Electric Griffith

[voso1]

With JLR in difficulty regarding diesel engines I was wondering about future impact on large petrol engines-- for instance the Ford 5Ltr quad cam V8 to be fitted to the new Griff. Electric vehicles seem to be doing reasonably well of late. Dyson are working on batteries and they intend to start production of an electric car in 2020. With TVR Griffith delivery date, as i believe, now delayed maybe TVR and Dyson should get together and who knows we may get a TVR Electric world beater!
Vincent Smith.

[phillpot]

What could possibly go wrong

[RayTVR]

Maybe it could vacuum its own garage at the same time..

[griffdude]

RayTVR said:

Maybe it could vacuum its own garage at the same time..

Now that IS funny.🤪🤪

[anonymous-user]

Dyson. The most inept company, led by a grumpy mad bloke joining forces with one of the most colourful car companies. What could possibly go wrong?

[Sardonicus]

Electric TVR

[ChimpOnGas]

Sardonicus said:

Electric TVR

I think we need to accept the future is coming, and for cars that means we are all going to be driving an electric car within the next 10 years.

Now with that out of the way where does that leave the classic car world?

Well people are already converting classics to electric propulsion, we've seen everything from VW camper vans, to Jag E-Types to Porsche 911s and Beetles all successfully converted in recent years, my guess is this will be an truly credible option for some moving forward, and often the predictions of science fiction films where we see retro looking cars buzzing about under almost silent electric power.

Retro will always be cool, nostalgia sees to that, and the more and more we migrate to electric powered high tech space ship cars for our everyday transport the more a certain community will see it as hyper cool to be moving about amongst them in something designed in the 1960's.

For me the elephant in the room these guys executing electric conversions on classics are completely missing is that the internal combustion engine in a classic car is a fundamental element of it's character and personality. To remove the internal combustion engine from a classic is to literally rip the heart out of the vehicle and removes a significant percentage of its soul. The sounds, vibrations and smells produced by an internal combustion engine in a classic are so bound up in the ownership experience to remove it is to change that experience so fundamentally as to make the vehicle a completely different entity.

However, we must accept the war against pollution is not going away, as everyday internal combustion engine vehicles decline and the roads fill up with more and more zero tail pipe emission vehicles one thing is for sure, its going to feel ever more uncomfortable driving about amongst them in a car that makes noise and smells. I guarantee you the next thing to happen is the ordinary driver running about all smug in his electric vehicle will start to look down on people still driving an internal combustion engined vehicle.

Much like smokers are now shunned by the mainstream population a strong and negative social stigma will be applied to drivers of cars with an internal combustion engine, at the same time the government is going to catch us at the other end by creating regulations that make it harder and harder for drivers of internal combustion vehicles to use their car, we can already see this happening with ULEZ.

Some dispensation may be given to historic vehicles but it will come with rules, restricted use rules that mean you'll need to prove you are driving to or from a car show and such like, and rules that limit your total annual mileage in your classic to just a few thousand.

This leads us to look at ways of reducing the tailpipe emissions on a classic car without tearing the very soul from it and turning it into some sort of milk float with retro car looks. We are already seeing companies marketing catalytic converters for classic, however given just how much unburnt fuel passed through a carburetor fed car's tailpipe and how a catalytic converter actually works you have to ask the question just how long such cat systems will last on a classic before all the reactive precious metals are completely washed away and the thing becomes completely useless?

That leads us to putting the old classic on a far more efficient fuel system such as injection disguised as a carb, these Webber lookalike throttle body injection setups already exist from the likes of Jenvey. Once youre on injection you can start to seriously look again at fitting catalytic converters which will now have a decent life and will go a long way to cleaning up the now fuel injected classic car.

The next step on your now injected and cat equipped classic is to get in burning a far lower carbon fuel than petrol, the car is now ready for you to convert to a modern sequential LPG injection system which will massively clean up combustion by adding a super law carbon fuel to the package of other improvements.

In the future I can see companies popping up who offer a service to massively clean up your classic, it may not be enough for the classic to be given dispensation because by that time there simply wont be any modern internal combustion cars on the roads so you'll still be seen as a leper. But there will be a market for technology that cleans up a classic car because classic car owners themselves will be a new younger generation with modern thinking that want to get into the classic hobby but do so with a clean conscience.

To be honest the answer may not be LPG, it is after all a byproduct of refining oil to get at petrol and diesel ect so with no more demand for these fuels as everyone goes electric LPG will disappear too. Perhaps the answer lies in another gaseous fuel, one that has no carbon at all. Petrol, diesel and even LPG are all hydrocarbons that is they are a mix of hydrogen and carbon, so what if you just made the engine run on pure hydrogen, what happens then?

Well I tell you what happens, all that comes out of the tailpipe of your old classic is pure water!

In my opinion converting a classic to electric power kills it's soul, convert it to burn pure hydrogen however and it sounds and drives just like it would on petrol.... but now the only thing to exit the tail pipe is pure non polluting and even drinkable H2O (water). As such I'd say hydrogen is the answer to cleaning up classics, and with a network of hydrogen stations growing on virtually a monthly basis to support hydrogen fuel cell cars, the infrastructure will be there to make a hydrogen fed internal combustion engine classic car a very real and practical proposition.

Dave.

[Zeb74]

I see at least an exception, a classic car where the engine is not the soul but a mistake, the Citroen DS. An electric DS, this is the kind of transformation I would accept to drive.
And I think that you're right (unfortunately :-)) even if I think that electric cars are not mature enough in term of:
- ratio weight versus range
- production environment costs
- power availability to charge millions of car in our countries (few weeks ago in France, we were close to the limit of the network at 9PM and EDF has asked to industrial companies to decrease their consumption)
- mondial usage. Norwegians are using massively electric cars, fine... the whole amount of vehicles of this country is the number of new cars sold every month in China. So, ok, in Europe we will maybe reach a 0 emission trafic but what about Asia, Africa, South America (and even USA as Trump just has withdrawn fiscal advantages)?
I don't want to say that we have nothing to do because it's too late or because it will generate a very little impact, but I think that we should not put all our effort on electricity but also to keep on working on petrol engines as this is still the future for half of the planet.

[Sardonicus]

I wouldn't own a classic no matter how fast leccy driven , like hit on already many classic cars revolve around their internal combustion engine OK some classics dont but I wouldn't own one so .... thankfully this tech is reeling in in my later years I cant strike up any passion for this stuff whatsoever a Tesla for example would reduce me to tears just an opinion if others are ready for this change good luck to you guess I am one of the many unfortunates of that opinion that wont be

[Zeb74]

I guess that few years ago, when a new way to travel appeared, which was missing of a proper infrastructure, with the fear to have an empty tank during your trip with no way to fill it in, and, with a risk to have an unknown mechanism breaking down, people were also afraid to change. And lots of them have kept their horses instead of those evil smoking machines called automotive .
Sometimes I'm in the same mood I guess.

[chris212]

I think in the distant future people will crave a combustion engine. The dirtier and noisier the better. They’ll be bored of silent soulless transport that’s being introduced.
We may have to go underground- arranging track days in heavily wooded surroundings!!
Of course I’m talking about those of the petrolhead persuasion, not the planet saving carrot crunchers that don’t understand the massive pollution their HP7 powered vehicles cause firstly being produced, then making the bloody electric in the first place!
What’s next? BBC replacing Top Gear with Top Watt?!
Of course we’ll all end up with electric as a daily user as that maybe the only option ( like the sound of Hydrogen though) , but keep the TVR’s as they where meant to be ( just keep them well hidden when the Gestapo come knocking asking for your papers (V5C document!!)😬

[nawarne]

As Zeb has mentioned, the UK (and I guess several European countries) are already running on the 'blood-line' in terms of electricity generation....I seem to recall that recently, a senior figure in the power industry mentioned that with the closure of (most?) of the coal burning stations, the UK has about 3% spare capacity.

The upshot is that should one of the nuclear or gas turbine stations fall over, then we'll be into a "brown-out" situation as the grid starts to suffer.

Add to this, the un-preparedness of the country as a whole to charge our 30 million vehicles then the reality is that internal combustion will be here for a while. I certainly can't see Mr. Stobart giving up 7 tonnes of payload capacity to change to electric tractor units.

I appreciate that advances in battery and motor technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds....but, it is the charging infrastructure that is lagging.

All IMHO - Nick

[SpudLink]

ChimpOnGas said:

...Interesting thoughts on how to modernise classic car engines...

What a brilliant post!
It was a long and roundabout way to say hydrogen is the future, but it was very good argument.

[voso1]

this is great!!,
When I started this post I thought it might make some comments. This is far above what I thought. Well done to all who posted.
I must say that the disposal of old batteries in years to come, if electric cars take a strong foothold of the market is something that is of concern.
Hydrogen is favorite with me. I cant help thinking TVR are not well prepared for the future. Such a pity.

[blitzracing]

The technology already exists to suck C02 out of the atmosphere (an no doubt some water) and turn it into a petrol equivalent. You can extract what you need from anywhere on the planet, and use solar energy (I think as heat directly) to make the chemistry work, so it makes sense to set this up in hot areas on the planet. Apparently about 100,000 of these conversion plants will be enough (less than the current number of power stations on the planet) and it will prevent the planet from overheating. The best bit is we have the infrastructure in place already for liquid fuel and the internal combustion engine.

Why is the world missing this!!

https://www.facebook.com/VICEAustralia/videos/2143...tn=%2CdC-R-R&eid=ARDVoFXC4qrKWBosMAIseXd-PKxYMF3mXoHWcKQpIp5v5Pn-23cpvLqJNLACiSXB_t_a6xOJAMumm7FY&hc_ref=ARTQxdUSN8sEqanqEFTRvO5Y79cZL2GcYNsh74BCyMAv-8xMrI6ZO_O9NPU7bLSE75E&fref=nf

Edited by blitzracing on Wednesday 16th January 11:49

[Bluebottle]

yonex said:

Dyson. The most inept company, led by a grumpy mad bloke joining forces with one of the most colourful car companies. What could possibly go wrong?

Did you work with him in the past as well?

[ChimpOnGas]

SpudLink said:

ChimpOnGas said:

...Interesting thoughts on how to modernise classic car engines...

What a brilliant post!
It was a long and roundabout way to say hydrogen is the future, but it was very good argument.

Hydrogen fueled internal combustion engines are not a new idea, BMW did lots of work on it around 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7

While the concept was proven to work extremely well hydrogen does come with some challenges, these are much the same challenges people considering an LPG conversion should study before committing, only more so!

For example LPG actually has a calorific value higher than petrol when it's in it's liquid state but we tend to burn it as a gas , as soon as you allow the compressed fuel to return to it's natural gaseous state it has a calorific value around 18% less than petrol. So if you want your LPG converted car to have the same range as it did when it was running on petrol you need to carry 18% more of the stuff.

Additional fuel requires additional space, worse still it adds additional weight to the vehicle which further impacts on its fuel economy, you then need a super strong and very heavy steel tank or tanks to hold the stuff safely under compression which again adds additional weight. LPG must be held compressed as a liquid or you'd need a massive Dad's Army bag of gas on the roof just to get to the next town, depending on temperature LPG must be compressed up to 250psi to change it from a gas to a liquid.





Hydrogen is quite a bit lower in calorific value than even LPG so you may need as much as twice as much of it to give you the range of the converted petrol vehicle, this or you just settle for half the range. Now consider that while it only takes 150-250psi (depending on ambient temperature) to turn LPG from a gas into a liquid, to turn hydrogen from a gas into a liquid takes a whopping 5,000psi!

Yes I did say five thousand PSI....

This requires immensely strong tanks made from woven carbon fiber, obviously we have the technology to hold compressed hydrogen in a car already, hydrogen fuel cell cars are doing it just fine. But the low calorific value of hydrogen does still mean either carrying twice the amount of fuel which often is completely impractical, or accepting you need to half the range of the converted vehicle.

Saying all that hydrogen is definitely by the best solution for the environmentally conscious classic car owner who wants to retain their internal combustion engine

[Sardonicus]

Not sure I would be happy about a pressure vessel containing 5,000 psi in my mode of transport 150 psi goes off like a grenade as is and will break & pull limbs out or worse still death , I dont care what construction the cell is accidents happen and running figures like that so does the possibility of failure

[ChimpOnGas]

Sardonicus said:

Not sure I would be happy about a pressure vessel containing 5,000 psi in my mode of transport 150 psi goes off like a grenade as is and will break & pull limbs out or worse still death , I dont care what construction the cell is accidents happen and running figures like that so does the possibility of failure

I'm with you mate, but you have to consider a pure oxygen internal combustion engine conversion would really be no different to a compressed natural gas conversion, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of CNG vehicles in the world

CNG must be compressed at 2,900 to 3,600 psi to turn from a gas into a liquid.

Do you have a set of oxy/acetylene bottles in your workshop?

If so much like my LPG cylinders in my TVR while the acetylene cylinder will only have a pressure of 250 psi, the oxygen cylinder is at 2,200 psi, so the chances are you've spent much of your working life stood right next to a 2,200 psi cylinder ..... and you haven't died yet

[RobXjcoupe]

Just quickly reading through, I read a few years back that the lithium reserves are all based in China and that there isn’t enough to build enough batteries to power the amount of transport the world currently needs.
I personally think the hybrid electric vehicle is the next step forward where as a minimal battery is used for say 100mile range but also the internal combustion engine is used not to propel the vehicle but turns on to charge the onboard batteries and just be an onboard generator. A tiny cc combustion engine is all that’s needed and will give a massive increase in mpg and lower exhaust emissions.
The problem with a 100% electric vehicle is that power stations have to create emissions to generate the constant electricity used for charging said vehicles! Unless everything is wind or tidal generated. That will still take years to create enough surplus capacity. Let’s face it. Sticking an electric motor in something is the easy bit. Saying it produces zero emissions is stating the blinking obvious. Generating enough electricity to charge the endless amount of modern battery powered gadgets and now battery powered cars is something the average person forgets about.
Another idea to reduce the emissions and load on the electricity supply is perhaps a re-design of the steam engine. A battery powered heating system to obviously boil water and create the steam and then a more modern and efficient steam engine itself to propel a vehicle or train or bus or ship.
Just my thoughts