Electric cars

[71 Trans Am]

Over the past Fifteen years i have worked alongside some of the very best electric vehicle engineers and listened to lectures from some of the most intelligent and clued up people who know and understand whether or not this electric vehicle thing can ever really work on a large scale and the opinion of most is No it can't - Recently three of these engineers are now working with Hitachi and an Undisclosed investor on Quantum Locking or otherwise known as Flux Pinning using Super Conductors and are trying to develop a zero energy loss drive which at the moment can only be achieved at sub zero temperatures but still early days - Here are a couple of primitive clips which are on Youtube the technology is already being used but in a different form - The new idea is to create a drive that can be used in road vehicles - You will get the general idea

[Aargent]

I know that I keep banging on about it but more and more the answer is Hydrogen China has just engaged an Edinburgh company in the quest to go with Hydrogen Cells, BMW and other manufacturers are developing Hydrogen Cell powered cars , there are Hydrogen powered Busses and Trains and once the manufacturing costs and processes are improved and are down probably by scale that is the answer only emission is water vapour. There are places in America with Hydrogen at Filling stations but the problem is until there are Filling station at sufficient Petrol stations people won't buy Hydrogen powered cars and until there are sufficient Hydrogen powered cars the companies won't put in the pumps,

[trevnhil]

In today's News the Cyprus Government has increased the money available to purchasers of Electric cars

https://in-cyprus.com/450-applications- ... -extended/

[Devil]

I know that I keep banging on about it but more and more the answer is Hydrogen China has just engaged an Edinburgh company in the quest to go with Hydrogen Cells, BMW and other manufacturers are developing Hydrogen Cell powered cars , there are Hydrogen powered Busses and Trains and once the manufacturing costs and processes are improved and are down probably by scale that is the answer only emission is water vapour. There are places in America with Hydrogen at Filling stations but the problem is until there are Filling station at sufficient Petrol stations people won't buy Hydrogen powered cars and until there are sufficient Hydrogen powered cars the companies won't put in the pumps,

Sorry, hydrogen is NOT a fuel. It is an inefficient means of transporting energy from another source. Either
1) the hydrogen is manufactured by stripping the carbon out of a hydrocarbon, e.g., natural gas. This requires considerable energy, so the process is inefficient
OR
2) the hydrogen is manufactured by electrolysing water i.e. passing an electric current through the water. That current must come from a source e.g., a power station (inefficient) or solar/wind (even more inefficient due to intermittency).

In either case, the energy used in manufacturing the hydrogen is considerably higher than the energy available from the produced hydrogen. In other words, the energy available at the wheels driving a vehicle is much less than the energy available from the original energy source, even discounting the inefficiency of the fuel cell converting the hydrogen back into electricity to drive the car. The overall efficiency going via hydrogen is, de facto, considerably lower than that of using the same energy to charge a battery driving the car. Hydrogen is very unlikely to become mainstream unless you build extra power sources to fuel the overall inefficiency.

I won't touch on the safety issues.

[J B]

Given that the UK is already close to generating capacity, where will the additional electricity come from?

H i C
You obviously don't understand - this electricity just comes by magic out of the sockets in the wall
It has no infrastructure costs and is just there at the flick of a switch whenever you want it!

Has any politician actually thought these things through?

Did you actually think that sentence through .... ?

[emgee]

I gave a neighbour, a UK resident, a lift into Pafos a short while ago. He asked me where the charging things were for electric cars. Having lived here for 16 years, I had no idea what he was talking about, apparently they are all over the UK.

Alan

[Aargent]

I know that I keep banging on about it but more and more the answer is Hydrogen China has just engaged an Edinburgh company in the quest to go with Hydrogen Cells, BMW and other manufacturers are developing Hydrogen Cell powered cars , there are Hydrogen powered Busses and Trains and once the manufacturing costs and processes are improved and are down probably by scale that is the answer only emission is water vapour. There are places in America with Hydrogen at Filling stations but the problem is until there are Filling station at sufficient Petrol stations people won't buy Hydrogen powered cars and until there are sufficient Hydrogen powered cars the companies won't put in the pumps,

Sorry, hydrogen is NOT a fuel. It is an inefficient means of transporting energy from another source. Either
1) the hydrogen is manufactured by stripping the carbon out of a hydrocarbon, e.g., natural gas. This requires considerable energy, so the process is inefficient
OR
2) the hydrogen is manufactured by electrolysing water i.e. passing an electric current through the water. That current must come from a source e.g., a power station (inefficient) or solar/wind (even more inefficient due to intermittency).

In either case, the energy used in manufacturing the hydrogen is considerably higher than the energy available from the produced hydrogen. In other words, the energy available at the wheels driving a vehicle is much less than the energy available from the original energy source, even discounting the inefficiency of the fuel cell converting the hydrogen back into electricity to drive the car. The overall efficiency going via hydrogen is, de facto, considerably lower than that of using the same energy to charge a battery driving the car. Hydrogen is very unlikely to become mainstream unless you build extra power sources to fuel the overall inefficiency.

I won't touch on the safety issues.

Every time I mention Hydrogen you come up with the same answer and quote a rather old article to prove your point. The trouble is that you wrote the article yourself.
Here is some information to back up the use of Hydrogen

China want to create a “ Hydrogen Society “
https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/ ... al-1365920
Hydrogen powered trains
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ered-train
Hydrogen powered cars available today
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hydr ... -for-sale/
Hydrogen Bus myths
https://blog.ballard.com/top-4-myths-ab ... ered-buses

They can't all be wrong!

[71 Trans Am]

I also believe that hydrogen is not dead in the water yet – I have also witnessed an engine running on other inert gasses years ago I saw one running on Carbon dioxide which was fired across a diesel glow plug and it did achieve some speed but not practical. I do think the flux motors could be the way forward.
Roughly how it was explained to me by one of the development engineers was when you were younger you would have done experiments at school with two magnets – You separate them put them on a table in the repel position and one will push the other along – Imagine an electric motor with the outside casing (The Stator) and the shaft ( The Rotor) both covered in precharged magnets and the motor stands still
If you could tilt the magnets on the rotor and the stator so they repel each other you then have free drive in either clockwise or anticlockwise direction – This has always been common knowledge but the problem was the ability to tilt the magnets by radio control because the magnetic field always interfered with this so the idea was left for dead.
But now advances in technology refining the use of Super conductors and the flux pinning principle to give low energy loss along with WiFi – GPS and 5G technology the magnets can be tilted to produce low or zero friction drive The ideal result combining these some of which has already been achieved by Tesla is that you have a vehicle which will drive at minimum cost with zero emissions will never collide with another vehicle can be speed limited by satellite in every location so no more speeding tickets and will get you to your destination by the shortest route in the quickest time by entering a post code or coordinates and I was told there is a long way to go yet but in theory it is worth the research

[Devil]

I won't comment on these articles but they all cast much doubt on hydrogen as a solution to replace carbon (and there are plenty more where they came from). I didn't write any of them and they are probably all more recent than my website.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... -problems/
https://www.greenoptimistic.com/hydroge ... fficiency/
https://energypost.eu/hydrogen-fuel-cel ... ll-expert/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtemple ... on-energy/
https://www.designnews.com/content/hydr ... 3426749923
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles ... aring-hype
https://reneweconomy.com.au/hydrogen-ho ... ype-85164/
https://thinkprogress.org/elon-musk-is- ... 37a4c9bee/
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/st ... stion.html

The following diagram explains exactly what I've written in my previous post; it is extracted from the last reference in my list.

2020-02-06_113522.jpg (66.51 KiB) Viewed 3255 times

[Aargent]

As with every discussion there are two sides, I remember when Standard produced a Diesel Vanguard with a top speed of 40 mph and people said no one would buy Diesel cars, you can now buy a Diesel, Porsche Panera 4S with a top speed of 177mph and 0- 62 in 4.5 sec.
We shall have to agree to disagree on Hydrogen power, but never say never.

[PolemIan]

Notwithstanding the quantum locking idea, there is still the elephant in the room that there are not enough raw materials on the planet produce all the batteries required to meet all the projections for EV production. I guess The added weight also impact the net efficiency and means the vehicles have to be built with stronger materials to carry the extra weight? There seems to be a gap between targets and commercial / resource availability reality.

Ian

[71 Trans Am]

This statement released this afternoon confirms Hitachi involvement in R&D and i wonder if Nissan is the undisclosed Investor ?

Behind the scenes of Nissan’s 230-mile autonomous drive in the UK

AOL.News
Feb 6th 2020 3.20pm
Today, Nissan has revealed that in November 2019, one of its Leaf electric hatchbacks drove from the firm's technical centre in Cranfield, Milton Keynes, 230 miles north to its Sunderland factory using autonomous driving technology.
Today, we're in Cranfield to speak to the team behind HumanDrive, a £13.5 million government-backed project that's trying to advance autonomous vehicle technology with a focus on giving them more human driving characteristics. This is the team behind that 'Grand Drive' last year.
An autonomous Leaf travelled 230 miles on UK roads in November last year, Nissan has revealed. (Nissan)
The various partners involved in the project all brought their own abilities to the table, such as Nissan, which provided vehicles and leads the autonomous vehicle development, Hitachi, which is focusing on artificial intelligence and 'machine learning', and the University of Leeds, which uses its world-leading driving simulator to study how people drive and their responses to autonomous driving.
Each Leaf is fitted with advanced technology that can map the vehicle's surrounding, including high definition cameras and LIDAR, which shoots light beams into the surroundings and measures how long it takes to return to the source. This helps to create a constantly updating, highly detailed 360-degree image around the car.
Military-grade GPS helps the vehicle know exactly where it is in the world, and on-board software reads all of this data to ensure the car travels safely through it.
At this stage, Nissan says it is working with the technology in its simplest form to make sure it nails the basics. Therefore, the car cannot be dropped in a random location and given a random destination to figure out its own path through the world; instead, its path must be mapped by human drivers first so the vehicle can follow.
Radars and cameras work together to interpret the world around them so the car can travel safely along the road. (Nissan)
Though that's initially disappointing – it was perhaps optimistic to think fully self driving cars are already here – the technology on show is still incredibly impressive, because it has to adapt to the chaos that surrounds it. While it's following said route, it has to deal with being cut up by cars on the motorway, know when to safely enter a roundabout, and stop at traffic lights when they're red.
On a 13-mile test route on real roads near the base – including a busy M1 motorway – where it's perhaps most impressive is on the country lanes surrounding the Cranfield base. The central dividing lines are faded, the road surface is atrocious, and vehicles of various sizes speed towards you on the other side of the road. The vehicle is simply sticking to its mapped route, but it's doing so with incredible accuracy and while also knowing what's a hazard and what isn't.
At no point did I feel nervous about the fact the 'driver' isn't holding the wheel, nor when we pull up to a T junction and wait for a gap to enter traffic.
Nissan has been developing its own 'intelligence' systems, which are what's fitted to the car that did that epic 230-mile drive, but project partner Hitachi has been working to give that a more human characteristic. It's a key focus of the project, hoping to make passengers feel safer and more comfortable if it feels like a person driving – like going "from a taxi to an expert chauffeur", according to Nissan.
Hitachi's software still uses pre-planned routes for simplicity's sake, but here technology takes the 3D image of the world the sensors 'see' and interprets it based on huge amounts of data it has collected from analysing how real drivers react to certain situations.