Graham Butcher

No, not a strange rant at all, merely recycling one of your own comments from months ago about posts without supporting evidence. Not at all surprising this one, seeing as I don't actually have an EV currently, nor have I ever had one in the past. It was a genuine question, if it was a what people call a "granny cable" or was it coming from a dedicated wall mounted external box with a fixed lead, some of those boxes look big enough to have some form power convertor contained within them. Either way, I can see potential electric shock hazards possibly ensuing from the use of damaged cables. Anyway, enough of the nit picking, the question/point I eluded to in the earlier post was, when watching the lady demonstrating how the Kerbo system, it looked as if the user has to get rather close and personal with it in order to place the cable within the channel. That would mean some people with limited mobility/flexibility i.e. the elderly, handicapped, or those with some disability to get down like she did in the video would be unable to use that system. Equally, what happens when there is snow on the ground or sharp hard frost preventing the system from operating correctly and also muck and bullets entering the duct and thus preventing the cable from sitting correctly within it and flush with the pavement. It also says in the video soundtrack that it is designed for use with tarmacked pavements, most are not, so it is unable to flex with the movement of the pavement if say tree roots are causing it to be uneven? These are issues that do not affect those with the luxury of putting their cars on their driveway for charging, for example, so what is the solution in such circumstances then? I do agree that it does offer some people a glimmer of hope, but is not suitable for everyone.

Not all councils approve of such schemes, and that Kerbo charge system appears to be good at first glance, look at it again and then think of all the conditions in which it could be an absolute nightmare to use, if not impossible to use and for some people it would be impossible. Also what is that cable being used, is it a 240V cable or is a cable carrying battery voltage, ie, 400V plus?

True, but the cars in question at the time were Rover 200, Ford Cortina, Vauxhall Cavalier and Vauxhall Vectra, before cruise control made it as far main stream cars.

Driving a manual in London jams is horrendous starting and stopping all the time causes the clutch plates to get very hot and distorted leading to jerky progess in deed and by the end of day working in those conditions did my left knee in. Automatics are king in traffic.

I've had a few automatics/DSGs and I have to say I prefer them, especially with 2ndhand cars as they are don't tend to get ragged about unlike manuals.

The only problem with tax avoidance is that it shifts the extra tax burden onto others. If everyone paid the correct taxes then everyone and the country benefits.

Well I thought that the video fully explained the very points that you mentioned, yes the risks are low, but the consequences are far worse than that poised by someone one carrying a jerry can full of petrol into a lift. Of course petrol cars catch fire more often than ZEVs, there are many more times of them for a kick-off and also secondly many of them are far older and therefore more prone to neglect and poor maintenance, as they get older and worth less many people will skimp on maintenance. Many fires as we have already mentioned before on both ZEVs and ICE are not in anyway related to the power source, petrol or traction battery, but other sources, such as DIR electrics, smoking related fires with etc, very few fires result from the petrol or the traction batteries, but if and when they get caught up in the fire the results are poles apart for severity and danger levels, petrol fires can be controlled pretty effectively and fire brigades have had decades of experience in dealing with petrol, the same cannot be said for Lithium-ion batteries and toxic gases of the latter can kill long before the fire would. Please don't think that the video was anti-EV, it was not and John went to great lengths to point that out and when as he said, you get a massive fine for parking a ICE car in ZEV charging bay but only a small fine for jumping traffic lights at red, says it all. There has not been proper joined thought process, the former offence just means that someone may not be able to charged, the latter, people could be killed, surely you of all people can see the relevance of the message he was conveying. The source of the battery in the video is not important, if it came from Asia or the very best factory in the world for batteries, in the event of an incident, the consequences of a failure can be deadly. I have a ton of equipment myself that runs on 18650 Lithium-ion cells, of which the most that are used in the gear that I have is 2, to that a maximum voltage of 2 x 3.7v = 7.4v, in a Tesla, there can be over 7,000 of these 18650 cells in its batteries connected in various way to give the car its voltage and also it capacity (AH) required to drive the car, so thats at least 3,500 times more likely that a single cell could malfunction than its likely to happen in my ring door camera. To put it in another context, if you have a petrol lawn mower, then there is a chance at least that you are storing in your garage / shed at least a litre of petrol either in its fuel tank or both its tank and a storage can, but would you be happy storing over 7000 litres of petrol in the same location. You also mentioned that we have strict rules for transportation of Lithium batteries as they are classified as dangerous goods and yet planes carry thousands of litres of aviation fuel in their tanks and the military even have flying tankers for air to air refuelling in flight, that kind of shows, just how highly dangerous lithium-ion batteries can be and in a few years time, we will have car transporter ships carrying nothing but such batteries fitted in cars, and they can transport thousands of cars at the same time. Yes, we have been shipping new cars all around the world for decades by such ships, but it is only just lately that we have had so many ships sunk or destroyed by fires in the cars. When you consider that modern cars have fuses to blow in the event of an electrical fault but years ago that was not true, but the number of fires has increased, so something is going wrong.

This has just come to light and please, I beg you, kindly do watch it to the end, it is not as I can hear many of you already saying clickbait and just EV bashing from an anti EV person, which is not the case as those who do watch it will discover.

The reason the beautiful Jaaaag was getting silly at several hundred pounds a year for VED has everything to do with the high levels of CO2 and other toxins emitted at the tailpipe. Something I repeatedly say that we don't actually need to have that much power on tap as the speed limits and roads conditions mean that we cannot safely use that power anyway, so why have it in everyday street legal cars? It is a recipe for all kinds of bad things. Really, you know for sure that EV will be the choice for those that want transport? You mean like bikes, horses, steam, petrol, electric (yes electric has been tried before), diesel and then electric again. Only the bike has been present throughout the whole time, horses and steam are now confined to the history books and enthusiasts popping to dedicated shows. Old style electrics died out with the milk floats, leaving petrol and diesel and now the re-emergent electric vehicles. Governments around the world once heralded diesel as the wonder fuel and actively encouraged its adoption until further research discovered that it is potentially more dirty than petrol and they dropped the active support for it like a hot potato. Hence all the law firms now seeking claims for diesel owners who were mis-sold a diesel and now paying for the government's advice to go diesel. Truth is that petrol and diesel engines are far cleaner today then they were just 20 years ago and still have more to give up in that area, I feel. In truth, there is nothing like the fulness of time to discover which will prevail, in the meantime I think it is far more sensible to continue with all three means of power and continue to develop them and conduct more research into them and their side effects so that we don't end down yet another blind alley and have sealed our own fates. Not quite as clear-cut as you might think, many reps and other company car users are not actually choosing an EV due to salary sacrifice schemes as a preference or super low BIK, instead many are being driven down that path because of their company policies and tax concessions provided to businesses to go down that route.

So in essence, it is really and truly a lottery at times whether you can get a charge or not, depending on the number of chargers at the location, the chances of them being out of service and the number of people deciding that they also need to charge at the same time. So if the uptake of electric cars were to suddenly begin to increase, and the rate was faster than the provision of new / repaired chargers and charging locations, then it could seriously impact severely on your times of reaching your destination.

I wonder just much time you have had to spend in chasing up on your accounts and duff chargers etc in total since you went electric?

What are ZapMap playing at, giving out duff information, apparently, according to Dave.

King Charles is going green... King Charles' Bentleys will undergo a green makeover | Regit

The report states it is estimated on every measurement regardless of where that is, even within London itself and that is not an actual scientifically proven statement of fact, which means it carries zero credibility.

I have driven a few Octavia's in the past and did even consider one getting one for a short time when I was struggling to find a suitable replacement for my old Superb as every Superb I looked at was falling short of my expectations, but even then even an equivalent L&K model could not hold a candle to the space or the all round comfort on offer from an L&K Superb. The extra throttle response you noticed was more likely down to the smaller car giving a greater sense of speed rather than actual speed. On paper a 1.5L TSI engine is actually 1.2 seconds slower 0-62mph in an Octavia compared with the same engine in a Superb. Either way, I'm pleased that you are happy with your car, and that is the final yardstick at the end of the day.

Well now who never saw that coming, take that with a huge pinch of salt, the key takeaway fact about this whole report is the extensive use of the word estimated. It is probably not worth the paper it is printed on. Every time the report makes a bold claim that the levels of pollution are lower in every aspect and is beating the performances of all other low emission zones across the country, that dreaded word estimated appears.🤥

We are in total agreement on that front now, I'm totally convinced that there are loads of fat cats getting fatter with public money as a result, whereas as you correctly said before there should have been many jobs created and investments in growing our green industries.

Sorry, but I don't think you are reading my posts correctly either, I said ""Well, I wouldn't go as far as saying net-zero a con, it might well be for all I know, but it could equally be just a bunch of misguided people making decisions for the rest of us to follow that maybe or not, based on science that later is proven to be fatally flawed later on further down the track come back to bite us all and them firmly on the arse."" To my mind, nowhere in that post did I say it was a con, read what I said again.

Well, I wouldn't go as far as saying net-zero a con, it might well be for all I know, but it could equally be just a bunch of misguided people making decisions for the rest of us to follow that maybe or not, based on science that later is proven to be fatally flawed later on further down the track come back to bite us all and them firmly on the arse.

Now, this particular truck, IMO has it right, the batteries are where the fuel tanks would be so the centre of gravity is still going to very low down and thus more stable to drive and like I have said before, this truck might well be ideal for their type of business running between fixed and regular bases where they could have charging facilities for it especially overnight, but that scenario is not what the vast amount of truckers and companies experience. So its not a one-stop shop that suits all. That being said though, imagine his shock that last year when the video was made, he said that he paid zero VED for the truck, thats not the case anymore and it will cost him hundreds this time around.

George, I never mentioned the cost to run or the need to reduce emissions, those are a automatic given, cost to run I doubt is going to change much, but emissions could be reduced with the right incentives being applied and also joined up thinking taking place, the emissions aspect I have already mentioned. The point I was making was that he was so keen to across the argument for electric that he could not be bothered to do basic research in order to find out how long we have been using diesel to power trucks. It also serves as an illustration that channels that are pro one sort of propulsion or another will always be biased towards their beliefs. That is why I tend to steer clear of channels which have nailed their colours to the mast because they cannot see truth even if it hits them between the eyes. I prefer channels that are not trying to steer you down a pathway as they, like me, have an open mind and like to look before I make the leap of faith over the fence. The other kind of channel I like is one where a person is sharing their own personal experiences, which can also go either way, but it is their true experiences that can count.

You already know the answer to that, NO I have not, and I already know that I would 100% love the way that they drive, I have made no secret about that either but the points I'm raising are not about personal experiences and preferences, it is about the very real possibility that in a few years time we will have sleepwalked in real mess of our politicians making that could be even worse than the continued fossil fuel burning. Now if electric was just a another option for the public to make, and they chose to shun petrol and diesel in favour of electric, then it would have been the consumer's own fault. Whereas, we do actually know how we can reduce and restrict the amount of bad gasses we put into the environment using the technology we already have and have been reducing that amount quite rapidly over the last few years and that trend is/would be set to continue, and I have said how politicians can speed up that process already going forwards. By having all the current technologies in use with continued development there would become a clear leader in due course that everyone could get behind and support, and that could be petrol, diesel, synthetic fuels, hydrogen, electric or something else. Think about it for a while, what if all the governments all declared a ban of petrol years ago and made diesel mandatory, just how bad a state would the world be in right now, armed with all the knowledge we have today about how harmful diesel fuel is over petrol for example? Petrol was a major killer years ago with its carbon monoxide, which saw loads of suicides from it alone, that has all gone these days thanks to catalytic convertors being fitted, and the same sort of result could have come about with the removal of PM2.5 and PM10 particles with more research, just as there was with the catalytic convertors and CO2 scrubbers could also be developed and fitted.

At 2.8 tons that battery is going to help make that truck unstable to drive as its weight is quite a bit higher than where the normal diesel engine along with the weight of the diesel in the fuel tanks would be thus making it more top-heavy before the trailer is even hooked up and loaded. It makes more sense in the big American truck that Robert Llewellyn is talking about in his Fully Charged video, but I would have expected a better standard of journalism from him when he speaks about that 16 Litre diesel and that we have been using that technology to move goods about for the last 120 years 🙄. Truth is that the very diesel powered truck was made by Mercedes-Benz in 1923 and they only started to gain real traction about 10 years after that, so there is a big difference between what he claims and the real truth so take what he says with a pinch of salt.

A bit of pot calling kettle black?

All true, but why is that people always take the trouble of calling out anything on social media as clickbait but going your comment above its not if you actually pay money for a paper or news access, its exactly the same thing, they want you and me to pay for the access to get just the same thing as you get from carefully selected social media for nought. They ALL use clickbait to draw you in but that clickbait on that American bus video was way OTT.