Electric vehicles-Conversions

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Post by MikeT »

I know it's unscientific but if you watch the TTZero vid I posted, the regenerative braking seems very effective indeed!
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Post by Mandrake »

Hell Razor5543 wrote: 24 Nov 2017, 10:07 I want to know what the 100 - 0 time is. One thing that Jeremy Clarkson said should be in the vehicle data figures is that, as (in his opinion) it is far more important to know how quickly a vehicle can stop as opposed to how quickly it can go.

Probably also 4.2 seconds, the acceleration is traction limited, so the braking will be too.

On the Model S P100D it can do 0-60 in 2.4 seconds, and 60-0 in about 2.3 seconds...of course such a rapid stop will use both regeneration and friction brakes together and reach the limits of the tyre traction.
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Post by Hell Razor5543 »

And, if you are not careful, this will have a detrimental effect on your teeth (and steering wheel)!
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Post by Gibbo2286 »

I was thinking the same James, you need damned good seat belts.
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Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Gibbo2286 wrote: 24 Nov 2017, 10:04 0-100 in 4.2 seconds My only question about that would be WHY


Had to give you a like for that one Gibbo :-D

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Post by NewcastleFalcon »

I like a colourful map

Image
World Speed Limits [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], by Amateria1121 (Own work), from Wikimedia Commons

and often think...at the top end why modern day cars are so "overcapacity" for want of a better term when it comes to top-end speed, and why if a car is sold in a particular country with a particular speed limit is it not restricted to that limit. There are loads of commercial vehicles physically limited to particular speeds, but not private cars unless you know different :-D

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Post by Michel »

Gibbo2286 wrote: 24 Nov 2017, 10:04 0-100 in 4.2 seconds My only question about that would be WHY


Because you can, that's the reason :)
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Post by Michel »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 24 Nov 2017, 15:07 I like a colourful map

Image
World Speed Limits [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], by Amateria1121 (Own work), from Wikimedia Commons

and often think...at the top end why modern day cars are so "overcapacity" for want of a better term when it comes to top-end speed, and why if a car is sold in a particular country with a particular speed limit is it not restricted to that limit. There are loads of commercial vehicles physically limited to particular speeds, but not private cars unless you know different :-D


You've answered your own question. I'm sure we can all recall being stuck in traffic caused by two lorries overtaking for miles on a dual carriageway. Limiting cars would make this so much worse.

I used to drive a Berlingo van for work in 1997/8. I found it quite worrying to drive as it wasn't fast enough. It'd do 80 at a push (it's brother I also drove, 1 digit more on the number plate would do a ton!) but if someone speeded up slightly while you were overtaking on a motorway you'd find yourself out in the outside lane with a car behind you and no way of completing the overtake.
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Post by xsaras4ever »

Hello again to all.

This is not necessarily our opinion, but just thought we would throw it in for info.

The front page of the Ouest-France newspaper today had an article about the move to electric. The position that was argued was that electric cars created just as much pollution - just in a different format.

The production of the electricity, the mining of the materials for the batteries and the recycling/disposal of the batteries was a hell of a lot of pollution.

They argued that hydrogen powered vehicles is the better option.

The general opinion here is that electric production is still more economic if done in a nuclear installation - and a strong debate between Fusion and Fission (definately not our opinion - just reporting this)

The french we have spoken to, generally feel that electric vehicles coupled with nuclear electric production is the better option.
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Post by Gibbo2286 »

This popped up on Facebook this morning:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/news/news- ... ed-bundle
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Post by white exec »

Their electricity looks mighty expensive per unit - or maybe I am out of touch with UK pricing now.
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Post by Michel »

xsaras4ever wrote: 28 Nov 2017, 19:03
The french we have spoken to, generally feel that electric vehicles coupled with nuclear electric production is the better option.


It's the best option by far but the doom-mongers and the hard-of-thinking see the word "nuclear" and freak out. The fact is that it is the safest, cheapest, and overall cleanest way of producing huge amounts of electricity with very little pollution . To generate the amount of electricity 1 person would use in a year produces just 30 grams of nuclear waste. Yes grams, of nuclear waste. Worldwide, that's about 2300 tonnes at the current rate of production by nuclear, per year. Nuclear plants also produce around 10% or less of the CO2 a coal plant produces, and only double that which a wind/water power plant produces per KWh.

If you compare the numbers of people world wide killed by mineral fuel borne pollution with those killed by nuclear power-generating accidents, there's just no comparison, even if you include the hundreds of thousands affected by incidents like Chernobyl. Electric cars powered by nuclear electricity are the future.

But.. it says "nuclear "... so it'll clearly either blow up and annihilate the earth, or leak and we will all grow 4 heads and 9ft willies, or something so the eco-loons won't allow it.
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Post by Mandrake »

white exec wrote: 03 Dec 2017, 11:03 Their electricity looks mighty expensive per unit - or maybe I am out of touch with UK pricing now.
Ecotricity's home electricity tariff is a bit expensive, but isn't a long way from what you'll get elsewhere. I pay 12.3p/kWh from bulb at home, which gives me about 3p/mile motoring when charging in my Ion at home.

When you read the article though you need to keep in mind that the price of 30p/kWh quoted is for use of 50kW DC rapid chargers at motorway services, which are a very expensive piece of kit, so you are not just paying for electricity, you are also paying back the cost of the thing being installed and maintained/repaired once out of warranty.

I believe the total installation cost of a 50kWh triple head (Chademo, CCS and 3 phase AC) rapid charger is on the order of £20k to £50k, and you also require a 3 phase AC supply to the site of between 50kW and 100kW depending on whether the unit in question allows use of AC and DC outputs at the same time, (Many do) which may be quite expensive depending on what electricity supply is already on the property.

There is an ongoing somewhat heated debate on SpeakEV about how rapid chargers should be priced - different charging providers have wildly (comically) different charging tariffs, and the method of charging for charging at rapids has not settled down yet in the industry.

Ecotricity themselves made them free during the initial roll-out, then switched to a £6 per 30 minute tariff which was widely derided by EV drivers especially those (like me) with small batteries that can't take on your money's worth of electricity from a flat rate tariff, and for most it made driving an EV long distance more expensive than an ICE.

It also encouraged charger hogging because once you've paid your £6 you want to get as much as you can in your 30 minutes even if it takes a long time and inconveniences others with more urgent need of the charger. (PHEV's like the Outlander were notorious for this)

Next they switched to a £3 connection fee (waived for people who use Ecotricity at home) with a 15p/kWh additional charge. Better but still not great. Now they've abolished the connection fee and are charging only for what you use at a rate of 30p/kWh, which I think is quite reasonable when you consider you're not just paying for electricity, you're paying for the immense cost of installing these DC rapid chargers and the convenience of having them at motorway services making journeys that would otherwise be impossible, possible.

Ecotricity is only of academic interest to me as there are only a token number (about 6!) in Scotland compared to hundreds in England and they currently have to compete with the free CPS chargers in Scotland, although they will only be free for a couple more years.
Michel wrote: 03 Dec 2017, 11:30 It's the best option by far but the doom-mongers and the hard-of-thinking see the word "nuclear" and freak out. The fact is that it is the safest, cheapest, and overall cleanest way of producing huge amounts of electricity with very little pollution . To generate the amount of electricity 1 person would use in a year produces just 30 grams of nuclear waste. Yes grams, of nuclear waste. Worldwide, that's about 2300 tonnes at the current rate of production by nuclear, per year. Nuclear plants also produce around 10% or less of the CO2 a coal plant produces, and only double that which a wind/water power plant produces per KWh.
You might want to do a little research on whether Nuclear is the cheapest option - hint, it isn't, by a country mile. If you've been following along with the Hinkley point C debacle you'd know that the government has guaranteed to buy electricity from the plant - when (if!) it is completed about 15 years from now, at a wholesale rate of about £92 / MWh. Sounded good when that was set a few years ago but wind power has swooped in and completely undercut it decades before the nuclear plant is even online.

Current cost of generation for state of the art wind farms being deployed right now is already down to £54 / MWh and continuing to fall rapidly - undercutting nuclear by almost 2 to 1. This has sent shock waves through the energy industry and has seriously called into question the wisdom of continuing with Hinkley point C, and I think there is a very good chance that the government will be forced to back out of the project.

If we continue with it the tax payer is saddled with building a plant that 15 years from now will be charging £92 /MWh for generation when wind and other renewables are down to god knows what, very probably 1/10th of the cost by then. It will be a giant white elephant if it doesn't get cancelled. France and China will be upset I'm sure, but it needs to be nixed now so we can cut our losses instead of blundering on with it.

Another thing the nuclear brigade forget is that all nuclear plants must be decommissioned after about 30-40 years which is the working life of a plant, and the decommissioning costs are astronomical. It's on the order of 10's of billions of pounds for a plant like Hinkley C - a cost that is part of doing business with nuclear but which we are kicking down the road to our children and grandchildren to pay... :roll:

Wind turbines also last about 30ish years before being decommissioned and replaced but the decommissioning costs per MW of generation capacity are infinitesimal compared to nuclear, they can be easily taken down, stripped for materials, melted down for steel recycling etc, no radioactive containment vessels to be dealt with etc...

Finally nuclear has a massive upfront cost and a nearly 20 year build time before the first power generation is available - you basically have to finish most of it before you can get any generation capacity. Wind is massively scalable and lends itself to phased roll outs as an individual turbine can go from the drawing board, through manufacture to installation and going online on the grid in well under a year - so you start to see generation results from an upfront investment within a year, making it easy to deploy extra capacity as demands increase without a massive 20 year lead time.

This phased roll out also means that decommissioning and replacement is also phased - not all turbines will be due to be replaced at the same time, so you can have a rolling maintenance and replacement program where at any given time only a small percentage of turbines are offline.

This is in contrast to nuclear where you are putting all your eggs into (usually) two baskets, as most have two main reactors. Any problem that affects a reactor takes a large chunk of generation capacity down at once. This happened last year when scheduled French nuclear plant inspections found a design fault with the reactors that caused a large number of French reactors to be shut down at the same time for several months to rectify the problem - this had a large knock on effect in electricity supply and costs right across Europe and including the UK. Wind is a much more distributed system with your eggs spread out safely among many, many smaller baskets...

Just as EV's are moving rapidly the last few years, the energy generation landscape has been completely turned on its head over the last 3-4 years, with new renewable generation already being cheaper than any conventional source like gas, nuclear or coal. Building another nuclear plant in this climate just doesn't make sense IMO.

The missing part of the puzzle for widespread adoption of renewables to supply the base load is massive, distributed grid storage, and thanks to the battery research for EV's the energy generation industry is about to benefit from that research too.

If Hinkley C is not cancelled within 5 years I will be very, very surprised.
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Post by white exec »

Sorry, Michel, but facts do tend to get in the way of glib opinion.
Thanks, Simon, for patiently detailing that so thoroughly.
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Post by Gibbo2286 »

I read the Elon Musk 'Biggest Lithium ion battery in the world' story, the headline said it could supply '30,000 homes in South Australia' ............................................for an hour. :-D
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