Well, my Thorium powered electric car that I have been designing for the last 6 years, should take the problem of being charged away. It will always have power, never needs to be recharged but the thing that I am having trouble with, is how the power source can be protected in an accident. Once I solve that, I will go ahead and build it. Thorium is a by-product of iron ore mining and we currently give it away to China, so sourcing it wont be a problem.

-- Edited by Bicyclecamper on Thursday 11th of November 2021 12:36:36 PM

Well, the main problem, is really, how to protect people and the environment, in the case of an accident. I have been using design specs, of nuclear powered subs, but the specs don't go far enough, so to design the protection of the power source is totally new, and will be innovative when I work it out. The US also built an nuclear powered bomber aircraft, but it was not safe. As thorium, has only a half life of 150 years, which is way less then a smoke detector, that has a half life of 430 years, the concept engine should be pretty safe, but you have to design in pretty good protection, in the event of an accident or fire. This problem is quite solvable but requires new technologies that are not really there at this stage the game. But it will happen, if not by me, then by others, as their are quite a few design teams out there looking into this concept.

-- Edited by Bicyclecamper on Thursday 11th of November 2021 12:58:30 PM

Bicyclecamper wrote:

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Well, the main problem, is really, how to protect people and the environment, in the case of an accident. I have been using design specs, of nuclear powered subs, but the specs don't go far enough, so to design the protection of the power source is totally new, and will be innovative when I work it out. The US also built an nuclear powered bomber aircraft, but it was not safe. As thorium, has only a half life of 150 years, which is way less then a smoke detector, that has a half life of 430 years, the concept engine should be pretty safe, but you have to design in pretty good protection, in the event of an accident or fire. This problem is quite solvable but requires new technologies that are not really there at this stage the game. But it will happen, of not b me, by others, as their are quite a few design teams out there looking into this concept.

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 While many of us may wish you well with your theories and experiments with Thorium or Uranium, your ramblings have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic as above.

Have a read of the article, have a rest to absorb what Toyota and some others are saying then by all means, contribute an on topic post.

It appears with repeated monotony on this forum that you and some others railroad what might be interesting topics by posting *pie in the sky* crap.

Robert Wimmer testified to a Senate Committee: 

Robert Wimmer, Director, Energy & Environmental Research, Toyota

Fairly simple arithmetic will indicate the electrical distribution grid in Australia, and most countries, cannot support a significant change to electric vehicles nor can our sources of electrical generation.

But never mind all that stuff the concept makes people *feel good* that they are supporting the *right way* to save the planet.

As I said in another thread:

Yer know... I hear a great many people bemoaning how awful global warming is and how governments should "Do something!"

But I have never heard anyone say; "Yes! I'd like to pay more taxes to help fight climate change."

 

Rob Driver wrote:

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Like this wawt

thegreynomads.activeboard.com/t65059593/extra-fridge-insulation-wattage-test/

-- Edited by Rob Driver on Thursday 11th of November 2021 09:38:34 AM

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I'm using an Android phone.

Concise text improves topic.

Magnarc wrote:

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Rob, very informative article. Although I have tried to keep up with the current discussions on electric vehicles there were a few points in the article that hadn't even dawned on me.

The time taken to fill up at a servo, and the much larger home electricity bill certainly made me sit up!!!! Something else to think about. Thank you for posting it. Paying attention to the meat of the article would appear to me to be more productive than worrying about the size of the text!!!

Just sayin.

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 Thank you,

My thoughts are that this is a topic that really affects most of us in Aus.

We are a huge country and we all suffer the tyranny of distance.

These vehicles through early development may be a solution to assist with air pollution in large cities but it seems we are building yet another form of infrastructure when we have existing modes of transport. We have had electric trains for years. 

Again something for comment and further thought. I am sure many of us will have their own ideas as to the practicality of electric vehicles, the replacing of the ICE and the fuelling, servicing and other necessary requirements.

 

If you charged your electric car from home, the extra cost of electricity, at full price, would be less that the cost of petrol hat you would have bought.
We have solar at home. We send most of what we generate to the grid and get nearly nothing for it.
There is plenty there to charge a small car and to power the house.

Petrol stations did not exist when the first cars "hit the road". That did not provide any problem to the rapid development of the auto industry.
Electrification will be even quicker.
Remember KODAK?
Cheers,
peter

One thing nobody seems to want to talk about is batteries. How long does the battery last ? how much cost to replace it or is it cheaper to just throw the car away and buy another. That is what happened in France with battery cars, I read an article a few months ago with a photo of dozens of cars scrapped because it cost too much to replace the battery.

How does having large batteries in cars make the planet greener ? Think of all components to make a battery, mining involved, that means more pollution. There is no simple answer here yet.

More wiring that means more copper, more mining, more pollution.

Barry

Copper, us$11,000+ per tonne. It's recycled.

Whenarewethere wrote:

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Copper, us$11,000+ per tonne. It's recycled.

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 And Australia produces about 1 million tons per year and has lots of unmined reserves.

Cheers,

Peter

dorian wrote:

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This is a little less painful to read.

 

Rob Driver wrote:

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Subject: Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Very interesting!

 

 

A bit of a read - to look at a practical view from a major player in the industry, well worth the effort.

 

 

 

Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Very interesting!

 

 

 

Finally, a little bit of common sense into this argument! Depending on how and when you count, Japans Toyota is the worlds largest automaker.  According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the worlds  largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves.  Thats including Volkswagens inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyotas four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

 

GM,  Americas largest automaker, is about half Toyotas size thanks to its 2009  bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If youre driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasnt been afraid to change the car game.

 

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasnt grown its footprint through acquisitions as Volkswagen has, and it hasnt undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

 

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, its probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward:

 

 

 

The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

 

Toyotas head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refuelling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.

 

Wimmers remarks come on the heels of GMs announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

 

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the worlds largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

 

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the worlds cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and thats even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring price tags down.\

 

The scale of the c hasnt even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to Finances Online, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyotas RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Hondas CR-V in second. GMs top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

 

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply arent there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. Thats about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

 

 

 

Simply put, were going to need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

 

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesnt exist yet.

 

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if were all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether were charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in as little as 30 minutes, according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didnt even turn on its biomass plant during the    recent freeze.

 

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. Its about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. Thats for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isnt reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those wont come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power were currently generating if we go electric. Hes not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

 

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signalling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyotas addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

 

Toyota isnt saying none of this can be done, by the way. Its just saying that so far, the conversation isnt anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

 

YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING REALITY!

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 Oh that was much quicker to read!

peter67 wrote:

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Peter_n_Margaret wrote:

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From 'Frank P' on another forum.

A litre of petrol contains about 9kWh of energy. So our Mazda 3 (passed on to the daughter) used about 9l/100km around town, IIRC, so about 81kWh/100km, vs Kona EV's 11kWh/100km . Mazda 6l/100km highway, = 54kWh/100km, Kona 14kWh/100 highway.

The ICE is very wasteful.

Electricity @ 25c/kWh will cost 1/3rd of the cost of petrol @ $1.50/L to drive a similar car the same distance.

Peter

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 Just to be fair I'd factor in a few Uber rides per year.

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 The fault at present with comparing the cost of petrol / diesel with the cost of electricity then using the lesser price to promote the savings that may be achieved by operating an electric vehicle is that the current price of electricity has little to no component to cover current govt tax figures that exist within the pricing structure of petrol / diesel.

At some time along with the takeup of electric vehicles the governments will want their tax component and consumers will have to be prepared to pay.

The infrastructure of a power supply to provide a reasonably fast charge will also have a cost attached. Probably a lot more applicable in a high density housing situation.

Can the vision of an all electric car community in say 25 years actually be achieved?

 Bazza made good points above.

Here is what he wrote,

BAZZA44 wrote:

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One thing nobody seems to want to talk about is batteries. How long does the battery last ? how much cost to replace it or is it cheaper to just throw the car away and buy another. That is what happened in France with battery cars, I read an article a few months ago with a photo of dozens of cars scrapped because it cost too much to replace the battery.

How does having large batteries in cars make the planet greener ? Think of all components to make a battery, mining involved, that means more pollution. There is no simple answer here yet.

More wiring that means more copper, more mining, more pollution.

Barry

..

Will an electric car actually be any greener than any other vehicle?

We need to bear in mind that manufacturers like Toyota are constantly aware of greener ways to work when manufacturing their products. Wont these same procedures have to be taken up to achieve a vehicle similar in comfort, functionality and styling that will be demanded by the users of the electric vehicle.

The amount of  plastic in a modern vehicle is overwhelming, will this change? The use of plastic in our environment raises a big question as to how *green* will we be when it comes to the use of plastic in the future.

Factor in a tow truck service call when the driver forgets the distance that the electric vehicle has travelled. Will that tow truck be battery powered?

Trucks and machinery will raise many other problems when these heavy units will need to be changed.

Long distant travel and long hour shifts with machinery will be interesting with battery life and time to charge. Again, massive costs for infrastructure to quickly charge these vehicles.

My thoughts are that Australia will really battle with the complete phasing out ICE vehicles. Unfortunately some of our current leaders and potential leaders in this country are dreaming when they are quoting our predicted performance while comparing Australia to other countries.
If any of this is to happen we will need a board or committee of people who are a lot smarter and have much more knowledge than the groups that are currently in control and it wont happen without someone providing a massive investment.

 

Rob Driver wrote:

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Trucks and machinery will raise many other problems when these heavy units will need to be changed.

Long distant travel and long hour shifts with machinery will be interesting with battery life and time to charge. Again, massive costs for infrastructure to quickly charge these vehicles.

 

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 Long distance and heavy vehicles will use hydrogen which is turned to electricity using a fuel cell. Drive will still be all electric.

Same will apply to trains, ships and aeroplanes.

Fill the hydrogen tank just like you fill an LPG powered car.

Already on the road in Switzerland. The first fleet (120 busses) in Australia next year. Mining haul trucks soon.

Australian-first as central Queensland's Emerald bus company ditches diesel for hydrogen - ABC News

"Our hydrogen fuel cell electric buses will have roughly the same range [as a diesel bus], it'll take about 10 minutes to fuel a bus, and it'll have about 800 kilometres in range."

Cheers,

Peter

 

-- Edited by Peter_n_Margaret on Thursday 11th of November 2021 11:54:13 PM