A Ban on petrol and diesel cars.
New cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel will not be sold in the UK from 2030, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.
But some hybrids would still be allowed, he confirmed.
One again we have politicians who think they know what they are doing and are so absorbed by their own hubris, they cannot see outside their own tiny bubble.
Technology changes and can change things pretty quickly. In 1900 man had not made a powered flight, in July 1969, men were stepping onto the surface of the moon. Politicians didn’t do this – people did. Okay, two world wars and a cold war also drove things forward, but I’m not suggesting that we have another one of those.
Look at computer technology and how that has advanced in the last two decades. At my age, I can recall a world without the Internet, whereas today it is ubiquitous.
My point there is that we do not need politicians poking their noses in setting timescales. It is entirely possible that technology will make the ICE redundant in the next couple of decades. It will do that all of its own, driven by inventiveness and customer demand.
All that the government will do here is create a rushed product that is unfit for purpose. At the moment, electric vehicles simply lack both the infrastructure and range to make them a practical alternative to the ICE powered vehicle – and let’s not forget here that an electric vehicle is not by any stretch of the imagination a green alternative. It merely doesn’t produce emissions in use, thereby making the government and the end user feel good about themselves while offsetting the damage to some poor kid in Africa who has to dig out the raw materials.
Of course, Boris can make this decree, having long left office when the results of his idiocy comes home to roost. So why would he care?
THE question to ask all those in favour of this lunacy – Where is the electricity going to come from to power all these electric vehicles?
Unicorn farts.
Solar panels, on the equator, that shadow a wide band of rain forests, thus killing them off ?
I’m waiting for electric motorbikes to get above 200 miles range in general, then I’ll have one.
15 years time the Grauniad will be running articles about all the dangerous metals contained in electric vehicle batteries, and the Daily Fail will be telling us how immigrants are stealing said batteries for sale on the black market….
The same thing happened in Cuba, so everyone drove around in carefully repaired 25 year old clunkers.
Seems Princess Nut Nuts has won.
Those clunkers are still there and more like 60 year old now. The US embargo on Cuba came in on October 19th 1960.
The one thing I was greatly pleased to see though was support for the modular reactors the Rolls Royce consortium are in the process of developing. This is what is needed in the real world to provide real electricity to real users. At least there are a few inside the Wehrmacht high command on the side of reality.
As for the the rest of it – milk floats being just the most egregious example – pure London bubble/wankerati wet dream (moisture and electricity typically don’t mix well). Doubtless there will be a plethora of “consultants” and other assorted parasites who will get a few good years milking it before aforementioned reality rears its ugly head.
2030. Yeh right! (actually that’s when I’ll be 70 and my licence expires. I’ll be driving a real car long after though)
I couldn’t possibly afford an electric car. I travel long distances and a tankful of petrol takes me 500 miles and i fill up in 5 mins. When will these Londoncentric people realise how we live in the sticks !!!
The lithium ion battery in a car will burn, unaided for 8 hours. If you’ve ever set fire to a mobile phone battery, you’ll find they burn like a marine flare. Hot and vigorous. An electric vehicle fire will burn through tarmac quite easily.
The battery technology is here and works now, what is lacking is the infrastructure.
Given a fat enough cable, there are batteries in existence that can be charged from zero to full in zero seconds. They simply change state in a binary fashion. The cable would need to be about 18″ thick mind.
What if I were to tell you, that the tech you think is here and works, is obsolete. Li-on batteries are expensive to make and use a lot of natural resources, including fossil fuels. EV manufacturers should be (and some already are) looking at OLD technologies. Trevor Jackson has just come up with an aluminium-air fuel cell which has loads of advantages –
Can be made from recycled drinks cans and can be infinitely recycled at small cost.
No bigger than a child’s lunch box
Needs no infrastructure because Al-air cannot be recharged. A battery swap takes 1.5 minutes end to end. Garages could stock these on a service exchange basis and send the dead ones for recycling.
Range is about 1,500 miles
The electrolyte is so safe you can drink it without any ill effects.
I’m hoping that this guy doesn’t end up in Stan Meyers shoes.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/20/uk-man-invents-aluminum-air-battery-in-his-garage/
They will have to pry my diesel out of my cold dead hands.
Li-on batteries are old hat.
Speaking with an ex-colleague who is working on a biological battery that is ready for market, bar the infrastructure issue of charging it… Goes from ‘off’ to ‘on’ instantaneously, given enough amperage.
However…as with any battery there is gonna be a weigh off between weight and range, so I’ve yet to see a dense enough cell that’ll power an HGV for a required distance.
I was talking with someone from the local Fire & Rescue recently (male, therefore “a fireman”). The impression that I got was that F & R are scared silly by the batteries in hybrid cars and will wait for the fire to go out before weeing on it!
It’s reassuring that National Grid say that they will be able to deliver all the electricity required to consumers – whether or not the generators will be able to generate enough is a different matter. And that’s without “smart” meters allowing users to buy electricity!
The lithium ion battery in a car will burn, unaided for 8 hours. If you’ve ever set fire to a mobile phone battery, you’ll find they burn like a marine flare. Hot and vigorous. An electric vehicle fire will burn through tarmac quite easily.
There’s also the little matter of what ‘battery industry professionals’ (such as my brother) refer to as ‘fade’. Hands up everyone whose mobile phone or tablet device lasts as long on power now as when they bought it? Constant recharging results in fairly rapid tail-off of performance, a well-understood relationship. So, there’s going to be a need for replacement fairly regularly. Good luck with that environmentalists.
I think that the plan is that the proles don’t have cars any more.
Stoneground has it spot on; the plan is that ordinary people, that’s you and me in the unlikely event that I survive that long, won’t own cars at all.
But there will be Zil lanes.
It was mentioned in a recent conversation that the London based politburo are happy for electric cars to produce no exhaust pollution, even if it means 10 year old African children suffer from mining the heavy metals needed for the batteries. Perhaps the long term plan is to ship white kids over there (offspring of politburo members not included) to do the work because BLM.