Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

[PHXPhlyer]

PP

[barkingmad]

This event is not quite an electric car malfunction, but seeing as how our leaders are dying to get us out of our cars and onto public transport, this is not quite the sales pitch for that idea they'd like you to view;

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpre ... explosion/

It really is rather spectacular and shows the failure to comply with it's low emissions legislation by this particular example.

It's good to read that similar types have been taken off the road.

Meanwhile back to the car topic, more negative aspects of the great electric dream are being unveiled;

"GREEN MADNESS: U.K. ALONE IN BANNING NEW PETROL AND DIESEL CARS IN 2030;

As host of COP26, our Government wanted to be seen as “world leaders in reducing CO2 emissions”, and so before the meeting it announced the U.K. would ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030. It hoped it could then persuade other countries to follow our lead. It completely failed and no other major country went along with this: Germany, Japan, Italy and China do not propose a ban until 2035, France and Spain do not propose a ban until 2040 and the USA and India are not proposing any ban at all.

It is not hard to see why other countries were so unenthusiastic to inflict this policy on their population. Electric cars are so expensive. For example, Nissan’s basic electric car, the Leaf, has a recommended retail price (RRP) of £26,995, whereas its equivalent petrol car, the Micra, has an RRP of £16,685. The cheapest Tesla is the Model 3, which has an RRP of £45,990 or more, depending on the version. The petrol equivalent is a BMW 3 series, which has an RRP of £29,990 or more, again depending on the version. The running costs of electric cars are lower – charging a battery is cheaper than filling a tank with petrol – but for the average U.K. motorist, who has an annual mileage of 7,400 miles, these lower running costs will never compensate for the very high purchase price.

The lower running cost of electric cars is in any case largely an artefact of Government fiscal policy, namely the enormous amount of tax on petrol. Most of the cost of a litre of petrol is tax, whereas there is only 5% VAT on electricity. These very high rates of tax on petrol mean that if motorists switch from petrol to electric then the Government will face a black hole in its finances. The Government therefore will need to find a way of taxing electric vehicles to make up for this lost revenue. A plan under discussion is to install tracking devices in cars such that the Government knows how many miles you are driving and can then charge you a “per mile road tax”. If this happens, the running costs of electric cars will rapidly increase."

[Undried Plum]

All the new features you mentioned don't take valuable parking spots in congested cities. So OFSO's argument holds a lot of water on how difficult is for someone who lives in a congested street in a block of flat to have his car charged when the spot is taken by a conventional car who has been unable to find another parking spot.

The problem of people hogging charging spots is not new. It's the same as able-bodied drivers blocking disabled person reserved spaces.

The answer is to impose punitive fines. This is already beginning to happen and is something which could easily be automated as public chargers are comms-connected and can easily flag the presence of a non-charging car to the nearest parking attendant or traffic warden. Nowadays most traffic wardens have a GPS-connected and data-linked hand-held data logger, so it's a trivial matter to do a software mod to deal with the problem.

[OFSO]

Traffic Wardens. Yes I remember those before Council cutbacks, deporting illegal immigrants, and outright assassinations took them off the streets. In my former residence, a street of some 60 four floor houses which were each divided into two duplex flats, and hence 120 households, Islington Council installed four car charging points, two each end. The streets at each end had none when I left in 2020. Assuming each household to have one car, that would be 116 households with no access to a charging point for their theoretical electric car. If Islington Council renounced their ban on cables strung across the footpath and hence permitted the ground floor flats to charge their cars parked in the street, that would still leave 68 households unable to charge their cars. Yes of course there are technological methods, such as kerbstone induction loops, to get round this. But Islington Council says TFL should pay and TFL says the Government should pay, and the so-called Government is bankrupt so it ain't going to happen in a million years.

[Rwy in Sight]

UP, the issue remains: charging vehicles in a city environment isn't going to be easy: people still park on disabled person reserved spaces and councils wouldn't gain on popularity by transforming regular parking slots to charging spots.And by re-reading OFSO's post I see another problem: people come back from work, the charging position is available they go home to cook/eat and fall asleep and over-stay for half an hour while another person returns and needs to charge his or her car but the spot is occupied for a plugged in not charging car.

It would take some time (I don't know how much) for people to get used to the different SOP required for using a car and in a city it is not easy.

[G-CPTN]

Where I live, vehicle parking is in such demand that there is rarely any unoccupied spaces at any time of the day.
This includes a large 'out of town' carpark which regularly has vehicles on surrounding pedestrian spaces as well as in-town places and residential streets.
As electric vehicle numbers increase, the minimal EV spaces will continue to be overwhelmed.

[John Hill]

I think we will be right, we have outdoor off-street parking for two/three cars and indoor parking for three, maybe four but that would require a tidy-up.

[Undried Plum]

a street of some 60 four floor houses which were each divided into two duplex flats, and hence 120 households

What you have described is a street which does not have sufficient onstreet parking places to meet potential demand.

Logic 101: if there are insufficient parking places, then there will be insufficient parking places to electrify. It's not an electrification problem. It's a parking problem.

In a socially advanced country like Norway, multistory carparks have several levels where every parking space has an adjacent charging point. It makes sense, and money, as well as making the atmosphere just that little bit nicer and makes having a modern car so much nicer than an old-fashioned pistonbanging rattletrap.

[Rwy in Sight]

Unfortunately not many countries are like Norway and what OFSO described is closer to reality in most countries. Hence the industry and governments should work with this situation in mind

[k3k3]

Norway is a big country with a population of 5 million(ish), the population density is 1/20th that of the UK, so direct comparisons seldom work.

[OFSO]

#28. You are wrong yet again UP. There was enough parking for two cars per household. But if you think Islington Council would install two charging points per household in every street - or even one - you have once again taken up residence in fantasy land.

[G-CPTN]

My village has recently installed two charge-points (4 sockets) though they aren't visibly obvious unless you are familiar with EVs so non-EVs are likely to occupy those spaces (which were, previously, normal parking spaces and still are not marked as EV-specific).

[OFSO]

There's an EV parking spot in our town. Normally empty as nobody can afford the electricity.

[Undried Plum]

There's a very funny half-arsed, and failed, attempt at dissing Tesla cars in today's Tory Dailygraph, dressed up in faint praise of course. All the usual crap about range anxiety and build quality from years ago.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/featur ... y-uk-2022/

The DT readers comments are almost a parody of ignorance. Truly hilarious, in fact. Well worth reading for a laugh. A Guinea a minute.

All the usual crap from the most profoundly ignorant about the imagined dearth of charging points in the real world of urban and rural life.

Then there's the crap about a dearth of Lithium and others metals in the real Universe. And the imagined lack of energy in the real world.

Then there's the tired old crap about "range anxiety". In the real world, we never ever use up the stored energy from 100% to 0% to measure range in actual journey planning --- for exactly the same reason(s) that we pilots don't do so in powered aircraft either.

Then there's the crap about electricity being "too expensive" to run an electric car. In the real world, leccie prices for charging leccie cars are much much lower than the peak time prices quoted when cars are being driven rather than when being battery-charged.

Oh yes, then there's the crap about Teslas catching fire. No mention that over a quarter of a million infernal combustion engine vehicles a year catch fire in just one country alone. Never makes the news of course. If a Tesla catches fire, and they do, it makes world news. In the real world the actual stats show that the rate of road vehicle fires for infernal combustion engined vehicles is 500 per billion road miles. For electric vehicles, all of 'em not just Teslas, it's about 5 per billion road miles. Never mind that reality.

Meanwhile: the DT did admit that the two best selling cars in the UK are the Tesla Model Y and the Tesla Model 3.

What of the smokey old dinosaur companies' tired old pathetic relics down the scale of sold cars? Lang may their lum reek? say I.

Anyone want to buy a used Vauxhall Corsa, as shown as the runner up in the league table? Check the timingbelt, is my second-hand advice from a mechanic of my acquaintance who knows about those relics as a result of having helped his unfortunate daughter to buy one of the wretched things.

[Undried Plum]

There's an EV parking spot in our town. Normally empty as nobody can afford the electricity.

There's normally an empty disabled parking spot in my town too. Though not for a reason which you might imagine for the real world.

Actually, nice people don't disable charging places for nice people. Nor do they even plan so to do.

The reason why there are so many charging places available is because there are so many charging places available.

Actually, the same is true of oil-slots at oil-worship stations, mostly.

[PHXPhlyer]

The electric Ford F-150 Lightning is the best version of America’s best-selling truck

By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business
Updated 8:59 AM EDT, Wed May 11, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/business ... index.html

The Ford F-150 Lightning may be the best pickup truck the company has ever made. All it took was making it completely electric, something that, not long ago, might have seemed off-brand for a traditional truck company like Ford.

Newer automakers have so far led the way on electric trucks. Tesla in 2019 revealed the prototype for its futuristic, electric Cybertruck but still hasn’t put it into production. Rivian came out with its electric pickup, the R1T, which won the 2022 MotorTrend Truck of the Year Award. But the electric pickup truly hit the mass market last month when Ford started production on the F-150 Lightning at its famous Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan.

It’s quick and powerful, and it drives better than any F-150 I’ve been in before. All that, and it does stuff you never imagined a truck would do, like provide workspace that also functions as a drinks cooler under the hood. (The front storage compartment is watertight and has drain plugs.) It can even power your entire home for days if you need it to.

This is a real truck, not a toy for campers and not a weird design exercise. It’s now in production by a company that already knows how to produce vehicles in big numbers. Ford has plans to make 150,000 of these trucks a year, which is equal to about 20% of all the F-series trucks Ford sold last year. The Ford Lightning is an all-electric version of the best-selling truck in America. To learn what truck owners really want and need Ford had only to talk to its own customers. This wasn’t delving into foreign territory. I recently got to drive several versions of the truck under vastly different scenarios at a two-day event around San Antonio, Texas.

In the fundamentals, this new F-150 doesn’t veer too far from its siblings. At a glance, if you don’t notice the charging port on one front fender and the fake charging port on the side, you might not notice it was anything but another F-150. Besides that, it has some extra lights running across the nose of the truck and across the tailgate, plus the grille has no holes on it. As I drove through the south Texas countryside I wondered how many people in the all the other pickup trucks around me realized how different this one was from theirs.

The F-150 Lightning has no engine in the front. Its huge boxy hood instead covers a massive storage space. To drive home the point, at the event in Texas, Ford representatives filled one with ice and served cold drinks from it. There are plugs in the storage space to power and to charge electronics, along with more plugs in the bed of the truck.

With one electric motor driving the front wheels and another the back, full-time all-wheel-drive is standard in every version of the Lightning. That includes a stripped down work truck with few amenities, a range of 230 miles, 426 horsepower and 775 pound-feet of torque, and a starting price around $40,000. That isn’t very different from the price of a four-wheel-drive V8-powered F-150 XL work truck which has a similar 400 horsepower and only 410 pound-feet of torque.

This is a real work truck that isn’t positioned as a luxury piece of camping equipment like, say, the Rivian R1T. As with other F-150 models, of course, the Lightning can be had with luxury levels of amenities and prices reaching six digits.

I spent some time in Lightning pickups towing heavy trailers and carrying heavy loads on highways and on narrow curving country roads. The truck does these things very well and can, in fact, accelerate up a highway on-ramp pulling a 5,000-pound trailer with remarkable ease. (The truck can tow up 10,000 pounds, according to Ford.) Electric motors provide instant response with smooth acceleration and are, of course, virtually silent.

With full tiime all-wheel-drive, the Ford F-150 Lightning proved to be capable off-road.

The thing that surprised me the most, though, was just how much more nicely the Lightning drives than gas-powered F-150s. That’s largely due to the improved weight balance that comes having heavy battery packs spread out between the front and back wheels rather than a big engine under the hood. The Lightning also has independent rear suspension, rather than a stiff solid rear axle like other F-150s do, so a bump on the side doesn’t immediately affect the other side. This, combined with the smooth power delivery of electric motors that never need to shift gears, make the Lightning a remarkably civilized highway cruiser. It’s also very quick – especially for a full-sized truck – when the accelerator is pressed.

Off-road, climbing perilously steep, muddy trails, the Lightning proved, again, remarkably capable. That may not be surprising given that the trail was one selected by Ford to show off the truck but, to Ford’s credit, the truck I drove clambered up slippery rocks with the same tires as the ones I drove on the Interstate. Electric motors, with their smooth and quick power delivery to whichever wheels can use it, are ideal for slippery work.

Besides doing all the things gas trucks can do but better and faster, the Lightning offers a number of bonus capabilities. First, there’s that huge “frunk,” or front trunk, with plugs and lights inside. Then there’s the fact that, when plugged into a home charger, it can automatically provide back-up power to the house if there’s an outage. That’s in addition to the fact that it can also run power tools at a worksite.

Of course, towing and hauling (and accelerating hard while towing and hauling) uses a lot of electricity. Without hauling a heavy load, an F-150 Lightning can go 230 or 320 miles on a charge, depending on what size battery pack the customer orders. Hard work eats into the truck’s range by about the same amount that it depletes a gas truck’s driving range, according to Ford.

However, gas trucks can go farther on a tank to start with – the V6-powered F-150 can go up to 520 miles, according to the EPA – and filling a tank takes less time than recharging a battery. That will be a serious issue for some buyers. Most pickup owners probably drive much less than 200 miles on a typical day, though, and could easily recharge overnight. The only problem now is that The Lightening will be tough to get for customers who did not previously place an order. Ford has stopped taking orders from retail customers due to high demand.

Much of what’s great about the F-150 Lightning will probably also be great about future EV trucks, like the Chevrolet Silverado EV and the Ram 1500 EV. The smooth performance and ample power are largely inherent to electric drive systems. But the F-150 Lightning marks a real turning point in America’s long love affair with pickups.

Just priced base model ~$54,000 w/230 mile battery pack. ~$75,000 w/320 mile pack

PP

[Undried Plum]

The electric Ford F-150 Lightning is the best version of America’s best-selling truck

Sez it all, Dunnit!?

Why didn't they it name the Bozo truck? The petrol one, I mean.

[PHXPhlyer]

Volkswagen is bringing back the Scout as an electric SUV

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/business ... index.html

The Scout, a one-time competitor to Ford Broncos and Jeeps that was last sold more than four decades ago, is being resurrected by Volkswagen as a line of all-electric trucks and SUVs.

Scout will become its own separate brand offering off-road-oriented electric trucks and SUVs in North America. A Scout SUV and pickup truck are expected to go on sale around 2026.

“The vehicles will be designed, engineered, and manufactured in the U.S. for American customers,” the company said in a statement. “To this end, a separate, independent company will be established in the U.S. this year as the Volkswagen Group moves the strong iconic U.S.-brand Scout into the electric vehicle space.”

The first prototypes are set to be unveiled next year, the company added.

The Scout brand “will be a separate unit and brand within the Volkswagen Group to be managed independently,” Volkswagen CFO Arno Antlitz added in the statement.

The boxy Scout SUV was originally the product of International Harvester, a brand better known for farm equipment and commercial trucks. The Scout, produced from 1961 to 1980, was the truck-maker’s foray into the passenger vehicle market. The term “sport-utility vehicle” didn’t exist at the time, but the Scout helped define what would become the SUV market segment. It was also available as a pickup during that time.

It was originally seen as a competitor to the Jeep CJ, the predecessor of today’s Jeep Wrangler. In 1965, Ford came out with the Bronco, its own competitor in this new vehicle segment. The Wrangler is now the core model of the Jeep brand, considered to be one of the world’s most valuable passenger vehicle brands. Ford recently reintroduced the Bronco brand on two new SUVs that have become major sellers. In a recent month, Ford sold nearly as many of the small Bronco Sport as it did of the popular Escape crossover SUV.

Classic SUVs, like the old Broncos, Jeeps and Scouts have become popular with car collectors in recent years, keeping their names and images in the public consciousness. Original Scout models have increased 43% in value since 2020, according to Hagerty, a company that tracks collector vehicle values. Values of later Scout II SUVs, a version produced after 1971, have increased by 48%.

International Harvester reorganized its truck business under the name Navistar in 1986. In 2021, Traton Group, a commercial vehicle subsidiary of Volkswagen Group purchased Navistar and, with it, obtained the rights to the defunct Scout brand.

Volkswagen has been shifting aggressively to electric vehicles ever since its embarrassing diesel emissions cheating scandal of 2015. The company has been rolling out electric Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen models among others. Soaring demand for electric vehicles has caused VW to run out of EVs to sell in key markets.

Volkswagen and other automakers are relying on well-loved brands, once associated with gasoline cars and trucks, to bring new customers to electric vehicles. Ford’s first electric-only model, an SUV, carries the Mustang name and pony badge. General Motors recently brought back the Hummer name on a new GMC Hummer EV electric truck. Volkswagen itself is re-introducing the beloved VW microbus as the electric ID.Buzz.

PP

[Undried Plum]

aka the VW Ketchup.

[Woody]

Here’s the 37 page Heathrow sustainability plan for the future https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/he ... _guide.pdf

Can any of our esteemed members guess how many ev charging points have been installed in the staff colleague car parks or at Terminal 5