I'll comment about the non-cosmetic issues. My wife tells me I have no style and honestly, I have to agree there !
2. On average how long will a BV last on the road?
How long will any car last? Longer if it's got aluminium/fibreglass panels, if it's garaged, if it's serviced properly... It's just a different power plant.
I expect electric vehicles of the future likely to outlast conventional internal combustion vehicles simply because they have fewer moving parts in the drivetrain, and what moving parts they do have can be replaced quite easily and cheaply.
The major cost comes from the cost of the batteries.
When you factor in the replacement cost of batteries and the cost per mile in electricity, compared to internal combustion engines and the petrol costs over the same distance the difference is quite startling.
Assume you have a high end battery pack, costing £4000 to replace, and it lasting only 50,000 miles (conservative), and you pay 3p per mile in electricty, the costs over the 50,000miles are £4000 + £1500 = £5500
Assume you have a petrol engine which dies at 100,000 and costs £1000 to replace, an interpolated cost of £500 for the engine at 50,000 miles seems acceptable. Assuming you get 35mpg, and do all 50,000 miles at £1.05p per litre, your 50,000 miles cost (6500 litres X £1.05) £6825 for fuel and £500 for the engine. Then you have five services in those 50,000 miles (first one free), at a conservative estimate of £150 including parts and labour (including one timing belt service) and thats another £600, or about £8000.
Then assume you are doing only 10,000 miles per year and you have to think about 5years of road tax difference too
(Typical Yorkshireman here, always looking at life in terms of costs)
5. How eco - friendly are BV's?
It's not as clear cut as it might seem. The vehicle itself ought to be 100% green, except that it apparently produces CO2, and as far as I'm aware, it also produces ozone (yum yum - the London underground smell; not to everyone's taste...) Although ozone might be considered good in that it might replace the ozone layer, apparently it doesn't do that and is actually a pollutant. Shame.
2 years ago the estimate of offset CO2 production for electric cars from the power utility company/electricity provider was about 46g of CO2/km of travel, which makes them the lowest CO2 producer of all cars. But of course, this is only true for places where the majority of electricity is produced when large amounts of coal ( over 30%) are burned. In Scotland we have about 18% renewably sourced electricity (according to
www.theiet.org) so our CO2 rate per kilometre is going to be down in about the 30-35g numerical region.
Any offsetting of CO2 coming from home generation is going to carve right into that too.
Although not directly relevant, carbonated soft drinks and lagers release about 24g of CO2 per litre, but of course that CO2 was taken as waste from industrial processes or compressed from the atmosphere, so in effect it is existing CO2 which is being temporarily sequestered. However if those industries producing the waste CO2 just released it they would be hit with a bill, so in effect they are smuggling it out of the back door, and the drinks makers do not have to pay premiums for releasing it !
Ozone from the motors is minimal, and is comparable to the amount produced by a typical laser printer running for the same amount of time. Luckily the industry which developed electrostatic printing also campaigned to fit 'ozone filters' to their printers, and the same devices can also be fitted to a motor if ever it was thought to be a harmful situation. The filters contain nothing but cheap old activated carbon, high can be both abundant and cheap.
But in the final event, an electric car has to be the greenest form of powered transport around.
Agreed !
OK, guys, time for you to pitch in and correct my newbie ideas!
But my questions were going to be:
1) I reckon you could get 2CV performance and 100 mile range with a 6kW motor and 10 x 56Ah car batteries. Where can I find information about electric motors? I'm not having much success so far, trawling the net.
6kw is about 8HP. It takes about 10-12HP to push a typical car along through the air at 50mph. This doesn't mean the motor will not do the job, it will be running at above it's rated load though, which is not an issue if you only want to do that for 15 -30 minutes.
At the load a car would demand your 56Ah batteries will appear to be 35Ah batteries (approximately speaking), due to the Peukert effect, which says that the faster you draw power from a battery the lower it's overall capacity. At 120V you have about 4.3kWh of capacity. Assuming your consumption is at the rate of 200Wh per mile your range is about 21 miles, if you keep your rate of acceleration down to 2CV levels.
The real world figure would depend on the route, inclination/declination, and temperature of the cells (not so much an issue with battery warmers and insulation) and you could get a real range of anything between 15 and 35 miles. Driving style is the single most important factor when considering range. Harsh acceleration creates wasteful heat and wastes power if you didn't need to really accelrate quite so quickly, which is why regenerative recovery systems impact fuel consumption in hybrids so much when the regen'd electricity is used during subsequent periods of acceleration
2) I reckon better still would be Li-Io batteries, something like 2000 Li-Io 2Ah AA batteries strung together. Has anyone tried going down this route? I know it would be very expensive (maybe about £3000?) but could be interesting?
Tesla do something similar. The only problem is that ,ideally, each cell needs a battery monitoring device to keep it working at it's best. It's fiddly and expensive, which is why larger capacity cells are preferable.
I was looking on eBay in the States and you can buy 11Ah D-cell, NiMH batteries at 8 for £20 from time to time. They're about £2.50 each , and to make a pack like the one discussed above would use about 500.
I don' think the maximum discharge rate is very good though, so maybe that is why nobody is building big packs from them
Chris
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