Graham Butcher

Why do I get the feeling that your baiting Tesla owners?

It turns out that McDonalds create their own bio diesel from their used cooking oils. Do McDonald's use recycled cooking oil to fuel your own delivery vehicles? (mcdonalds.com)

But that would create smoke and soot and then we would get the re-emergence of smog and god that was deadly enough in its own right.

That is a very good point and also the gas being banned. I had already discovered that in the case of air quality in London is often at its worst in areas of high density housing estates in the Southern areas. even down to in some areas where the official air monitoring stations had been located next door to the exhaust vents from commercial kitchens in fast food outlets etc whereas areas of high volumes of slow moving traffic like the North Circular road had far better readings for air quality. I do think that transport has been singled out as a scapegoat and this will hopefully become increasingly evident when we have higher numbers of BEVs but discover that air quality has not improved.

While there is some truth in this, at the time nobody and I mean nobody knew about what was to be discovered many years later that is now coming to the fore, Which is why I think that we're heading down a dangerous slippery slope by acting with speed that we are in the pursuit of just the single solution of electric traction. One day we might just be discover major flaws and dangers that might have been spotted cured by a slower approach. Edit Lead was also added into paint and many other things and even incorporated into millions and millions of buildings as dampproof courses and sealing for porch roofs etc so it is wrong to pin the blame and point fingers solely at petrol.

Also remember that much of the really large heavy plant that JCB and others build very will often be spending much of their time miles away from any other structures or any sources of large enough power to charge their batteries overnight, such as motorway construction, other sites like HS2 etc they may also be working 24-hour shifts, so battery is not the ideal power source in such situations, we need diversity and the sooner people wake up to this the sooner can stop point scoring and move on.

Destination charging sounds like a really wonderful thing, doesn't it. Until that is that you actually stop and think about it properly and just gloss over it, I said it before, there are millions and millions of people for whom destination chargers while at work are not available. Many of those don't even have a dedicated parking place. Take most places of work, most have more staff than they have parking spaces so in those places' seniority of positions in the company will, if they are lucky, get a destination charger if space permits the installation of them. Others who work in multi-storey offices, also miss out on the facility, others may not even have space for the owners cars let alone staff cars, so there is no point in banging about destination chargers being the answer. They can form part of the answer in some cases just the same as being able to charge at home is a possible solution for those lucky enough to be able to do that, but many people simply have no access to either option.

@Rooted United we stand, divided we fall and people forget that just how much we rely on each other to keep us all going.

Strange but that does seem to be the same message that Essex County Council are putting out for the future transport plans for my city. They want more of us to walk or use cycles and those cannot do so to use public transport.

It all sounds great but then if you consider the space needed to store the equivalent amount of energy it does not look as attractive, but it is still worthy of further development, as indeed all forms of traction and energy, and then we have other alternatives available to us and a clear winner will ultimately emerge. (1510) The Unfortunate Truth About Toyota's Hydrogen V8 Engine - YouTube

@Rooted Yep, there is a load of the old "Not in my backyard" at play here, everyone wants all the advantages but none of the disadvantages, but you don't get anything for nothing.

Like all things not used, rust will attack and with regen braking, mechanical brakes receive very little wear and will need servicing just the same as you rightly point out and discs are going to be far more expensive than pads.

The point about vintage cars is the fact that they are essentially identical to their modern ICE counterparts in their operation and they can still be driven and repaired and if new parts are required they can be made by engineering shops. They still use oil and petrol, and these do need any special adaptors in order to get them topped up. How many various and unique plugs/sockets are there already in existence for the purposes of recharging traction batteries. How long will it before support for the oldest and slowest vanishes? Electric car charger types and connectors – a visual guide | RAC Drive

@lol-lol Well you certainly got a good quote there and it is also I notice for a lower excess figure, best go get it lol.

Destination chargers are not going to be available to millions of people, fact. These service stations are not there just to service long distance driving, for many people they are also their local service station, that is certainly true for those at South Mimms as they are accessible to anybody, not just those on the A1M or the M25. The only ones that you could safely say are primarily for long distance drivers are those at service areas located on Motorways with no local access to the service area. Oh yes of course, why didn't I think of that? Do you think that perhaps batteries would not available for it, least of all as 2nd hand batteries as per the Leaf battery you provided a link to from Ebay. Electric motors could be rewound at a repair shop, but batteries would be extremely hard to repair/fabricate as batteries are designed to fit each car, its not like you can walk into a shop and purchase a pack 10 AA batteries, pop them into it and be good to go is it? You could certainly take that 55 year old car to any pump at any service station and fill its tank up, think about it. You can also forget about servicing costs as for many people, it is way more than the sheer economics of ownership, its about personal connection, heritage etc. witness the historic London to Brighton run for vintage cars, many of which are 120 years old.

Agreed, but that is still only 2 models out of how many on the road? Equally it is still a long way off being the same as an ICE car which was used as the target to get to in order to enable the same throughput of cars in the same time period. There are plenty of really old cars, some even older in use as daily drivers, the cost of servicing during its life time is not the point, the car is still going strong on the original engine, you will not find a 55-year-old battery still capable of driving any EV car. And I certainly don't expect the cost of the servicing during that time to have cost half the cost of the car. At this point in time there will not be any 15 year old BEV cars around to discover if the battery will last that long or not. But last year 2023, there were a number of cars that were 120 years old taking part and one of these 1903 MMC cars was the very first car to arrive at the finishing line in Brighton last year.

Now the problem here is, what is the planned lifetime of the car, 10 years, 15 years or what. One thing is going to be pretty certain, however, and that is that they will never last as long as ICE cars can and do last and still be perfectly useable as a daily driver. How about a 55 years old Renault 10 which is still on its original engine which had 46BHP new and still has today 40BHP. There is no way on earth that a BEV is ever going to be capable of claiming the same thing.

The problem with the above plan, if it is even achievable that is, that it also the cars and the batteries need to be capable of accepting a charge at those speeds and there will many that are not anywhere nearly capable. But I do hope and pray that one day they will be able to get to the sort of level without the cars etc suffering in any way whatsoever.

Quite, but that was not the dream that they sold us was it, one of the points they make is BEV's are cheaper to run, which is only true for the fortunate ones who can charge at home or have access to destination chargers at a fair price when at work, which is not even remotely possible or true for the majority of us.

Yeah, I was being what I thought was generous by allowing 5 minutes per fill up and paying, but in reality, maybe 3 minutes is more likely. Having said that, it is not that often that you see a filling station constantly that busy, but they could be, which was the point I was making and so to be able to charge the same number of EV cars, which is going to be a need as more ICE cars are replaced with BEVs, then those chargers are a must, but then also comes another problem, the real estate required to park those cars during the charge cycle is many more times the real estate need for ICE refilling I suspect, part of the problem you notice with the lengthy queues at the payment kiosk over the payment at the pump with a credit card is maybe, partly due to people like me, who are not happy with the way that supermarkets etc are reducing people with machines. Those people have families and bills to pay just the same as you and I have, and I'd rather help keep them employed to help them in that respect. The other reason is that there are zero savings to be had for serving yourself either, other than time maybe, but is not a given on the time saving front either. For example, I went shopping earlier than normal today and the only tills open were indeed self-service ones and if you're buying multiples of something and they then come in a tray, such as yogurts and your buying say a tray full of 12, then each tub of yogurt has to be scanned on its own and placed on the receiving bench which then checks the weight is correct and if you then place the tray on the bench alarms all go off and the till goes into lock down as it sees the extra weight of the tray as unscanned items being stolen and a member of staff has to come and override the till. At a staffed checkout, the operator scans 1 yogurt and multiples that by the number and job is done, no time lost in removing, scanning and then replacing back in the tray. Call me old fashioned if you like, but having been out of work a few times, I can understand just how hard life can be in that situation so I try and avoid using all forms of self-service so that bosses cannot just cut people out of their money making schemes, god knows they pay as little as they can get away with and low or zero contract hours, this I know because one of my sons works in that market sector.

That, if you don't mind me saying so, is BS unless you're a super quick typer, the time it took to type up your reply to me, you could have gone onto the compare the market site and got about 60 plus quotes for a MG4

I think that James is about right really with the charger aspect, each year there are more of us being coerced into the electric family and there is always going to a large portion of those unable to charge at home looking for public chargers. Then there are those do not want or need a longer range car as they only need a small city type of car with a range of approx 100 miles and if and when they partake in a longer trip like Rooted is, will find themselves looking to top up their batteries, who will be competing with those drivers of long range cars looking for their next charge in order to continue their journey. It has been discussed before about filling stations with a dozen pumps can service around 144 cars in an hour so to do the same number of electric cars (not all cars can be charged at superfast speeds) so you would need to cater for approx the same of chargers as car serviced at filling station, i.e., 144 to allow for the slower cars, or those that need a higher charge level. It is not always either desirable to quick top and move to the next less busy hub etc, as there not be one on your route or you can't rely on them working etc. This James May interview is only 4 hours old, so he is talking about current conditions and he has 2 electric cars of his own, so he is living it not, like me observing it from the sidelines.

Lol, when I said get a comparable quote, I did of course mean on the MG4 like I did, so you could compare your quote v mine 😁

Personally I don't believe it, the true air quality as measured by unbiased organisations does not back up the claims, when in truth the quality is roughly the same as before. If you tell a lie often enough then people will begin to believe it and we have seen that played out before.

Why not do a comparable quote to see how cheap it is?