pwa wrote:Actually, I had already wondered why the batteries aren't more easily swapped, like a cartridge system. Probably because they are too voluminous and have to be squeezed into inaccessible places to stop the vehicle being too big.
That is true and it applies to lots of things (it’s the main reason that phones, laptop computers, etc., no longer have user-swappable batteries).
Car batteries also need elaborate cooling systems that add to the complexity of making them removable.
But the main thing is they weigh hundreds of kilograms. You’d need a forklift to move them anywhere. Keep in mind that people drive their cars to the supermarket to avoid carrying a few grocery bags farther than the length of their cemented-over front garden. They’re not going to volunteer to carry a 250 kg battery indoors to charge every day, even if the battery was somehow divided into 25 ten-kilogram lumps.
However, if the industry managed to organise itself to physically transport vast volumes of petrol without contamination into millions of tanks distributed across the country, sending electricity over a largely existent network is easy by comparison.
reohn2 wrote:All that said the problem which Cunobelin hi-lighted up thread isn't only the air pollution of ice powered vehicles but the physicality of so many cars,any cars,either on the roads or parked up,and a much better way forward is public transport and smaller vehicles.
The problem also for government is revenue,it rakes a LOT of money in from travel by private vehicles,and like Vorpal mentions up thread or on another similar thread,we simply have to begin to look at an alternative means of transport before we either all choke(the health issues are well known) or nothing hardly moves by sheer volume of traffic,which already is very inefficient especially at peak travel times or when there's a crash on any given motorway.
These are problems successive UK government's have dragged their feet over since the building of the first motorways,building more and more roads isn't the answer,the country needs a new outlook to it's whole transport needs IMO.
I read the BBC article mentioned earlier and saw several quotes by the Department for Transport offering no hope except new roads as quickly as the budget allows.
Think about that. When offered the chance to talk to the BBC, i.e. a huge public audience, this was apparently the full extent of the DfT’s vision to fix congestion. Rail, bus, cycling, car-sharing, tolls, or anything innovative were not even given lip service. Just the failed and deeply stupid policy of building as many roads as possible, as quickly as possible, while blaming a finite budget for congestion that any economist will tell you will always be there with this approach.
As far as I can tell, the DfT offered these quotes without so much as a hint of irony. Does this fill you with hope?
This is because big political projects are seen as old-fashioned or even dangerous in the UK, and this idealistic dogma causes a lot of pragmatic harm. These are national problems (in fact global problems) that need vision, courageous leadership that inspires people, and joined-up thinking to solve. Instead what we get are the worst newspapers setting the tone of thought (the ubiquitous pro-car, anti-change thinking), unethical for-profit companies (Silicon Valley, car companies) dictating which technologies get investment (obviously the only ones that get money are those the market rewards in the short term, e.g. Uber; problems that need a chicken and egg at once are laughed out of the boardroom), and fragmented policies that pitch fiefdoms against each other and have no hope of effecting sweeping change.
thirdcrank wrote:I think it's futile to look for any logic in car ownership and use, now or in the future. It's irrational and I'll put my hand up here.
I think that is undeniable at this stage. Almost everything about car use today is absurd. The thinker Ivan Illich used a striking example in his ‘Counterproductivity’ concept:
“The main notion of Ivan Illich is the concept of counterproductivity: when institutions of modern industrial society impede their purported aims. For example, Ivan Illich calculated that, in 1970s America, if you add the time spent to work to earn the money to buy a car, the time spent in the car (including traffic jams), the time spent in the health care industry because of a car crash, the time spent in the oil industry to fuel cars...etc., and you divide the number of kilometres traveled per year by that, you obtain the following calculation: 10,000 km per year per person divided by 1,600 hours per year per American equals 6 km per hour, the real speed of a car.”
And it has got a lot more absurd since the seventies …
