Motorhome evolution in a diesel-banned future (1 Viewer)

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Feb 27, 2011
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Interesting info in this video..

I was aware of quite a bit of it....

The ones I want to point out are;
  • The old car batteries being reused for boosting charger stations in remote areas. Add a few solar panels or a wind turbine to this and you have a very good system..
  • The 100% electric ferry, ok not doing a long distance trip but it does indicate that some ferry routes from the UK to Europe could be electrified.
  • The Zinc Air batteries, I have been following this for a few years now... This breakthrough is significant but doesn't put Zinc air on the doorstep just yet. I reckon 5-10 years for it to be fully commercialised. However when it is, overnight batteries will become 5x more energy dense and much cheaper to manufacture. 1,000 Mile electric car anyone?
  • China's amazing solar growth. I knew they were pushing on with the de-carbonising of their energy supplies but they have already beaten their 2020 target which I thought was unbelievably ambitious when they announced it.. Seriously, well done China..
 

PhilG

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The only problem with solar growth is the environmental impact of covering vast swathes of land with what are highly toxic pollutants, should they break.

Giving up huge amounts of arable land to produce electricity , instead of crops will do the same as biofuel, push up the cost of food production, by reducing the amount of land available to grow it.

As for using old batteries... there is a reason they are old batteries, they are past their useful life and have been discarded.
 

PhilG

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With an electric car there is no spares down the line (except for batteries). Because electric is cheaper per mile travelled you have to do a reverse calculation on Total Cost of Ownership... (TCO). An electric car currently costs a little more than an ICE car but over the life of the car you get that money back in cheaper fuel.

So it has no requirement at all, for brakes, or any of the other ancilliaries that every car has , that isn't the engine.

The idea that an electric car is zero maintenance , or repair is about as daft as it gets.




QUOTE]

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Giving up huge amounts of arable land to produce electricity ,

The land doesn't need to be "given up"

Where a solar farm is built on agricultural land the land usually can be, and is, still used for livestock grazing.
 

PhilG

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The land doesn't need to be "given up"

Where a solar farm is built on agricultural land the land usually can be, and is, still used for livestock grazing.

In Germany there are huge areas of solar panels, they have gone big, and I have yet to see any with livestock around them, talking to a friend in the business, he said that they could tolerate sheep grazing around them, with additional fences. etc, but the notion of having fields open underneath with stuff roaming round was a bit of a stretch. He also said that obviously the land becomes less productive as its designed to take maximum sunlight, so loads of shade means stuff isn't growing as fast.

Elon Musk's solar roof tiles are the way forward IMO.

My workmate just had a hell of a job selling a house with panels on the roof , for some reason, seems lenders weren't keen .
 

PhilG

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That would be no good where I live majority of street is converted houses into flats , street lighting is about every third house, so would be around 30 households per street light. Not to mention we have saving measures in place, council switch off every other one at midnight to save money.

Lin :)

Was thinking that myself, and what if you are not charging, do you have to move to another place. In a city where its hard enough to get fuel , I see this as a major stumbling block , that many households have non-designated parking , and they will be fighting over a tiny amount of spaces. I know car ownership in London is a major PIA , simply because by using it you end up with nowhere to park .

Maybe the future is a vehicle that carrries its own easily renewable fuel supply , and has a range that means it can go for a long time without needing to be topped up... I'd buy one of those.

The joke of this is that the whole thing is comparing the EV of the future , that doesn't yet exist , with the car of today, which is as clean as clean can be, and will only improve , provided the technology and money is used to do it.
 

Blue Knight

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I'm just watching the BBC News Channel and it looks as if the SNP want to implement a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2032.

Umm!
 
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The only problem with solar growth is the environmental impact of covering vast swathes of land with what are highly toxic pollutants, should they break.
They don't release anything if they break. There is a coating front and back of each cell that is bonded to the silicon cells. A broken panel will be replaced long before any degradation and leechates are released.

As for using old batteries... there is a reason they are old batteries, they are past their useful life and have been discarded.
Once a battery in a car has passed it's useful life in a car, it still has loads of useful energy left. A car battery does not just die. It very slowly degrades losing mileage. Once that degradation gets to a point where it is intolerable for the owner of the car, the battery will be replaced. However the old battery is not dead, it still has a massive storage capacity so will be re-used in homes and grid scale storage. In stationary installations size and weight do not matter like they do in a car.

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So it has no requirement at all, for brakes, or any of the other ancilliaries that every car has , that isn't the engine.

The idea that an electric car is zero maintenance , or repair is about as daft as it gets.
I perhaps could have phrased this a bit better.. An electric car has close to zero maintenance in comparison to an electric car. There are no timing belts, fuel pumps, oil, spark plugs, injectors, exhaust system, engine gaskets, filters and many other things. The brakes tend to last the lifetime of the car or if needing changing only once is required due to regenerative braking.

An electric car is not zero maintenance but it is about as close to zero maintenance as it is possible to get. There is a single moving part in the engine. There is no gear box, no clutch, no exhaust system etc etc...

A battery swap after 100,000 miles and maybe a brake disk swap sometime between 70 - 100,000 miles... That is it.
 
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Was thinking that myself, and what if you are not charging, do you have to move to another place. In a city where its hard enough to get fuel , I see this as a major stumbling block , that many households have non-designated parking , and they will be fighting over a tiny amount of spaces. I know car ownership in London is a major PIA , simply because by using it you end up with nowhere to park .

Maybe the future is a vehicle that carrries its own easily renewable fuel supply , and has a range that means it can go for a long time without needing to be topped up... I'd buy one of those.

The joke of this is that the whole thing is comparing the EV of the future , that doesn't yet exist , with the car of today, which is as clean as clean can be, and will only improve , provided the technology and money is used to do it.


By the time the ban comes in, there will be batteries that can charge in 10 minutes or less. For people who can't charge at home, they will just treat the electric car like they do a current ICE powered car. They will go to the fuel station (charge point) plug in for 10 minutes then carry on. Most people will top up at the supermarket while they are shopping, top up at work or in a public car park etc etc.

The other thing that is likely to happen in the future is fully autonomous cars. It will likely work out cheaper in the future just to call an autonomous (electric) car when you need it.

Phil, you just seem to be looking for problems without considering that there are solutions to all of them and that none of this is going to happen tomorrow. We have 23 years...
 

PhilG

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By the time the ban comes in, there will be batteries that can charge in 10 minutes or less. For people who can't charge at home, they will just treat the electric car like they do a current ICE powered car. They will go to the fuel station (charge point) plug in for 10 minutes then carry on. Most people will top up at the supermarket while they are shopping, top up at work or in a public car park etc etc.

The other thing that is likely to happen in the future is fully autonomous cars. It will likely work out cheaper in the future just to call an autonomous (electric) car when you need it.

Phil, you just seem to be looking for problems without considering that there are solutions to all of them and that none of this is going to happen tomorrow. We have 23 years...

I work in R&D , its my job to look for problems, for every mock-up of some utopian society with self driving cars that is thrust upon us, there is a team of engineers trying to actually make what some boffin has sold to the people, before we are even halfway there, and i am behind them , trying to stop them making the same mistakes that stopped it working last time.

The guys who should know, tell me we are a long way off, and while autonomous stuff is commonplace in industry, the idea that we can let it out in the streets is just a disaster waiting to happen.

The term 'Greenwashing' was used in this thread, and it sums it up perfectly for me, the idea that any percieved saving of the environment , no matter how small, can be justified, irrespective of cost, the article i read , which i have still yet to find, stated the premature death numbers equated to minutes .. not even days or years , and the car companies are being slaughtered over it . Its really hard to find any quantification of the data, its just all the same news, with no proper figures behind it.
 
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If you have two leisure batteries and one has a duff cell, it generally pulls the other battery down too, can't imagine a bank of used car batteries being much cop.
 
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I work in R&D , its my job to look for problems, for every mock-up of some utopian society with self driving cars that is thrust upon us, there is a team of engineers trying to actually make what some boffin has sold to the people, before we are even halfway there, and i am behind them , trying to stop them making the same mistakes that stopped it working last time.

When looking for problems, surely you should be looking at solutions and trends... You seem to be presenting issue that have already been solved, aren't actually true or are trivial in the grand scheme of things. Self driving cars are a lot closer than you would think. Nvidia has recently (1 year ago) demonstrated a car that can drive on unmarked roads that it doesn't already have training data for. I could give loads more examples. What has changed in the last 3-5 years is that Convolutional Networks have really moved forward, this is conjunction with incredible advances in GPU's means that we have phenomenal neural networking capabilities at seriously low power now. The push for electric vehicles is happening at the same time as Neural networks are becoming pocket sized (relatively speaking). Within a couple of years if not sooner we will be seeing Class 4 autonomous vehicles that can do most of the driving for us, within 5-10 years class 5 autonomous vehicles will be common place and probably at similar prices to todays cars.

The guys who should know, tell me we are a long way off, and while autonomous stuff is commonplace in industry, the idea that we can let it out in the streets is just a disaster waiting to happen.
You are not speaking to the right guys then. There are loads of real worlds tests going on with this technology today. Even the UK is licensing manufacturers to test these vehicles today...

The term 'Greenwashing' was used in this thread, and it sums it up perfectly for me, the idea that any percieved saving of the environment , no matter how small, can be justified, irrespective of cost, the article i read , which i have still yet to find, stated the premature death numbers equated to minutes .. not even days or years , and the car companies are being slaughtered over it . Its really hard to find any quantification of the data, its just all the same news, with no proper figures behind it.

No one is saying that these technologies should be implemented no matter the financial costs. It is just that electric vehicles are actually cheaper to run so the TCO is lower. The subsidies are temporary to get the industry going. Even without the subsidies they would still happen. As for car companies being slaughtered over it... I have no idea what you are on about. BMW, Nissan, GM, Ford etc etc are all on board with the changover and if they keep up they will profitable as ever.. On the premature deaths thing. You keep stating it but don't present any evidence for it? Even if is was just minutes, it is irrelevant. The fact that Diesel only really took off over the last 20 years at most so the long term effects are not actually known. Very few manufacturers were even producing diesel cars until the end of the 90's. The rise in childhood breathing issues in built up areas however is well known and a causal link to diesel has been proven...

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If you have two leisure batteries and one has a duff cell, it generally pulls the other battery down too, can't imagine a bank of used car batteries being much cop.

You are misunderstand me. We are not talking about batteries that are damaged or dead. We are talking about batteries that still have a large percentage of their capacity intact, not a lead acid battery that has been abused to death in a motorhome... Totally different things.

Think about it like a battery in a childs toy that has a motor or a Torch. Once the motor slows down a little or the torch dims a little. Those batteries can be replaced and then used in a device that is purely electronic for instance a portable mp3 player. When it can no longer drive this, there is still enough power left in it to drive a remote control infra red emitter.

The same applies to lithium batteries which are actually a lot more resilient than lead acid batteries and can survive much worse abuse.

The other thing to note is that the battery bank in a car is not full charged nor is it fully discharged. The battery bank is treated extremely well, which rarely happens with a lead acid battery in a motorhome.

Seriously, watch the 2 previous videos I have posted.

The one relating to battery chemistry which will explain how good lithium batteries are etc.

Here is a quick article about how just one car company is trialling this..

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/0...hicle-ev-batteries-home-energy-storage-units/
 
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The guys who should know, tell me we are a long way off, and while autonomous stuff is commonplace in industry, the idea that we can let it out in the streets is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Nvidia have been doing amazing things with their new neural network hardware. Watch this self learning car... Once it has learned how to drive it can drive itself pretty much anywhere, without road markings, past coned roadworks, at night, in the rain on single tracked and unmarked roads...

This was a year ago.

 
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one question, at this time the oil companies and producers control the world and when they are no longer in command the electric producers will be in control and prices will rocket just like the oil.

I'm all for change and the environment but I think it's been jumped into without any forward planning or putting the infrastructure in place first.

roads are falling apart shouldn't we fix that first.

I can foresee some hefty backhanders taking place in the future.
 

Jim

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one question, at this time the oil companies and producers control the world and when they are no longer in command the electric producers will be in control and prices will rocket just like the oil.

I don't think the oil companies ever really controlled much. Fuel is dirt cheap, the price we pay is mostly tax. But you are right that all that fuel tax will need to be recouped from somewhere. So will the price of leccy go up, or will we just pay to use the roads? Probably plenty of both :D
 
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................ the car of today, which is as clean as clean can be, and will only improve , provided the technology and money is used to do it.
No matter how clean the car of today is, or becomes, it emits CO2 in direct proportion to the amount of hydrocarbon fuel it burns. That cannot be changed. Cars go further for a given amount of fuel burned as engine efficiency improves but for that amount burned a corresponding amount of CO2 is produced. That fact alone will be the death of the ICE.

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PhilG

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When looking for problems, surely you should be looking at solutions and trends... You seem to be presenting issue that have already been solved, aren't actually true or are trivial in the grand scheme of things. Self driving cars are a lot closer than you would think. Nvidia has recently (1 year ago) demonstrated a car that can drive on unmarked roads that it doesn't already have training data for. I could give loads more examples. What has changed in the last 3-5 years is that Convolutional Networks have really moved forward, this is conjunction with incredible advances in GPU's means that we have phenomenal neural networking capabilities at seriously low power now. The push for electric vehicles is happening at the same time as Neural networks are becoming pocket sized (relatively speaking). Within a couple of years if not sooner we will be seeing Class 4 autonomous vehicles that can do most of the driving for us, within 5-10 years class 5 autonomous vehicles will be common place and probably at similar prices to todays cars.


You are not speaking to the right guys then. There are loads of real worlds tests going on with this technology today. Even the UK is licensing manufacturers to test these vehicles today...



No one is saying that these technologies should be implemented no matter the financial costs. It is just that electric vehicles are actually cheaper to run so the TCO is lower. The subsidies are temporary to get the industry going. Even without the subsidies they would still happen. As for car companies being slaughtered over it... I have no idea what you are on about. BMW, Nissan, GM, Ford etc etc are all on board with the changover and if they keep up they will profitable as ever.. On the premature deaths thing. You keep stating it but don't present any evidence for it? Even if is was just minutes, it is irrelevant. The fact that Diesel only really took off over the last 20 years at most so the long term effects are not actually known. Very few manufacturers were even producing diesel cars until the end of the 90's. The rise in childhood breathing issues in built up areas however is well known and a causal link to diesel has been proven...


I have had diesel cars since 1985, in 1992 they accounted for 18% of the market , and had been around since the 1980's , and in 2010 they outsold petrol, because the experts of the day said they were safer.

I grew up in world where main roads went through the town centre and lorries used them with exhausts that belched smoke out directly onto the pavement, the air is nothing like that now, and hasnt been for 20 years.

In 2010 diesel was the future , now all of a sudden it isnt, i dont buy it... its a shame that these scientists that seen to be able to blame this stuff on the ICE cant find the link between Autism and excessive vaccinations.. as it stands now, at current rates, by 2025 every other child in the UK will be an Autistic Romanian.

I cant present evidence because they wont bloody tell us , premamture death of 5 years i would worry about , 5 weeks , i'd be pissed off, but it wasnt even days... i will find it.
 
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I have had diesel cars since 1985, in 1992 they accounted for 18% of the market , and had been around since the 1980's , and in 2010 they outsold petrol, because the experts of the day said they were safer.
I said very few car manufacturers were producing diesel cars. I didn't say none were. Your figures confirm what I was saying.

I grew up in world where main roads went through the town centre and lorries used them with exhausts that belched smoke out directly onto the pavement, the air is nothing like that now, and hasnt been for 20 years.
There are a lot more cars on the road than lorries especially in city centres. 85% of vehicles on the road are cars (30 Million of them). If we have gone from 10% to 60% (which is I believe the latest figures) then using todays figures we have gone from 3 Million Diesel cars to 18 Million of them. This has coincided with a huge rise in childhood breathing issues which have been causally linked. Now that 3Million figure is on the high side as there wasn't 30 Million cars on the road back in 1985...

In 2010 diesel was the future , now all of a sudden it isnt, i dont buy it... its a shame that these scientists that seen to be able to blame this stuff on the ICE cant find the link between Autism and excessive vaccinations.. as it stands now, at current rates, by 2025 every other child in the UK will be an Autistic Romanian.
Diesel was the future because of stupid environmental laws that prioritised CO2 over all other pollution and set laws to limit it... The EU has a part to play in this. The UK government in a bid to reduce it's CO2 output wrongly subsidised diesel and punished petrol... This is conjunction with manufacturers being able to influence how testing was done, and then cheating those tests led us down this path. Just because we went down this path on bad information doesn't mean we shouldn't change direction now....

On the Autism vs vaccinations thing. I am sorry if you believe that you have just lost all credibility with me. That was a single report by a rogue scientist. His findings have been conclusively trashed and proven to have zero truth to them.

I cant present evidence because they wont bloody tell us , premamture death of 5 years i would worry about , 5 weeks , i'd be pissed off, but it wasnt even days... i will find it.
As I said previously, premature death is not a valid indicator because diesels only really took off in the late 90's. Their full effect on mortality rates can't accurately be measured yet. However Child respiratory effects have been proven.
 
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http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/20...se-40000-deaths-every-year-fact-check-linked/

This article is from Greenpeace, not the original source that i saw, but they explain it really well IMO, and it shows how all the papers run with a headline figure without actually understanding what it means, same as the Paris Agreement.

I wouldn't usually trust any greenpeace article because they have a very strong bias which makes a lot of their stuff unusable..

However on this occasions I will answer it directly :p

These are years lost across the whole of the population — an average of three days per person.
Which is I believe what you are getting at...

So 3 days doesn't sound too bad. Let's keep diesel engines going because we only lose 3 days per person. You will lose 3, I will lose 3 and Bobby who lives in the middle of nowhere in the highlands loses 3 days. That is a worthwhile price to maintain the status quo and not do anything about CO2 and diesel emissions surely?

However, the key word in that sentence is "average".... if we continue reading your article.
So it is equivalent to:

  • 569,000 people who lost half a year of life
  • or 191,000 people who died from cardiovascular causes, linked to air pollution
  • or 29,000 people who lost 11 and a half years of life. It is these deaths that are said to be “attributable”.
Hurley explains: “340,000 years of life lost is equivalent to 29,000 deaths at typical ages… Just remember that many more people are affected in reality.”

So in actuality Bobby didn't lose any of his life. I lost half a year due to living near a rural major road and because you live in the centre of Leicester lost 11 and a half years of life.

Ok. I can live with that 6 months if it means you can keep your diesel car and we as a race don't progress to cleaner energy, and we can all pay the price for global warming later. Sorry that you will be losing 11 and a half years though, but it is cheaper no?

However remember that word average? For the 11 and half years of life you lost, there is a child living in absolute misery due to a breathing ailment directly attributable to high diesel fumes near his house, school and playground...

Remember that the ban on the internal combustion engine doesn't happen for another 23 years. All the vehicle manufacturers have 23 years to replicate what Tesla is doing today. Many already are doing it, The Chevy Bolt, The Nissan Leaf, The BMW i8 etc etc etc. Within 5 years they will all be producing fully electric cars. There will be a large take up of them pushing the price down. As there will be many of them on the road it is worth many different companies investing in electric charge points. Engineers will looking into ways of charging at the road side for people without offroad parking. It is all solvable within 10 years never mind 23 years.

I have just re-read what I wrote above, and can see it might be taken as being a little harsh. That wasn't my intention but I can't see how to write it without the edge and still make the point as strongly as I can.
 
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I would also like to point out that people who die from respiratory diseases tend not to die very quickly, often suffering a lingering and uncomfortable death. So it is not just the deaths, the childhood breathing illness but the long term suffering as well...

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Well lets hope they arent selling the Bolt at the $49000 per unit loss that they did with the Volt

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michel...ng-50000-on-each-chevrolet-volt/#471b8fb42cc9

It appears its only $9000 ... which they get back through subsidies

https://electrek.co/2016/11/30/gm-chevy-bolt-ev-loss-before-zev-credit/


A couple of points, the Volt is now profitable. Car manufacturing does quite often produce cars that are not initially profitable. Even Tesla had this issue.
The second point is that Chevy is not actually manufacturing an electric car really. They are buying in the vast majority of the workings and really only producing the shell.
This is not the way to make money in the car industry, vertical integration is. Lots of car manufacturers though don't have experience of Electric vehicles so they have to initially buy in this expertise or risk getting left behind. But as the sales figures grow, there is incentive for them to develop their own power trains, battery modules and control software. Tesla is rare in this, in that they went for vertical integration from the start. The only thing they don't produce themselves is the batteries but that is changing now they have their giga factory up and running. This is a joint partnership with Panasonic. Tesla gains battery manufacturing experience and technology. Panasonic get access to a large market for their batteries along with chemistries that were jointly developed with Tesla... Due to the scale of the factory Tesla are aiming for a 30% drop in the price of batteries which will make their cars more affordable and profitable. Other car manufacturers will follow this path once they see Tesla succeeding..

If one manufacturer can make it work and be profitable then all of them can. Just because one is making a loss on each car, doesn't mean they all will.

Finally, in the U.S. they have what are called compliance cars. This is mainly a California thing. If a car manufacturer wants to sell any cars in California they MUST manufacture electric or ultra low emission cars as well. Compliance cars are simply cars produced to comply with California rules. They are not made to be profitable. They quite often are produced as quickly as possible with minimal R & D work just so they can continue selling petrol based cars in the state.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-compliance-car-85648

California is part of the reason we are now looking to an electric future. I would say in equal parts Tesla proving the technology and California forcing manufacturers to make cars is why we are now getting on track with them.
 
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We're all missing an important point here. I consider myself a "petrol head". All my life I've enjoyed the freedom of personal transport on 2, 3, & 4 wheels. I like the feel and sound of a healthy engine, I enjoy their performance, and I like getting my hands dirty inside them. And yet, if I was younger and still enjoying that side of personal transport, I'd want an electric car or motorcycle now. Not in 10 or 20 years but this year or next. Performance in terms of power delivery and driveability is streets ahead of any ICE powered vehicle. Once the average motorist becomes more aware of what they can offer, and stops thinking of them as geeky green things, the tipping point that moves us from ICE to electric propulsion will arrive very rapidly indeed.
 
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We're all missing an important point here. I consider myself a "petrol head". All my life I've enjoyed the freedom of personal transport on 2, 3, & 4 wheels. I like the feel and sound of a healthy engine, I enjoy their performance, and I like getting my hands dirty inside them. And yet, if I was younger and still enjoying that side of personal transport, I'd want an electric car or motorcycle now. Not in 10 or 20 years but this year or next. Performance in terms of power delivery and driveability is streets ahead of any ICE powered vehicle. Once the average motorist becomes more aware of what they can offer, and stops thinking of them as geeky green things, the tipping point that moves us from ICE to electric propulsion will arrive very rapidly indeed.

Exactly (y)

I love the thought of an electric motorhome. Better torque, better performance, no gear changes, quieter driving experience, cheaper to run, less to go wrong, no nasty smell. What's not to like :D The one and only issue which is resolvable in time is range. Other than that every single thing about electric vehicles is better.
 

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The land doesn't need to be "given up"

Where a solar farm is built on agricultural land the land usually can be, and is, still used for livestock grazing.

Not round here it ain`t, The two fields currently in use near us are Mown, and the grass left. No feedstock. Grass like most plant-life needs the sun to generate quality. therefore it holds that Grass grown in the shade will be of a lower quality, which is probably why they dont bother using it for Feed?.

I would agree though that Substituting roof tiles instead of panels would be a move forward. But again I suspect that the cost would be a big offput, and (more) subsidy would be required. which translates to even more tax from those who will not benefit.

I still don`t see the diesel dying in my lifetime, the capacity for Electric Truck`s will be (Very) slow, after all we are still seeing large numbers of OLD tucks on our roads, some have done 1/2 a million miles before they are sold on. and still going.

Another point, The most EFFICIENT method of moving "Mr an Mrs Consumers" goods about the planet is STILL the Large container vessel, which almost exclusively use? DIESEL (in many cases almost crude oils) as fuel. Replacing that with Batteries?, capable of "steaming" for over a Month?.

Where not the battery packs which where catching fire in the New Boeing Dreamliner Li Iron?.

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