Morris Minor Owners Club

Apparently this is the new electric car to be built in Sunderland, which I am sure is welcome news for the workforce.

What made me laugh was the news reporter, who called it a zero carbon footprint car/zero emissions car etc etc. I just wondered how they can build the car with zero emissions and how do they know that the electricity used to charge the batteries will be carbon neutral? Furthermore, the batteries will presumably have a finite life (Though I know from bicycle lights that the new batteries are much improved) and will need to be replaced. Also, as with many modern cars, will high repair costs mean that they get written off sooner than would otherwise be the case? As an example, yesterday I was told about a Peugeot (607?) being written off because the ECU has gone and its going to cost £1400 for a new one and the car is “Only” worth £1800.

Not much interest to me its got a range of 100 miles - the nearest town is 35 miles away

Bill you would be OK coming to Inverness as it is mostly down hill but getting back up the hill would be your problem

I could always stay overnight to charge it back up but then again do I realy wanted to drive a milk float

The theory of running an electric car is all very well, especially around town, but the number of town dwellers who have off street parking to allow overnight charging is very limited.
Unless there is some investment in charging infrastructure I cant see how this technology will become popular.

It will prove popular because the cost of petrol will rise and rise and rise, and electric cars will be given free parking with fast charge, no road tax, no London charge etc etc Economics will drive it. I certainly wish I had a 100 miles range car, does no-one do an electric minor? I'm sure I read in the past about electric Renault Dauphines somwewhere in Canada. Surely a 100 mile range car would do the 35 miles to Inverness and back, even if you can't get a top-up charge there? But that is the secret, top-up charging when parked. I beleive this 'Leaf' will do 90 mph, but presumably this also cuts the 100 mph range.

Is there not an electric MINI out already ? Issued to a few lucky volunteers for testing I believe.

Electric cars, with current technology, will be fine for the cities but are totally impractical if you live in the countryside. Even now that I am retired I can still easily do 150 miles a day and the chances of having free parking and chargers available in small highland towns is pie in the sky at least in the forseeable future.
No you can keep your milk float I'll stick to the good old internal combustion engine.
In any case price of oil will drop like a stone once all you milk float owners have stopped using the stuff. There will be a glut on the market and no one left to buy it.

Aye right!

You have to remember Roy the price of fuel is not a green problem its a brown problem

I agree with Billoban on the impracticality of electric cars. In the veteran car era, there were a variety of means of vehicle propulsion. Steam, internal combustion and, yes, electric cars. Internal combustion won for very good reasons- the main one being compactness of energy store and easy re-charge of the energy. You can store enough energy by using the chemical energy of hydrocarbons to get your car hundreds of miles (even with a Minor's small tank, a 240+ mile range is possible) and at useful high speed (60 mph in a Minor).

Electric cars are far behind this capabillity because battery technology has not moved on that much in the past 100 years and I do not think it ever will as the weight of batteries needed to store the necessary energy to drive hundreds of miles always will be much more than can be stored by chemical bond means (i.e.petrol or diesel).It is simple physics and chemistry! In addition, heavy batteries means slow and you need more batteries to get the speed and range- a vicious circle. Plus, batteries lose their storage power after so many cycles and have to be replaced- at greater cost than repairing an engine.

There are three ways round this that I can think of:-

1) electric rail/ over head line for cars, like trams use.
2) Nuclear power
3) Hydrogen fuel cell.

Really, 3) is the only viable option as you can simply fill up with hydrogen and drive off again when needed.

Purely electric cars like the curiously named "leaf" are little more than milkfloats and will go the way of the Sinclair C5 in the future. Hydrogen fuel cell, along with synthetic petrol are the future.

In the meantime, though, there is no need to panic. There is plenty of oil left in the world. As evidenced by the drop in the barrel of crude price recently. What is needed is pressure on governments to cut tax on fuel and pressure, by consumers, on oil companies to lower their prices. We need competition between oil companies to lower their prices.

At £1.20 a litre we are being ripped off! When I started driving in the 1980's, we could buy a gallon of petrol (not a litre) for £1.70, even accounting for inflation, this is a huge price rise.

http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html

Yes we are being ripped off. What we need to realise is that governmment claims that high fuel prices are good for the planet is just bul***it. Fuel prices are nothing less than an easy way to raise taxes for a sucession of governments. Ever twas thus - the Road Fund Licence was meant to fund roads now its just Tax.
If their tax revenue begins to fall due to falling fuel sales in the future how long befor they think of another convenient way to hit the motorist? a battery tax? they'll think of something.
For the last 30 years we have lived in an oil rich country whose income has been squandered. Wheras our close neighbours Norway invested their money and now make more money from their 'oil fund' than they do from oil

I'm seriously considering changing my 'modern' car to run on LPG at half the price of petrol. It will pay back in just over a year. But fuel cells are the way forward and the technology is well adavnced. More likely with ethanol as the fuel I think. I like the comment about fuel cost being a 'Brown' problem, very true.