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https://group.renault.com/en/news/blog-renault/electric-vehicles-towards-dynamic-wireless-charging/
Now that would be a very cool way to charge your EV.
That's spooky - this morning the UK government announces no more petrol or diesel cars from 2040.
It's the same as any car. It's just got a smaller tank to begin with.
I think simply changing the cars isn't enough (though it would be a big step). There needs to be a new attitude towards transport - a big push for cycling (including more cycle paths connecting villages to towns and cities) and walking, incentives to use small motorbikes (125cc bikes can do longer journeys and get 90mpg+) and reserving cars for when necessary - it's frightening how many people I know who drive 3-5 miles to get to work, through Cambridge. Cycling would be cheaper, usually quicker and reduce pollution far more than substituting for an electric car.
There are two charging points in the town where I live and they are regularly used. They are quite big though which is why I think charging points on a suburban street are a non-starter. You'd also have to cut down hundreds of trees where I live as well as dig up miles and miles of roads to lay the infrastructure. It would costs trillions (factoring in new electricity generating capacity).
The real answer would be banning car ownership. When you need to go somewhere you book a car (like a taxi) which turns up and being driverless takes you to where you want to go. There cars could be stored on industrial estates where charging points could be consolidated. Another benefit would be no cars parked on our overcrowded roads.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
While the type of car will make a big difference, as @ThePrettyDamned said we need to get people onto 2 wheels.
A very large proportion of car journeys in cities are short and could easily be cycled. The problem does come with the journeys that are 5 to 10 miles. Even though cycling is probably the quickest way to make those journeys in a place like London, it's a bit far for a lot of people to cycle.
One thing that would be a big game changer would be to change the rules on electric bikes. Currently they are limited to 15mph and then the motor cuts out. In Canada and a lot of US states they can go to 20mph. If we changed the rules to allow 20mph, it would cut the journey time significantly and I think you would see a big uptake of electric bikes.
On the car front, I don't think Li-ion batteries are the way forwards. Apart from all the charging infrastructure, the number of incidents I hear about them catching on fire (in cars or phones) makes me wary. I saw a report yesterday that Toyota are planning to have a car with solid state batteries on the market in 2022. That might help. They won't have the same risks, and they have a higher energy density so a car using them will be lighter which will also help.
That doesn't solve the fundamental problem with battery cars which is how to charge them. Where I live, we have to park on the street. If I run a cable across the pavement then it's a tripping hazard. The council has put charging points in some lamp posts but even if they put it on all the lamp posts there wouldn't be enough for all the residents.
I don't think they could put it on all the lamp posts. The amount of current required is too high. We had new LED lights put in a few years ago. They can't be more than 200W per lamp post. Even a relatively basic charging point is 7kW - delivering 32A. I'm pretty sure that the infrastructure wouldn't take multiple cars charging at the same time from all the lamp posts.
Even at 7kW the best electric cars on the market now would take around 9 hours to charge - capacity around 60kWh. If you do get better batteries, then you could be looking at ridiculous charging times. You can get 22kW from a 3 phase supply but you are still looking at 3 hours. The fastest "rapid" charging points are 50kW. You would need to get battery capacities of 100kWh to give the kind of range that is needed. That's a 2 hour charge time even with the fastest chargers currently around. It would be a day an half on a 13A socket. If nothing else, wholesale uptake of electric cars would require massive upgrades to the grid.
I still think that hydrogen fuel cells are the best option. You can use intermittent renewables like solar and wind to electrolyse sea water when there is a surplus to get the hydrogen. By doing that you are storing the intermittent renewable energy, and creating a network of hydrogen filling stations would probably also be cheaper than all the upgrades to the power network that would be needed for electric cars.
In simple terms your statement is complete bollocks. And it centres on the word 'ever'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fossil_fuel_consumption_in_the_United_Kingdom.svg
And that only starts on 1980, after the start of the decline of the coal industry in the UK
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
The issue to date has been there is a sort-of minimum size for electric cars as the batteries take up so much space. As this issue goes away (and it will, the technology is advancing rapidly) a proper electric supermini for reasonable money (they need to become as cheap as regular cars) will hit the market and hoover up sales.
The big cars everyone uses to zoom over the whole country can then become plug-in hybrids, the details of the 2040 ban are relatively sparse but I suspect a small petrol engine of, for example, up to 750cc for backup charging, will be totally fine.
I'm not seeing battery replacement cost as being a big deal these days, my last one showed no measurable degradation at all in 26K miles and commercial operators report that they continue to hold up way, way, way beyond that, eg.
As I said earlier, super capacitors built into the car might be the solution in as much as you can charge a capacitor very very quickly using a very large current low voltage supply. You could then use that quickly stored power to charge the LION batteries without the use of cables. This isn't possible at the moment (without towing a trailer full of them) but advances in super capacitor material have led to ever greater surface area and thus we now have 3000 Farad capacitors the size of a beer can
I can't afford a Tesla but if I could then charging wouldn't be an issue as I would plug it in on the drive and charge it over night. The 260 miles of range would last me a week but I would probably let it get down to 100 miles and then charge overnight again. I would probable consider plugging it in on the drive less hassle than driving to a petrol station
If you think of how we use electric nowdays, 10 watt LED bulbs instead of 100 watt ..... 90 watt TV's instead of 280 watt CRT TV's ... Halogen 1.2KW ovens instead of 3KW ones's ...although our population is growing we are using less electric to a certain degree .... although 3 teenagers in a house all with a 90 watt flat screen is as much electric as one old CRT family TV in the front room
Now I don't know how much of that is true and I also don't know the premium paid for a new car and intelligent power point. But the idea seems logical if solar/tide/wind/hydro power makes up a large measure of grid power. Maybe there is a bright future and we can all stop buying oil and making the middle east a well armed war zone one day.
Up to now Tesla have been building their battery packs out of the same 18650 cells we have all been using in out laptop batteries, drill batteries etc. The giant Giga factory however produces their own slightly larger design at an unprecedented scale .... that one huge factory when up and running will produce more batteries than every other battery manufacturing plant combined ..... the sheer size and scale of the thing is amazing. This is the 4th stage of the Musk masterplan .... build batteries cheap than ever before to power electric cars and do away with the cost of expensive battery packs
Someone buying an 8 year old car second hand won't want the threat of an expensive battery replacement on the horizon. If you do end up scrapping these things after 8 to 10 years then overall you would still be better off with a petrol that can last a lot longer. That wouldn't solve the pollution problem in our cities, but that's more caused by diesel than petrol.
A Tesla is made from Alloy so technically won't rust ... it's too early to say how long it will last as a car though.
@chillidoggy Tesla already do the slide in battery pack already charged at USA dealers. Then when you return from your trip they slide yours back in fully charged. The Tesla infrastructure is quite advanced over there with over 4000 supercharger stations by the end of 2017 ... currently around 2800. At a moment a Tesla owner can drive to NY to LA and back for fuck all as Supercharging is free. As long as you don't mind stopping for an hour every 200 miles
Also will petrol stations still be open in the numbers we have today running up to the deadline!