Graham Butcher

Well there is certainly more Taycans on the road than I thought, interestingly though it seems that there were just 3,064 recorded in 2020, so maybe some were the subject of more than 1 recall from that year? It still shows that Porsche are having a fair amount of problems, so a posh name does not always mean a high quality product is the result. It seems that my Superb being a 2016/17 model was one of the better ones then, according to the gov website when I entered my registration number it came back with a zero.

Yes, but I was of course referring to dedicated bus depots for the refuelling. And for coaches on tours those stops are/were always arranged at dedicated bus depots with other operators both nationally and internationally along its route. The coaches on international routes would have designated stops with hotels booked for the driver and passengers and once the driver had dropped his passengers off at the hotel, would then drive to the local depot, refuel, wash and clean the coach then drive back to the hotel for his rest period ready for the morning departure. Sadly, while I was on the buses, we had an international coach driver die unexpectantly while on tour, his son was working alongside me on the engineering team at the time, bad few days all round. We had to fly another driver out to continue the tour.

And what is more to the point is that they have done nothing at all in the production of that barley, or the alcohol, but they take the largest slice of profits.

@J.R. So I don't show the dash of a coach then the Bristol RE is a very good coach, even today, it rides on air suspension as did Bristol FLF Lodekkas and also Bristol VR buses and coaches. These I have worked on and also driven extensively, and I stand by my claim. I don't deny that there might well be some modern ones that do have fuel gauges, I know of some that have been converted into RVs, and gauges added because their usage has changed but as pure PSV vehicles they do not need a fuel gauge for all the reasons that I mention, and you refuse to read and learn. When used as passenger service vehicles, they travel strict routes, and total distances are all precalculated by their operators (not the drivers) and are known factors and service buses are refuelled fully each night and all routes are well within their safe range and coaches are refuelled at predetermined garages along their route and are where they also usually drop off or pickup new passengers, or have overnight stops so they are fixed locations and again well within the tanks range. Seeing as this thread is supposed to be about electric cars, I'm not going to discuss this any further, I know the buses that I used to work on did not have them and neither do the current buses in my city and they aren't Bristols either.

Precisely my point, I dare say the whole diesel debacle was the result of big oil's lobbying governments. In fact vested interests have long played some very dark roles in history and this particularly true when it comes diesel as it would appear that the inventor of the diesel Rudolf Diesel was murdered by coal magnates in 1913 in an attempt to prevent his invention becoming popular because it had the potential to kill their market. The History And Origin Of Diesel Fuel – Kendrick Oil As an example of how ICE vehicles, and diesel engines in particular, have been making massive strides in cleaning up their emissions over the years have a look at the sulphur content has been reduced from around 2000ppm in 1994 over the space of 15 years to max of 10ppm and developments are on going to further clean up emissions. This table is extracted from Diesel fuel - Wikipedia. Emission standard At latest Sulfur content Cetane number N/a 1 January 1994 max. 2000 ppm min. 49 Euro 2 1 January 1996 max. 500 ppm min. 49 Euro 3 1 January 2001 max. 350 ppm min. 51 Euro 4 1 January 2006 max. 50 ppm min. 51 Euro 5 1 January 2009 max. 10 ppm min. 51 This video explains what is currently happening with Euro 7 engines.

A clear example of how vested interests corrupt governments, such events and industry lobbies and think tanks should have no place in politics anywhere never.

Musk should stay out of politics, his game is not really pushing the emissions benefits of electric vehicles as much slamming the door on competitors, especially the Chinese by getting UK to slap duty on their cars to maintain his dominance over the UK market. Pure greed.

The situation with Porsche Taycans is not good really, out of the 11 recalls issued by the Gov website, 5 of the recalls issued this year are for battery issues, and they say that fire is a possibility in all 5. This affects no less than a possible 3,839 cars since 2020. Bearing in mind that this is UK recall, there is a good chance that might be all the Taycans in the UK, they are hardly common are they? I also notice that the recall that he is talking about is ARB6, which is NOT listed in the Gov website listing, so that might be that new that the website is yet to be updated, or it does NOT apply to his car. Anyway, the interesting takeaway I took from the letter that he read out and showed the copy of in the Porsche Taycans Forums website that it does not mention only about charging in garages but it rather specifically states to ensure that the car is not parked adjacent to or under buildings. When it comes to actually charging of the car, it states not to charge it under cover! As he points out, there is a good chance that your house insurance or indeed insurance of other buildings could be negatively affected if you do not follow the guidance that Porsche have given. That means that the car has a real chance of self combusting even when not being charged and its because of the ferocity of any subsequent fire that they are stating not park it near to buildings or under them, so in multi-storey car parks, underground car parks, under your place of residence or any building, as we have seen recently there have been some horrific fires etc in car parks under buildings. I just did a check on my car and there are zero recalls for my model, so may be there is something to be said about old established engineering where most problems have been ironed out, lessons learned and far less reliance on software and overcomplicated electronics.

Think about it logically then, why does a bus need to have a fuel gauge when they are normally used on known routes, exact length of route is a known, the number of trips it makes in a day is also known, the mpg is also a known, the size of the fuel tank is also a known, it is also a known that the bus starts its day from the depot and ends its day in the same depot, and it gets refuelled to the brim each and every night, before it gets parked up, so why make the bus overly complicated by adding in things that it does not need? The fuel consumption is all worked out in advance when planning the buses day, they all run to a timetable so there is no way that a bus can do more miles in a day, very often they do less because of heavy traffic will often lead to trips being cut short and another bus takes over the rest of the route in order to try and maintain some sort of timetable as they get fined if they are not able to keep within certain limits on timetables. Each bus has a fleet number on it and the that particular fleet number is ticked off on a fleet chart and the amount of fuel it took to brim the tank is recorded against it. The crew will always drop the bus off at the fuel pump or in the queue for the pump, which is always located at the entrance to the depot and then the garage staff (like me) takes over the bus, fills it, and drives it through the washer, next to the pump and then drive it further inside the garage to find a bay to reverse into and leave it there for the morning. And on a freezing icy morning, the buses are (were) started and left idling in the garage to warm up before the crews arrive to take them out. And yes, we used to stuff a rag soaked in paraffin and attached to a long welding rod and burning, into the air intake while cranking the engine over with the half compression levers engaged to ease the cranking. I have already fully discussed this before with you. I really don't understand why you have trouble believing it, have you any experience of buses, ever worked on buses? I would say that is a huge NO to that question, and that is why are struggling with it.

Maybe on some buses or coaches, but the ones that I'm talking about don't have any, may be that is because they know how big the tank is and on service buses at least, they are on known routes so they actually now how many miles they are doing and are always refuelled every night in the depot? But I've always been interested in buses and go some bus running days etc and none of the normal day to day buses and coaches I've seen have them. Some of the more gimmicky makes do,

Well seeing as you don't believe me, here is a photo of the dash on a Bristol RE and all the driver has is a temperature gauge and an air pressure gauge on the left and a large speedo. These coaches were also used on continental trips and the driver would be told where to refuel on his trip, usually another bus/coach operators depot and the tank would be brimmed each time. Local buses are also brimmed every night and that fuel would last the entire day, and this I also know because I used to work extra shifts after I had finished as the electrical engineer, to provide breakdown cover or helping the fuel fillers at night to fuel every bus and take them through the bus wash before parking them up as they returned to the depot. London Routemaster dashboard is spartan too. Dashboard of a Bristol FLF Lodekka, equally spartan and not a single fuel gauge among them.

I know he lost his licence, but he was talking from memory and I was just saying that is the only information that he is likely to be given, just as I was with buses. The thing with buses and coaches is that they don't even have a fuel gauge, you just have to take it on trust that the tank is full.

He more than likely does not know what type of vehicle it is that he is collecting, more likely that he has the registration number, the address of where it is and the destination and nothing else. Why would you assume otherwise, his driving licence covers him for all kinds of car and van. When I was working at the National Bus Company and I was told to go and fetch a new bus, I only had either the fleet number or registration number and its location, no idea as its type or make, assumed to be a Bristol, but always as we would also get Ford, Leyland or even Bedford demonstrators as well, manual gate crashers or semi automatics.

I know what you mean about the range claims, BUT, what we don't actually know is just what the SOC was when he picked them up from the airfield or just what problems he encountered on the delivery drive or when trying to get charged and rather than point fingers without the full facts, I'm happy to sit on the fence on that issue. His claims about the discounting and the build quality however might well be indicative, as he claimed of the true state of the market.

Any thoughts?

Who said I feel left out, I never, keep on making it up as you go. I have always said that currently an EV does not suit me because of the way that I use my car and if forced into one it would cost me a lot of time faffing about looking for and then recharging it in order to make it back home again at the end of a long day when I'm at a venue that has no charging available to me. If I was just nipping about my city then I possibly would have one as I could possibly save a lot of money then. So maybe you need more reading comprehension. Electric cars I have always said, do have a place, but they are also not for everyone and also there are a lot of risks that come with them, they are still new technology, and we have much to learn yet. I also say that we are trying to run before we are ready for them to become mainstream.

The voice of reasoning, well said.

This is just typical, these discussions have been had, and I'm not going to repeat past discussions, just so you can carry on again. Oh and for the record, I'm not having a rant either.

Likewise, I'm not doing scaremongering stuff either, just highlighting that these current batteries do come with some massive drawbacks and IMO it is wrong to push this mandate onto people before we truly fully understand the implications implied by it and how we can mitigate against it. We are being used as the guinea pigs in this, just as we have always done before in every major step forwards and those in a position of power are never putting themselves at risk.

That was just a off the cuff reply to @wyx087 when he quoted CO2. I do really understand that it is not just CO2 and that burning fossil fuel is not good, but that does not detract from the fact that, man kind is making vast strides in improvements of all kinds across many things, but what gets up lots of peoples' noses is this constant banging on about how dreadfully bad we are for still using ICE when we should be embracing electrification and how wonderfully green it is when it really is not anywhere near as green as some claim it is. Also about how much cheapness can be had from driving electric by charging at home and how some folk constantly bang that drum and how they must have their eyes wired shut because they fail to see the reality that there are far more people who cannot enjoy home charging than there is who can, and also how electric cars are not the solution for loads of people, even those who could indeed charge at home with ease. I don't go around trying to preach to anybody who has made the choice of switching over to electric that they have made the wrong move etc, I respect that it is their chosen method of transport and that at the point of usage there is virtually zero emissions. Yet many of these same people are always telling us who drive ICE vehicles that we are using filthy polluting dinosaur juice etc. As I mentioned earlier, many people who drive ICE might just love to have an electric vehicle but because of where they live, and their personal circumstances simply cannot have an electric car, but these electric car enthusiasts simply cannot respect that and will at every opportunity attempt to demonise those who are not into the whole electric ethos, lock stock and barrel.

Oh, so now, all of a sudden it's all about CO2, well in that case we do know that plants take CO2 and convert it back into Oxygen, so let's stop concreting over masses of land to create charging hubs etc, let's stop chopping down huge forests, let's stop starting bush fires (we know that some are natural, but most are started by people either through careless behaviour or on purpose). Let's stop wars from happening, etc. We can achieve so much more if we could all learn to exist in peace with each other.

Perhaps get the cylinder compression tested and also the injectors should also be tested, it is not unheard of that injectors fail. This video may help you.

So how do you explain that life expectancy is also on the increase and has been all the time since the industrial revolution then? Surely with all the increased man-made PM2.5 and all other pollutants life expectancy should be reducing not increasing???? You cannot have increased life expectancy without considerably greater living conditions overall.

I guess you could take the PM2.5 particles even further and say that anywhere where some sort of friction is occurring that there will be particles being emitted, walking, cycling, flying, trains etc, even our clothes, volcanic eruptions, fires, explosions, wars etc, all generate emissions. Makes me at least view things in a different light, these emissions have always been there, so could it really be down to the fact that mankind has only fairly recently been able to measure these particles and seeing as the vast majority of people will accept whatever those people who they see as being better than themselves, say as being the defacto truth and not challenge them in any way whatsoever?

The glow plugs are there to prewarm the cylinder before starting on cold days. If the engine is already warm from an earlier start or the ambient temperature is high enough, then they do not operate at all. You have a warning light on the instrument panel that should light up briefly and then go out if the combustion chamber is warm enough to allow the engine to start easily. If the glow plug is on, then the engine should not crank over until it goes out.