Electric vehicles

[Andy Bennett]

Alan: agree completely.
Electric is pushed as the choice for in-town by everything else being 'fined' out of viability.

I never have understood why hydrogen has not gained ground and if the cleanliness of new oil based transport can continue to improve then who knows?

We sat next to a motoring writer at a recent show and he had just given back his electric test car. As was/is the case with official/real mpg calculations, the quoted distances for electric cars assume no air-con, no radio, no lights, no heaters, no passengers, no luggage, no head wind, no hills. Add in real life and the quoted distances can halve.

Also the answer to electric cars isn't solar. We have 25 solar panels, the largest domestic system our installer had fitted. In summer we can get c.30kW in a day, in winter rain 1kW. Take away domestic use, which uses more power than we can generate in a year and, given that a typical car has a 30-90KWh battery, then a domestic solar system will never do more than a minor slow rate top up portion to the electric car system.

We also have a solar panel on our caravan and there is no way that a solar panel on an A7 roof at perhaps 80W-100W will do more than a trickle top up charge to a normal car battery, let alone do anything for a battery powered vehicle.

But as I say, the bloke who sat there and said that the resistor would never get smaller than 5mm because you wouldn't be able to hold it with tweasers to solder it in place has sort of been proved wrong too, so who am I to say.
Andy