Drivers of electric cars should be charged 10p per mile to pay for the power

We could alleviate a lot of the problems if we can produce room temperature superconductors. Has that been covered here yet (can't be arsed to read the entire thread)?

 

This is the entire point with the "smart grid" when you get home and plug your car in, it recharges at a time specified by the electric company, and not you.

 

Indeed, but will there be a manual over-ride?

Let's say for instance that I am planning on running some errands in the evening, but I have a long commute and the battery is low once I get home from work. Will there be a manual override so that I could tell it to charge up while I eat dinner so it is ready to go in the evening, or will the electric company not let it charge until after peak times, leaving me SOL?

Only feasible solution IMO is to give a slight discount on electricity if you allow the car to wait until an off-peak time to charge it.

They can't prevent you from charging it during peak times, because you may NEED to charge it during peak times. But to discourage people from just deciding to charge during peak times when they don't need to, there should be some sort of minor discount or other financial incentive.

 

It would have to cost you an extra % in cost for the charge, otherwise everyone would always just hit the button.

 

They should charge a lot more at peak times. Maybe the price of petrol at peak times but much lower off-peak?

 

It would make more sense (to my mind) if they discounted you for using non-peak hours like Altron said rather than fee'd peak hours and simply charged more standard. After all, it's your car and you're paying for electricity service at the times when you want to use it and it's your electricity provider's job to make sure you can do that, that's what you pay them for. Using non-peak hours is a courtesy to the provider which you don't have to provide and should be 'rewarded'. Effectively it ends up costing the same amount whether you charge for peak or discount non-peak and raise prices, but the mentality of avoiding fees is stressful whereas the mentality of being discounted for being such a nice and happy customer is friendly and makes people want to charge at night because they think they're getting some cool discount (which is actually just the price they paid before the standard cost was raised).

 

Yeah, that's a great way to entice customers - inconveniencing them as much as humanly possible, and discouraging them from buying your product completely.

Isn't the entire purpose of electric cars to save money on fuel costs? I mean, obviously, the more you drive, the faster you recoup the additional expense of buying an electric car in the first place, right? So it would make sense to cater to the businesses or individuals who do a lot of driving, as they are the ones who spend the most on gas now. Taxi cabs, delivery drivers, limo services, municipal services (garbage collection, police, park rangers, etc.) - the people who would NEED to recharge an electric car during the day - let's make electric cars be just as expensive as gas cars for them. That will teach them not to try to reduce their carbon footprint.

The only way something like this can catch on is if there are tangible and immediate cost savings. Not "Oh, it will work out to be cheaper after 100,000 miles" or "Oh, it will be cheaper only if you drive less than a certain amount of miles per day, and only charge it once a day at night". Stuff like this 10p tax or other random electricity surcharges are just going to turn people away from electric cars.

I pay between 10 and 12 US cents a mile for gas in my car, and it's not a gas-saver or economy car. that's something like 6-8 UK pence. If there was some ridiculous 10 UK pence per mile gas tax, the only people who would save money by transitioning to electric cars would be those who have very inefficient gas cars, as even a normal sedan can do better than that in terms of gas mileage.

 

I agree about the need to electric cars to be cheaper as a direct savings to the customer, at the very least to help make the trend more than a trend, but have to add that we are actually quite blessed on our gas prices (and sadly that will probably make us take forever to go electric/alternative). A direct translation to 6-8 pence a mile is completely unrealistic and could quite likely go over 20 pence a mile in a vehicle with the same fuel economy. Not saying it justifies adding an arbitrary 10p fee, just that it isn't as ludicrously expensive as it would be here.

 

Hydrogen fuel cells will not be here in the UK for a long time. This has been looked at by the relevant trade bodies. Even if there was a cheap reliable source of hydrogen it would not be stored on current petrol filling stations. Petrol filling stations are in the whole very safe places in the grand scheme of things, but hydrogen is a different beast.

Many of the independent filling stations are in built up areas and rely on the shop sales , ie mars bars and coke to make their profit. So the forecourt gets little notice but is a means to get customers into the shop.

10 years ago the average independent filling station pumped about 2.5 million litres per year, now that figure is an average of 700,000 litres. The average supermarket site is now doing 15million litres per year.

The industry realises with economies of scale the independent even oil company owned sites are only going to get a smaller and smaller part of the market so there is no incentive for operators to carry out the required upgrades of a filling station to meet the requirements even if passed by planning that would cost between 500,000 to a million pounds depending on the size of site.

At the moment the independent sites are making around a penny per litre profit after costs , the cost of the credit card and polling charges, rates etc etc, and out of that the wages need to come out of the net profit so you can see the problem there.

Sure the supermarkets may put some in, but again their sites are maxed out so there would be little scope for installs there.

So even if you could get them installed , look what happened to LPG despite promises to keep the price low.

Bio fuels are a con, there is another 3 pence per litre rise coming to pay for the carbon trading licenses .

At the moment America is subsidising their crop growers to produce the bio diesel and ethanol needed for ethanol based petrol.

The UK because it has not got the capacity for ethanol production at the moment to meet the targets the industry gave government are buying this fuel and paying the suppliers a (green fuels tax ) to make up for the fact that the target of 2.5% ethanol in petrol has not been met.

At the moment the only target met is the bio diesel one for 5% as most suppliers are 7% + for bio product in derv.

The problems with ethanol in petrol are it is hydoscopic, ie it attracts water , it is a pwerful detergent so putting it into the existing tanks is causing problems as it effectively cleans the crap out of the tanks and pumps it into your car if it has not blocked the filters in the pumps.

Ethanol based petrol has a short shelf life of about a month and the bio diesel of about a year, before it goes off spec to comply with EN standards for quality and Ron ratings

The whole bio fuels thing is a con, the payback time taking account of the fertilser needed to grow the crops, the shipping of the bio fuel, the amount of energy required to produce ethanol even if all targets are met , the payback time even by government figures in their latest report is over 200 years.

As I mentioned before it is a con cooked up as a trading scheme to allow the likes of Goldman Sachs to act as the main dealer in the trade of green certificates.

IE only two of the fuel suppliers in the UK have met their targets the others will buy carbon offset certificates from the city that suddenly makes them green.

The fuel gives less miles per gallon

Even hybrid is short term, the cost of production of oil is exponential and is nearing its point of equal cost of production to cost the market will bear. Most of the oil in the ground will be needed for the many other things oil is used for like plastics, tyres, chemicals, medicine etc etc.
South America has large deposits of Lithium required for the batteries and latest estimates of the finite material gives it an 80 year life span


Electric will serve a short term purpose but nothing comes close the the energy that was gained from oil or the length of time we have had it.

Areas like Scotland have hydro schemes for the cheap green production of electric that acts like a battery when demand is low by pumping water back up to reservoirs to start the process all over again. But here is the kicker , all the utility companies have been sold off the foreign companies that are themselves near insolvent from huge borrowings to buy the companies in the first place.

In the highlands where huge amounts of electric are generated it costs the generating companies £200 more per GW than suppliers in the South of england who produce from oil fired and nuclear power plants who receive a subsidy to put the power into the grid.

Wind mills, ever wonder why you see so many of them bulit by foreign companies not turning ?
Because they are paid to not generate electric , yes you read that right, because the amount produced just now is more than required, even allowing for the stuff that is sold across the channel, its all a big con of subsidies , big business and government doing what lobbyists who pay them to do as they are told.

I'm all for a cleaner atmosphere , I recognise the benefits, but whilst there is money to be made its not going to get greener any time soon, unless there are bucket loads of cash that can be made from it

I use a van for work, working on filling stations, harbours, airports etc so do a big mileage, But my choice for the next decade will probably be the family car is going to be electric, the wife does about 10 miles per week going to her work, then its a couple of trips into town of a week for shopping which is approx 20 mile return.
I,m going to put a windmill up for charging the batteries , the only flaw I see is what happens in the winter when it is flipping cold up here

here endeth my dribble

 

there's the big problem with electric cars (besides being driven by wussies).. soon as laser fusion is reality they still need to figure a way to solve the problem of people on deadlines

over here if you drive a lot.. it's over what an electric car is going to have in one charge- noone wants to wait while the car charges back up.. hydrogen could be used instead.. I have a feeling the oil companies are going to blow up the laser in livermore, or there will be a convenient 'accident'

I've drove through there a couple times and it's just a town out in the middle of nowhere XD you watch it gets close to being a success and you'll see.. guys running oil are dirty like that

 

The biggest issue of batteries is as many have said, just lack of capacity. All other forms aren't necessarily cost effective, Hybrids are a quick fix, but even then it's not the greatest since at one point the batter needs to be replaced, and all the benefits go out the window since most diesels can out MPG them for cheaper too.

 

In the UK we have a concept called white meter heating which came about in the sixties when electricity was much cheaper. The idea was to use off peak electricity to heat great big blocks of concrete the logic being they radiated heat during the day. They were woefully poor and completely replaced by gas where possible and by more modern designs where not.

But any one who has a variable rate meter or "white meter" has this cheap off peak rate and a slightly higher peak rate. I think mine is something like 5p vs 12p so i run things like the dishwasher or tumble dryer at night, this is easily done with smart grid tech and could even give a greater granularity of pricing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter#Multiple_tariff_.28variable_rate.29_meters

 

Come to my humble country, where those SUVs are on the low end of midsize..

That added weight over the years isn't just for comfort or speed, most of it is due to safety regulations (crash testing, ratings, etc), and the fact that in the past 30 years people have noticed how awesome having enough room in your car to sleep in comfortably is.

 

Are you talking about the oil companies that, by chance, are the ones pushing for hydrogen cars?

 

It's better costing more than having rolling blackouts, as might happen in the UK in the next few years.

 

i am tempted to try and build a magnet motor powered generator Linky

 

Hmmmm - Free, Perpetual Energy? And you have plans that I can buy, you say? Hmmmm.... I smell ********, diluted with snake oil.

 

Complete and utter ********, hopefully you were being sarcastic.

 

Quick question guys - would anyone here like to buy a bridge?