RE: Final EU vote on 2035 engine phaseout delayed

[SpeckledJim]

Strangely Brown said:

SpeckledJim said:

Strangely Brown said:

SpeckledJim said:

Strangely Brown said:

SpeckledJim said:

What does this mean?

Do you think that batteries are the only fuel source for vehicles with an electric drivetrain?

Ah, I see. We’ll be rescued by hydrogen.

What do you think is going to be used for haulage and light commercial in the future?

Maybe hydrogen, but it’s not going to be relevant to your motoring complaint about recharging taking too long.

Why? If it can be used for haulage and light commercial then why can it not be used for passenger vehicles?

The reasons to use it in haulage don’t really apply to cars. But all the downsides do.

Batteries are a much better solution for cars. And if they keep improving in tech, then in time they’ll be useable for haulage too.

[Strangely Brown]

SpeckledJim said:

The reasons to use it in haulage don’t really apply to cars. But all the downsides do.

That does not answer the question. Why can it not be used for passenger vehicles?

SpeckledJim said:

Batteries are a much better solution for cars. And if they keep improving in tech, then in time they’ll be useable for haulage too.

Again with the blanket statements. They are not better for ALL cars. They are only better where the use case fits.

You really think that haulage is going to be BEV? I would really love to know how the problem of battery weight and charge time will be addressed for that. Even light commercials don't really work as BEV, at least according to the "EV Transit" owners that I have heard from. Great when empty. Useless when loaded.

So that elephant just refuses to go away. BEV is fine, for many people in their specific circumstances, and that's great, but it is absolutely not the panacea that people seem to think. The future of transport is going to be a mix of technologies because no one of them is appropriate for all use cases.

[kambites]

Strangely Brown said:

SpeckledJim said:

The reasons to use it in haulage don’t really apply to cars. But all the downsides do.

That does not answer the question. Why can it not be used for passenger vehicles?

Primarily cost - cost of the infrastructure required to transport and store it, cost of the vehicle to run on it, and perhaps most crucially cost of the fuel itself.

It doesn't look plausible to me that enough people will be willing to pay so much more that it ever really becomes viable to install all the infrastructure for those few who are. If the infrastructure is being built anyway for HGVs, I guess it's possible that we'll see a handful of cars owned by extremely rich people running on the stuff

Even the most optimistic proponent of hydrogen powered cars doesn't seem to be predicting it will ever hold more than a single-figure market share.



This is rather off-topic anyway because HFCEVs are not due to be banned anywhere anyway, as far as I know.

Edited by kambites on Monday 20th March 08:56

[DMZ]

I suspect you will need to be very rich to go to a supermarket if you think the fuel alternatives will be very expensive. Basically nothing will work unless we can find alternatives that work with heavy loads. So if that's going to happen to in order for anything to work then it's not that big a deal to provide it for cars also. There is quite a big gap between what people who are investing billions in efuels are saying and the often repeated mantras on threads like these. I'm inclined to believe the people putting their money down, to be honest.

[kambites]

People are are developing efuels are claiming improbably optimistic things about efuels? Who'd have thought it?

If that comment was aimed at me, the above was about hydrogen anyway which isn't generally considered an "efuel".

[911hope]

Strangely Brown said:

Again with the blanket statements. They are not better for ALL cars. They are only better where the use case fits.

You really think that haulage is going to be BEV? I would really love to know how the problem of battery weight and charge time will be addressed for that. Even light commercials don't really work as BEV, at least according to the "EV Transit" owners that I have heard from. Great when empty. Useless when loaded.

So that elephant just refuses to go away. BEV is fine, for many people in their specific circumstances, and that's great, but it is absolutely not the panacea that people seem to think. The future of transport is going to be a mix of technologies because no one of them is appropriate for all use cases.

Is there a specific reason why haulage cannot be electrified?
The vehicles loaded are perhaps 15x the mass of a car, but MPG is <10x worse.


So is there any detailed credible analysis to support the premise that it is impossible?

[GT9]

Hydrogen suits large vehicle far better than small vehicles because of its volumetric energy density in gaseous form.

It's an order of magnitude lower than liquid fuel, which is not something that can be swept away as a minor issue.

That says to me that the future of cars is a mix of battery and liquid fuel (fossil or renewable).

All of the rest of the road transportation sector can also be met bet with the same combination.

Which effectively makes hydrogen unnecessary for the entirety of road transportation.

Given the acute safety/leakage challenges, as a society, we will need to go through a very steep learning curve to adapt to having copious amounts of highly pressurised hydrogen in close proximity to effectively the entire population.

If I was in charge, I'd be choosing my battles carefully, and saving hydrogen for other industrial uses.

[braddo]

Strangely Brown said:

What do you think is going to be used for haulage and light commercial in the future?

Are those in scope for the 2035 bans?

[SpeckledJim]

911hope said:

Strangely Brown said:

Again with the blanket statements. They are not better for ALL cars. They are only better where the use case fits.

You really think that haulage is going to be BEV? I would really love to know how the problem of battery weight and charge time will be addressed for that. Even light commercials don't really work as BEV, at least according to the "EV Transit" owners that I have heard from. Great when empty. Useless when loaded.

So that elephant just refuses to go away. BEV is fine, for many people in their specific circumstances, and that's great, but it is absolutely not the panacea that people seem to think. The future of transport is going to be a mix of technologies because no one of them is appropriate for all use cases.

Is there a specific reason why haulage cannot be electrified?
The vehicles loaded are perhaps 15x the mass of a car, but MPG is <10x worse.


So is there any detailed credible analysis to support the premise that it is impossible?

Today's battery tech (weight) doesn't really work for 150,000 miles a year in a 40 tonner.

It works very well indeed for 15,000 miles in a 2 tonner.

Batteries continue to improve, and for a truck that's running depot to depot, and sitting still for >8 hours a day, maybe in 10 years it'll work fine.

[D4rez]

braddo said:

Strangely Brown said:

What do you think is going to be used for haulage and light commercial in the future?

Are those in scope for the 2035 bans?

They’re on a separate later timeline for commercial vehicles. Motorbikes I believe are also on a different timeline but will be migrated to zero emissions

[SpeckledJim]

Strangely Brown said:

SpeckledJim said:

The reasons to use it in haulage don’t really apply to cars. But all the downsides do.

That does not answer the question. Why can it not be used for passenger vehicles?

Who is going to build the infrastructure, and who is going to build the cars, and who is going to buy one? And who is going to go first?

Electricity is already everywhere and the cars already make money for manufacturers and work for customers.

Although you don't have 20 minutes to wait to recharge a car, or any other way to get your battery juiced up, almost everyone else either won't need to wait at all, or will be able to find the 20 minutes.

The people for whom this is unacceptable (like yourself) are such a small part of the population that wishing a whole new method of transportation into existence is some of the wishfullest wishing around.

[DonkeyApple]

Strangely Brown said:

Why? If it can be used for haulage and light commercial then why can it not be used for passenger vehicles?

Cost and supply is the short answer.

There are industries that have no choice but to pay the premium for a more more costly fuel that has a lower carbon footprint. The hydrogen industry itself is obviously the biggest customer for green hydrogen and has the greatest need to pay to avoid growing carbon taxes.

Delivery of commercially viable GH remains years away and the existing H2 market will soak up all supply for yet more years.

After that you have essential need markets where using electricity directly as a means to decarbonise remains decades out. The key example here being aviation. This will require the construction of FT plants near the GH production facilities.

Global demand from aviation on its own will soak up all planned capacity.

Road haulage is extremely unlikely to use H2 widely due to its price sensitivity to fuel costs. It's worth noting that existing and near term planned transport solutions involve vehicles such as buses where the taxpayer is underwriting the cost and all the fuel is fossil fuels not GH. Economies are not going to subsidise road haulage just so that it can use an inefficient fuel that doesn't actually exist. Like shipping the immediate steps towards carbon reduction lies in utilising biodiesels, scrubbing exhausts more efficiently and eliminating 'final mile' usage by using EVs.

When it comes to private cars people vote with their wallet. You can see this in the current aversion to EVs by those for whom switching now would cost more money. If consumers can use electricity directly they will not ever pay triple for a less efficient fuel that is manufactured from that electricity. It would be like going into a pub and instead of ordering a pint of beer for £5 choosing to buy a pint of beer for £15 and ordering the barman to pour more than half of it in the sink before handing it to you.

The value of hydrogen lies in the niche needs where a battery or electricity is seen as not a viable solution still in 20-30 years time. Of which there could be many such niche needs beyond just replacing grey hydrogen and several other new industrial uses.

What's key to this is that so much electricity is lost converting it to a gas and then more converting it to a liquid and then even more converting it back to energy that GH is only viable and usable where the initial electricity simply cannot work in any viable way and where there is no other superior liquid fuel alternative such as biofuels etc.

Siemens, Enel and VW are lobbying for a temporary allowance to burn the HIF alcohol within the EU as they need to monetise the Chilean production over the next decade while volume is ramped up to make it viable for the intended industrial markets.

Meanwhile, the U.K. is transitioning all private vehicles to EVs so has no use for any synthetic liquid fuels as we have petrol. We also have nat gas as the infill and fallback to renewables. And any excess in renewables can be dealt with via discounting or exporting. The key for the U.K. is the shortfall side but that's where nat gas covers.

More importantly is that urban centres in the U.K. are currently under political control of groups that aim to remove private cars altogether and are specifically targeting the poorest car users. For people living in the U.K. it's the micro provincial politics that are going to take their car from them not the national policies.

[911hope]

SpeckledJim said:

911hope said:

Strangely Brown said:

Again with the blanket statements. They are not better for ALL cars. They are only better where the use case fits.

You really think that haulage is going to be BEV? I would really love to know how the problem of battery weight and charge time will be addressed for that. Even light commercials don't really work as BEV, at least according to the "EV Transit" owners that I have heard from. Great when empty. Useless when loaded.

So that elephant just refuses to go away. BEV is fine, for many people in their specific circumstances, and that's great, but it is absolutely not the panacea that people seem to think. The future of transport is going to be a mix of technologies because no one of them is appropriate for all use cases.

Is there a specific reason why haulage cannot be electrified?
The vehicles loaded are perhaps 15x the mass of a car, but MPG is <10x worse.


So is there any detailed credible analysis to support the premise that it is impossible?

Today's battery tech (weight) doesn't really work for 150,000 miles a year in a 40 tonner.

It works very well indeed for 15,000 miles in a 2 tonner.

Batteries continue to improve, and for a truck that's running depot to depot, and sitting still for >8 hours a day, maybe in 10 years it'll work fine.

These are sweeping unsupported statements. Where is the supporting analysis?

[SpeckledJim]

911hope said:

SpeckledJim said:

911hope said:

Strangely Brown said:

Again with the blanket statements. They are not better for ALL cars. They are only better where the use case fits.

You really think that haulage is going to be BEV? I would really love to know how the problem of battery weight and charge time will be addressed for that. Even light commercials don't really work as BEV, at least according to the "EV Transit" owners that I have heard from. Great when empty. Useless when loaded.

So that elephant just refuses to go away. BEV is fine, for many people in their specific circumstances, and that's great, but it is absolutely not the panacea that people seem to think. The future of transport is going to be a mix of technologies because no one of them is appropriate for all use cases.

Is there a specific reason why haulage cannot be electrified?
The vehicles loaded are perhaps 15x the mass of a car, but MPG is <10x worse.


So is there any detailed credible analysis to support the premise that it is impossible?

Today's battery tech (weight) doesn't really work for 150,000 miles a year in a 40 tonner.

It works very well indeed for 15,000 miles in a 2 tonner.

Batteries continue to improve, and for a truck that's running depot to depot, and sitting still for >8 hours a day, maybe in 10 years it'll work fine.

These are sweeping unsupported statements. Where is the supporting analysis?

A 40 tonner does, what, about 6mpg? Which in EV terms is about 18mpg equivalent. You need the truck to do, what, 450 miles on a 'tank' if you're going to get 150,000 miles a year out of it.

A Model S with a c.600kg battery does 300 miles at the equivalent of 150mpg. So to do the 450 miles you'd need about a 900kg battery. But to pull the truck instead of push the Tesla you'll need about 8.3 of those batteries. So you're into about 7.5 tons of batteries. So take that out of your payload. And can you put all that weight in the tractor unit?

But this is just today. A few weeks ago there was news of a huge potential step forward in energy density. Maybe in 10 years we're talking 2 tons of batteries, and it all goes fine.

[Pan Pan Pan]

911hope said:

Pan Pan Pan said:

It means nothing, when proponents of EVs desperately try to kid people, that it takes less energy to move a 1200 pound EV battery (which weighs the same when it is empty, as when it is full) than it takes to move a full 70 pound ICE fuel tank (which reduces in weight as the fuel in the tank is consumed)
Add to this that electricity has one of the worst Government fuel factors (Cradle to grave emissions) of any of the fuels available in the UK, where only 43% is produced by renewables, and the rest by fossil fuels and some nuclear.

No-one is moving the fuel store on its own....

So please make rational comparisons...such as...

energy to move a EV, including the battery vs. energy to move ICE car, including the tank( with reducing fuel)

Unless you can dream up a 3 x mass factor (mass EV/Mass ICE car), then your argument is just plain wrong.

These highly selective arguments, where key elements are deliberately left out don't sell your case in the slightest.

In fact you probably don't even believe it yourself.

Edited by 911hope on Sunday 19th March 15:41

I dont know whether to feel shocked, or sorry that some are so desperate to promote EVs, they want people to ignore basic physics and just use flimflam, to try to kid people, that it takes `less' energy to move the 1200 pound weight of an EV battery, than it does to move a the 70 pound weight a (full) ICE petrol tank (including the weight of the fuel tank tank itself) for the same sized vehicles.
Even this does not take into account that the ICE vehicle will get lighter, as its fuel is consumed, whereas a battery in an EV will weigh the same, regardless of whether it is fully charged. or completely empty.
Therefore as the power runs down in an EV battery, more of the power remaining in that battery, must be used (Wasted) to haul around the deadweight of a (STILL) the same weight, but very EMPTY EV battery.
They also seem to ignore the fact that assuming the vehicles they are fitted to are identical, the energy needed to accelerate a 1200 pound EV battery to a specific speed, will be far greater than is needed to accelerate a 70 pound ICE fuel tank to the same speed.

[bigothunter]

SpeckledJim said:

A 40 tonner does, what, about 6mpg? Which in EV terms is about 18mpg equivalent. You need the truck to do, what, 450 miles on a 'tank' if you're going to get 150,000 miles a year out of it.

A Model S with a c.600kg battery does 300 miles at the equivalent of 150mpg. So to do the 450 miles you'd need about a 900kg battery. But to pull the truck instead of push the Tesla you'll need about 8.3 of those batteries. So you're into about 7.5 tons of batteries. So take that out of your payload. And can you put all that weight in the tractor unit?

But this is just today. A few weeks ago there was news of a huge potential step forward in energy density. Maybe in 10 years we're talking 2 tons of batteries, and it all goes fine.

Increase GVM from 44 to 50 tonnes. Manage axle loads so road damage is not exacerbated. Problem solved

[DonkeyApple]

911hope said:

These are sweeping unsupported statements. Where is the supporting analysis?

The problem starts with the capex but is ended by not being able to deliver the enormous electricity demand to the many small and spurious locations that are essential to the efficient movement of long distance haulage.

Ie you could fit the recharge times into the driver mandated rest times on paper but in reality the ability to deliver the power required to the locations used is where it totally collapses.

This is why we can do stuff today with large vehicles that travel very short distances on defined routes and where all journeys begin and end at a depot. Electrifying that is simple, if not hugely expensive. But just consider the typical long distance path and it becomes clear that while batteries blows apart the economic model upon which land haulage has been built the real issue that makes it a non starter is the remote recharging need. It's the size of the power demand in locations where the supply is too small that is the issue.

On the continent you have trials with ideas like overhead cables but it's only logistically feasible a solution at certain points where there is a below average level of road infrastructure.

HGVs were built around cheap and highly flexible diesel fuel and totally reliant on it for most long distance usage.

What will be interesting is to see how something like the Tesla truck gets used by the haulage industry to Mayne do the known, fixed repeat short routes and more importantly the 'final mile' stuff.

[TheBinarySheep]

Pan Pan Pan said:

I dont know whether to feel shocked, or sorry that some are so desperate to promote EVs, they want people to ignore basic physics and just use flimflam, to try to kid people, that it takes `less' energy to move the 1200 pound weight of an EV battery, than it does to move a the 70 pound weight a (full) ICE petrol tank (including the weight of the fuel tank tank itself) for the same sized vehicles.
Even this does not take into account that the ICE vehicle will get lighter, as its fuel is consumed, whereas a battery in an EV will weigh the same, regardless of whether it is fully charged. or completely empty.
Therefore as the power runs down in an EV battery, more of the power remaining in that battery, must be used (Wasted) to haul around the deadweight of a (STILL) the same weight, but very EMPTY EV battery.
They also seem to ignore the fact that assuming the vehicles they are fitted to are identical, the energy needed to accelerate a 1200 pound EV battery to a specific speed, will be far greater than is needed to accelerate a 70 pound ICE fuel tank to the same speed.

If you assume that both are being pushed by the same power source, then yes, it takes more energy to move the battery.

However, in the real world, if you have a 1200kg ICE and a 2000kg EV, and you want to move them both the same distance, the EV will use less energy. That's because let's say you need 3kw to move the ICE vehicle, then because it's only 20% efficient you would actually need 15kw of energy. On the other hand, if the EV needs 6kw to move it, then you'd still only need 7kw to move it because the conversion of energy to kenetic energy is 90% efficient.

At least that's my basic understanding anyway, but happy to be corrected.

[DonkeyApple]

bigothunter said:

Increase GVM from 44 to 50 tonnes. Manage axle loads so road damage is not exacerbated. Problem solved

Put a 200% tax on non essential consumer imports. Problem gone altogether.

Haulage is primarily not a cause of pollution but a symptom of excess consumption which in itself can only occurs when enables by excess consumer lending.

Most of the haulage issue can be instantly remedied by removing the root cause of much of that haulage but it might upset some people to lose their credit card or see everything in Dunelm quadruple in price.

But it does all come back to BLT. Buying Less Tat.

[SpeckledJim]

bigothunter said:

SpeckledJim said:

A 40 tonner does, what, about 6mpg? Which in EV terms is about 18mpg equivalent. You need the truck to do, what, 450 miles on a 'tank' if you're going to get 150,000 miles a year out of it.

A Model S with a c.600kg battery does 300 miles at the equivalent of 150mpg. So to do the 450 miles you'd need about a 900kg battery. But to pull the truck instead of push the Tesla you'll need about 8.3 of those batteries. So you're into about 7.5 tons of batteries. So take that out of your payload. And can you put all that weight in the tractor unit?

But this is just today. A few weeks ago there was news of a huge potential step forward in energy density. Maybe in 10 years we're talking 2 tons of batteries, and it all goes fine.

Increase GVM from 44 to 50 tonnes. Manage axle loads so road damage is not exacerbated. Problem solved

Indeed, I bet that's going to be the answer. Rather than hydrogen, anyway.

What does a tractor unit already weigh though, and is adding 7.5 tons of battery a go-er? Surely it won't be practical to add the batteries to the trailer units, given how they outnumber the tractors.