RE: All good things come to an end in 2035
Discussion
skyrover said:
Your optimism in batteries is ill founded. They are crap and will be crap for the foreseeable future.
In measurable terms battery energy density has tripled in ten years since 2010. The demand for greater capacity/weight will drive innovation.Even if you don't "believe" in Climate Change (because I can't be bothered to argue with idiots) fossil fuel use is patently limited.
MalcXFR said:
Still the problem of where to charge if you live in a flat or terrace house with no off street parking as you can't always park outside your own house no matter how good the batteries become.
I don’t think that is an issue. It’s 15 years until anyone has to buy an EV. Even at that point in 2035 your ICE car is fine. It’s only new cars that must be EV. There are 30m ICE cars in the UK and we buy 2m new cars each year so that is crudely another 15 years before ICE is completely replaced. And that’s assuming new car purchases don’t plummet in 2035 as people simply halt replacing cars and start holding on to what they have. That essentially means that under the current provisions there remains up to 30 years remaining of being able to drive ICE. In reality this actually makes the plans look a complete environmental farce.
At the same time almost every point in the UK where cars are parked on the street has electricity next to it in the pavement so it is merely a matter of money when it comes to everyone having a charger where they park at the end of the day.
Alongside this is the matter that there is tremendous elasticity in domestic car usage. We all saw this first hand when petrol neared £2/L and almost everyone adapted to compensate.
And of course the technology will not stand still. The 300 mile EV that is unaffordable to most today almost certainly won’t be within even a ten year outlook. Within this decade we are likely to see the price inversion that sees EVs genuinely being cheaper to buy and run than ICe and then the masses will simply elect to adapt to take advantage of those savings.
The final point to consider is that 50% of households in the UK do have off street parking and of the remaining 50% that don’t, car ownership is nowhere near 100% so even as things stand today the issue is not as big as some might think and that is before you even take into account that some households without home charging are managing to make EVs fit because the average daily car usage in the UK is just 9 miles.
In short, if we woke up tomorrow to a country where every car was a 200 mile EV there simply wouldn’t be the charging problem that some are making out. The number of households genuinely crippled would actually be very small.
The real problem at this moment in time is the cost of the EV and even there the trend is heading downward rapidly. In just a handful of short years we have gone from badly built £100k behemoths to seeing well built, £25k hatchbacks.
Under the current provision
Max_Torque said:
skyrover said:
Your optimism in batteries is ill founded. They are crap and will be crap for the foreseeable future.
Global battery develoment spending per annum is around 1 Billion. The market for all types of high density batteries is forecast to reach well over 120 billion per annum by 2025.It's not just about cars. Our modern mobile world runs of batteries. Your phone, your lap top, your smart watch, your wireless headphones, your IOT devices, everything needs batteries. Never in the history of mankind has this level of investment and development been focused so accutely on one particular problem. It makes the development of ICE seem like two blokes in a shed by comparison (and look at where those have ended up from where they started...)
And yet you think that there will be no significant improvements?
and no... any small gains in phone batteries have been offset by increased processor/software demands. The battery life of my phone is barely better and perhaps slightly worse than one from 10 years ago.
rxe said:
Lithium ion energy density (in watt hours per kilo or litre) isn’t moving much - it’s about 690 Wh/l at the top end and has been for a decade. 18650 cells (which is what Model S Teslas are made with) have been kicking around for 2 decades now - capacity is largely unchanged since I soldered my first pack together in 2001.
They ARE a s
t load cheaper, they degrade less easily and they’re more tolerant of brutal charging regimes, but anyone expecting a step change in capacity is likely to be upset. This is a chemical process, and you can try and shove more energy in, but it tends to come out again rather violently.
Moore’s law has been supported by advances in x-Ray lithography, which is pretty much done now. Very different analogy.
You're looking at the cell, not the battery. Battery density (packaging, cooling etc) has increased 3 fold in less than 10 years.They ARE a s
t load cheaper, they degrade less easily and they’re more tolerant of brutal charging regimes, but anyone expecting a step change in capacity is likely to be upset. This is a chemical process, and you can try and shove more energy in, but it tends to come out again rather violently. Moore’s law has been supported by advances in x-Ray lithography, which is pretty much done now. Very different analogy.
DonkeyApple said:
But as the market evolves and reaches the point of being self sufficient and not requiring massive subsidies but can out compete ICE in a free market then energy consumption for transport will switch to the very high taxation use of petrol to the very low taxation use of electricity, plus the risk of self generation. As such what will happen is that taxation on electricity and gas will begin to ramp up as taxation on petrol declines.
I think a lot of the lost revenue from fuel duty will come from road pricing, which I believe the mass adoption of EVs will drive. Governments everywhere have been trying to introduce this for years, but have been beaten back by a combination of technological limitations and public opinion. It becomes a much easier sell when it's positioned as an alternative to blanket energy price rises, and of course the technology is pretty much there already. Not only are black boxes now routinely used by the insurance industry, but smart motorways provide pretty much everything needed in terms of the roadside infrastructure to be able to identify and bill vehicles.A nice side effect of road pricing is that by its nature, it requires continuous tracking of vehicles, whether that's by means of a black box, roadside cameras or whatever it might be. The point being that speed limits can therefore be policed automatically, and NIPs issued with minimal human intervention. The cynic in me would also say that the data collected in terms of movements could be quite valuable too. Google and Apple (and others) do well out of it.
And all of the above will drive the acceptance of autonomous vehicles. Why would anyone want to drive themselves if they are constantly running the gauntlet of blanket speed enforcement, and scrutiny?
skyrover said:
Witchfinder said:
skyrover said:
Batteries are a long way from parity.
So with battery cars managing ~300 miles on a full charge, how come petrol cars aren't managing 5,000 miles on a single a tank of fuel?
It doesn't, because combustion is about as inefficient as it gets.
Limpet said:
I think a lot of the lost revenue from fuel duty will come from road pricing, which I believe the mass adoption of EVs will drive. Governments everywhere have been trying to introduce this for years, but have been beaten back by a combination of technological limitations and public opinion. It becomes a much easier sell when it's positioned as an alternative to blanket energy price rises, and of course the technology is pretty much there already. Not only are black boxes now routinely used by the insurance industry, but smart motorways provide pretty much everything needed in terms of the roadside infrastructure to be able to identify and bill vehicles.
A nice side effect of road pricing is that by its nature, it requires continuous tracking of vehicles, whether that's by means of a black box, roadside cameras or whatever it might be. The point being that speed limits can therefore be policed automatically, and NIPs issued with minimal human intervention. The cynic in me would also say that the data collected in terms of movements could be quite valuable too. Google and Apple (and others) do well out of it.
And all of the above will drive the acceptance of autonomous vehicles. Why would anyone want to drive themselves if they are constantly running the gauntlet of blanket speed enforcement, and scrutiny?
Governments don’t like collecting tax from individuals. It costs far too much and is highly inefficient. A nice side effect of road pricing is that by its nature, it requires continuous tracking of vehicles, whether that's by means of a black box, roadside cameras or whatever it might be. The point being that speed limits can therefore be policed automatically, and NIPs issued with minimal human intervention. The cynic in me would also say that the data collected in terms of movements could be quite valuable too. Google and Apple (and others) do well out of it.
And all of the above will drive the acceptance of autonomous vehicles. Why would anyone want to drive themselves if they are constantly running the gauntlet of blanket speed enforcement, and scrutiny?
Governments collect via corporates. It is through these that they collect income tax, VAT, fuel duty and taxes on utilities.
The latter is exactly how fuel duty will be replaced. There is already tax on utilities and it is collected with extreme efficiency. No chasing, no waiting, no staff costs. It is all covered by the utility company.
As fuel duty declines then the existing rhetoric on utility wastage will be built upon to levy green taxes on what is seen as excessive, polluting domestic electricity and gas usage.
We will simply all be on a sliding taxation scale for our usage. The argument being that those who use more are either profligate or affluent so can and should be taxed more for the waste.
I’m sure VED will remain and continue as a tool to generate VATable activity getting consumers to switch unnecessarily etc. But the pay per mile type of taxes are incredibly intrusive to civil liberties as well as being incredibly costly to collect.
LetsTryAgain said:
Just all the environmental harm done in the production and transportation of the vehicle and components and production of the electricity for charging.
The real harm is the rampant consumption of cars in general that we have fallen into in the UK, compounded by them being used to facilitate endless, unstoppable consumerism. In the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter what the car is made of or how it is fuelled, it is how we use them that is the most polluting aspect of the private motor vehicle.
DonkeyApple said:
The real harm is the rampant consumption of cars in general that we have fallen into in the UK, compounded by them being used to facilitate endless, unstoppable consumerism.
In the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter what the car is made of or how it is fuelled, it is how we use them that is the most polluting aspect of the private motor vehicle.
I agree with the first paragraph, a lot. In the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter what the car is made of or how it is fuelled, it is how we use them that is the most polluting aspect of the private motor vehicle.
The second one, I think if we looked at those ships that transport these things thousands of miles around the world, there must a serious amount of fuel used there alone.
I personally don’t buy in to the man made global warming religion as much as others, though.
We need a proper public transport system which is so good, people would voluntarily give up driving their car ALL the time.
Town and housing planning all based around the motor car etc
Always baffled me how Gov spending on roads is classed as investment, yet Gov spending on the railway network is classed as subsidy.
The railway is one of the very cleanest, most efficient, least ugly, least dangerous methods of transporting large number of people and goods between large towns and cities.
Edited by LetsTryAgain on Tuesday 25th August 10:47
MalcXFR said:
Still the problem of where to charge if you live in a flat or terrace house with no off street parking as you can't always park outside your own house no matter how good the batteries become.
That's not a problem that doesn't exist now with fossil fuel cars. The solution is you travel to a fuel station and fill up there.The advantage of electric over petrol is that far fewer people will need to make that trip to fill up.
The challenge is to either make that trip to a station a short one - 45 minutes is OK at a motorway service centre halfway through a long trip but not for the weekly fillup - or to make it possible to fill up wherever the car will be left at the end of its trip.
LetsTryAgain said:
The railway is one of the very cleanest, most efficient, least ugly method of transporting large number of people
Unlike the passengers. We are a complex country. A small island with a large population but one that has made the mistake during the de-industrialisation of the last 4 decades of allowing London to pick up the economic slack instead of flooding the old industrial zones with enormous corporate tax breaks to bring in new business to replace what was being lost.
The end result is a country which has empty houses in the regions, inhabitants of those regions living beyond their means while the South East has become over crowded and over valued. Where once the regions were self financed and prosperous they have become debt fuelled facades kept on life support by London. Even the acts of giving them their own governance is a facade to try and mask their total reliance on subsidies.
If we redistributed employment away from the South East and hailed in employment from overseas we would do more to solve congestion and pollution than any other single act.
We could also radically change the automotive industry by setting it that any car costing more than £40k or with an engine greater than 1L needs to be an EV, leaving everyone free to choose yet without forcing people to change in a manner that costs more than it needs to. And we could place an environmental subsidy on cars built/assembled in the UK of a size that means overseas firms are strongly incentivised to set up plants in the UK regions.
The whole 2035 event and the current plans are a farce that do nothing to redress the real issues.
If it were down to me I would remove all subsidies for EVs but simply make them the only vehicle you could buy if you wanted to spend big money, have a big car or have a powerful car. That would sell infinitely more EVs than any of the subsidies can achieve. I would slash corporation tax and NI in the regions for businesses that employ locally while increasing taxation in the SE and also on chain enterprises that suck wealth from regions so as to underpin local enterprise. And I would apply subsidies to domestically assembled vehicles.
I would rebalance the country and ditch all the sticky plaster stuff.
LetsTryAgain said:
The railway is one of the very cleanest, most efficient, least ugly, least dangerous methods of transporting large number of people and goods between large towns and cities.
It is. It's great when you have large numbers of people who are all close to A and want to go somewhere close to B. It's just not very good at dealing with diffuse movement within rural and suburban environments which makes up a great deal of household travel.otolith said:
It is. It's great when you have large numbers of people who are all close to A and want to go somewhere close to B. It's just not very good at dealing with diffuse movement within rural and suburban environments which makes up a great deal of household travel.
The car is the ultimately efficient means in the UK to allow people to remain living in one place and move between jobs that’s for sure. The constant referencing to small European countries with infinitely more simplistic human geography tends to be somewhat fruitless. What the North for example does need is basically a ‘Canary Wharf’ built from scratch between all the major cities and linked in with rail lines from out of town transport hubs into it so that fewer people need to migrate South for work and the service economy incomes can remain in those regions. That’s what HS2 ought to be linking in with if we are going to embark on major structural projects.
otolith said:
It is. It's great when you have large numbers of people who are all close to A and want to go somewhere close to B. It's just not very good at dealing with diffuse movement within rural and suburban environments which makes up a great deal of household travel.
The car is the ultimately efficient means in the UK to allow people to remain living in one place and move between jobs that’s for sure. The constant referencing to small European countries with infinitely more simplistic human geography tends to be somewhat fruitless. What the North for example does need is basically a ‘Canary Wharf’ built from scratch between all the major cities and linked in with rail lines from out of town transport hubs into it so that fewer people need to migrate South for work and the service economy incomes can remain in those regions. That’s what HS2 ought to be linking in with if we are going to embark on major structural projects.
otolith said:
Spreading infrastructure development more widely would help. The regional variation in per capita transport spending is shocking. I would also move pretty much everything that is state owned and not nailed down out of London.
It amazes me that the railways still have their offices in central London. Huge spaces full of old boys sitting there doing nothing other than waiting for retirement. A colleague just did a stint in a couple of them drawing up a consultation on how to be more efficient and he was firstly shocked by the number of long term employees who just came to work to sit at a desk doing nothing but was more shocked after handing in his recommendation to slash head count when they informed him that they couldn’t cut employee headcount but could terminate some of the contractors that we doing the work for these people.
By all accounts it was utter lunacy.
However, I’d wager that most public sector employees in London are people who were born in the vicinity whereas it is the private sector that has dragged hundreds of thousands of graduates from the regions. Incentivising these firms to relocated head count outwards and slowing down the growth in economic migration might be better.
It’s been years since I’ve met a fellow Londoner in London or even the Home Counties!!
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