Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Electric cars - a question.

Hopefully hydrogen production can one day also be done via photosynthesis - i.e. only requiring sunlight and no electricity.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/...ha-developing-hydrogen-fuelled-449bhp-v8 looks fun!

Two people have mentioned this to me this week - could be the way forward? Apologies if it's already been mentioned.

Porsche synthetic fuel

Indeed ... I've said before that I'm surprised how little effort and investment has gone into fuels useable in current vehicles that reduce their impact.

The CO2 impact of the massive charging infrastructure (smelting all that copper, digging all that trenching etc etc) seems lost in the discussion (not to mention the environmental impact of removing the current infrastructure) ... the obvious win/win situation would be to keep using what we have, but with a fuel that reduces the impact.

What I've never seen is a comparison that looks at the holistic impact of electric cars and their new infrastructure and works out the equivalent reduction in CO2 needed for our current system to match it .... it would be ironic if, after complete auditing, we found that a relatively small percentage improvement in liquid fuel (or a modest drop in annual mileage with the difference taken up by public transport) would actually have the same real-world effect as the huge social and financial churn of completely switching technologies.

K

An excellent idea lets hope it makes it

I am a 'fan' in the same way I am a fan of Morgan, Aston, Range Rover or any number of cars I've had.

They did a test in Norway, in sub zero conditions, and a Tesla went 3 days and nights with the heating on - probably more than an ICE car would do with the engine running. In my 15,000 mile experience and 160 mile commute, having the heating on makes almost no difference to the range - actually unnoticeable in my case. I only have the heating at 20 degrees, so maybe if I had it at full blast I'd drop a few miles. I have absolutely no worries about being stuck in a snow drift for 2 days - far less than I would in a petrol car.

This story made me smile...

Around 1,100 Porsches and 189 Bentleys are known to have burnt out on a car carrier crossing the atlantic.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/...ches-fire-adrift-atlantic-crew-rcna16675

EVs are no more likely to burn than an ICE car, but when they do the Lithium Ion battery fire is self sustaining and has to be left to go out.
This will be an expensive insurance claim, and there will be a lot of unhappy customers in the USA who will now have to wait 6 months to a year for their bespoke plaything to be built!

The alternative to Hydrogen Fuel Cells may just be to use a fuel already in use
https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-resear...ew-alternative-to-power-cars-technology/

I like that... but Ethanol is still a hydrocarbon, so in a fuel cell what happens to the carbon? Released as carbon dioxide I guess.
Yes, ethanol from fermentation is "new" carbon, so we are not burning fossil fuel.
And Ethanol works quite well in an ICE, it has a very high octane value and so it great in high compression racing engines.
Brazil has produced tonnes of it and 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline is available as E85 in the UK from Sunoco, at £4.16/litre....

Plus, it's fewer emissions not less emissions!