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phantom_iv

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Everything posted by phantom_iv

  1. Probably some "independent think tank" staffed by people who have never left London.
  2. 75p/mile is still a massive increase - back of the envelope calculations suggest that the government would break even on current annual VED by the end of January at that rate. On my old diesel car VED was about £180 / year, plus ~10p/mile fuel tax (assuming £1/litre of diesel cost is tax), so the government would break even on annual tax take once you'd driven 280 miles. So assuming average annual milage of 8000/year, at an extra 65p/mile, that's equivalent to VED being £5200 a year at current fuel tax rates.
  3. Surely there's a decimal point missing there? 7.5 p per mile would be in line with current fuel tax receipts I'd have thought? I reckoned on my old diesel car doing about 10 miles / litre of fuel, so 75p/mile is equivalent to diesel at £7.50 per litre in tax alone
  4. Synthetic Intertia is a thing now - they found in the big battery in Australia (Hornsdale power reserve) that it could respond way quicker to frequency changes in the grid than the coal plants that were contracted to provide frequency response services. So it's possible the grid frequency might get more stable rather than less if we get a ton of these big batteries connected - e.g. a battery farm in Dorset went online earlier this year - not at the same scale as Aus though but still a good start. However I'm all for more Nuclear - we need to keep the lights on when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining somehow!
  5. True, but that wasn’t the cost for comparison vs replaceable batteries. However ICE cars also have significant depreciation on new models - I doubt electric ones will be radically different. Yes batteries will degrade over time but so do engines etc
  6. Running costs of 8p /mile? (from the article) No thanks. Today's Teslas will do sub-2p per mile easily.
  7. The CATL batteries may be Cobalt-free but are quite low performance. I was thinking of the forthcoming 4680 cells (https://www.electrive.com/2020/09/23/tesla-battery-day-tabless-4680-cell-and-in-house-production/) which will be using a high-Nickel cathode in place of Cobalt.
  8. It was interesting watching Tesla's "battery day" a few weeks ago where mr Musk and co were showing off their new battery which they plan to produce in the next few years. It'll be zero Cobalt, and fully recyclable, so eventually they hope to get to the point where pretty much all their raw materials come from recycling old batteries. Until then they're also getting into the mining business and have come up with a process to extract Lithium from clay deposits, of which they've bought a load in Nevada for just this purpose, with the intention of returning the used clay to the ground when they've got the Lithium from it. Interesting to see how much of this comes off as they say it will, but there is certainly potential for innovation in how these raw materials are extracted and reused. Of course the Lithium mining industry says he's bonkers. But people said that when he started making electric cars and reusable rockets...
  9. Probably not, but they were opened under private ownership and closed under public. I assume no such thing. But if performance, good or bad, has no consequences one way or the other (as seems to happen in the public sector), then you can't expect good performance as a result. Regarding cartels, firstly we already have competition laws for things like this, but also the barrier to market entry is fairly low for EV charging I'd have thought - the equipment isn't terribly expensive and electricity supplies are commonplace - which might make a price-fixing cartel rather hard to maintain in this sort of market I'd expect. Major cost will be wholesale cost of electric I'd have thought. You can form as big a cartel as you like but watch what happens if I open a charging station just down the road with significantly lower prices...
  10. Which is surely measured in Watts? I can't really find a use for "Watts per hour" other than maybe the rate at which solar power increases as the sun rises?
  11. National grid is a private company these days ? Last time I checked, there wasn't national water distribution - there were only local private monopoly-holding companies. Road and railway infrastructure takes longer, costs more and is worse maintained in general than many other comparable companies. E.g. go to France. Yes, it is state owned there, but they're better at it it seems. I'm not saying state ownership is necessarily a bad thing in itself, we just seem to do it really badly in this country. As for railway provision in remote areas being worse pre-grouping, there's a lot of places that had a railway connection before nationalisation that don't have one now. Ultimately, the key to successful privatisation is competition. Without competition private companies have no incentive to keep prices low, as their customers have nowhere else to go. The days of duplicated railway lines into major urban areas did at least provide competition for better services and lower prices for customers, compared to these days of insufficient capacity. Regaring EV charging points, yes, I do believe private companies will do a better job than the government of rolling them out. Because eventually if they make them too expensive / too hard to use / too unreliable customers will simply go elsewhere. With a government-run monopoly if you don't like the service / it's too expensive / too unreliable then tough. You'll have to live with it as you have no alternative. And the people running it will still have a job regardless of how incompetently they do it so what's their incentive to make it actually work well? Same as in the NHS there seems to be zero incentive to provide a good standard of care to your patients and actually look after them, because patients have nowhere else to go. Complain and you're told, "it's free, what did you expect?"
  12. As an aside it really does my head in when people can't use units for power and energy properly - "The net gain was a disappointing 9.5% of our total battery capacity, equivalent to 5.32 kWh, or 532 Watts per hour." - I mean what does this actually mean? I think he means 532Wh per hour, or 532 Watts, but as written it's nonsensical.
  13. Fair play to the MHRA for quick work on the approvals. But the NHS is a disaster in many ways... as is the US system, true. But elsewhere in Europe (and indeed the world) there are much better health systems than either, not all of which are publicly run, which are also free at the point of use. Must admit I'm not sure what to think about railway nationalisation - BR was a disaster, private operation is also a disaster, although the track and signalling systems are still nationalised.
  14. You make a good point - the MHRA seems to be a rare exception on recent performance. Don't get me wrong, I think in this case the government needs to regulate to ensure a payment method that works for everyone, and to make sure commercial operators aren't ripping off "pay as you go" customers, but not actually manage, install and maintain the infrastructure. That's not something they do well. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/all-new-rapid-chargepoints-should-offer-card-payment-by-2020
  15. Oh god no. When has anything the state does (at least in this country) ever been delivered on time, not cost 10 times more than it should, actually worked reliably without massive headaches and not been embarrassingly laughable compared to what is available overseas?
  16. Isn't it a legal requirement to accept contactless credit/debit cards in all newly installed ones? Frankly getting the bloody apps to work is the biggest problem with the UK charging network to date, it's so much faff. Some are better than others though, e.g. Instavolt are great. Tesla's charging network is a big plus point for buying their cars, just plug it in and wander off with zero faffing and they'll send you the bill. Yes, it's hard to imagine why you would want a fossil-fuelled car in 2030. They just seem really expensive to run, unreliable and inconvenient. Having to go to a petrol station to buy fuel all the time is just so much faff!
  17. Funnily enough, before contributing to this discussion I checked the dictionary to make sure "condone" means what I think it means. The answer it came up with is " to regard or treat (something bad or blameworthy) as acceptable, forgivable, or harmless" - which was what I thought it did. I'll have to re-read all those posts now in light of the other definition.
  18. It’s perfectly possible to disapprove of an action yet still appreciate a positive outcome unless you take a completely utilitarian view
  19. In practice this is less of a problem than it first sounds. For low speed charging pretty much every car sold in the UK/rest of Europe has a “type 2” port. For higher-speed charging there are two main types, CCS (which is just two large extra pins tacked on to the bottom of the type 2 port), and chademo, which is a separate port. CCS seems to be winning the race to become the “de facto” standard in Europe, I suspect chademo ports will pretty much die out on new cars over the next few years. Most rapid chargers tend to just have two cables attached to cater for everyone. Much like apple and the phone chargers, having just two options is manageable, rather than every device having something different.
  20. Going back to something dangerously close to on-topic - Porche's e-fuel - I suspect this may prove to be the way forward for boats (in a hybrid/generator context) and perhaps some classic cars, but will prove too expensive to produce for day to day large scale road use - especially given how cheap wind power is getting these days. Regarding change of use of streets - it never ceases to amaze me that people are building new developments with deliberately limited numbers of parking spaces to encourage people to have fewer cars by making it difficult to park them. Why not accept that people will have cars, embrace and extend this, build the houses one story higher and tuck the cars away underneath when they're not in use? There's plenty of space vertically last time I looked.... Same goes for non-residential urban planning. There's more than one place I've been to in France that has a nice park in the middle of the town, that just happens to have a multi-storey car park buried underneath. Also very interesting what the Boring Company is doing - tunnels for self-driving electric cars in urban environments. Maybe we don't need to rid out towns and cities of cars altogether, just hide them away underground, and let the computers and tunnels get rid of all the traffic
  21. Headlights I'd expect to make minimal difference with modern LEDs. Rain and cold are not your friends though, subtract maybe 20%. For comfy Jaguar sized cars you'd have to ask Jaguar - https://www.jaguar.co.uk/jaguar-range/i-pace/index.html - it's a lot. For more sensibly priced cars that are a bit bigger, Hyundai Kona electric and Tesla model 3 can be had for ~£30k and £40k respectively,
  22. I thought the same when reading the article. If moving it a little way further down the canal causes it to sink then I can't really believe it was long for continued floatation anyway.
  23. True - the main advantage of electrics is flexibility. Charge it from solar if the sun's out, from a high powered charger, a built-in generator running on biofuels or just chuck the landlord of a canalside pub a fiver to plug a cable in while you recharge yourself with beer and sleep it off. You don't get that with Hydrogen!
  24. Apart from where it says "not a launch" - perhaps it would be better if they changed this wording to "not mechanically propelled" as I think that's what they actually mean here?
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