Dump Your Deezel

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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Mandrake »

daviemck2006 wrote: 27 Jul 2017, 12:13 I wouldnt be happy with a range of just 60 miles or so, but wouldnt need 500 miles at 70 mph! A range of about 150 miles would be plenty, that would do an Aberdeen shopping trip comfortably without having to worry about getting the top up charge when I am there.
200 miles of "true" range (and ubiquitous rapid charging) is often said to be the tipping point that would get most people on-board with EV's, and I tend to agree with that.

60 miles range in my Ion is enough for my day to day activities but it wouldn't be adequate for my one and only car. I was recently thinking what range would an EV need to have to replace my Xantia completely, if the EV was also as large as the Xantia in terms of luggage and people carrying, (which the Ion most definitely is not) and the figure I came up with was around 150 miles.

A major problem with trying to do long distance trips in a 60 mile EV aside from the number of stops required is that whilst there are rapid chargers about every 30-40 miles or so in most routes in Scotland making it theoretically possible, if tedious to do long trips, if you encountered one that wasn't working there generally isn't a second redundant charger either at the same location or within short driving distance, so if you arrived with say 5-10 miles of range left and the next nearest rapid charger was 20 miles away you're stuffed.

Your choices are then either limp to a nearer, much slower charger and wait a couple of hours to get enough charge to make it to a rapid charger, or make an embarrassing call to the AA for rescue... :oops:

Ideally there would be a redundant charger either at the same location, (which also helps avoid having to wait behind someone else...) or nearby, but that's not the case today. However once you get to a range of about 150 miles you're no longer having to stop at each rapid charger you come across - you can skip to say every 3rd charger, cutting your number of stops down to 1/3rd, AND have enough range left when you get there to move onto the next charger if you come across one that isn't working. So with 150 miles of range and a little common sense you can avoid ever getting into a situation where you arrive at a faulty charger without enough range to get to another one.

On our recent trip up north I also discovered that at 41, 150 miles is about all that I am willing to drive without stopping, especially with a child in the back... :twisted: After that I found I was having to stop for a short snooze/rest to fight back tired eyes that were trying to close on me. And about 250 miles was all I was comfortable driving in a single day. So a range of 150 miles before needing a rapid charge actually suits me just fine - as long as the charger was in a good location where we could park and go get something to eat and have a walk around for 30 minutes I'm perfectly happy with that, and I was doing that even in the Xantia when I still had half a tank of petrol left...

200 miles would be great of course, but I think I could make do with 150 without any real inconvenience, as long as the rapid chargers were quick and reliable. 200+ miles range requires at 60kWh battery or larger, while 150 miles requires about a 40kWh battery or larger. Currently the only 40kWh EV on the market is the new version of the Zoe, which does manage about 140 miles, the only cars with 60kWh+ batteries at the moment are the Tesla's (60-100) and the Chevy Bolt (60kWh, 238 miles range) which is not available in the UK. Keep your eyes peeled in the next 2 years though for a number of 40/60kWh cars to come out, some in the UK.
And charging at home, I am ok as I live in a house with a private drive, but that could be a problem if one lived in a block of flats, or even in terraced houses with no drives and no guarantee of parking at your house.
Lack of off street parking for such a large percentage of the UK population is actually my biggest concern for EV adoption. Issues like battery capacity/range, charging speeds and public charging infrastructure will all improve over time until they are essentially solved problems, however lack of off street parking to charge your car at home is a very intractable problem with no clear solution. :? Very few UK streets have lamp posts that are both sufficient in number and on the road side of the pavement (to avoid cables being trip hazards to pedestrians) to make upgrading lamp posts a ubiquitous solution, and as you say, you have no guarantee of being able to park outside your own house anyway.

One of the major advantages of an EV is being able to "fill up" every night at home by just taking a few seconds to plug your car in as you get home. It literally takes me under 10 seconds to pull the charge flap, grab the cable off the hook on the wall and plug it in - which I do every night, instead of a 2-3 times a month detour to a petrol station which takes me 15-20 minutes. In terms of time spent, plugging in at home is a very small time investment compared to buying petrol.

I suppose if affordable EV's get ranges up into the 200-300 mile range and public rapid chargers become ubiquitous and very fast to use then the old model of taking your car somewhere to "fill up" a few times a month will work for those without off street parking, but it certainly won't be an optimal experience compared to plugging in at home each night where you leave each day with a full charge, and it certainly won't be as cheap either.

Another option would be to charge at work, but I doubt that will ever be ubiquitous, especially when a majority of employers don't provide any parking in the first place.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by white exec »

Aluminium comes a useful close second for electrical conductors. It has around double the resistance of copper - still very tiny - and so needs a larger cross-section for given job, but has the advantage of being a fraction of the weight, and the price. Multistrand aluminium is the choice of preference for overhead (grid) cabling, with a steel core for strength. There are issues for jointing, and for miniature assemblies.

In the '70s, when the price of copper almost doubled (partly a result of the S.African sanctions), the electricity industry was drawing up plans to move to aluminium for cables, motors and transformers, despite the size-penalty and the need for wholesale re-designs. The threat of doing this was enough to push the Cu price down.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by myglaren »

A lot of domestic wiring in the US seems to have been aluminuninum and they look to be having lots of problems with it.
They have funny electricity there though.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by CitroJim »

myglaren wrote: 27 Jul 2017, 17:28 They have funny electricity there though.


:rofl2:

Yes, wrong in every way... Wrong voltage and wrong frequency...
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Gibbo2286 »

CitroJim wrote: 27 Jul 2017, 17:32
myglaren wrote: 27 Jul 2017, 17:28 They have funny electricity there though.


:rofl2:

Yes, wrong in every way... Wrong voltage and wrong frequency...


And still for the most part still hanging on poles that collapse under the weight of snow and ice.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by white exec »

...feeding wooden houses that blow away when the weather turns nasty, as it does regularly.
Hmmm...
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by demag »

Isn't it centre tap 55v either side?
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by myglaren »

Crunch coming for ICE commercial vehicles too.

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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by white exec »

demag wrote: 27 Jul 2017, 21:29 Isn't it centre tap 55v either side?

Not sure, but I believe many houses have both 230 and 115v supplies (and two sorts of power points), the former to cope with high-wattage appliances.

Had it been up to that American hero Edison, the country would have been on DC ! Something else to thank Nikolai Tesla for heading off.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Mandrake »

The US uses earth centre tapped 220v. Normal 110 sockets connect to earth/neutral and to one side of the centre tap. Some other 110 sockets in the house are connected to the other phase/side of the centre tap, with the hope of balancing the load on average. 220v appliances like dryers connect across both sides so get the full 220v.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Gibbo2286 »

myglaren wrote: 28 Jul 2017, 06:40 Crunch coming for ICE commercial vehicles too.

Beeb


It makes a lot more sense than the cars, if they went after the bus fleets that would also make more sense, a seventy seater bus with a seven or eight litre diesel engine carrying just four passengers at a time is quite common around here.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

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Gibbo2286 wrote: 28 Jul 2017, 09:03
myglaren wrote: 28 Jul 2017, 06:40 Crunch coming for ICE commercial vehicles too.

Beeb


It makes a lot more sense than the cars, if they went after the bus fleets that would also make more sense, a seventy seater bus with a seven or eight litre diesel engine carrying just four passengers at a time is quite common around here.

Busses that do a city route (eg not long haul intercity routes) being electric makes a lot of sense.

Efficiency is very good at slow speeds (<30mph) in an EV where wind resistance isn't a big factor, and regenerative braking would help massively for the constant start/stop driving cycle of a city bus. Today every time a bus slows to stop at a bus stop (or a traffic light for that matter) all that massive amount of kinetic energy is thrown away as heat on the brakes. Being able to recuperate a large percentage of that energy and reuse it dramatically reduces the energy penalty for speeding up and slowing down constantly. In a car with modest amounts of regeneration (like mine) it already reduces energy consumption by at least 25% in stop start traffic, I would imagine in a bus it would be even greater.

It also means that the extra energy used by carrying additional passengers is largely negated - it takes more energy to accelerate more passengers but you get more energy back during regenerative braking too, provided that the bus had sufficiently strong regeneration to avoid using the friction brakes too much.

For charging, a lot of busses aren't on the road constantly - at the main Glasgow bus terminal as well as the stands where busses stop waiting for their time to arrive to pick up passengers there is a "parking" area with room for about 15 busses that aren't currently in service, and that is always nearly full. So busses do actually spend a lot of time sitting around where they could be charging. In fact there are two plug in busses at the Glasgow bus terminal already - they are only medium sized and I don't know if they're PHEV or Rex or pure BEV, but they are there.

Finally there is the opportunity for a lot smoother (and quieter!!) ride for the passengers with a fully electric drive train. I don't know if the drivers do it on purpose or the busses are just that hard to drive smoothly, but even the automatic diesel's throw people around all over the place due to abrupt acceleration, deceleration and rough gear changes. I used to catch a double-decker into Glasgow every day - an automatic diesel, and trying to get down the stairs when you were approaching a stop with the driver in stop start traffic in 1st/2nd gear without being thrown to the floor was a real challenge... :evil: Many times I witnessed other people being thrown about while on their feet.

City route busses are definitely a good candidate for electrification.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by white exec »

Three of London's bus routes are now all-electric, with a BEV fleet of 170 vehicles, from Chinese manufacturer BYC. The double-deckers have a range of 180 miles on a single charge, enough for a day's service.

Inductive charging at bus stops and turnrounds/stands is part of the TfL roll-out programme.

After years of dealing with agriculturally re-engined Routemasters, where the auto-change from 1st to 2nd was so lurchy that most drivers did it manually, the move to these quiet and smooth BEVs must be a godsend. Boris's tiny-engined hybrids were not only massively expensive, but thirsty, polluting and unreliable.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

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white exec wrote: 28 Jul 2017, 13:09 Three of London's bus routes are now all-electric, with a BEV fleet of 170 vehicles, from Chinese manufacturer BYC. The double-deckers have a range of 180 miles on a single charge, enough for a day's service.

Inductive charging at bus stops and turnrounds/stands is part of the TfL roll-out programme.

After years of dealing with agriculturally re-engined Routemasters, where the auto-change from 1st to 2nd was so lurchy that most drivers did it manually, the move to these quiet and smooth BEVs must be a godsend. Boris's tiny-engined hybrids were not only massively expensive, but thirsty, polluting and unreliable.

That's great to know that London already has some fully BEV busses. :) I found a small article about it here:

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/transpor ... 67256.html

180 miles is pretty decent for a single charge for something as big as a double-decker - I think that batteries, much like rocket engines, (which have to carry their own weight in fuel) scale better on larger vehicles than smaller vehicles - it's easier to get a longer range using current battery tech on a large vehicle than a small one, as the larger vehicle is better able to carry a larger battery where it becomes a smaller proportion of the overall weight.

The lurch from 1st to 2nd on the double-deckers used up here is pretty horrendous too, enough to knock people over or into each other who happen to be standing at the time... :x

It's interesting that these articles only harp on about emissions reductions but don't talk about improvements in overall efficiency, or a smoother and quieter ride for the patrons !
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by myglaren »

Mandrake wrote: 28 Jul 2017, 13:55 It's interesting that these articles only harp on about emissions reductions but don't talk about improvements in overall efficiency, or a smoother and quieter ride for the patrons !


There seem to be many advantages with BEVs that go largely overlooked, especially the commercial section.
Most people I speak to won't even consider them and seem to think they are the spawn of Satan.
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