Electric
Vehicles.
What about electric vehicles? I have my concerns
that we are going headlong into a disaster that will create so much pollution
that we are not able to deal with. I have titled this article to include cars,
motorcycles and lorries that will be built in sufficient numbers throughout the
world to create the problem. I will try to show the arguments in a sensible way
and why I have come to my conclusions but I will start with what I see.
Politically there is a drive to reduce pollution and
all of that is being placed on the general public to make our environment
better but I see no burden being forced upon industry that contributes over 30%
to mucking up our environment. Covid has done us a big favour in showing how
wasteful people are. Showing that much travel is unnecessary thrust upon the
community by employers who don’t trust their employees. Now the buses and
trains are empty. All the public transport is losing money and air travel is a
fraction of what it used to be. I have benefited immensely living near
Heathrow, the air is so much better now, the roads are less congested and the
threat of the third runway is somewhere on the horizon out of sight for the
time being. Politicians are forcing us to change to electric vehicles. No more
Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) I don’t understand this as the most pollution
comes from the particulate matter discarded by brakes and tyres not from car
exhausts. That blows away but traffic that starts and stops leaves behind the
particles that don’t blow away. The pollution on the London Underground
assaults the senses and is far greater by orders of magnitude than anything
above ground. There is a blindness by the politicians over this funded by big
business. If you want to reduce pollution then you need to reduce traffic, even
ban it from some areas. Many cities have
reworked their road systems in favour of bicycles during Covid and now want
everyone to ride bicycles everywhere. This has resulted in a reduction of space
for the majority of traffic vastly increasing pollution. The result of this is
that the cyclists don’t use those cycle lanes because of the stationary traffic
next to them. All I see is a waste of money. The politicians have no idea that
the majority of the population are not able to use bicycles as a mode of
transport. Currently less than one percent of the total journeys are made by
bicycle in London. Most of the time the cycle lanes are empty along busy roads. The cycling lobby are doing a great job in
twisting the arms of local government but who is going to ride a bicycle anywhere
in the pouring rain? As about a third of the population are over the age of 65 so who would want their granny to be out there
in such conditions? Even if the weather is nice cycling anywhere requires a
level of fitness that eludes most of the population and does not get you far. Where
I live you take your life in your hands just trying to get to a safe riding
area on urban roads. There is no respect out there. Using a bicycle is not a
favoured mode of transport. You need an engine to be with the traffic and to do
any distance. I’m not sure who is advising the politicians, but whoever it is
they are out of step with this world. You would get better advice from any
group of people in any pub, on any evening anywhere in the country for free.
My choice for getting around town is by motorcycle.
I can get through the traffic, can park easily at no cost and my pollution
footprint is very low. Since Covid with the risks of using public transport the
motorcycle shops have been cleaned out and there are no scooters or lightweight
motorcycles to buy. I have no information about electric bikes or power
assisted bicycles or scooters. I have seen a few of these oversized childrens’
scooters around and they are quite quick. A bit too quick to be used on
pavements. I only see that they have a rear brake and am not sure if they are
entirely legal or even safe enough to be out there. At some point there will
need to be legislation to protect people from themselves. I do like the idea of
power assisted bicycles especially the, not so legal, 40mph ones. Now that is a
beast. It is a motorcycle with pedals! Oh! A proper moped! We have a situation
that there are bicycles out there that can exceed the 15mph limit that should
be taxed and insured but at the moment it is a free for all and many are taking
advantage of it. It won’t last.
Industry
Mentioned earlier, about industry, and their contribution
to the environment needs to change. There is so much being produced I am not
able to tackle all the issues so I will focus on the most important one, and the
one we all rely on in the car industry. To think that we would have no more
cars produced would be unthinkable, but I’m sure it was the same for the horse
and cart at some point. Surmising that the loss of production could reduce the
pollution levels by 30% at a stroke and save the planet is a possibility but
that would cause a financial disaster and governments to crash is unthinkable
but Covid has done that for us. And we
would still want our cars in this mobile society. Even if we keep the old ones
running we would still need all the parts to replace the worn out bits. I see
there is not much thought into how we can have lighter cars with narrower
tyres. We have a trend for bigger cars and wider tyres making our cars heavier
and fatter than ever before, Reducing the weight of a car requires less energy
to move it and to stop it and being lighter needs narrower tyres all of which
could reduce the particulate matter immensely along with using less fuel. Time
to have a tax on the weight of the vehicle. Current tax is wrong, when cars pay
much less than motorcycles to use the roads and some pay nothing at all. This
excludes historic vehicles. The revenue must be very low having emissions as
the bench mark. Who ever advised the government on this? Someone who has an
electric car or bicycle?
The car industry needs to rethink how they make
their cars. We have a surfeit of plastics that is polluting our oceans, rivers
and countryside.15p on a carrier bag has not solved this. We have to do
something about this. How about using all these plastics to make cars? Some things
would have to be of metal. Steel needs about 1000 C to melt it down and turn
the raw material into a sheet. Plastics require about 200 C to do the same.
Using plastic could save 80% of the currently energy used cutting pollution
proportionately and cleaning up the world at the same time instead of the
discarded, one use plastics going into a big hole in the ground in a poor
country.
Batteries
Pollution is the word here. Batteries are a big
issue, in that the materials used to make the new high powered batteries being
Lithium, Nickel and Cadmium are all very toxic and not massively abundant in
this world. Mining them creates a wasteland where nothing can live because they
are so toxic. Keeping them in the ground is the best option. Our world is going
headlong into creating more powerful batteries using more toxic materials but
these materials just don’t go away until they are chemically dealt with to make
a safe compound as with the old alkaline batteries the materials are recycled.
How do you deal with the modern mixed metal batteries? I don’t know. Does
anyone? Where is the information about how we are going to deal with the
problem of safely disposing of millions of old electric car batteries? Sending
them off to anywhere that will take them I guess.
Safety comes into the equation. Has anyone being
following the E motorcycle racing? One of the big issues with powerful
batteries is the stored energy within them. When an E motorcycle is damaged the
whole bike is contained in an explosion proof chamber until the energy within
the battery dissipates. Fires and explosions have been reported on these. You
might think that your electric car battery is “Safe” but what evidence do we
have to support that? There is no information about what happens to an electric
car in a major accident. Government vehicle safety tests don’t appear to cover
this. What would happen if a battery or batteries are damaged in an accident?
We know it would have the same outcome as with an E bike but more so as they
are bigger batteries. Now let us put some energy into an electric car. So far
there are only about 30,000 electric cars on the road. There are not enough
charging stations even now but what will be needed will be fast charging
stations at motorway service stations for people to carry on their journeys.
You need lots of volts to do that
somewhere in the region of 50,000. The more volts, the faster the charging even
80,000 has been muted. This will not be free as someone needs to pay for this
roadside technology. It is a disaster waiting to happen. Forcing 50,000 volts
into a battery in 20 minutes will make it very hot indeed. Mains electricity is only 220 volts and most
people know how big a bang that can produce when a fuse blows. How big a bang
would you get with 200 times more potential?
I do hope they don’t put these in the same area as fuel pumps. The
assumption that most of the charging would be done at home, slowly and
overnight. At present there are not enough electric cars to have any real
impact on the electricity supply but what happens when it becomes a million or
more? Will there be enough electricity available from the National Grid? If
demand required more power then that will increase the pollution levels as most
of our supply is based on fossil fuels. This does not make any sense. Is it any
different from burning fossil fuels in your car?
What may be done in the future?
I have read an article published in the Road
Magazine Aug/Sept issue 2020 featuring Pat Symonds Chief Technical Officer for
F1 and he thinks that the ICE still has a future with different types of engine
and fuel cells. Synthetic fuels tailored to suit a specific type of engine are
possible drawing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from the air. In this article he
says that electric cars produce twice as much carbon emissions than conventional cars because of the amount
produced in building the batteries.
In my view if you want to tackle pollution and make
the air cleaner then going electric is not the solution. Making better use of
what you have is the way forward. People want cars, so smaller, lighter and more
fuel efficient is the way. It is up to the manufacturers to make then without
pollution making processes.
