Not a bad idea, except for the cost. Oil companies don't like the idea of high fuel mileage cars. Electric cars are a scam to the public. Oil, natural gas and are primary fuel sources, whereas electricity is a secondary source, thus there is a loss of efficiency generating it. Electric cars (and hybrids) must get there electricity from electrical generating plant, which will use more overall fuel for the cars. What is needed is a super efficient gasoline engine, which was finally invented in 1984 by Smokey Yunick. It never reached the market.
Part electrical motor powered, part gasoline powered. They compliment each other and switch back and forth during certain driving conditions. Quite high fuel mileage but very expensive.
They also present less risk of being stranded, than do purely battery-driven cars. I can foresee the motoring-breakdown services of the future investing in fleets of generator-vans!
I think they say that making modern batteries will contaminate more than producing petrol and diesel vehicles........Huge areas of Canada are already heavily contaminated by mining for the metal and minerals to make the batteries..... There is also the extra polution from shipping the minerals to Japan for processing and then back to Canada to make the batteries ....once made the batteries are shipped back again to Japan.......
Its all just a huge con by huge industries desperate to make even larger sums of money..... No one in power cares about the enviroment.......
China is on a huge expansion plan and doesn't care how much it pollutes the earth we all live on.....
The powers-that-be DO care, in many countries including the UK at least; but not about the people who will be affected, nor how.
Nor do they seem to know or care anything about science and engineering at even a basic, lay level, so can't see the enormous problems their ideas will create. Sometimes I think most of them do not even know the differences between energy, fuel and power; let alone such concepts as efficiency (in the technical sense).
They are expensive because the batteries use rare metals. There are not enough metals in the world to provide cars for any one nation, so hybrid cars ain't never gonna be the norm
I agree. But don't tell the politicians! I think the nett effect is that in a few decades, huge numbers of people will be unable to own or even lease cars, if only by sheer cost.
Set the above replies - which make some valid points although also some errors - against this context:
Norway - some 40% of cars there are now hybrid or battery-only, with heavy tax incentives to buy these rather than i.c.-engine vehicles.
The United Kingdom - the Government has decided to ban the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars by 2040, in favour of electric cars.
Other countries are looking at similar schemes, and Norway has found itself something of the world's consultant on the subject, with politicians and industry directors from many nations visiting to see how it's done. Easy for Norway though, with a relatively small population, abundant hydro-electric power and their policy of ploughing North Sea oil revenues into road-building for the last several decades (making journeys more efficient though the policy pre-dates the idea of battery cars).
People's Republic of China - a huge and rapidly-growing car-market - now pushing to move to electric cars.
Various cities around the world already banning, or planning to ban, i.c. cars from the urban centres.
Already the oil companies and the car and battery manufacturers are rising to the challenge, and one (Shell I think) is developing a "filling-station" that will sell no petrol and diesel at all.
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Actually there is nothing new in electric traction. Battery-electric cars and small lorries were being built back in Edwardian times - >100 years ago - but the batteries of the time were much heavier and bulkier than now per Ampere-hour capacity, and rapidly gave way to the improving petrol engine with its greater range.
In theory the best small battery-only cars now have a full-charge range of >200 miles - but I bet that was not tested in real conditions, like a very busy motorway with services on average 30 miles apart, on a typically wet and windy Winter night needing lights, wipers and heater as well as the traction-motor having to move the vehicle at prevailing traffic speed against the extra drag from the wind and the water on the road.
Heater - yes, that would be a hefty power drain even at a very modest hundred Watts that might just warm your toes.
I can't help feeling the politicians bringing these policies know little about science and engineering, the "Green" campaigners most vocal in supporting them are just that - "green" - and none of them live in town-centre flats or the estates of terraced houses and tower-blocks very common in UK towns, where home charging points would not be practicable.
"IOW"? I don't know what the Isle of Wight has to do with it, but with respect you are incorrect.
If you don't buy a car you don't pay its capital, fuel and servicing costs, nor its tax and insurance + (in Britain at least) insurance-premium tax; and you don't pay for others' vehicles. If anything, road users of all types except pedestrians subsidise everyone else because the various taxes are combined in a single income then shared out according to Departmental needs - though never enough - and Governmental policies. Even cyclists and mobility-scooter users pay indirectly, because whilst not having to pay road-fund tax and taxed insurance, their vehicles and accessories are expensive even before the VAT charged on the sale.
My remark about "heavy tax incentives" refer specifically to Norway anyway. The Norwegian government levies a high Value Added Tax and Purchase Tax on buying a new petrol or diesel car, but not on battery-electric cars. I don't know the situation for hybrid cars. It also taxes the fuel heavily, as I know from driving my own car there, when there were still car-ferries between the UK and Scandinavia.
The UK replaced Purchase Tax with VAT, which is an EU-concocted hence desperately complicated, high levy on almost all goods and services; and the VAT on the road fuel in on the (retail + Excise Duty) price, so compounding the cost. Presently, the UK's VAT is 20% on top of the commercial price.
With that in mind, think of the ££-umpteen-million tax revenue per year on road fuel. So far at least the Government has kept very quiet about how it will compensate for that, but my guess it will use one of two direct methods as well as raising the taxes on everything else. It could wait until most motorists have no choice then charge very high Road-Fund Tax on the electric cars it wants us all to use, or heavily tax the electricity they draw from the mains - or indeed a combination of both.
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