Paphos Life

This is not the first time that somebody has come up with the idea of speed control. It has been shown to increase the number of accidents simply because drivers cannot accelerate out of a tight situation that they have found themselves in, often through no fault of their own.

Devil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 3:51 pm This is not the first time that somebody has come up with the idea of speed control. It has been shown to increase the number of accidents simply because drivers cannot accelerate out of a tight situation that they have found themselves in, often through no fault of their own.

Agree with the above, but at the same time I never saw the point of a car that can do 130 mph when the speed limit is 70.
Surely a top speed of ,say 90 mph, would be enough to allow for overtaking or that wee be it of oomph to get you out of a tight spot.

Tesla Have had this technology fitted to their vehicles for 5 years now it is connected to their guidance mapping system and when you enter a 30mph zone from say a 50mph zone the car automatically drops the speed but it can be overridden ie switched off

I agree with Mouse, on the whole. If you motor from Cape Greco to Polis, obeying the letter of the law, there may only be a minute or two difference in the arrival time, whether in a Ferrari or a Fiat. And I bet you would arrive more laid-back in the Fiat because the Ferrari driver would be on tenterhooks all the time trying to overtake the vehicle in front of him.

Where I disagree with our favourite rodent this is in the last sentence. You quote the two extremes but the reality lies in the middle.

Cappielow1 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:23 pm I never saw the point of a car that can do 130 mph when the speed limit is 70.

You may want to drive where there is no speed limit. Like e.g. on German motorways. Sales of cars with automatic throttling would probably be negatively affected in Germany.

They used to have a bell fitted in the Middle East that used to ring if you went over 120 kph but most people just ignored it.
I don't find speeding excessive in Cyprus you get the odd idiot but generally most take it steady and even on the motorway most drivers stick to around 110 kph.
As Lloyd said there will be a cottage industry disabling them or a gadget to modify the output.

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Reading this thread, I dont know why , but this song keeps playing in my mind?



https://youtu.be/Y9mRl9tW3kE

mouse
I think Tesla were probably just making full use of the Sat Nav Guidance system - If you were someone who was concerned about going over the speed limit as you drive through different areas then this is a good thing = If your not bothered you could turn it off - Except when you have the car on autopilot as then it does exactly what the guidance system tells it to do. - I think that at some point in the future when the majority of vehicles are electric and Satellite controlled this will be permanently switched on to avoid speeding - If the technology is there why not put it to use .

71 Trans Am wrote: ↑Sat Aug 21, 2021 11:15 am I think that at some point in the future when the majority of vehicles are electric and Satellite controlled this will be permanently switched on to avoid speeding

Maybe not! When you add bells and whistles to electric cars, you reduce the kilometrage on a charge. Every single milliampere sucked out of a battery would be considered as undesirable and I'm sure that the car manufacturers are aware of a problem. I have a hybrid which, theoretically, should not have this problem, yet the lighting of the instruments can be problematic at times. I'm sure a full-blooded all-electric vehicle will also have some limitations on the battery discharge. A

I doubt whether the power loss would even exist - Tesla are connected to the mapping system the second you switch them on anyway with the option of being connected even when not switched on for location purposes and with battery technology getting better every day and more options being added to every new model i think that the speed monitor is of little concern in the grand scheme of things

Mouse
You are correct --- https://insideevs.com/news/526536/gac-a ... -charging/

And yet to be independently verified - What the article does not say is how many batteries exploded trying to reach this achievement -
Nissan are also working on Lithium Gel Batteries for fast charge - The electricity has always been available to whack into the battery at super fast rates
But the battery is not available yet to take it - They are now going down the route of using the same technology as toy car superfast charge Lipo Batteries which can take a very fast charge but at the moment get very hot - The end plan is to develop a cooling lithium gel pack that can take the fast charge without getting hot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_p ... C%20or,gel)%20polymers%20form%20this%20electrolyte.

A friend of ours recently bought an all electric car and has decided it's the worst mistake he's ever made.
The charging time takes forever and the limited amount of charging points throughout the island means there are queues which add to the journey times.
He asked the dealer to take it back and replace it with a hybrid but was refused. Don't think I'll be going down that route (pun intended) anytime soon.

We are looking at replacing the wifes Toyota Yaris and the price difference between a standard petrol and a Hybrid is around €5,000.
Is it worth paying an extra five grand on a vehicle that only occasionally goes further than Coral Bay. Even road tax differences are negligible and insurance costs more. There has to be incentives, price wise, which at the moment don't exist. Remember in the UK when deisels were the best thing since sliced bread and anyone who owns one inow s a pariah.
As for fuel storage, the UK has enough fuel stored to last several years. Up at Zygi there's a new storage facility for the Cypriot fuel reserve

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/uk-oi ... 20reserves).

I don´t understand why nobody is talking about renewable fuels like biodiesel. A mate of mine back in the 80ies already had a modified diesel car (Audi) which would even run on sunflower oil (which he bought lots of at the local supermarket and used as it as fuel because it was cheaper than diesel).

I think there's a Bio-Deisel plant on the industrial estate by Agia Vavara.

We have two different situations here and we must be careful to differentiate the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Firstly, the UK has an enormous advantage of adequate wind. You may say that the wind does not blow all the time; that is true at any given place. However, today is an excellent example of worst-case conditions. The whole of the UK is in the grips of a high-pressure zone or anticyclone, where wind levels are fairly low over a large part of the country; thus wind generation may be lower than average. BUT, there is part of the coastline and more so offshore where the wind is blowing sufficiently to generate quite a number of kilowatt hours. As the weather systems progress so the same area may stop generating but another area will start pumping into the grid. It would be more than extremely rare for the whole of the coastline of the UK to be wind-free. Even with a "smart" grid, the worst-case scenario rarely falls below about 25% capacity under the worst weather conditions. NOTE WELL that I am applying this only to the UK which has the advantage of having a wide range of latitudes. The same argument cannot be applied to Cyprus, where the wind situation is totally different with abysmally low average wind levels (the wind really blows only in the afternoon in the form of sea breezes and is largely insufficient to power the country especially because of his intermittency. The existing Cyprus wind farms operate at an efficiency as low as 12 to 15%, making them very large white elephants.

To sum up, the UK has all the advantages of being able to usefully generate electricity from wind in sufficient quantities to provide a useful adjunct, pretty well 24/7 for most of the time. The "craze" for offshore wind generation will lead to an overcapacity at times and the country can consider itself to be extremely lucky to be able to generate such vast quantities of energy.

What will the long-term impact to be of this capacity? I do not believe that this has been studied in depth, but extracting such enormous amounts of energy from nature must have a price to pay. It may be that the price will be a different type of climate change over the UK or, worse, stealing the energy from countries that have prevailing downwind from us. Who knows?