Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Time for Electric Power?

Public transport fails dramatically at the moment to meet the needs of the entire community in urban areas let alone service remote rural communities. Main commuter routes may be relatively well served but local services to get people to hospitals, supermarkets even schools are less than adequate. By way of example to get to the local General Hospital only 8 miles away (15 minutes by car) may involve up to 3 different buses taking up to two hours each way according to the time of day. I'm sure others in remote communities will experience far greater issues than those in urban areas.

I'm sure that the economics of EV production will change over time as more cost effect and efficient batteries and motors are produced, in the same way ICE vehicles costs will rise due to lower volumes being produced and smaller economies of scale start to work against it.

According to the program the typical cost of domestic electric is 15p so 29p is virtually twice that. And he did have to pay 70p, he didn't make it up.
OK, petrol varies a bit from garage to garage, but not those sort of percentages.

You say no-one said it's going to be easy, but the powers are banning new petrol cars and basically telling us to change. Instead of subsidising rich people (all the Tesla priced cars have terrific tax advantages for those in a position to claim them (not paye staff) which make up a big part of the economic argument) those powers should be subsidising the low end of the market to encourage everyman to buy/lease one, shouldn't they?
Nick

An interest article in Autocar this week suggests that the main manufacturers of small cars cannot make ICE or hybrids at a profit, the complexity of the engineering makes it impossible. The answer is to make EVs at £k more and as the cost of batteries falls, much greater profits.

The cynic in me (never far from the surface) thinks the Londencentric woke eco greens think "the people" don't need small urban cars, they should use public transport. All well and good, but as John Harris says, this mostly doesn't work. I am part of a scheme that takes people without cars to the local District Hospital, the Tesla is perfect for this as it costs me next to nothing.
In this debate no one mentions the time cost of using public transport, perhaps they think that for the old and poor time doesn't matter: such arrogance. Time is finite and as we age it should not be wasted!

As an aside, house prices in Salisbury are, according to a survey published today, the 11th most unaffordable in the country. Winchester is the most unaffordable. Both are on main lines to London, from here, is 1hr 20 min, from Winchester 55 min. So we are now in "the commuter belt" for those with high paying jobs.

End of rant!

The current EV models are absorbing much of the development and set up cost for the new technology. The tax position for EV's will change over time, without question any tax/running cost advantages will disappear over time as the Exchequer introduces new basis of charging for use on the road. Whether a pence per mile or what ever I'm sure that there will be scale banding and differential charging perhaps reflecting the power output of the motor, longevity in mileage of the batteries, physical size of the vehicle (congestion) in some way to reflect energy consumption disparities between say an EV Rolls Royce and a Nissan Micra EV type of vehicle.

Of course there is always the wider debate of tax anomalies dependant on what schedule your income is derived which is not restricted solely to EV's.

An unchecked but alarming claim posted by a German friend of mine..

Total fuel consumption of U.S. airlines is approximately 19 billion gallons annually.
Total fuel consumption for mining Ore for construction of electric car batteries is approximately 21 billion gallons annually.
The 21 billion gallons of fuel burned can only produce enough Ore to build 250,000 electric car batteries.
The lifespan of an electric battery is 10 years and is not renewable. By 2050 these batteries will fill landfills with 50 million pounds of waste that does not break down.
I wonder if people would still believe in electric power cars, vehicles or equipment if they knew how massive the carbon emissions footprint really was?

Interesting.

But batteries are re-used.

It would also be interesting to know the energy costs of producing and disposing of uranium and nuclear waste.

An interesting additional statistic for that view would be the number of gallons of petrol used by vehicles in the USA in a year.
Nick

In 2020, about 123.49 billion gallons (or about 2.94 billion barrels ) of finished motor gasoline were consumed in the United States, an average of about 337 million gallons per day (or about 8.03 million barrels per day) and about 166 million gallons of aviation gasoline. Gasoline is one of the major fuels consumed in the United States and is the main product that U.S. oil refineries produce.

Excellent work John.
So, if we knew how many cars it takes to use that 123 billion galls, could we work out whether batteries are better or not by combining it with Richard's figures?
Nick