Organisations unable to ever fully adopt electric vehicles

Organisations unable to ever fully adopt electric vehicles

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DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
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The emergency services and armed forces cannot go fully electric. There, I've said it. A lengthy emergency or terrorist attack on the electricity supply would make the use of fully electric vehicles unworkable to the point of being absurd.

I wonder if the drive towards fully electric vehicles is a political move, not to save the planet, but to artificially stimulate the economy. The, as it turned out, pointless drive to diesels a few years ago is an example.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
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SSBB said:
In a prolonged and complete shutdown of the UK electricity grid, the least of our worries will be emergency service vehicle propulsion.

I’m not sure how armed services propulsion is really relevant to the average motorist in the UK.

I don’t think the ideas in this post have been thought through well at all.
Reductio ad absurdum tells us that if no electric vehicles can move due to major power failure, the owner of the sole remaining petrol engined Bedford van is king.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
quotequote all
Dingu said:
DickyC said:
The emergency services and armed forces cannot go fully electric. There, I've said it. A lengthy emergency or terrorist attack on the electricity supply would make the use of fully electric vehicles unworkable to the point of being absurd.

I wonder if the drive towards fully electric vehicles is a political move, not to save the planet, but to artificially stimulate the economy. The, as it turned out, pointless drive to diesels a few years ago is an example.
As mentioned there are options to have as backups. What do you think happens to a hospital in a power cut? All the patients die?

How are you going to power ICE vehicles in 1000 years? Amuse me.
You seem to be agreeing with me and yet you're asking me to provide counter arguments.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
quotequote all
Dingu said:
I’m not agreeing with you. You said they couldn’t use fully electric vehicles. That’s clearly untrue. If you said they can’t use fully electric vehicles without having a back up non grid charging system then I agree, but you didn’t say that.
I said they "can't fully adopt electric vehicles" not "they can't adopt fully electric vehicles."

It's in the title.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
quotequote all
disago said:
DickyC said:
A lengthy emergency or terrorist attack
I saw that movie!!

Real life will be way more boring, it’ll be entirely avoidable under-investment eating safety margins slowly over the years, tipped over the edge by a human messing up one day. Operational error is all but guaranteed.

DickyC said:
would make the use of fully electric vehicles unworkable.
Petrol, diesel, hydrogen and lpg too! The massive electric pumps in the refineries, and the wee ones on the petrol forecourts need to be working


DickyC said:
I wonder if the drive towards fully electric vehicles is a political move
Oh, here we go. You’ve had too much internet. You’re drunk on the stuff. Go for a walk :-)
Can't go for a walk! Making dinner. Youngest daughter's 50th birthday dinner. It's considerably more difficult and time consuming than the recipe suggested. Then I have to go and fetch her so she can have a drink. Consequently, I might not be giving this the attention it deserves.

Anyway, where do you stand on the proposition that some organisations will be unable to ever fully adopt the electric vehicle?

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
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Max_Torque said:
What is it about anti-electric car idiots? Why do they feel so threatened that they have to make up utterly stupid and patently false "reasons" why BEVs won't work?



And for the sake of completeness, in the case of a large grid outage, a BEV that can be recharged from a local wind turbine or solar panel is actually likely to be the last thing moving, because the entire petrol fuel chain requires massive amounts of electricity to work, from pumping crude off ships and rigs, to refining it, and of course to pumping it into the tank of the vehicle being filled!

Take the film Mad Max, where they all drive around the very sunny desert killing each other for fuel, when a couple of solar panels and an EV would have given them total mobility in that scenario.....
No anti electric car idiots here as far as I can see. The proposition is about fully adopting electric vehicles as the UK government seems to want. I can't see it happening. I'd like one but I'll keep a petrol engined car as well for as long as I'm permitted. Then I can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Marvellous.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 30th January 2022
quotequote all
Max_Torque said:
Er, i'm actually working on electric traction projects for the defence industry, because they do have some advantages, from much lower thermal and audible noise signatures, being agnostic to the source of the 'lecy used to charge them, reducing logistics chains, masively improving the servicability of front line vehicles, reduced flamibility due to not having to carry hundreds of litres of highly flamable liquid fuels, being more maneouverable and faster, and potentially allowing one basic EV "chassis" to be used across a wide range of configerable utility and fighting bodies. And you have to remember, the push in the industry is for increase and potential total autonomy so as to minimise our casualties in any future battle (the political stomach for dead UK solders is very small these days), and a EV powertrain is much easier to integrate in this respect, and allows many more packaging benefits, and reduced armour, meaning an MTB may not need to be a 60 tonne leviathan for much longer.....
Agnostic?

The fight with autocorrect continues.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Monday 31st January 2022
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Dingu said:
It makes sense.

“not preferring a particular device or system —usually used after a noun”.

E.g. they can hook it up to solar, wind, nuclear, petrol, diesel etc generators.
Thanks. Prior to this I'd only ever heard agnostic used in the religious sense.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Monday 31st January 2022
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GT9 said:
I look that at this phenomenon in a different light.

M_T, myself and several others have been working in this field for decades. We have literally spent a lifetime investigating all the avenues, trying all the ideas, doing endless calculations, trade studies, analyses, validation tests, you name it, to all pretty much arrive at the same conclusion as almost every other engineer/manager/technical authority in this field.

That conclusion can be summarised fairly easily. Energy efficiency is king, the rest is just noise.

It is human nature for a certain % to continually question the consensus, either due to lack of knowledge & ability, or because that's just your personality type. For some, no amount of new information or reasoned argument will change their entrenched position. They will only accept information, fact or fiction, it doesn't matter, that backs up that entrenched position. Confirmation bias 101. I think this is nature's subtle way of making you go back and triple-check your work, just to be more than 100% sure you are on the right track.

Yeah, it's bloody annoying, but less so if you see at as a natural checks & balances process.
No one here has said they are anti electric vehicles.

The proposition is that some organisations will be unable to fully adopt electric vehicles. It's nothing to do with energy efficiency, it's to do with situations where an electric vehicle is impractical. For those situations, however scarce, the military and the emergency services, for example, will have a Plan B which requires internal combustion engines. There will be circumstances, I'm fairly certain, where horses are used in preference to motor vehicles because even a Land Rover isn't appropriate. Putting all your eggs in one basket, burning your bridges or drilling holes in the boats after you've invaded isn't wise.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Monday 31st January 2022
quotequote all
When I was trying to plunder Google for examples of someone - anyone - keeping some old technology knocking about 'just in case', I found out that US Army Special Forces used horses in Afghanistan in 2001, which was a surprise.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Monday 31st January 2022
quotequote all
DonkeyApple said:
But you did seem to be suggesting that they were being forced to go EV.
Ah, I thought the ban on internal combustion engines coming in a few years' time applied right across the board and, if so, was a bit impractical.

I'll go back to the Lounge. I cause less upset in there.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Monday 31st January 2022
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Evanivitch said:
Not sure how we've started talking about torpedo boats laugh
The all new eMTB.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Wednesday 2nd February 2022
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Megaflow said:
A question for all of those people that still come up with hypothetical reasons why BEV’s won’t work in the ‘real world’, do you come up with similar reasons why the sun won’t rise tomorrow? Because that is basically what you are arguing against!

Just about every industry that uses ICE, with the possible exception of commerial aviation, is investigating electricity because we just cannot keep on burning fossil fuels. How that electricity makes its way to motor is about the only part under debate.
No one is saying they don't work. The debate here is about whether or not they are the whole one-size-fits-all solution or if, in some applications, battery powered vehicles are not appropriate. I wondered about the armed forces and the emergency services. You said commercial aviation. There may be others for whom electric vehicles are not the 100%, across the board, 'it's electric vehicles or nothing' solution.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 6th March 2022
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The thread has gone quiet.

DickyC

Original Poster:

50,033 posts

200 months

Sunday 6th March 2022
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Hill92 said:
ChrisNic said:
DickyC said:
The thread has gone quiet.
Run out of energy?
Someone blowing up the fuel tankers supplying the thread?
We should have gone fully electric.