Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Electric Cars

The first fuel cell hydrogen powered busses will be in active use in the UK within the next 6 months.

On another point , when lots of us some time in the future are driving around in electric or hydrogen powered cars where is the govt going to get all the tax from as half of the price of petrol/diesel is tax !

Road pricing. You'll be charged by the mile, pollution/traffic density, and time of day. Peak time journeys on main routes will cost more than rural journeys at quiet times. Roadside traffic sensors will check for the necessary transponders in cars and send out fines for cars that don't have them.

Yes, but it would need a significant investment in transponer readers across the road network.
What about older cars and classics? Probably banned from Motorways and the like, a flat annual fee based on a declared mileage.

GPS based trackers that tell "mother" where you went and when would make much more sense, but I can hear the howls from those who see an invasion of personal liberty already.

I hope that by the time this all comes to pass I will be in my electric buggy running down pedestrians on my way to Tesco's

+1

Burning hydrogen in an ICE is quite a different matter from a fuel cell though. I can imagine this would be a flippin' expensive proposition.

Though hydrogen fuel cells are a clever solution to the long range use of vehicles, I'm still struggling to see the appeal for people like me.

Once I have all the kit installed I can make electricity for nothing at home, use it to provide for a very large proportion of all my domestic electricity use and store it in my powerwall / BEV at no cost. I can also make money from the equipment by selling my excess generated power back to the grid.

The cost of the domestic solar PV array + the cost of a BEV (Kia e-Nero is around £35k, 10KW solar array + powerwall say £30k) is broadly the same as buying an HFC vehicle (Toyota Mirai £65k). My electricity provider gives me free on the road charging at its network of chargers.

Filling up an HFC is broadly the same cost at the moment as filling up an ICE car in terms of pence/mile, so that's an extra cost on top.

So from my perspective one would be spending quite a lot of money and losing quite a lot of benefit to solve the range problem, where the alternative is simply to do a bit of forward planning when making infrequent long journeys.

Given this is the same technology as used by computers I might be able to contribute this.

Modern laptops charge very quickly to 80% and then slowly for the last 20% as this is where it places stress on the battery wears them faster if you continue to blast them.
The charging electronics are monitored to boost the rate up to 80% (along with other factors such as temperature and age) and then more gradually. Some of the new systems are over-provisioned allowing a few blocks at a time to be relaxed or cycled for a period to benefit long term reliability.

As we have seen with the recent laptops and tablet/phones the efficiency of these devices is improving as much from the control and charging capabilities as the actual storage.