Everything posted by Graham Butcher
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the truth about electric cars
But how many of such cars does one dealer need? There are lots of such cars, offered by the same dealer for sale with huge discounts, and which have been discounted multiple times and still not sold? How many people are willing to purchase a car based upon a demo where all you did was sit in the car, you have zero idea what it drives like, are the pedals in the right place for you, is the steering wheel at the right position for you etc, in many cars the pedal box or the steering wheel is not in the correct place to make it really comfortable or indeed safe for you to consider it as a really viable car to splash money on.
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the truth about electric cars
Be that as it is, but the interesting point is that I have been observing the points that Barrie is making here and in previous videos, and to me it seems that he is speaking the truth, and new BEVs are not selling like hot cakes and outstripping supply as many other people are suggesting. The evidence is there on Autotrader as it lists the date of first registrations in the adverts, and these are very often 2 to 3 years before them being listed for sale, and these cars only have a handful of miles on them, and then they are having to offer heavy discounts and still they can't shift them. As you suggest, if they were being used as demonstrators, how were they used as static ones to allow potential customers to sit in them and not ever take them for a short spin around the block? If all the claims being made about them selling well, ask yourself why they were discussing a discount to you on that Megane-e that you are eyeing up? It is not the sort of thing that happens if sales are booming.
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the truth about electric cars
Ok, someone is most certainly trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes. This shows why I always say that you need to ignore the headlines and the fanfare etc and dig deep into the actual figures as Barrie does here regarding statements and articles by Cinch do not back up the actual figures. SMMT are also complicit in my view as they keep reporting BEV sales are up all the time, when in reality they are not actually sold to either fleets or private buyers, but to the dealers and makers alike by preregistering them, storing and then reappearing some time later as used cars with just delivery miles on the clock!
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Is there an age when you are 'supposedly' meant to buy a newer car?
If it is still working fine, why even think about a newer car unless of course you really want one. It really is far greener to run an older car for as long as you possibly can as the only CO2 it generates is from the fuel used. I wonder just how many of the current new cars will make it to the 20 year mark, and they do create far more CO2 during the manuefacturing process, to say nothing about the increased CO2 generated during the transportation half round the world with the battery materials.
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the truth about electric cars
@Ootohere the 400kW charge rate is ideal for Scotland with the abundance of power you have, as long as they build the chargers and up rate the feeders to all the hubs......
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the truth about electric cars
Does anyone here ever feel a little odd when driving their electric cars particularly on extended drives, and not just BEV's but hybrids and PHEVs as well? If so then it seems that a new study has shown that they are emitting a far higher level of microwave energy then what is considered to a safe level apparently. This is alleged to be at its worst when pulling away and accelerating as well as when doing regen to top up the battery a report says. Microwave News | WakeUp Call for EV Industry
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the truth about electric cars
I think just about everyone and their dog knows that Li-on batteries are far superior in energy density and length of life, also that NiCad batteries are nasty for the environment to boot and very corrosive when they start to leak everywhere. I have seen many pieces of technical test equipment and also also rechargeable calculators that have had their circuit boards completely destroyed when the electrolyte leaks and creeps across the PCB's.
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the truth about electric cars
Apparently Citroen were making electric Berlingo vans back in 1998 but were using NiCad batteries, who knew? That means there has been activity on electric vehicles in the European motor industry long before many think, so why did they cease going down that road?
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Car Park Fires, Transporters / Ships, any fires, any EV,s involved or not thread, were they the cause just there and so made fighting the fire harder.
Yet another Lion Electric school bus catches fire, 3 in 10 months, and the fire is blamed on a diesel heater, but that is not even possible due to the fire starting at the front and smoke coming from the dashboard. Diesel heater is behind the back wheels. Fire not being investigated and the company trying silence the firefighter vlogger, odd behavior then unless there is something to hide.... From previous fires with these buses, we know that there are battery packs along the length of the vehicle beneath the floor and one beneath the bonnet, and in the last link there is a clear photo/video of the left side of the bus and there is zero fire damage anywhere near the left rear wheel which is the location of the diesel heater. Makes me wonder just is going on, so glad the driver and children were not harmed. School bus catches fire in Montreal, 5 children inside unharmed | CBC News Five children safely evacuated after school bus fire in Montreal 5 children and driver escape before electric school bus catches fire in Montreal | CBC.ca Electric school bus bursts into flames, driver and children are okay
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Anyone managed to install map updates on their Columbus system?
Excellent
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the truth about electric cars
Interesting one funder has direct links to TFL and many of the LEZs as well the proposed PPM.
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the truth about electric cars
I wonder who Transport and Environment actually is and or funds it, that is the real question as there will another report created somewhere by someone that will counter that one. It is so difficult to decide which is fact or fiction these days, why I like to look beneath the stone and see if there is alternative possible reason for things. Its a bit like the old joke, how do you know if a politician is lying or not, if his lips are moving, he's lying. Trust has to be earned and we have all been systematically lied to over the years by people who we elect to office to do great things for us and our country when so few of them are experts in anything and they listen to the lobby/thinktank groups who are in the employ of rich powerful people who are keen to get a particular result.
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My 2023 MINI Cooper S Level 3 Electric leased from Motability which will be with me for 3 years & now a 2021 MG5 as a dog wagon.
Car is looking great.
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the truth about electric cars
No, I got that wrong, that charger for that bus was at the bus station/garage and it seems that the bus calls there once per trip and it adds 20 miles of range. I have certainly read it somewhere that some buses (location not known) do charge at one end or other of their routes.
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the truth about electric cars
Take that with a pinch of salt, yes toxic air is not good, granted, but air in London has been improving consistently year on year for many decades now. The actual air quality in London is far far worse on the tubes, many times higher than the safe figures released by the WHO and the air quality at street levels near to tube stations entrances or the many ventilation shafts dotted all over London, again push the levels in those far higher but I don't see anything being done to resolve that issue. I have posted before about the air quality maps showing air quality in real time and the locations of the monitoring stations, most are clearly visible on Google Earth as are the station entrances and ventilation shafts. People can clearly see the various locations and real time and also historic data recorded. It certainly does not look like we are being told the entire truth, just enough to make people believe it, in I think similar vein to another controversial event that happened 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum - Wikipedia Interestingly it seemed that Scotland was whole heartily opposed to it but were forced to tow the line as can be seen in the map showing the split of the vote, as @Ootohere points out. So far there is zero evidence that any of the benefits as far as the normal person in the street is concerned have materialised.
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the truth about electric cars
@Ootohere Ok, look, I understand that electric buses exist, geez, we have them all over parts of London and we have had a few of them go into thermal runaway as well and they were pretty well reported at the time and caused massive problems with road closures etc for hours on end. In fact I think the London was one of the first places to try out alternative energy buses even, we hydrogen buses a few years ago as well, which were hailed as the future, where are they now? The point that I was actually making was that unlike the single deck intercity coaches like those that you posted, which spend most of the time actually moving at a reasonable speed and so use less energy to keep up the moment. Compare that with a double deck town service bus which has bus stops every 500metres or so, plus traffic jams and traffic lights, road junctions etc which force the bus to stop and pull away again, these use use significantly more energy per mile then buses and coaches going from town to town. Don't forget that while you in your car decide that you are not going to use the A/C or heating etc to maximise your range, you cannot expect fare paying passengers to make the same sacrifices that you do, so the want heating or cooling, they want to sit in a lit interior, they have powered doors, route signs, information screens etc all drawing power. Because of this they also need to have chargers located at the terminus at each end of their designated routes and will take around at least 10 minutes to top up the batteries ready to make the return trip where they repeat the process all over again Perhaps this video will assist in explaining this and I again make the point about the chargers will actually make changes to such bus services extremely challenging as the infrastructure needs some pretty major construction not to mention a good grid connection. Plus of course, given that in many situations the routes end up in the middle of housing estates, would you be prepared to have one of these chargers that London Transport transport are using outside or in view of your house?? Its a case of location, location, location 😉 Ps, I see that the deputy mayor is once again repeating the lie that each year 4,000 people in London are dying from poor air quality, pure fiction. Edit: My bad, the type of charger shown is located at the depot/bus station and tops the bus up when it arrives there. This video shows they can also plug in.
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the truth about electric cars
Not disagreeing with you, but all the narrative's are about Net Zero, that being CO2 and not NOX.
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the truth about electric cars
Or of course, people who can perhaps just see that maybe the Emperors new clothes are NOT as they were described to the Emperor? Remember, nothing is as dangerous as a closed mindset. If we all had closed minds, then we would be having no new inventions, discoveries etc, people would still think the Earth was flat. We would be doing and accepting everything we are told as a done deal, like the rats following the pied piper, think about it, we need people on both sides of the fence to have open minds so that progress can be made.
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the truth about electric cars
One would certainly hope so, but that also assumes that they are given the correct figures in the first instance, i.e, diesel gate?
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the truth about electric cars
The busses that I was talking about were the town buses, driving routes across towns and cities from from one estate to another which have frequent stops and traffic delays and where of course there is a need to maintain interior lighting as well heating/cooling etc. Surely electric buses follow the same rules of physics where they require far more energy to get them rolling each time they come to a stop at bus stops, traffic holdups, traffic lights etc, than it does to keep it trundling along motorways between city to city?
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the truth about electric cars
@Ootohere I remember reading somewhere about electric busses need a top up charge at each end of their routes so they have had to build in chargers at them,that is less.them ideal and makes route changes harder to do.
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the truth about electric cars
@classic there might be a clue there as I think someone mentioned something about being the first or early adopter? I guess someone has to the guinea pig in to discover the problems?
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the truth about electric cars
The above, I think is intended to illustrate that the council head of fleet, was trying to say that he would replace an electric van with a diesel van and would not even hesitate to do so. But as I have said before, time will tell if this is true or not, but seeing as it being widely reported there could well be some truth here. Sometimes it is very hard to tell as there are as always claim and counterclaim, just as their was in the lock down era.
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the truth about electric cars
Oh no, even more , the world must have gone crazy, Porsche are now allegedly stopping EV battery production and going back to ICE? Barrie Crampton has discovered that the issue with the Taycans battery was (so he says) was a busbar was not correctly torqued down and a short circuit could occur and hence the recalls and claiming that a software update would prevent the fault from happening or even prevent the battery from going into thermal runaway, no way on earth is that even possible.
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the truth about electric cars
Oh dear, Its not April the 1st is it? Is the world going crazy? Renault, Geely and Aramco are backing a ICE range extender that will fit into a frunk and will be launching it at the upcoming Munich Motor Show. I though range anxiety was not an issue, but it seems to be a real thing after all or is just a load of BS. There is simply loads of mentions and references to this all over the internet and has been on TV as well and yet nobody is even talking about it? Horse reveals drop-in range-extender conversion for EVs | Autocar Renault and Geely showcase compact range extender for EVs - electrive.com This Tiny Engine Fits In a Briefcase. But It Could Boost Your EV's Range by Hundreds of Miles Horse launches C15 range extender for EVs - PistonHeads UK Horse 1.5-cylinder range-extender engine for electric vehicles Horse Powertrain unveils compact range extender technology - Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology International Horse Powertrain reveals Horse C15 ultra compact range extender solutions | Automotive World Briefcase-sized C15 engine to turn EVs into range-extended hybrids Large Briefcase-Sized Range Extender Turns Any Fully Electric Car Into a Hybrid of Sorts - autoevolution range extender Archives - Motor Trade News