13 December - Looking towards greener transport
The Carrie Symonds inspired green agenda continues to spew nonsense from
Government mouthpieces. Last week it was air-source heat pumps at £8,000 to
£12,000 a go which are too big to fit in your kitchen cupboard.
A month
ago it was no new diesel or petrol powered vehicles to be sold from
only nine years time which might be stupidly ambitious. We may well have sufficient
power and vehicle battery storage back to grid at night and various ingenious initiatives will make the
whole idea more viable than it looks to be right now but there is a very sceptical public to convince.
Even
Government agencies do not know what they are talking about.
Last week the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development came out
with a totally ridiculous statement.
Electric cars create eight percent more toxic particles from brakes, clutches and tyres.
They
must have been desperate and made it up. For a start an electric vehicle does not have a clutch, it
provides seamless full power from a stand still to top speed much to the consternation of Mercedes and Audi drivers.
You can pick out an electric car from a traditional motor by looking at the
front wheel hubs. One is clean and the other is black. On my trip to East Ham
and back this morning I didn’t use the brake pads at all. (†)
Some electric cars do
things slightly differently but basically the speed is proportional to the
accelerator depression. Take you foot off and it rapidly slows down and stops.
Drive reasonably carefully and you need the brakes only for an emergency stop.
As for tyres, I have worn 1·5mm off my fronts in nearly 16,000 miles. They
should be good for the close to 40,000 I have always achieved on every car I have owned.
I
can just about understand the fears of regular long distance drivers who don’t want to
stop every two or three hundred miles for a half hour to fill up but that isn’t going to go on for ever.
I dropped in to the new
Gridserve electric car
refuelling station on Thursday. If you have the currently most expensive car their ‘pump’
can put in 300 miles of energy from totally green sources in ten or twelve
minutes. Not even time for a cup of tea.
In ten years time the ultra fast charging will probably be common place. Ten
minutes charging of mine would be lucky to give you 50 miles but if that is enough to get you home for an overnight trickle on cheap electricity what is the
problem with that?
100 refuelling stations like this one should be on stream within the next five years; assuming Councils are sufficiently forward looking to approve them.
Uckfield up for approval next week I understand.
Gridserve provides WH Smith, Costa coffee, Post Office, exercise bikes and
comfortable lounge at their Braintree service station. Slightly cheaper
electricity than Bexley Council’s offering too. In ten
years time the electric vehicle scene will look very different to what it does
now and many will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
† This can be a slight nuisance as the lack of use can lead to
brake drum corrosion. On the Gridserve trip I used the brakes once on the
outward journey and twice on the return. Having just read the OECD report I was counting!