Why Electric?

 

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.