How do you feel about the decline of petrol vehicles? | Page 24 | GTAMotorcycle.com

How do you feel about the decline of petrol vehicles?

A Volt charging at max L2 capacity is 16 Amps actually. ;)

A Tesla charging at a traditional max L2 (non-special Tesla charger) is 32 Amps.

Regardless, *most* EV’s charge at 32A or less at home.
 
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Ummm you are rather out of date natural gas turbines are only used in Ontario as fill in when ( rarely ) needed.

Of course it's really hard to tell an expert something new but I probably should have asked,....and where do you think all that huge additional supply will come from (and I'm not just talking about our rather local Ontario situation)? Even California needs Canadian natural gas to burn, so it can supply its humongous appetite for electricity in summer to power air conditioners. Think global ramifications; we increasingly are living in a much smaller world than our fathers.

And you could answer, solar, wind, nuclear, all of which would be wrong. Solar and wind are but drops in the ocean, look at Germany who had ambitious plans to be virtually totally solar and wind by 2025, and at this date they expected to be half way there, but they are only about 15 to 20% there. And this is after billions of capital has been invested. Consequently they have now modified targets (lowered them) drastically.

And nuclear (fission), I don't think so and even if you wanted it, it takes 25 years from start to completion in building these concrete monoliths. So you are really stuck with replacing gasoline powered cars, with gasoline powered cars masquerading as electric vehicles. Of course the problem will be solved around 2070 when abundant cheap non-radio active nuclear fusion power will be common (even that estimate was originally 2050 and has been pushed back). But in the meantime it will be dino-juice.

Now there is one even more important fact that everyone has missed so far, and that is the efficiency of the motor versus the engine. Engines are highly inefficient and historically only about 30 to 35% of the actual BTU energy in gasoline actually moves the vehicle forward. Manufacturers are playing around with modifying the Otto cycle (used in virtually all cars until recently) and some are using an Atkinson cycle, VW is pioneering the Budack cycle and Mazda is using skyactiv, all meant to extract as much efficiency from an engine. Mazda is the first car manufacturer which has achieved 50% efficiency according to what I have read. But an electric motor is close to 95% efficient because it lacks the drag of thousands of internal components found in the gas engine and which sap power away from the goal of moving forward.

Now that is what I see is the biggest game changer and has not been discussed.
 
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and where do you think all that huge additional supply will come from?

We have a TON of extra unused capacity right now, particularly at night.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if Hydro One would offer a super-off-peak rate between midnight and perhaps 6AM (when demand starts to ramp up) many EV owners would program their cars to shift ALL their charging to that time period and instead of paying US states to take our surplus (the dumbest thing EVER) they could actually MAKE money on it.

Right now both of our Volts are programmed to start charging at 7PM when electricity rates go to off-peak, but the grid is only *starting* to decrease it's load at that point, bottoming out usually around 3AM. If they offered a super off peak rate then of perhaps 2-3c/kwh, I'd gladly reprogram our cars to start charging then instead.

But it'll take more thinking outside the box by Hydro One.

And you could answer, solar, wind, nuclear, all of which would be wrong. Solar and wind are but drops in the ocean

At midnight last night here in Ontario wind was producing 2MW, and hydroelectric was generating 3.6MW. All our nuclear plants together were 10MW.

At 10AM this morning hydroelectric was generating almost 5MW.

Not a "drop in the bucket". A very real contribution. I suggest you spend some time on the IESO website and look at things.
 
Is this information relevant? http://www.endofsuburbia.com ,,

Yes relevant and interesting. Suburbia is a huge factor in wasted inefficient energy usage. Many living in suburbia have two cars and whose owners commute 25 km each way, then park it at work and pay, then return in the evening to store their car over night. How inefficient and expensive is that? You wonder why everybody is working so hard to pay off debt, and stress is through the roof?

Self driving cars for-hire owned by conglomerates (ride share concept), and non-individual ownership is the answer, at least for suburban transportation. But these self-driving cars won't actually be cars unless you need to transport 3 or more people. Instead they will be self-driving electric cabin motorcycles https://media.wired.com/photos/5926cb028d4ebc5ab806b7ea/master/w_532,c_limit/Cyclotron_003.jpg seating up to 2 people who sit longitudinally and are built like an enclosed capsule and using a gyroscope to keep the motorcycle upright when stopped. It drops you off at work then goes to its next scheduled ride nearby as determined from a central logistics computer. These vehicles will run 24/7 and likely last a year before being scrapped. And no costs of ownership in a vehicle that is rusting and depreciating in a garage or parking lot for 90% of its life. It's also an answer to taking the stress off public transit, as everything will be linked by a massive computer that will tie everything together for efficiency. Seat belts might even be deleted because eliminating human driver error, and assuming back up computer contingency systems are in place, will move the death rate by traffic accident down toward zero.

So its either a revised suburbia as we know it and I envision, or it's mega-highrise buildings stacked on top of one another like in Hong Kong.

The question is, is the glass half full or half empty? Depends on timing; what happens and when. As per usual, the only thing we know for sure is death and taxes.
 
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But it'll take more thinking outside the box by Hydro One.

Hydro One is thinking outside the box--where the telecom and insurance industry cartels are. It's just going to take time to flop over the edges while our Governments make soothing noises.
 


Now there is one even more important fact that everyone has missed so far, and that is the efficiency of the motor versus the engine. Engines are highly inefficient and historically only about 30 to 35% of the actual BTU energy in gasoline actually moves the vehicle forward. Manufacturers are playing around with modifying the Otto cycle (used in virtually all cars until recently) and some are using an Atkinson cycle, VW is pioneering the Budack cycle and Mazda is using skyactiv, all meant to extract as much efficiency from an engine. Mazda is the first car manufacturer which has achieved 50% efficiency according to what I have read. But an electric motor is close to 95% efficient because it lacks the drag of thousands of internal components found in the gas engine and which sap power away from the goal of moving forward.

Now that is what I see is the biggest game changer and has not been discussed.

Thermal efficiency of mass produced vehicles is well under 50% currently. Mazda hopes to improve to 50 but that is in the future...currently 40% is about the best you can do. (hybrids not included).
 
Thermal efficiency of mass produced vehicles is well under 50% currently. Mazda hopes to improve to 50 but that is in the future...currently 40% is about the best you can do. (hybrids not included).
I thought it was a curious thing to say too so I looked it up and found a few claims that Mazda's Skyactiv-X due next year will get 44% TE, and they expect much better in the future according to what they've been able to produce in the lab.

So yeah he was probably refering to some lab test and you're right 40% is the max on road right now. But the future potential was an eye-opener for me.
 
Thermal efficiency of mass produced vehicles is well under 50% currently. Mazda hopes to improve to 50 but that is in the future...currently 40% is about the best you can do. (hybrids not included).

You listen to Mazda lately and you think that they will soon release a Carnot-like efficiency engine ... I guess we will have to see whether they got it wrong or not.
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...n-city-bans-for-heavily-polluting-diesel-cars

If they follow through it will make an interesting case study of what happens to an economy when government is so heavy-handed in its social engineering efforts on microscopic timescales.

The diesel is going extinct whether cities are allowed to apply a ban or not. Everyone knows it now that you cannot make diesel to comply with emission standards without a cheating algorithms ala VW. It's also known that not only VW has done such thing, but pretty much everyone else making diesel cars. Nobody in their right mind will invest a penny into a future diesel based passenger vehicles now. So the question is really what to do with the old diesel cars ... how long to let them stay on the road. Sensitive question for some countries, but certainly the most sensitive is Germany ... special case due to the heart of their car industry. Everywhere else in Europe, that is west of Czech Republic, it will be an easy case to be made, and has already been made in number of large cities.
 
The diesel is going extinct whether cities are allowed to apply a ban or not. Everyone knows it now that you cannot make diesel to comply with emission standards without a cheating algorithms ala VW. It's also known that not only VW has done such thing, but pretty much everyone else making diesel cars. Nobody in their right mind will invest a penny into a future diesel based passenger vehicles now. So the question is really what to do with the old diesel cars ... how long to let them stay on the road. Sensitive question for some countries, but certainly the most sensitive is Germany ... special case due to the heart of their car industry. Everywhere else in Europe, that is west of Czech Republic, it will be an easy case to be made, and has already been made in number of large cities.

The ability of any solution to pass emissions standards is primarily related to the politics that created those standards to begin with. If they wanted diesel cars to remain, their needs to be an admission that cheating happened in the past and reset the bar to reasonable levels. The fact that their are different emission standards based on fuel type shows how messed up the system really is. Set the levels based on something that matters like health or global warming and let manufacturers do whatever they want to hit the mark.
 
The ability of any solution to pass emissions standards is primarily related to the politics that created those standards to begin with. If they wanted diesel cars to remain, their needs to be an admission that cheating happened in the past and reset the bar to reasonable levels. The fact that their are different emission standards based on fuel type shows how messed up the system really is. Set the levels based on something that matters like health or global warming and let manufacturers do whatever they want to hit the mark.

About 60% of all cars in Europe are diesel. But the tide is turning. 2017 is the first year that new petrol cars outsold new diesel cars in Europe. The charge is led by Spain who wants to eventually eliminate diesel cars altogether. Note the diesel Golf and Jetta are sold around the world as they always have been, because their pollution standards are not as tough as in North America (led by California of course) and which was the only market where they had the diesel-gate scandal.

VW got so burned by diesel-gate that they will be launching 50 new all electric designs by 2025 and plans to sell 25% of its fleet as EVs. In 2017 VW passed Renault in EV sales and VW is now the largest seller of EVs in Europe.
 
The ability of any solution to pass emissions standards is primarily related to the politics that created those standards to begin with. If they wanted diesel cars to remain, their needs to be an admission that cheating happened in the past and reset the bar to reasonable levels. The fact that their are different emission standards based on fuel type shows how messed up the system really is. Set the levels based on something that matters like health or global warming and let manufacturers do whatever they want to hit the mark.

I cannot disagree with your conclusions here, as long as they thoroughly test whether the OEM's hit the set mark or not. Don't just take their word for it .... otherwise you will have dieselgate 2, gasolinegate 1 soon ...
 


VW got so burned by diesel-gate that they will be launching 50 new all electric designs by 2025 and plans to sell 25% of its fleet as EVs. In 2017 VW passed Renault in EV sales and VW is now the largest seller of EVs in Europe.

VW is not developing EV's, because they got burned by dieselgate. Let's be clear, they are so financially sound that this effected them very little (unless Europe will turn on them from criminal/legal standpoint ... which is increasingly harder and harder to see). The real reason is the fact that they know they cannot cheat again (at least not in ICE game; I am sure there will be a new sort of cheating once the EV game is full on ... not necessarily emission related cheating), thus EV is the only proven option they really have.
 
It's not about clean air tree huggers anymore as much as economic decisions by buyers encouraged by govs that see the healthcare costs from vehicle pollution sky rocketing and like cleaning up the rivers...it's time to deal with the air.

Set the levels based on something that matters like health or global warming and let manufacturers do whatever they want to hit the mark

If they actually set those levels realistically ne'er an ICE in sight ...as with Volvo.
The fossil fuel companies have not had to the pay the piper for the damage....that might be changing....

New York sues fossil fuel majors, plans divestment from pension funds
https://www.reuters.com/...fossilfuels/new-york-sues-fossil-fuel-majors-plans-divestme...
Jan 10, 2018 - NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City announced on Wednesday that it filed a multibillion dollar lawsuit against five top oil companies, citing their “contributions to global warming,” as it said it would divest fossil fuel investments from its $189 billion public pension funds over the next five years. The lawsuit ...
 
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Thermal efficiency of mass produced vehicles is well under 50% currently. Mazda hopes to improve to 50 but that is in the future...currently 40% is about the best you can do. (hybrids not included).
Thermal efficiency is an interesting discussion, but economic efficiency -- how far can I travel on a dollar? -- is what really counts. Hydrogen fuel cells are considerably more efficient than a ice at converting fuel, but if 1$1 of hydrogen gets me 4km and $1 of gasoline gets me 10km, I'm not worrying about thermal efficiency.
 
In my crappy car, $0.10 = 5kms ... you are right, I am not worrying about thermal efficiency.
 
Thermal efficiency is an interesting discussion, but economic efficiency -- how far can I travel on a dollar? -- is what really counts. Hydrogen fuel cells are considerably more efficient than a ice at converting fuel, but if 1$1 of hydrogen gets me 4km and $1 of gasoline gets me 10km, I'm not worrying about thermal efficiency.

And that is the argument for electricity....less than a dollar of electricity will take you 40km.
 

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