content of the fuel until it hits 100%.

You can use renewable power to do this. The product is easily stockpiled using the same infrastructure as we have now and intermittency is not a problem. The public doesn't have to buy new cars unless they want to or do anything. Slowly their ordinary cars will become carbon neutral.

This is a much more elegant solution than the massive upheaval and expense required for EVs.

I think, also, the expectation that batteries will dramatically improve is likely not to come about. People - talented and well resourced people - have been trying to improve on the 150 year old lead acid cell still in use in cars, aircraft and submarines with not a great deal of success. In terms of expense, safety and robustness the lead acid cell still wins as often as not. As I pointed out earlier, the energy density remains stubbornly at a negligible level compared to hydrocarbons.

Incidentally, somebody in Israel I think, tried a system of battery replacement, which would - had it worked out - might have over come the recharging time problem. This involves a whole shedload of new problems like a common battery size for all cars, a massive recharging facility etc and it didn't work out.

Charge as you drive is being trialled with under road induction.

I've not read-up on the theory or practice of charge as you drive using underground induction. However, when I first heard of it, I thought that it would need ac, due to transformers.
But what if a low-slung aluminium car, say a sports car, went over the top of the inductors? Alloy 'floats' on top of inductors, hence the principle of some high speed trains.
Interesting - as would be the efficiency figures the system.

It is clearly impractical on the grounds of cost. You would have to install induction coils plus all the supporting electronics for miles to transfer enough energy into a moving vehicles - not forgetting to remove all rebars from the concrete before you start!

The efficiency would be terrible too, and I don't know how metallic rubbish such as squashed drinks cans would affect things either. They'd certainly get hot due to eddy currents and might melt. This would suck energy from the system.

Induction charging for parked vehicles is more practical, but even there I doubt whether you'd get more than 80% or 90% of the power across. It sounds high but a simple piece of wire can be expected to be pretty close to 100% and is dirt cheap by comparison.

Nope, not ignoring the power supply problem. Answered that with the electricity required to refine petrol/diesel. Maybe some will plug in when they get home, some will plug in every other day, some may wait until economy 7 makes it cheaper.
Not my concern, works for me now. Could not care less about about the UK energy infrastructure.
"Changing oil refineries over to power stations is probably infeasible as they are not generally close to major demand". I dont think Stanlow is that far away.
As for renewables to generate, brilliant, yes please. Like hydrogen they are the fuel of the future and always will be.
As Henry Ford said if i ask the horse rider what they want they would say a faster horse.
The business in Israel went bust with massive debts. That was never a viable solution. Only tried to support the Renault Fluence.

So looking at an EV today, not worrying about lithium supply, or electricity provision, or efficiency of batteries, or hydrogen is the solution, etc etc.
Is an EV a viable cost effective transport solution available today?
And please answer honestly, do you really give a toss to the future viability of the energy supply in the UK or are you like me and just want to cover your families transport costs as cheap as possible?

I have been out with my mates tonight and do you know what we all still love our cars. One of my mates is thinking of a Zoe as his second car rather than a Mondeo.

Now i must question your original post.
"Has anyone any experience of these vehicles? Are they as hopeless as I suspect them to be?" You then go on to quote all manner of facts and figures and arguments against EV's. Do you work for Esso?

Lets get back to the range..............

Apologies for the very brief post before but I had to shoot off.

The trial is mentioned HERE (I was praying I hadn't dreamt it!) and it appears to be serious with a UK trial and a 15 mile stretch already in place in South Korea.

@norton, not quite, levitation has to have coils wound a certain way and phased, as Excoriator points out it could just get hot and may also act as a brake.

I've not looked into contactless charging systems but I presume they work on tuned circuits and if resonances don't match then little current is drawn???

@Excoriator I also guess that a modern version of pennies-on-the-line would come about!

I presume it is a demand based system - vehicle sends a signal saying "hit me with it", I also assume it is a resonant system to get the efficiency up but even so I would agree that breaking the 80% efficiency mark would be difficult or even miraculous unless something was near enough touching the road surface. I'm sure I read somewhere that the initial idea was that it would be a stationary system in car parks and at traffic lights etc but they appear to have progressed - or someone had their eyes on a lucrative research grant.

EDIT: Apparently its not a new idea CLICKY

You have not answered the power problem. The amount of electricity needed to run a refinery is small. Power stations in refineries burn oil or gas from the refining process, and the main object of this is to provide process heat. The power requirements of the lighting and pumps etc is an incidental benefit. About 90% of the energy in the crude oil emerges in the refined products, so there certainly isn't a massive generating capability in refineries.

But more seriously, 30 million cars doing 40 miles a day involved increasing our daily electricity production by 50% even if the motorists spread the load evenly over the day. They won't of course, and that exacerbates the problem.

I don't want to provide transport for myself and my family at the lowest possible financial cost if it will involve a massive and polluting expenditure in the electricity industry and involve big imports of primary fuel like oil gas or coal. Nor do I want it to encourage nuclear power plants.

And I don't want to contribute to increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere if I can help it. That is why I favour the use of the production of hydrocarbon fuels for road transport by synthesising them from freely available water and atmospheric carbon dioxide. The energy source for this would be renewables. (Denmark for instance produces more electricity than it needs. The excess should be used for making fuel) I am very much in favour of hybrids which make better use of the fuel of course, despite the additional complexity of these things which is a negative consideration.

The fact remains that at the moment and for the foreseeable future, hydrocarbons is by far the best way to provide adequate energy for transport. It needn't be petrochemical fuel however, and sticking with the ICE - which will accept either type of fuel without modification - seems to me to be the best way of weaning ourselves of fossil fuel.

At the moment the combination of unacceptable (to the vast majority of us) charging times, and the need to do it at frequent intervals due to the poor range means that EVs are unsuitable for general use. Even the government subsidy combined with other perks like no congestion charges and free parking etc, combined with hoopla from people like Llewellyn has not managed to raise the sales of these things above about 1%. Sales are actually falling in the US, and I suspect that in a few years EVs will have passed into history as they did in the early 1900s.

That it evidently suits you and you enjoying driving one doesn't change the fact that most people find them a poor choice. I hope it continues to give you pleasure and that when you come to change it for another EV that the manufacturers are still making them, but I feel that they will eventually abandon production. I'd give it a decade at most.

You have not addressed the problem of getting a lot of electrical energy into a car in a short time either. At the moment, batteries are unable to accept charging at these rates, but even if one was developed, the high voltages and currents involved would make it necessary for the passengers to vacate the vehicle during the process. I don't believe this would be readily accepted by the public.

An electric motor is a much cleaner, simpler, more elegant and efficient machine than an ICE, but unfortunately lack of an efficient way of providing, storing and transferring enough energy to supply an electric motor renders it impractical for most of us.

We could use the 30 million gallons of fuel per day saved by the cars running on electricity for local generation.
I am interested by the hydrocarbons from renewables but i just cant imagine we would have the capacity to enable it at present.I read this, admittedly a newspaper probably isnt the best resource for research http://www.theguardian.com/sustaina...ioxide-co2-climate-change-photosynthesis
New technology or processes may come which will but until then it a very power hungry process.

The batteries charge time is slow but rapids are not painfully slow but for my use i have only used them maybe 8 times. They are 500v and 100a and you can stay in the car.

Porsche have developed an 800v car which does a 250 mile charge in 15 minutes. The Mission e. One downside, 800v chargers dont exist. Yet.

I guess only time will tell which will win out, but it will probably be a long slow road. The public have an inherent dislike of change especially with very expensive things and their cars are often seen as an extension of themselves, so not surprising there is a slow take up.

It will probably be a mix of all modes for many years but for consumers the choice and competition can surely only be a good thing.

Right i am off now to do some more reading up on Hydrogen production. You know i do like the look of that Toyota Marai.

You need to Look at Joule Unlimited's site. They are producing fuel at the rate of 25,000 gallons per acre per year using nothing but sunlight!

The whole point of EVs is NOT to burn the 30 million gallons of fuel. If you are going to burn it, you might as well burn it in cars, surely! If you are proposing burning it in a thermal station the overall efficiency is way below what modern cars can manage (Thermal power stations waste two thirds of the energy ) Gas turbine power stations manage about 50%, but overall it is more efficiently used in a modern ICE.

From the figures you give, rapid charging would take you 30 minutes I guess. My point is if you want to do it in five minutes, you would need 3,000v at 100A.

Also to provide the same grade of service, as it takes six times as long, you will need six times as many charging points. And as you can only get something under 100 miles per charge you need a LOT more charging stations too.

Take a conventional motorway services. I haven't counted but I guess they have about 20 pumps. If you went over to battery cars you would need 120 charging points, each taking 50 kW. A total of 6 MegaWatts!

I'm sorry Blueskier, but this simply isn't a practical proposition. Nobody is going to provide this sort of infrastructure for free. You would end up paying more for the electricity than you do for petrol or diesel!

In passing you might like to look at this site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

It gives the energy densities of lots of different fuels. You will not how poor batteries are, and interestingly, how poor hydrogen is by volume. It is about a fifth or a sixth of hydrocarbon fuels. It wins on weight because it's so light, but unfortunately the containers needed to hold it are extremely massive so in a practical car it loses out there too.

Hydrogen is better than batteries but not as good as boring old diesel or petrol.

I think it is a sort of arrogance that leads people to assume that we can do what people a hundred years or so ago failed to see. They were not fools, and realised after trying alternative approaches like steam cars or electric cars and compressed air that the ICE beat them hands down. It still does.

The comment about burning the fuel to make electricity was very much tongue in cheek.
I think you are way off with your mileage calculations by the way. Total road fuel use in 2012 was 33400 tonnes which if my calculations are right is 10.5 millions gallons. And it is dropping, from here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...transport_consumption_factsheet_2012.pdf page 6. There are 30 million + cars in the UK but there is no way every single one of them averages 40 miles every day. But lets not get bogged down in that.
I am aware of the energy densities, but you must admit that is burning the fuels in a lab. Not the reality of carrying them round in a vehicle with an inefficient engine. Surely the energy used to drive per mile is a more relative than energy density. Batteries are heavy, fuel light that is a very simplistic argument.

Thanks for the Joules link, i will have a look at that.

Yes steam, compressed air and electric have been tried before and ditched. But in 100 years the ICE has improved immensely due to technology as have other technologies, EVs included. They have a lot of catching up to do.

If EV is already a dying solution with hardly any take up from the public with no future, why have pretty much every manufacturer invested billions upon billions in them? They have every conceivable variation of the ICE in production, tried and tested and popular. Why are they doing it? Love the planet? Dont think so. Maybe they have some insight into the market, maybe even more than you and I.

I guess we need to resurrect this thread in 5 or 10 years time.

Cheers. BS.

That Joule project seems like promising stuff.

A company i used to work for had loads of sparks on Stanlow including TRC, Thornton Research Centre. The sparks always had tales of boffins basically left to do whatever they wanted with unlimited budgets.
Also tales of Shell buying up ideas for fuel alchemy and burying them.
I have no first hand knowledge but was also intrigued. And i am a sucker for a conspiracy theory.

You say EVs have improved but the important bits of them are the motor and the battery.

The motor has not improved much, for the excellent reason that it was always pretty good. Efficiency is around 90%

The battery is a different story. Although the development of Lithium chemistry gave an improvement of about five times, it has stuck there, and an improvement from about 0.4% to 2% of hydrocarbons is nowhere near enough to give it a competitive edge against them, even allowing for the massive losses of an ICE engine.

Remember too, that the huge lost energy of the IC engine is not all waste. It is put to good use in keeping the occupants warm and this has no impact on range at all.

There have been efforts to recover the waste heat - or part of it - using thermoelectric generators (TEGs) - which look interesting too ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603110849.htm )

I accept your point about the fuel consumption figures, although I cannot explain the error. There are undoubtedly 30 million cars registered, and the figure of 40 miles a day on average is widely accepted (it is accurate in my case, certainly) If it is an average, this must take into account those not doing anything like 40 miles a day as well as those doing a lot more. It can only be explained by cars getting a lot more efficient, but that doesn't fully explain it either. I will look into it in more detail.

Confession time, there is a problem when you have several web pages open and are watching MOTD. The fuel figures on that doc were kt so 35,000,000. Whats a factor of a thousand between friends?

"In 2012, consumption of road transport fuels in the United Kingdom was 33,339 thousand tonnes of fuel (kt). Consumption of fuel used for road transport purposes decreased from 34,164 kt in 2011 (a decrease of 2 per cent) and from 36,949 kt in 2005 (a decrease of 10 per cent)."

In the first figure from 2012 it is not entirely clear. The figure from 2011 makes it clearer.

I was surprised when i saw that figure, now it makes sense.

http://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility
This has some amazing stats.
Average car is used only 4% of the time.

There have been a number of frankly potty ideas for storing enough energy to run a car.

One of the recent ones was to use an 80 Farad capacitor and charge it to 1,500 volts. This would be achieved using a wonderful new high-tech material for the dielectric involving ultra high purity bariun titanate. A company called Eestor was set up in Texas and attracted a great deal of attention and millions of dollars in venture capital, with which the founders paid themselves an excellent salary.

It rumbled on for years, with little in the way of progress to show for it. Concerns about the 25 kWh of instantly releasable energy and how it would behave in a crash were dismissed as ridiculous, as was the difficulty of voltages like 1,500 floating about in the wreckage. They also ignored the phenomenon of saturation (the capacitance falls as the voltage rises) and stoutly refused to allow any third party testing.

Peripheral and irrelevant 'progress' was announced such as the development of associated DC-DC converters that would transform the high voltage on the capacitor to something that could drive the motor, and measurements of the purity of the barium titanate. But the essential detail of whether such a capacitor could be made and whether it would work remained shrouded in mystery.

Eventually it was found not to work and the whole structure of misplaced hope collapsed, taking with it the investor's money and a Canadian manufacturer of EVs or golf trolleys who had paid millions for the intellectual property.

I was sceptical from the first and was accused of 'trolling' by the enthusiasts when I asked awkward questions on a blog about the system. Many of these enthusiasts lost a great deal of money investing in what was essentially a wildly optimistic idea from the first.

I think it is important to keep an open mind about unlikely claims like this, but not so open as your brain falls out!

So cards on the table. Are you just very clued up and interested in transport and energy or do you have some professional involvement?
No problem whichever or neither is the case. Made an interesting path for the thread.
You original question was expressed very much in laymans terms and i feel was almost like a baited trap.
Paranoid? me? quite possibly.

Why dont you join an EV forum so you can get the opinion of some people who have a lot more time using EVs and other types of EVs than just my rather limited ownership?
SpeakEV is a very popular one. Is also a very active forum. And not totally dedicated to EVs.

Either way thanks for the conversation, i think it has run out of steam (excuse the pun) unless another EV owner is a member of wikiwirral and pipes up. Any time you want a ride drop me a PM.

Cheers, BS.

I have no professional interest in cars, or any great interest in them. I just like to look at the detail of claims made for things.

EVs caught my attention as the 'Zero emissions' claim was so palpably false. Checking on various other claims made for them revealed they too were less than the truth or unsupported by any calculation of what they involved.

That some people - like yourself - happen to lead lifestyles that can accommodate the deficiencies easily doesn't make them universally a viable alternative unfortunately.

I am mainly interested in renewable energy and how the intermittent nature of it can best be addressed. This is how I came across the Eestor business.

I will look at SpeakEV at your suggestion. I too have enjoyed the chat and agree it has run out of... charge???

Well maybe we come full circle with addressing how the intermittent nature of renewables can be addressed.
I presume you have heard of the V2G system. Vehicle to grid.
This uses the cars that are mostly parked up as electricity storage units from solar or wind and they can feed back to the grid at low or no generation times.
I have a vague recollection of an island in Denmark or Sweden where the whole population have Leafs and they run this V2G rather successfully.

I've heard of it, but I am not convinced by it. If I had an EV, my intention in plugging it in would be to get a full charge, not to supply the grid. Batteries are an expensive way to do it anyway.

So far the best solution I've seen is Isentropics Ltd and their pumped heat system. This is dirt cheap (its mostly tanks of gravel) and is about a third the cost of pumped water storage. It is readily scaleable, and there are no geographical requirements. They are building a 2MW system which will be connected to the grid to see how well it performs. I notice, too, that they have a way of combining it with underground compressed air storage which raises the efficiency of the two of them to over 90%, better than batteries!

http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

It confuses me how compressed air storage can be significantly more efficient that hydro storage.

Hydro generation above 5MW's efficiency can be as high as 95%, so its the pumping stage that must be inefficient.

Surely a liquid is more efficient in a turbine than gas and surely pumping a liquid is more efficient than pumping a gas?

Gravel heat storage would seem to me to have a low energy storage by volume as a limiting factor, the melting point of rock which isn't particularly high, the heat capacity of rock isn't brilliant either.

Dinorwig, the UK's biggest pumped hydro scheme at 1,750 MW manages about 75% efficiency. (For every 100kWh you put in, you get only 75kWh back)

There is no reason why liquid should have higher efficiency than a gas. The biggest losses with pumped air is the stuff gets hot when it is compressed, which represents waste energy. And that's not the end of it, because when it expands in the generation phase it gets much colder which lowers the efficiency so you have to heat it before it goes into the turbines - which costs more energy.

The PHES system can be modified to take advantage of this problem - there is an explanation on the Isentropics site - which raises the overall efficiency to around 90 to 95%

The melting point of Granite is about 1200C. Plenty hot enough. Its specific heat is about 800 J/kg/degree C so if it is raised through 1000 degrees, a kg would store 800,000 Joules or about a quarter of a kWh. a tonne of it would hold 250 kWh, four tons a MWh and so on. To store what Dinorwig stores - about 11GWh, would require 11,000 tons of it. This is roughly a 20 metre cube. Yes its a lot, but far, far less than a whole mountain and two lakes etc, god knows how many miles of concrete lined tunnels and massive underground installations.

And you can put lots of smaller ones wherever convenient to get the same storage capacity.

Batteries ARE an expensive way of storing energy but in this instance it is an island with limited journey.
So in this instance the 2 birds 1 stone philosophy i can see the sense in it.
Wish i could find the article. But it was Norway who have very strong EV sales anyway due to the generous tax breaks.
EVs currently make up nearly a quarter of all car sales. Up 70% on last year.
This was a community initiative which saved them having to import electricity from the grid saving the community collectively.
They charged for free on the condition that they would feed back when required.

Wouldnt work in the UK, we would get our charge and then unplug.
Screw everyone else, i am alright Jack.

Dinorwig is 1960's technology and I have read now that hydro can be a more efficient with expected 80% minimum round trip and possibly approaching 90%.

There are two problems with compressing a gas compared to pumping a fluid, the first is seals which will be a compromise between leakage and additional friction or other losses, the second is that it does compress and so you will never exhaust all the compressed gas from the pump, assuming some sort of reciprocal action. I can't see how it would be possible to produce a linear high pressure pump but neither have I looked into it yet.

In its simplest form water could be bucketed upwards with very little loss (possibly the most efficient way for large vertical heights?), I can't see the advantage of bottom pumping - I believe they are even looking at bucketing rubble as a means of achieving gravitational storage using its higher density over water to reduce volume.

Anyway, grid storage is a secondary problem to generation and much to my disgust it looks like we are going the nuclear route yet again, it would be safer to use ultra compact nuclear generators in cars than large nuclear reactors on the grid imho.

Erratum!

In my previous post, the 11,000 tons should have read 44,000 tons, and the 20 metre cube would then be a 35 metre cube.

The large oil tanks at Stanlow are much bigger than this. Some are about 80 metres in diameter.

How about starting a new thread as this is getting pretty far from EVs?
Some pretty specialised processes getting discussed now.
May even get other participants who have no interest in "battery cars" but alternative/renewable energy.

I think, diggingdeeper, that on a large scale gas and water are pumped with turbines not reciprocating pumps so sealing is not an issue.

Isentropics' explanatory video uses reciprocating pumps, but the general principle applies to a turbine variant as well.

On a smaller scale I doubt whether sealing is a big problem any more than it is in a car engine, or a steam engine. This sort of technology has been well and truly sorted out by now surely.

The storage of large quantities of gas has been done in old salt mines. Apparently salt 'self-seals' so high pressures can be used. Obviously Cheshire would be good for this.

I have sent an email to those running the site asking for a new Forum on 'Renewable Energy'

Got a reply saying

"New Forums take time, you may find dedicated solar panel forums have more information sharing similar issues, its only a quick google."

I'm not sure if that means yes or no.

The problem with dedicated solar forums is that they tend to be filled with enthusiasts to whom any discussion of problems is seen as a personal attack on them. I think (hope) it might be more conducted more dispassionately here.

Just thought I'd update this thread.

Three recent developments have occurred.

Ways have been found to fast charge batteries which may reduce charging down to between 5 or ten minutes.

A practical method of producing the allusive stable aluminium batteries has been developed, these could hold twice the charge of lithium and be considerably cheaper.

A method of producing mass sheets of graphene cheaply has been developed which has got the potential to produce better performing batteries.

Battery 'breakthroughs' come thick and fast. Alas, they seldom make it to production. The problem is that improvements in one area - say fast charging - seem to come at the expense of another area like energy density or safety. It is a multi-dimensional problem which is nowhere near being solved.

A 'perfect' battery is not the only problem however.

A little old lady can put a MegaWatt hour of energy into her car in complete safety in the form of diesel in about a minute. To do that with electricity would require power levels of 60 MegaWatts. That is 60,000 volts at a thousand amps! You wouldn't allow a little old lady or anyone else anywhere near that sort of power.

Moreover, if you consider this going on at a motorway services with perhaps two dozen cars simultaneously, the required power level would be almost 1.5 GigaWatts - the entire output of a medium sized power station! For a single motorway filling station!

Contrast this with a hydrogen filling station with the hydrogen produced by wind and solar. The hydrogen can be stored easily and large amounts of energy transferred to cars in perfect safety, quickly and easily. The hydrogen can be produced from fossil fuels in the short term, so that an easy changeover to all renewable sourced hydrogen can be carried out. Also, we will not have to rebuild the national grid and build loads of power stations. The infrastructure for supplying hydrogen cars is not much more expensive than that for petrol or diesel.

A hydrogen powered road transport system is a lot more practical than battery cars!

Glad to see you are warming to hydrogen.

Local charging capacity has a few solutions:-

Cassette batteries.

Local storage (which ties up nicely with local power generation like solar etc).

Wireless on-the-go charging (yeah, I'm sceptical on this one as well).

Another thought slightly related is the car-train concept being furthered to a physical coupling which not only saves the amount of energy required but could also redistribute charges.

I don't think battery swapping is practical. How many batteries would a filling station have to store? Where would you charge them? Could you get car manufacturers to agree on a standard, or would there be dozens of different types?

Most of all, however it is done, transferring the energy requirements of the road transport system onto the National Grid would involve rebuilding it, as well as a lot of power stations. It certainly couldn't cope as it stands!

A big bit of news in January was a relatively simple process to turn Carbon Dioxide from air into Methanol.

That would be a fantastic solution to portable energy storage.

Its been done many times before but the catalyst normally gets eroded away however the new process has achieved a stable re-usable catalyst.

SOURCE