Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms EV article from Rowan Atkinson

No EV for me yet. I only do about 6k a year as I am retired. Just filled my Volvo this afternoon, took 3mins for a range of over 400miles.

An interesting article for sure, but electric cars are horses for courses, and I would suggest that they are not yet suitable for long journeys where re-charging is done at unknown charging stations or where time is at a premium. I thought long and hard, (as you would) before buying the cheapest new electric car on the market. It also happened to be the only electric estate car, an MG5 and have been nothing but impressed by it since then.

It was in stock for a start, so no wait involved, it does no less than 170 miles to a full charge - in winter, when they are at their worst, and in the last few days I have been seeing over 200 real life miles. For my use, which is always local driving, with my longest journey no more than 60 miles away, that is perfect. In a year and a half I have never needed a public charger, always charging on a 13amp socket in my garage over night and ready for use the next morning, at under half the cost of petrol/diesel, even now.

It is great to drive with a real turn of speed when accelerating, overtaking for example, quiet and smooth, what more could you want. I obviously keep a stable of vehicles for all needs, including an old Hilux for moving stuff, an X5 for those long journeys and obviously the Mog for spirited driving when nothing except a manual gearbox will do.

I'm afraid I have conveniently closed my mind to other associated environmental costs, such as batteries, build costs and end of life cost, etc etc. I do not know enough about that side of it and even though I should find out, there is enough going on in my life already.

Time will tell on electric cars and in 5 years time, no doubt someone will resurrect this post and comment favourably or adversely on our comments today.

Don’t worry too much, my son just bought a 10 year old Renault Zoe for £4.5k and absolutely loves it, so much so that the VW SUV is hardly used.

Not to dampen your cornflakes

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...tkinson-is-wrong-about-electric-vehicles

For those concerned about CO2 released from Fossil Fuel my pal in Canada tells me that the wild fires in Eastern and Central Canada have ignited the peat beds and there is no way to put them out. One pessimistic estimate is that they could smoulder for 1000 years, releasing more fossil CO2 each year than all the cars in Canada.
Already the air quality in some eastern towns and Cities in the N E of North America rivals that of Delhi and Mumbai....

Yes exactly this, my Shredded Wheat were perfect this morning with Greentop Milk too...

if only they'd read & responded to what RA actually wrote... eg it's not internal combustion engines that are the problem per se, it's the fuel.

Decarbonise the fuel & its supply chain, and the anti-ICE rhetoric has no foundations

Some clearly believe that physics and chemistry can be simply brushed aside.

Decarbonising fuel consumes massive amounts of energy, something people turn a blind eye to if if suits your wants and wishes.

Electric vehicles use energy 3x more efficiently than burning it, let alone the inherent transport and creation costs.

What next are you going to De-nitrogenise the air too? The cleanest way other than electric vehicles is fuel cell electric vehicles. This doesn't produce side products other than water.

People say the infrastructure isn't there for electric vehicles, but creating synthetic fuels to continue on the way we use liquid fuels now would actually place a greater demand on the energy infrastructure but hey ho let's just ignore that.

Those fuels should be kept for shipping and aviation.

Nobody is saying transition over night and no one is going to take your internal combustion engines away.

Having a hybrid EV in the household, I can agree about the infrastructure. Charging at home is easy and cheap (we have a private drive so can park offroad) but the public charging system is just not fit for purpose. We had a recent trip to London - no EV chargers at the hotel, and all the motorway chargepoints we either occupied or not working. This has been our experience for most of our attempts to charge away from home - but you can also add '3 times more expensive per mile than petrol' in to the mix for when we have managed to find a working, empty chargepoint. I appreciate that the Musk Float network is better, but who can afford one of them?

Thankfully we still have the ICE option - the first 30miles of the journey were on electricity but we relied on petrol for the rest of the trip.

We're off to Cornwall for a week at the end of July - if we only had an EV, I would hire an ICE for the holiday as I have no faith in the EV charging network and want to enjoy my holiday, not spend every day stressing about where I am going to charge. We will spend 3 minutes every couple of days filling with petrol, and this will give a comfortable 400+ mile range each time.

My understanding is that synthetic fuels can use the existing garage/fuel pump network, but not sure about the production and transport costs.

The field does seem to be developing very quickly and it's now more of an economic challenge to the science - to quote the article"There is a lot of R&D at the moment to find the lowest pressure and temperature possible, and the most efficient catalyst."
eg https://spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-fuel which seems to be a recent, plain English assessment of the manufacturing options, with the article triggered by using nuclear energy to manufacture synthetic fuels.

& yes, although the press are interested in cars, the low hanging fruit are more likely in heavy transport on land, sea & air.

Will