Exactly! Look how little effect Covid 19 is having on the world population - still rising by around 150,000 per day! https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
An old work colleague of mine used to commute 170mile a day in a Leaf, he’d stop at the services for a top up and coffee but what he saved in fuel he more than made up for in tyres, as said heavy car, skinny tyres. It’s been said elsewhere but I think maybe car ownership will become a thing if the past. Around here we have Beryl bikes, they are everywhere, you hop on, you ride it, you hop off and pay for your journey. Everyone mocked it and said they’d all get nicked or dumped in the sea but they are still around (too crap to want to steal one and too heavy to throw in the sea) and have now expanded to Beryl electric scooters, you know the ones that are illegal to ride on the pavement or roads unless they can find a way to make money out of it which they obviously now have. Next will be electric cars? Walk to your nearest parking/charge point, jump in drive into town, no need to pay for parking, just drop off at a charge/park point and leave it, pick up another when you want to come home. The crux will be the investment in vehicles to ensure the likelihood of an available car when and where you want to use it, get over that and if could be the future. Having said that, post covid how happy will people be to jump into a car many others have used that day/week? Surprised the people that run the Beryl bikes have been allowed to continue, guess it’s up to the user to sanitise it themselves? I think we could easily live with an electric car, we went down from a diesel and 3ltr petrol car to 1 2ltr petrol that does almost as well in mpg as my diesel did. But even in that we are only doing 3-4K a year and that was before covid. But when your using it so little the saving on fuel costs make little difference so I can’t see it being worth changing it just for that?
Trouble is - as I see it - every type of transport until you go back to the horse, has an environmental impact. The human race is quite stupid (look at who we elect to govern us) and gullible. 28k eclectic Harleys are not the answer and replacing oil consumption with mining lithium, copper and whatever else is needed for electric vehicles is not going to "save" the World... The shift from petrol to desal and then back again, should give hints that we know not of what we are doing. The lust for batteries and hitting the fook out of the national grid should give us warnings that we need more thought and less action.
The solution is too simple. Keep efficient petrol and diesel cars for now. Small cc, ultra light weight, compact. They use less fuel, use up less resources and materials in manufacture. Speed limit is what? 70...80. Max speed 90 then. If governments and people are serious then performance needs to be massively dropped. SUVs, just a loophole for producing non efficient cars. In 2018 I covered big miles in France in a little Twingo turbo thing. Quickish and very economic. Most people dont need more. It surely has not escaped peoples notice the size of some the hybrid and electric cars. Its a nonsense.
After 1000 miles and 6 months I have finally had to put £46 worth of fuel in my Kia Niro PHEV. As my trips are mainly local it runs mostly on electric. The engine has to run on start up as that is for the heating. Now the warm weather is upon us this should lessen. Overall I am pleased with it.
In all these equations about energy consumption does anyone consider how much the carbon cost is to take a perfectly good car off the road then replace it with another car with a revised engine. There's certainly an argument for type of use and the mileage to be had, but for a car that's used now and then, I'm sure destroying a perfectly decent vehicle and replacing it with another round of bullshit figures has any benefit. Manufacturers want to move numbers and will jump on the latest trends to do so, not sure I beleive the hype.
In about 30 years time, when much of the World has been raped of Lithium and nobody wants to deal with the pile of old batteries, some bright spark will suggest going back to petrol as it is really no that bad. There is new fuel cell technology that uses hydrogen with water is the waste product. A few cars (James May has got one) are available now but they are very expensive and the infrastructure to make hydrogen without greenhouse gases is not their yet. Rather than wait until the technology is sussed, we rush straight in to screw the national grid with a poor, hardly ground-breaking technology. Makes me feel no guilt about using petrol.
I cant see there being the infrastructure in place to support e cars by 2030. Terraced houses, apartment blocks and houses with no off street parking. Just how do the government propose to provide charging points to service their needs. Not forgetting the local caravan club, will have a field day recycling power cables at the local scrapyard.
That is stopping my sister from going electric. She wants to and can afford it but she lives in a flat in Hove. She has a pass for on-street parking but you take any space that is available as there is quite a lot of competition. On street charging is just a dream, so she sticks to her petrol BMW. Where she is in Hove, an electric car is just not practical.
it won’t go in the bin though. It’s illegal to put it in the bin. It will be recycled my last car was a Skoda superb I’d the engine went on that it wouldn’t be worth repairing so that would have to be recycled let’s all have different opinions but let’s fair about them. I do like my company car hybrid but my 640D remapped to 371BHP would do 70mpg at a steady 50mph, something my hybrid doesn’t. It is averaging over 60mpg and I do a lot of long runs
