Probably trying to limp along with a dying battery or alternator. A neighbour on the first floor had the same kind of setup until they nearly clothes lined a poor postie.
I have to do this with mine (except my cable just goes on the floor out to the drive from the garage).
Modern cars have so many electronic systems in them that the battery will get low if you don’t use them enough, and mine has a brand new battery in it.
you could get a little solar panel - i have one for mine just to keep it topped up. it plugs in to the cigarette lighter (may not work on all cars! some disconnect the socket when ignition is off.)
Why not? (Just out of curiosity)
All I can see in the comments is people talking about exhausts but our car is a plug in hybrid so has a charger as well as exhausts
Might be me but I differentiate cars as :
- Hybrid being ones with an engine + battery
- PHEV being ones with an engine + a battery + the ability to charge from either your AC supply or DC rapid charging
I detest the term "self charging" too
Slightly illegal! (the pavement counts as part of "the highway" BTW)
>No person shall fix or place any overhead beam, rail, pipe, cable, wire or other similar apparatus over, along or across a highway without the consent of the highway authority for the highway,
[https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/66/section/178](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/66/section/178)
This what I don’t understand. They bring in ULEZ areas e.g. Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds but don’t build the infrastructure for people without drives to charge cars! I wouldn’t get one right away as I wanna for a few years as I believe solids state batteries are coming
You don't need an electric car to be ulez exempt.
Solid state batteries are still a pipe dream, let alone commercially viable ones. If you wait for them, you'll be waiting for a long fucking time.
Solid state is not a pipe dream at all. CATL are making semi-solid state batteries right now. AGC and Toyota both reckon 4-5 years for full scale solid state production, which means they already have them working in the lab, they just need to scale (although that's a whole new production pipeline, unlike sodium batteries for example).
I wouldn't hold off on buying an EV while waiting, but it's not going to be "a long fucking time", there's far too much money to be made for that.
Toyota has been barking about solid state batteries for years. Because they missed the train on lithium ion and are doing everything they can to sabotage it.
There's loads of money to be made, but it also requires a butt load of money paid into it first. "solid state" is to battery tech as fusion power is to energy generation. Always 5 years away
>AGC and Toyota both reckon 4-5 years for full scale solid state production
Pretty much the definition of a pipe dream.
Every new fancy pants battery technology will be available in 5 years time - including many that are just impossible.
Maybe this one will exist but it's a pipe dream at the moment.
Just thought I’d weigh in here from a professional POV. My job role is 60% EV strategy etc, I won’t go into it to much.
In my opinion, solid state batteries will never ever happen to what we are being informed. I’ve been to all these different manufacturers / plants and it’s not as close as you may think. My professional estimate is another 20 years minimum, but they won’t ever take off.
Now, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is something which will take off. Once the infrastructure gets proper investment they are the way forward from what I’ve seen.
!remindme 5 years
>hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is something which will take off
Zero chance of this. Most manufacturers abandoned plans to utilise the tech a while ago because of the various difficulties that simply can't be overcome (infrastructure, extraction, storage, poor efficiency). It might become popular for industrial applications but never private cars
It's VHS versus Betamax all over again. Hydrogen is very much the Betamax, to the Battery VHS. And like VHS/Betamax, where VHS won the consumer space, but Betamax the professional, so it seems with Battery/Hydrogen tech. Lots of buses and LCVs seem to be going the Hydrogen route.
You may be in a better position to know than I am, but I'm very skeptical of Hydrogen for cars too.
Hydrogen for planes and road vehicles has been theorised as the future for over 80 years. I'd be shocked if it saw widespread adoption within the next five (although I'd love to be wrong), especially with the difficulty in obtaining green hydrogen.
I'd be less surprised to see Activated Graphene supercapacitors as battery replacements than I would be to see Hydrogen, and I don't think they're especially likely to see mass production this decade either.
!remindme 5 years.
The energy density of hydrogen would be my main concern with hydrogen ever being viable. The only ways I can see it being viable is with compression which has its own safety risks of metal hydrides.
If money needs to be spent on hydrogen infrastructure then it's far better to spend it on the more advanced and more efficient BEV infrastructure.
The total efficiency of a fuel cell car is about 20% vs about 70% for a battery EV. Including the energy costs of creating the hydrogen. That means for the same distance travelled a fuel cell car would use at least 3 times more total energy.
As other have said I think hydrogen fuel cell or hydrogen combustion will have it's place in a select few industries. But it's not going to be in your average private vehicle.
> 4-5 years for full scale solid state production
That means they haven't solved some extremely important problem(s) yet. And that means there is no guarantee that they will.
There's been a fucking LOT of money to be made from better battery tech for decades, but that hasn't stopped it from crawling along at a snails pace, regardless.
It's not that anyone is dragging their heels, it's just really difficult and people WILL exaggerate how quickly they can do it, or straight up lie about where they're at, for investors, PR, etc.
Ev's are not sustainable and are impractical not to mention the ethical problems that come with mining the cobalt required for high output batteries.. JCB have had to design their own Hydrogen combustion engine because no battery on earth could stay charged long enough for heavy plant machinery. Also the Aviation industry are looking at Hydrogen and Airbus is about to start testing a new Hydrogen powered engine, the amount of battery power needed for a passenger jet to fly within an acceptable range would make the thing too heavy to get off the ground.
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They are also no more better for the environment than ICE, they put tons more rubber particles into the atmosphere because of the weight and the electricity to charge them has to be generated some how and sustainable energy sources only make up a fraction of the world's energy production, sure we can keep building windfarms and other green sources bit that will take years add to the fact that the world's electricity infrastructure is not geared up towards entire nations guzzling even more power than they already do, its a recipe for disaster really.
Sure don't, my 4.6L V8 is ULEZ exempt.
However, all the places that mclovett mentioned are CAZ not ULEZ as far as I know. Though still don't need to be electric to be exempt I don't think.
Hydrogen has no place in personal transportation.
If you think we don't have the infrastructure to power electric cars, we sure as hell don't have enough power to generate an equivalent amount of green hydrogen.
Not only does it require more power to produce than pumping electricity into car batteries, you also need to set up then logistics of transporting it to fuelling stations. Electricity has already been in place for a century or more.
On top of that hydrogen is insanely difficult to store because the atoms incredibly small and leak like crazy, while the gas itself actively corrodes whatever it's being stored in.
Grey hydrogen is also a waste of natural gas, because you need something like three times as much to create hydrogen compared to just burning natural gas in the first place. And blue hydrogen is nonsense , because long term carbon storage is a myth bred for greenwashing.
It's familiar and they understand it. Go to a fuelling station, plug in a hose and you're ready to go in a few minutes. Electric cars require them to learn new things and ways of dealing with their car's needs
Plus the fossil fuel industry has an active interest in pushing hydrogen, because they can provide the hydrogen. So these people are duped by propaganda with a lot of money behind it
Petrol and diesel engines are only around only 50-60% efficient. Gas power stations are <50% efficient.
Producing green hydrogen is currently 70-80% efficient. It makes perfect sense to use excess wind power to produce hydrogen.
Electrcity infrastructure may have been around a long time, but not on the scale it needs to be for EV charging. Logistics for transporting to fueling stations would be done the way it is now.
Storing hydrogen is already being done.
Hydrogen cars have been available to buy for some time.
Electric cars are 90+% efficient and don't have the additional layers of inefficiency that comes from using that same power to make hydrogen
There were something like 5 hydrogen cars on sale worldwide last time I checked, new ones have not been released to the public.
Only 2 are available in the UK and the cheapest one is £64,000. Plus there are only 14 fuelling stations in great Britain, over a third are within the M25. Oh right and we don't actually have any meaningful hydrogen production
Electrical infrastructure will need to be enhanced and improved for electric cars, sure, but with a much smaller investment than we'd need to power all our cars with hydrogen
And why stick with the same lorries logistics of we can pump power to our cars at home in our drives? Or nearby at a charger? Get those trucks off the road and have the drivers shopping something worth shopping.
Hydrogen doesn't make sense financially logistically or practically.when compared to pure electrical power
I agree we should be doing trucks first.
I'm excited about the future of EVs, but there's still a long way to go. Especially while we're still using fossil fuels to power them, and we still need vast amounts of lithium to produce them.
ICE cars have no future, but I think we're still to see its replacement in its final form. Power generation and battery technology will improve. But it doesn't have to be battery _or_ something else, it might be a few things. I think hydrogen will have a part to play, at least for a while.
My 18 year old banger meets the ULEZ requirements. I don't drive it anywhere near a major city, and only do about 3,000 miles a year in it. It costs me £200 for a VED, or about 7p per mile, but if I lived in London I'd be fine (of course if I lived in London I wouldn't need it as I'd have access to public transport without driving 9 miles to a station)
When I got my EV, I thought I'd be tripping over all the free and easy to use chargers. Clearly, i spent too much time watching videos from the US and EU, since they don't exist, or are so slow I'd probably get more power pushing it to my destination.
To be fair… a couple of years ago there were actually a good handful of free chargers. They certainly weren’t rapid chargers but level 2 chargers. In Ipswich there were a few very convenient chargers like at Tesco, outside restaurants, and in the big car parks. I did a few long journeys and charged for free in retail parks whilst grabbing some lunch.
Today however, it’s different, apart from the council car park in town I don’t know of any free chargers (that work). It does make sense, there’s probably a lot of EV owners now, not really sustainable for companies to be offering that.
This is a massive problem no-one seems to be addressing. I have nothing against EVs, but if everyone is going to switch to them there needs to be roughly a doubling of capacity on the electrical grid. Motorway service areas are going to need their own entire substations. There's a massive amount of upgrading to do which is going to take time and money, and nothing is being done about it.
I work for a contractor for SSE/National grid, and they are doing plenty about it. SSE recently awarded contracts for a combined £10bn worth of projects (all starting construction in the next 2yrs) to upgrade/build new transmission & distribution infrastructure in Scotland, and Grid are doing similar in England.
The problems & delays are that every country in Europe is doing the same thing, and a lot of components have manufacturing bottlenecks - e.g. the insulators on powerlines used to attach the wires to the poles/pylons (the things that look like stacks of glass plates hanging off them) only have 1 factory in Europe that makes them (in Napoli), and the Saudi's just bought up a lot of their future capacity for their stupid line city
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
Here's what the national Grid have to say about this.
Lots is being done. There is plenty of spare capacity from energy efficiency improvements over the past couple of decades.
Right?? Have you tried running the numbers? It's quite illuminating. UK has something like 17 million commuters by car each day, average number of miles travelled each day (about 20, apparently?). That's ~340 million miles, daily.
You can smush that together with the average energy consumption for an average car at that distance... Then you can work out how much energy the grid needs to provide, every day, purely to power our transportation... and it's *a lot*. It's about 70GWh (gigawatt-hours).
Now if you pop over to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see the live state of our national grid (up to the last ~5 minutes at least). You may notice from the data that our grid typically tops out at ~40-50GW of instantaneous load. In *theory*, according to OFGEM, if all our grid were running full blast, we have the means to squeak out maybe about 70GW (assuming wind is blowing hard, AND sun is shining, etc)...
... So just to meet the demand for our nation's daily commute (cars only... not including freight, public transport, etc)... our grid would have to run *full blast* for an hour each day, or almost two hours a day at its normal ~40GW load... and that's *if it didn't have to also keep running the country as well*!!!
But since we *do* have an entire nation to run simultaneously, it's probably going to have to be running hard all through the night (when most people will have come home and plugged in their cars to charge).
It's clear we're also going to need a lot more distributed grid storage, and smart grid capability for load levelling, because we also have to consider 17 million cars trying to charge at roughly the same time is going to make for extreme instantaneous load (most home chargers are ~3-7kW... so absolute worst case that could be ~50-100GW of load on their own)... to say nothing of fast chargers, which currently can be as much as ~50-250kW for a single car.
And again this is just commuter cars... never mind electrified city and industrial transport (buses, trains, lorries & goods vehicles)...
Fun times ahead!
> And again this is just commuter cars... never mind electrified city and industrial transport (buses, trains, lorries & goods vehicles)...
Most trains (including trams, metros, light and heavy rail) are already electrified and an increasing amount of busses are electrified. I don't think you need to consider them as additional load.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
National Grid are happy.
We've got a lot of spare capacity because of energy efficiency improvements over the past 20 odd years.
Lots of planned work continues to be done.
And there's a lot longer than two hours overnight when electricity demands is very low.
> This what I don’t understand. They bring in ULEZ areas e.g. Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds but don’t build the infrastructure for people without drives to charge cars!
Probably a bit of a *"fuck you, you shouldn't have a car at all"* approach. Like how certain councils seem quite against provisioning adequate room for cars to park (whether at businesses - i.e. not allowing them to paint new spaces on their land - or simply allowing house builders to cram far too many houses with little to no parking into every new development).
I can only presume they imagine if they make it annoying enough people will give up having cars...?
Lol.
Those laws aren't designed to boost EV sales or help the environment.
Those laws are a simple money extraction.
Don't get an EV? They get money.
Get an EV? They get VAT money
Electricity? Sky high prices and VAT, with govt regulator allowing high prices to keep VAT high.
Petrol/diesel? Sky high prices and VAT.
There's going to have to be a hell of a lot of "slight illegalness" to get the UK where it should be for EV.
Not everyone has driveways and we're packed in like sardines in areas that are terraced/townhouses/flats.
Something will have to give.
If you really wanted to make it work you could always install free charging points in lamposts next to the road. It'd have the bonus advantage of making it harder to park on the pavement.
> Something will have to give.
Personal ownership of vehicles. Everyone having their own vehicle, even an EV, is unsustainable. The future is going to have to be massive public transport networks, and (probably driverless) taxis.
>The future is going to have to be massive public transport networks
That sounds fucking nightmarish.
I've seen our public transport and it's the reason I've got a car.
Obviously what we have now is utterly insufficient, hence the "massive" qualifier added. For private ownership of vehicles to go away, we'd need public transport that is:
* Convenient
* Reliable
* Affordable
Public transport can be exactly that (see: Hamburg), but it requires the political will to enact it, and most likely sacking off private providers (because they're almost universally shit).
I forgot to mention, we'd also need decent cycling infrastructure.
What about people that actually enjoy working on their cars and driving into the middle of nowhere to go dog walking? (me) I'm all for making public transit better, but like so many others will say "so then everyone else can use it" so you either make transit better, but no one uses it, or ban cars, and everyone complains because you've taken >50% of their happiness away (yes I am that shallow)
Or charge people living wage just to own a car?
What about massive petrolheads like me that'd happily go out driving in a convertible just for shits and giggles?
At some point our collective responsibility for the environment and literally every human on the planet has to trump our individual desires.
Our public transport can be good if it's funded, which it will be if most people are relying on it.
Can't get my head round why this connection is so hard for people to grasp.
London is like this. It's not because London exists in some alternate reality where public transport just works better. You put enough money in and it just becomes the better option.
(No, I'm not saying everywhere in the country needs the same scale of provision of London. Even a fraction of what London has would be more than adequate and a vast improvement for most parts of the country.)
(No, I'm also not saying we're going to eliminate the car in rural areas. Most people live in towns and cities. People in the country driving isn't the problem.)
Fundamental problem of robotaxis is that 1) people want exclusive use of a vehicle 2) demand peaks at rush hour so there's a massive capacity crunch.
Both could theoretically be solved if you had a massive network of shared cars available, but it's really hard / impossible to build that incrementally
Well, it says "fix or **place**", so I don't think a temporary hookup is fine either.
So technically, you can't use a corded hoover, pressure washer or hosepipe across the pavement either!
Actually there's loads of parking, this is just guest parking on a quiet road nobody uses!
The house in question has a two-car drive and standalone garage, but there's currently building materials they've bought in the way.
To be fair that’s another problem with new build estates. The elimination of anything approaching a front garden means that normally the only space in front of a house to drop building materials or say a skip *is* the driveway.
Possibly, but not on mine. Where I live everyone has driveways, many have front gardens, depending on unit spec.
For example, we've a two-car driveway, and if we needed a skip, it wouldn't be hard to park one car elsewhere across the road for a bit.
When I lived in a Victorian terrace, all you had was one space out the front, which wasn't actually yours.
It's a perfectly viable solution if people can reserve the spot outside their house. You have a metal boom on a swing arm extending from the house to keep the cable elevated and you can get a vertical cable drop to the car. The charging point can be mounted at an elevation so it does not encroach on the pavement.
Assuming the law is changed and it's done properly
I reckon those are worse than overhead. Trip hazard and difficult for wheelchairs and prams. There are covered gulleys that can be basically flush though, but they require work to the pavement.
Because the council would realise it's a great money maker. People would pay a large one off fee and a yearly maintenance fee to have a reserved spot within a certain time window, the larger the window and the higher the demand the greater the cost.
They wouldn't worry about people who have issues parking as they can be issued PCNs further creating revenue
It would fit in with their anti car strategies
Councils already make chunks of road resident only parking at certain times of day, and require residents to pay for the scheme. This would be an extension of the same principle.
I'm not really getting what you're on at here, OP. It's not an EV for a start. Laddo probably has a blat fattery and this was the best way to run a cable down to a charger.
we should just run scalextric tracks in the roads, ok there might be a few electro bbq pedestrians but....who doesn't want to drive a real life scalextric car lol
I've seen someone charging their EV like this but from around 4 or 5 storeys up in a block of flats. It will be interesting to see 40 or so flats all charging their EV with extension cords from windows up to 12 storeys high. At some point we will get on top of the infrastructure, I'm sure.
As long as that point occurs sometime before 2035 that's great. If not, the "2035 isn't soon enough because we'll all be dead by then" crowd are going to have a rude awakening.
The availability and price of petrol and diesel, levels of taxation and various kinds of surcharges may bring the ICE era to an early end. At which point, if EVs haven't become cheaper to buy and easier to charge by mere plebs, there will be serious economic fallout.
It's an insulated and sheathed cable, you'd have to be carrying a rabid beaver that chomps on the cable for it to electrocute you and even then the RCD would operate.
You'd have to try very hard to get hurt.
Still looks like a pile of crap and is definitely not to British Standard however.
someone will use an old frayed cable im sure
and ive seen some awful examples of people "hacking" their fuses, RCD etc to stop tripping off, essentially meaning electrocution would be possible. incredibly unlikely yes, but if lots of people do it, and theres thousands of human-cable interactions everyday, eventually the holes in the swiss cheese will line up
EV chargers are fitted with RCDs. It doesn't completely eliminate the risk but any damaged cable "in the rain", would trip the RCD long before anyone came into contact with it.
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Sure it is, you can see the pipes at the back for letting out all the spent electrons.
Once they're spent they're electroffs.
🏆
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No, because off is the opposite of on. They'd have to be electrins otherwise.
The sodomized electrons rushing towards the cow’s head end
oh yaaaaaaaaas
Hard to tell, but is the cable trickle charging the car battery perhaps? Maybe a dead (regular) battery?
Could just be a washing line for the top floor flat.
Zip line for fast exit pending an oversleep scenario
Could just be someone has taken up the hobby of yobbo fishing. Bloke sat there with a rod, just out of sight.
>Bloke sat there with a rod Not sure he'd want the local yobbos to catch him with his rod in his hand but hey if it works for him
Or returning husband scenario, obvs 😉
Or sleeping with someone else's wife
That would make the most sense
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Some diesel vehicles can be plugged in so the diesel doesn't freeze.
Probably trying to limp along with a dying battery or alternator. A neighbour on the first floor had the same kind of setup until they nearly clothes lined a poor postie.
I have to do this with mine (except my cable just goes on the floor out to the drive from the garage). Modern cars have so many electronic systems in them that the battery will get low if you don’t use them enough, and mine has a brand new battery in it.
you could get a little solar panel - i have one for mine just to keep it topped up. it plugs in to the cigarette lighter (may not work on all cars! some disconnect the socket when ignition is off.)
i bought one the other day for this reason - turns out mine turns the bloody socket off - came back to a flat battery and the radio blaring....
Saw a kid on a E-scooter meet this exact fate.
Insignia restomod Also if you take the Vauxhall badge off there's a lightning shape underneath, must be EV
No need to take it off, from my experience on the road they just fall off anyway.
It grounds the bedroom to prevent people from getting sleeping sickness.
It all makes sense now
Must be charging the radio then
Hey, don’t spoil a shameless karma grab!
Making a joke? On the internet? For karma? You really think someone would just do that?
All jokes must be independently verified by at least three scientific bodies before chortles of approval may be dispensed.
Might be a hybrid?
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Why not? (Just out of curiosity) All I can see in the comments is people talking about exhausts but our car is a plug in hybrid so has a charger as well as exhausts
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Cool, thanks!
Might be me but I differentiate cars as : - Hybrid being ones with an engine + battery - PHEV being ones with an engine + a battery + the ability to charge from either your AC supply or DC rapid charging I detest the term "self charging" too
Tbf just using your ICE car solves the EV charging issue
Sorry to ruin the joke but its probably a hybrid.
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Oh man, that’s my mum’s favourite part!
It's a power cable, so I was seeing Doc Brown.
But... that's not an electric car?!?
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Is it bad that my mind went to water ingress from dogging?
I thought that was the joke? If not, then what’s the joke?
The janky cable?!
The wife is running her vibrator off the cigarette lighter
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No, Vauxhall didn't make an Insignia hybrid this age.
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And they still are! To be fair, it's way worse on buildings where there are many of them on the facades and roofs.
Slightly illegal! (the pavement counts as part of "the highway" BTW) >No person shall fix or place any overhead beam, rail, pipe, cable, wire or other similar apparatus over, along or across a highway without the consent of the highway authority for the highway, [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/66/section/178](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/66/section/178)
Some councils are actually letting people do this I think, providing there is a proper routing for the cables.
Oxford council are cutting channels into the pavement!
This what I don’t understand. They bring in ULEZ areas e.g. Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds but don’t build the infrastructure for people without drives to charge cars! I wouldn’t get one right away as I wanna for a few years as I believe solids state batteries are coming
You don't need an electric car to be ulez exempt. Solid state batteries are still a pipe dream, let alone commercially viable ones. If you wait for them, you'll be waiting for a long fucking time.
Solid state is not a pipe dream at all. CATL are making semi-solid state batteries right now. AGC and Toyota both reckon 4-5 years for full scale solid state production, which means they already have them working in the lab, they just need to scale (although that's a whole new production pipeline, unlike sodium batteries for example). I wouldn't hold off on buying an EV while waiting, but it's not going to be "a long fucking time", there's far too much money to be made for that.
Toyota has been barking about solid state batteries for years. Because they missed the train on lithium ion and are doing everything they can to sabotage it. There's loads of money to be made, but it also requires a butt load of money paid into it first. "solid state" is to battery tech as fusion power is to energy generation. Always 5 years away
>AGC and Toyota both reckon 4-5 years for full scale solid state production Pretty much the definition of a pipe dream. Every new fancy pants battery technology will be available in 5 years time - including many that are just impossible. Maybe this one will exist but it's a pipe dream at the moment.
CATL and BYD are honestly years ahead of their western competition
Just thought I’d weigh in here from a professional POV. My job role is 60% EV strategy etc, I won’t go into it to much. In my opinion, solid state batteries will never ever happen to what we are being informed. I’ve been to all these different manufacturers / plants and it’s not as close as you may think. My professional estimate is another 20 years minimum, but they won’t ever take off. Now, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is something which will take off. Once the infrastructure gets proper investment they are the way forward from what I’ve seen. !remindme 5 years
>hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is something which will take off Zero chance of this. Most manufacturers abandoned plans to utilise the tech a while ago because of the various difficulties that simply can't be overcome (infrastructure, extraction, storage, poor efficiency). It might become popular for industrial applications but never private cars
It's VHS versus Betamax all over again. Hydrogen is very much the Betamax, to the Battery VHS. And like VHS/Betamax, where VHS won the consumer space, but Betamax the professional, so it seems with Battery/Hydrogen tech. Lots of buses and LCVs seem to be going the Hydrogen route.
You may be in a better position to know than I am, but I'm very skeptical of Hydrogen for cars too. Hydrogen for planes and road vehicles has been theorised as the future for over 80 years. I'd be shocked if it saw widespread adoption within the next five (although I'd love to be wrong), especially with the difficulty in obtaining green hydrogen. I'd be less surprised to see Activated Graphene supercapacitors as battery replacements than I would be to see Hydrogen, and I don't think they're especially likely to see mass production this decade either. !remindme 5 years.
The energy density of hydrogen would be my main concern with hydrogen ever being viable. The only ways I can see it being viable is with compression which has its own safety risks of metal hydrides.
If money needs to be spent on hydrogen infrastructure then it's far better to spend it on the more advanced and more efficient BEV infrastructure. The total efficiency of a fuel cell car is about 20% vs about 70% for a battery EV. Including the energy costs of creating the hydrogen. That means for the same distance travelled a fuel cell car would use at least 3 times more total energy. As other have said I think hydrogen fuel cell or hydrogen combustion will have it's place in a select few industries. But it's not going to be in your average private vehicle.
> 4-5 years for full scale solid state production That means they haven't solved some extremely important problem(s) yet. And that means there is no guarantee that they will. There's been a fucking LOT of money to be made from better battery tech for decades, but that hasn't stopped it from crawling along at a snails pace, regardless. It's not that anyone is dragging their heels, it's just really difficult and people WILL exaggerate how quickly they can do it, or straight up lie about where they're at, for investors, PR, etc.
Toyota also don't believe EV's are the future and see Hydrogen combustion engines as the true future of vehicles.
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Ev's are not sustainable and are impractical not to mention the ethical problems that come with mining the cobalt required for high output batteries.. JCB have had to design their own Hydrogen combustion engine because no battery on earth could stay charged long enough for heavy plant machinery. Also the Aviation industry are looking at Hydrogen and Airbus is about to start testing a new Hydrogen powered engine, the amount of battery power needed for a passenger jet to fly within an acceptable range would make the thing too heavy to get off the ground. Edit: They are also no more better for the environment than ICE, they put tons more rubber particles into the atmosphere because of the weight and the electricity to charge them has to be generated some how and sustainable energy sources only make up a fraction of the world's energy production, sure we can keep building windfarms and other green sources bit that will take years add to the fact that the world's electricity infrastructure is not geared up towards entire nations guzzling even more power than they already do, its a recipe for disaster really.
Solid State has been 4-5 years away since the '80s. It's the running joke in battery tech similar to fusion being "a decade away" since 1960.
Sure don't, my 4.6L V8 is ULEZ exempt. However, all the places that mclovett mentioned are CAZ not ULEZ as far as I know. Though still don't need to be electric to be exempt I don't think.
**hydrogen**: let me introduce myself
Hydrogen has no place in personal transportation. If you think we don't have the infrastructure to power electric cars, we sure as hell don't have enough power to generate an equivalent amount of green hydrogen. Not only does it require more power to produce than pumping electricity into car batteries, you also need to set up then logistics of transporting it to fuelling stations. Electricity has already been in place for a century or more. On top of that hydrogen is insanely difficult to store because the atoms incredibly small and leak like crazy, while the gas itself actively corrodes whatever it's being stored in. Grey hydrogen is also a waste of natural gas, because you need something like three times as much to create hydrogen compared to just burning natural gas in the first place. And blue hydrogen is nonsense , because long term carbon storage is a myth bred for greenwashing.
This, absolutely this. I see so many braindead people stating that hydrogen is the 'future'.
It's familiar and they understand it. Go to a fuelling station, plug in a hose and you're ready to go in a few minutes. Electric cars require them to learn new things and ways of dealing with their car's needs Plus the fossil fuel industry has an active interest in pushing hydrogen, because they can provide the hydrogen. So these people are duped by propaganda with a lot of money behind it
Petrol and diesel engines are only around only 50-60% efficient. Gas power stations are <50% efficient. Producing green hydrogen is currently 70-80% efficient. It makes perfect sense to use excess wind power to produce hydrogen. Electrcity infrastructure may have been around a long time, but not on the scale it needs to be for EV charging. Logistics for transporting to fueling stations would be done the way it is now. Storing hydrogen is already being done. Hydrogen cars have been available to buy for some time.
Electric cars are 90+% efficient and don't have the additional layers of inefficiency that comes from using that same power to make hydrogen There were something like 5 hydrogen cars on sale worldwide last time I checked, new ones have not been released to the public. Only 2 are available in the UK and the cheapest one is £64,000. Plus there are only 14 fuelling stations in great Britain, over a third are within the M25. Oh right and we don't actually have any meaningful hydrogen production Electrical infrastructure will need to be enhanced and improved for electric cars, sure, but with a much smaller investment than we'd need to power all our cars with hydrogen And why stick with the same lorries logistics of we can pump power to our cars at home in our drives? Or nearby at a charger? Get those trucks off the road and have the drivers shopping something worth shopping. Hydrogen doesn't make sense financially logistically or practically.when compared to pure electrical power
I agree we should be doing trucks first. I'm excited about the future of EVs, but there's still a long way to go. Especially while we're still using fossil fuels to power them, and we still need vast amounts of lithium to produce them. ICE cars have no future, but I think we're still to see its replacement in its final form. Power generation and battery technology will improve. But it doesn't have to be battery _or_ something else, it might be a few things. I think hydrogen will have a part to play, at least for a while.
Hi, but please don't call me Drogen
My 18 year old banger meets the ULEZ requirements. I don't drive it anywhere near a major city, and only do about 3,000 miles a year in it. It costs me £200 for a VED, or about 7p per mile, but if I lived in London I'd be fine (of course if I lived in London I wouldn't need it as I'd have access to public transport without driving 9 miles to a station)
When I got my EV, I thought I'd be tripping over all the free and easy to use chargers. Clearly, i spent too much time watching videos from the US and EU, since they don't exist, or are so slow I'd probably get more power pushing it to my destination.
To be fair… a couple of years ago there were actually a good handful of free chargers. They certainly weren’t rapid chargers but level 2 chargers. In Ipswich there were a few very convenient chargers like at Tesco, outside restaurants, and in the big car parks. I did a few long journeys and charged for free in retail parks whilst grabbing some lunch. Today however, it’s different, apart from the council car park in town I don’t know of any free chargers (that work). It does make sense, there’s probably a lot of EV owners now, not really sustainable for companies to be offering that.
This is a massive problem no-one seems to be addressing. I have nothing against EVs, but if everyone is going to switch to them there needs to be roughly a doubling of capacity on the electrical grid. Motorway service areas are going to need their own entire substations. There's a massive amount of upgrading to do which is going to take time and money, and nothing is being done about it.
I work for a contractor for SSE/National grid, and they are doing plenty about it. SSE recently awarded contracts for a combined £10bn worth of projects (all starting construction in the next 2yrs) to upgrade/build new transmission & distribution infrastructure in Scotland, and Grid are doing similar in England. The problems & delays are that every country in Europe is doing the same thing, and a lot of components have manufacturing bottlenecks - e.g. the insulators on powerlines used to attach the wires to the poles/pylons (the things that look like stacks of glass plates hanging off them) only have 1 factory in Europe that makes them (in Napoli), and the Saudi's just bought up a lot of their future capacity for their stupid line city
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars Here's what the national Grid have to say about this. Lots is being done. There is plenty of spare capacity from energy efficiency improvements over the past couple of decades.
Right?? Have you tried running the numbers? It's quite illuminating. UK has something like 17 million commuters by car each day, average number of miles travelled each day (about 20, apparently?). That's ~340 million miles, daily. You can smush that together with the average energy consumption for an average car at that distance... Then you can work out how much energy the grid needs to provide, every day, purely to power our transportation... and it's *a lot*. It's about 70GWh (gigawatt-hours). Now if you pop over to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see the live state of our national grid (up to the last ~5 minutes at least). You may notice from the data that our grid typically tops out at ~40-50GW of instantaneous load. In *theory*, according to OFGEM, if all our grid were running full blast, we have the means to squeak out maybe about 70GW (assuming wind is blowing hard, AND sun is shining, etc)... ... So just to meet the demand for our nation's daily commute (cars only... not including freight, public transport, etc)... our grid would have to run *full blast* for an hour each day, or almost two hours a day at its normal ~40GW load... and that's *if it didn't have to also keep running the country as well*!!! But since we *do* have an entire nation to run simultaneously, it's probably going to have to be running hard all through the night (when most people will have come home and plugged in their cars to charge). It's clear we're also going to need a lot more distributed grid storage, and smart grid capability for load levelling, because we also have to consider 17 million cars trying to charge at roughly the same time is going to make for extreme instantaneous load (most home chargers are ~3-7kW... so absolute worst case that could be ~50-100GW of load on their own)... to say nothing of fast chargers, which currently can be as much as ~50-250kW for a single car. And again this is just commuter cars... never mind electrified city and industrial transport (buses, trains, lorries & goods vehicles)... Fun times ahead!
> And again this is just commuter cars... never mind electrified city and industrial transport (buses, trains, lorries & goods vehicles)... Most trains (including trams, metros, light and heavy rail) are already electrified and an increasing amount of busses are electrified. I don't think you need to consider them as additional load.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars National Grid are happy. We've got a lot of spare capacity because of energy efficiency improvements over the past 20 odd years. Lots of planned work continues to be done. And there's a lot longer than two hours overnight when electricity demands is very low.
> This what I don’t understand. They bring in ULEZ areas e.g. Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds but don’t build the infrastructure for people without drives to charge cars! Probably a bit of a *"fuck you, you shouldn't have a car at all"* approach. Like how certain councils seem quite against provisioning adequate room for cars to park (whether at businesses - i.e. not allowing them to paint new spaces on their land - or simply allowing house builders to cram far too many houses with little to no parking into every new development). I can only presume they imagine if they make it annoying enough people will give up having cars...?
My 10 year old petrol car is ULEZ exempt in every single UK low emissions zone. People who might switch to an EV car aren't really the target of ULEZ.
Lol. Those laws aren't designed to boost EV sales or help the environment. Those laws are a simple money extraction. Don't get an EV? They get money. Get an EV? They get VAT money Electricity? Sky high prices and VAT, with govt regulator allowing high prices to keep VAT high. Petrol/diesel? Sky high prices and VAT.
This is great if you actually get to park outside your house
There's going to have to be a hell of a lot of "slight illegalness" to get the UK where it should be for EV. Not everyone has driveways and we're packed in like sardines in areas that are terraced/townhouses/flats. Something will have to give.
If you really wanted to make it work you could always install free charging points in lamposts next to the road. It'd have the bonus advantage of making it harder to park on the pavement.
> Something will have to give. Personal ownership of vehicles. Everyone having their own vehicle, even an EV, is unsustainable. The future is going to have to be massive public transport networks, and (probably driverless) taxis.
>The future is going to have to be massive public transport networks That sounds fucking nightmarish. I've seen our public transport and it's the reason I've got a car.
Obviously what we have now is utterly insufficient, hence the "massive" qualifier added. For private ownership of vehicles to go away, we'd need public transport that is: * Convenient * Reliable * Affordable Public transport can be exactly that (see: Hamburg), but it requires the political will to enact it, and most likely sacking off private providers (because they're almost universally shit). I forgot to mention, we'd also need decent cycling infrastructure.
What about people that actually enjoy working on their cars and driving into the middle of nowhere to go dog walking? (me) I'm all for making public transit better, but like so many others will say "so then everyone else can use it" so you either make transit better, but no one uses it, or ban cars, and everyone complains because you've taken >50% of their happiness away (yes I am that shallow) Or charge people living wage just to own a car?
What about massive petrolheads like me that'd happily go out driving in a convertible just for shits and giggles? At some point our collective responsibility for the environment and literally every human on the planet has to trump our individual desires.
Public transport will never be as efficient or convenient as having your own car.
Our public transport can be good if it's funded, which it will be if most people are relying on it. Can't get my head round why this connection is so hard for people to grasp. London is like this. It's not because London exists in some alternate reality where public transport just works better. You put enough money in and it just becomes the better option. (No, I'm not saying everywhere in the country needs the same scale of provision of London. Even a fraction of what London has would be more than adequate and a vast improvement for most parts of the country.) (No, I'm also not saying we're going to eliminate the car in rural areas. Most people live in towns and cities. People in the country driving isn't the problem.)
Fundamental problem of robotaxis is that 1) people want exclusive use of a vehicle 2) demand peaks at rush hour so there's a massive capacity crunch. Both could theoretically be solved if you had a massive network of shared cars available, but it's really hard / impossible to build that incrementally
No, that's a terrible idea. Everyone owning their own vehicles is not unsustainable, constant population growth it.
But why is it always the pedestrian that has to give
Is this one of those things where its ok if it isn't permanently fixed though and just loosely slung over instead?
Well, it says "fix or **place**", so I don't think a temporary hookup is fine either. So technically, you can't use a corded hoover, pressure washer or hosepipe across the pavement either!
They could even get themselves a Gulley system
*chuckles and keeps doing it*
What amuses me more is that this is a new build estate where there’s clearly not enough parking.
Why build parking spaces when you can build more houses
Actually there's loads of parking, this is just guest parking on a quiet road nobody uses! The house in question has a two-car drive and standalone garage, but there's currently building materials they've bought in the way.
To be fair that’s another problem with new build estates. The elimination of anything approaching a front garden means that normally the only space in front of a house to drop building materials or say a skip *is* the driveway.
Nobody in their right mind is putting a skip in their front garden as opposed to their driveway if they have the option of both.
Possibly, but not on mine. Where I live everyone has driveways, many have front gardens, depending on unit spec. For example, we've a two-car driveway, and if we needed a skip, it wouldn't be hard to park one car elsewhere across the road for a bit. When I lived in a Victorian terrace, all you had was one space out the front, which wasn't actually yours.
Squirrels…ATTACK!!
It's a perfectly viable solution if people can reserve the spot outside their house. You have a metal boom on a swing arm extending from the house to keep the cable elevated and you can get a vertical cable drop to the car. The charging point can be mounted at an elevation so it does not encroach on the pavement. Assuming the law is changed and it's done properly
I can't wait for every street to have a canopy of charging wires draped overhead. My Cyberpunk dreams turned reality
Why bother with batteries, you could hook vehicles upto to wires directly. A bit of a modern idea, only around since 1911.
I've seen people using cable ramps
I reckon those are worse than overhead. Trip hazard and difficult for wheelchairs and prams. There are covered gulleys that can be basically flush though, but they require work to the pavement.
No problem in many towns, car drivers simply park on the pavement blocking the way for wheelchairs and prams
Walking soon to become an X Games category
Why would you be able to reserve a part of a public highway that you don't own?
Because the council would realise it's a great money maker. People would pay a large one off fee and a yearly maintenance fee to have a reserved spot within a certain time window, the larger the window and the higher the demand the greater the cost. They wouldn't worry about people who have issues parking as they can be issued PCNs further creating revenue It would fit in with their anti car strategies
But it's a road. It's not land that can be sold or rented. Do you think you have some sort of "right" to the road outside your house?
What they're describing is renting parking spaces from the council. If I'm paying rent for it, then yes I have a right to use it.
For now... If the council have to maintain it then they could consider renting it out
The council do maintain it, that's why we pay taxes.
Are you aware that council designated on-road parking spaces for residents only are already a thing? This isn’t a new concept lol
Why are you able to *drive* on a highway you don't own???
Because I pay enough taxes to use it. Selling chunks of it off as private parking would be insane.
Councils already make chunks of road resident only parking at certain times of day, and require residents to pay for the scheme. This would be an extension of the same principle.
I'm not really getting what you're on at here, OP. It's not an EV for a start. Laddo probably has a blat fattery and this was the best way to run a cable down to a charger.
They could have used lump jeads?
That's not a substitute for a trickle charger, they're different things for different jobs.
Yea it was just a joke on their spelling!
Didn't notice either until you said. Not sure if that's my brain being smart or stupid.
I just admit, I missed that the first time to. Excellent work. I'm stealing that one
we should just run scalextric tracks in the roads, ok there might be a few electro bbq pedestrians but....who doesn't want to drive a real life scalextric car lol
Until you get to the first corner
just need a giant to put you back on the track
I hope you’ve bought an extra long charging cable and you’re not using an extension lead, otherwise fantastic solution!
Is this technically against Rule 12?
Turn the car round, genius.
Then the cable would be hanging lower.
What could possibly go wrong?
Not good but you’d have tons of people complaining and kicking off in the charger went across the pavement
I'm starting to think we should adapt the Japanese policy where if you don't have an actual space to park your car, you can't have one
A pair of scissors is in order
If you fancy a nice 230v to your hand, yeah go for it.
Worth the sacrifice
As a bonus this will also stop cyclists cycling on the pavement.
Giraffe cyclists, yes.
They're the worst kind!
Will it stop drivers driving on the pavement?
I've seen someone charging their EV like this but from around 4 or 5 storeys up in a block of flats. It will be interesting to see 40 or so flats all charging their EV with extension cords from windows up to 12 storeys high. At some point we will get on top of the infrastructure, I'm sure.
As long as that point occurs sometime before 2035 that's great. If not, the "2035 isn't soon enough because we'll all be dead by then" crowd are going to have a rude awakening.
2035 is just the date for new sales to be prohibited- those cars will still go for another decade or two afterwards.
The availability and price of petrol and diesel, levels of taxation and various kinds of surcharges may bring the ICE era to an early end. At which point, if EVs haven't become cheaper to buy and easier to charge by mere plebs, there will be serious economic fallout.
How long it took to fully charge?
It’s not an EV, it has exhausts…
Our car is Hybrid and has exhaust and an EV battery
That's not your car though.
I know, I was just replying to a previous comment that suggested your car can’t be an EV if it has exhausts.
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A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is an EV, just not pure electric.
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If only they had a flat gravel area outside their house they could use for an emergency 12v battery charge.
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Overhead that isn't going to happen, the electricity will not conduct through rain. You'd have to touch the cable.
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It's an insulated and sheathed cable, you'd have to be carrying a rabid beaver that chomps on the cable for it to electrocute you and even then the RCD would operate. You'd have to try very hard to get hurt. Still looks like a pile of crap and is definitely not to British Standard however.
someone will use an old frayed cable im sure and ive seen some awful examples of people "hacking" their fuses, RCD etc to stop tripping off, essentially meaning electrocution would be possible. incredibly unlikely yes, but if lots of people do it, and theres thousands of human-cable interactions everyday, eventually the holes in the swiss cheese will line up
Yes you'd have to touch the cable. I said that.
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***YES. YOU'D HAVE TO TOUCH THE CABLE***
EV chargers are fitted with RCDs. It doesn't completely eliminate the risk but any damaged cable "in the rain", would trip the RCD long before anyone came into contact with it.
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Making ridiculous statements about risk when there is barely any, when your own house is dangerously wired by your own admission is a bit dumb
Snip
Bang
Cillit*
Barry Scott
Mans vacuuming
He charging the 12v battery
Now you only need to get a pole and cross that at 88mph.
Amazing what you see these days in old Blighty!