One sure thing, whatever happens it will be an almighty cock up devised and admistered by idiots who have no clue about practicalities for the everyday person. Heard someone suggesting charge points on lamp posts last week, try and find one without a parking restriction of some sort and then wait for a space to become available if you don't die of old age first. If it wasn't so pathetic it would be laughable. Long live proper engines and fuel stations.
What happens if you live in a flat or a tower block? or a road with no parking?? Maybe they make the roof of car solar panels?
call me a cynic but these things are rarely not thought through. usually the exact opposite. those that are payed to do do the thinking will have been given the parameters to work with. city dwellers wont need cars. zero hour contract workers wont be able to afford em.
They'll make everyone will buy an electric car and they'll nail Hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen has to the be way forward.
What sort of fuel are they going to use to generate all the extra electricity that will be needed for the electric vehicles?
No one will be able to afford cars in 2040 anyway. robots will have taken up all the manual jobs.Trucks and cars will not need a driver to drive them and all the people that sit in offices and sell services will have nobody to sell to because nobody will have a job to buy owt. So everyone will be bored sh*tless due to the government banning all the fun things in life and just cause riots for something to do.
hmm, these new lightweight battery cars. lots more plastic in them yes? where does all the plastic come from? what they gonna do with the waist products called petrol and diesel?. carbon capture dudes. thats where the investment needs to be. maybe they could be made from the miracle product called hemp? ladies and gentlemen i give you the car to end all wars.
Personally i think electric cars and bikes will be the saviour of cars and bikes.....if i could afford one (for example) id buy a ktm freeride e supermoto....if i didnt have my supermoto (no one will buy it off me for what i want for it) i reckon the other half would let me have one).... Use that for work and tootling around where i live. Then i keep the petrol powered noisy stuff for long distance and hammering the tits out of on the weekends. Im quite sure that there are small number of people on here that use, say, for example their pikes peak ms or panigale r for commuting. If electric stuff takes over for the mundane journeys then im all for it.
It's going to be interesting in just what will be covered. If vehicles basically finish with diesel and petrol it impacts more than just cars. As mentioned many rural places who do not have gas still use heating oil. Lawnmowers and gardening Business's, builders and roadworks with petrol rollers, stompers etc, sailors, fire engines with generators and pumps that during flooding often have pumps running for many hours and with large volume pumps. Also will it effect our food prices? The bit that jumped out was many large supermarket chains have petrol/diesel stations that help subsidise food. With these gone how will that effect food prices, where will people still needing petrol and diesel get it from and until they do flash charging then there maybe no need for those stations so most would close possibly?
the concept, as I see it, is the convergence to megacities where we all live in shitty blocks of flats (e.g. government over-investment per capita in London, and stretching its commuter belt (HS2)), use pubic transport to get from home to work to leisure activity (crossrail, HS2, etc), all run by big industry. if you want/need to go beyond the boundaries of the pubic transport routes then self driving uber/google/MS vehicles will get you there on a per mile basis, therefore nobody needs to own a car/bike. the same self drive technology will be used for van/truck deliveries from hub/spoke depots at e.g. rail terminals thus negating the need for so many lorries (current research in Li Sulphur batteries is showing vey high charge densities (specific energy) of upto 500Wh/kg, in comparison to 200Wh/kg for Li-Ion and 45Wh/kg for Lead-Acid * - although still a long way of petrol at roughly 13kWh/kg (although I may be completley wrong on this as it required a conversion that I may have messed up and got the orders of magnitude way off!) but this is subject to IC engine losses) running on batteries. utopian/dystopian - take your pick. *sources = wiki & Neutrium.net, therefore trust at your own discretion. Pete
Perhaps not the expected thing from someone who love cars and bikes but I'm massively for this whole move towards electric vehicles. Whilst I can think of nothing more fun that tearing around a track with the engine screaming in my ear; in general cars are the biggest blight on our lifestyles at the moment. Noise, pollution and the space that they take up are all way out of hand and the lifestyle that many lead sitting in traffic jams going no where has no positives. Moving to electric vehicles will solve the noise and pollution in our immediate areas (pollution from power plants aside...hopefully that will develop as well?) and it will help with the number of cars on the road if it boosts the development of self driving vehicles reducing the need for people to own cars. Think of all the houses near main roads that are massively unhealthy to live in due to noise and pollution suddenly becoming actually reasonably nice places to live. Personally I'm waiting for 2050 when they have flying cars and we get to reclaim all the land that's currently used by roads Isn't a big factor the efficiency of the system though? Google quote since I'm no authority: How efficient are electric cars? EVs have several advantages over conventional vehicles: Energy efficient. EVs convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.
It's going up nearly 26% for me as a British Gas Collective October 2017 customer. See the British Gas bashing thread for the maths.
