Notwithstanding my comment in another post that my car was “alive”(!), I feel that ICE cars, especially naturally aspirated ones like the MX-5, have “soul”, which I doubt battery-operated cars will ever have.
I appreciate that electrification might deliver a performance dividend in many cars, the Porsche Taycan, for example, but at what (non-monetary) cost?
One YouTuber that loves Lamborghinis bought a Taycan (Turbo, I think) but sold it after a couple of months, as it didn’t “hit the spot”, in spite of back-damaging performance. Ultimately, it was the absence of an exciting sound-track that led to his decision.
I am happy with my ND2, complete with Mazda sports exhaust, and I am looking forward to taking delivery of another car (not a replacement) in a couple of months, with even more soul! Doesn’t that play a huge part in our “perma-grin”, when driving our pride and joy?
The key to the MX-5ND is that it doesn’t exceed itself in one area over another… It mixes good performance with good handling whilst maintaining a good level of comfort. It’s such a joyful experience without doing licence losing speeds, and the gearbox (forgetting for just a moment, any issues some might have!) is just a thing of tactical magnificence bringing the character of the car to the driver in spade loads… If it has one extreme excess, it’s it’s character and how it takes you into it’s soul on every drive… Any new electric version of the MX-5 can’t fuse all these wonderful characteristics together because so many of the ingredients will no longer be there…
I think an electric MX5 should have a small battery, which means limited range, for keeping the weight down. If they give it proper fast charge speed (which is more difficult the smaller the battery gets, I must admit) then limited range should be less of a problem. Especially when solid state comes around, solid state batteries are a lot lighter and also able to charge faster.
I do like my ICE engines and though MX5 engines do not impress me (except perhaps the 134 and 184hp ND engines) I would like it more than an electric engine experience wise. But I certainly do not believe our environmental problems are fake. Everybody needs to take steps. Consumers, travellers, industry, aircraft industry, farmers etc. So ICE disappearing for daily drives is just a matter of time. And maybe, just maybe if everyone does what he/she/it can reasonably do, it might be an option to keep ICE’s for weekend cars…
There are many many problems with electric vehicles that are rarely aired. The first and most immediate is that batteries have only 20% of the energy density of carbon fuels. We keep hearing about wonder batteries just around the corner, but they never seem to arrive.
Then there is the cobalt conundrum. The best batteries use cobalt, but there is simply not enough cobalt on this planet to switch the world vehicle fleet to battery power.
Disposing of li-ion batteries is also a huge headache. Yes, it is said they can be recycled but who is dong it on a commercial scale and is it economically viable?
And then there was the unfortunate study emanating from Cologne University a couple of years back which concluded that the Tesla had a 20 -25% larger carbon footprint that than equivalent Mercs and BMWs.
I could go on but you get the gist and I’m a newbie here, so best not go on a rant straight away!
What we need is a small, light battery that, in conjunction with the appropriate electric motor, can perform like an internal combustion engine, take a car as far as a tank of petrol can now, and charge up in ten minutes…
It’s nowhere near. A Canadian physicist once mused that perhaps there is a natural limit to how many free electrons you can pack into a box without it going bang. Worth noting that electricity is not nature’s way of doing things, she uses carbon for energy management and electricity for messaging and occasionally as an offensive weapon. Even then, the generator and battery organs in an electric eel make up 80% of its body mass. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
The ban is utterly nonsensical, as is the whole to push towards EVs, a form of propulsion that nobody actually wants. The whole idea was that by 2030 a magic battery would have arrived and all would be grand, but there is only talk of such a thing rather than one appearing in the flesh. Governments were willingly hoodwinked by the green lobby and the dreaded words ‘climate change’ (‘global warming’ was dropped as it wasn’t happening as anticipated), and so we got lumbered by this nonsense. But do we really need to accept the ban? Policies are never written in stone despite the impression given, it’s time to get brave and start campaigning against it
Hydrogen is certainly a possibility but it suffers a lack of infrastructure, as does electricity should too many more battery powered cars be sold.
The greenest solution is to recycle the carbon from fuels, it can be done direct from air as shown by a company called Carbon Engineering of Canada. It would be argued that extracting the energy in ICEs is inefficient, but the management and distribution of carbon based fuels is well understood and established. Why replace what we have now with batteries that demand scarce mineral resources and, at the end of the day, are not anywhere near as efficient as the theory tells us.
Hydrogen is likely to make some inroads into future vehicles but its one advantage is refuelling speed, almost everything else about it it a pain in the behind. Most current hydrogen production makes it from fossil fuels which defeats the point. If you use some low carbon power source like wind farm electricity to make hydrogen by electrolysis then, when you factor in the conversion inefficiency and the need for cooling and compressing the stuff, you end up making enough hydrogen to drive only about a third of the distance as if you had used the electricity to charge a battery vehicle directly.
On the up side for H2, if we do start producing green H2 in bulk it has a ready market (so it doesn’t need a vehicle fleet waiting to use it) We can just add it do domestic gas supplies. So long as it doesn’t go over a few percent, it seems to work fine. (If you get up to about 20% it begins to reveal some of its own safety pitfalls; making gas pipes brittle and producing invisible flames.)
I think that if there was enough R&D spend into producing hydrogen more efficiently, it is definitely a good solution. As natural gas will be effectively outlawed in the next few years, mass production of hydrogen needs to be the way forwards. Perhaps it will need to be done in certain parts using wind/hydro electric power. There will be plenty of users wanting it and it is by far a better environmental solution overall. Both energy companies and car companies are putting their toe in the water, but they rally need government support - if not money, then in other ways to help them.
I think it’s going to be a very very long time after new gas boilers are banned before domestic gas goes away as there’s such a huge proportion of UK houses still relying on gas for heat, hot water and cooking. Hydrogen can’t simply replace it because the gas pipe infrastructure can’t cope with delivering pure H2 - it makes the pipes brittle. It’s a bit like adding ethanol to petrol: E5 is no issue but we’re getting anxious about E10 and obviously you can’t just make all the filling stations sell E85 (or indeed E100) because the nation’s car fleet can’t handle it.
Back in the days of rigid airships when they needed hydrogen in huge quantities, they produced it by passing steam through red hot scrap iron. The process stripped the oxygen from the water molecules and bound it to the iron instead to produce hydrogen and a pile of rust.
I think we need to start looking again at the fundamental issue here, and that is, just what is the problem? The great global warming terror is running into the sand. The name was quietly changed to climate change because the scary predictions are turning out to be somewhat wide of the mark. The climate has always changed, that’s what it does, so now the argument has shifted to mankind is accelerating it and therefore we are very wicked indeed. But that cannot be proven one way or another as we have nothing to compare it against, only computer models of a highly complex and poorly understood system.
I am not condoning the burning of fossil fuels, that is a short term and rather selfish activity, as is cluttering the world up with disused wind turbines and toxic used batteries. However, as noted before, nature uses carbon to manage its energy needs and has been doing so for around four billion years. Personally I find it stupendously idiotic, naive and arrogant to think that we can come up with a working alternative overnight. As humans, we ain’t that clever!
The debate over whether climate change is a real crisis or not is politics so far as I can see and in particular it’s toxic, polarised US politics. It’s not a debate, it’s just yelling.The science seems to have much greater consensus and is more concerned with the scale of the crisis and what we can do to mitigate it.
If people think the science is wrong, then the floor is theirs to show otherwise. If they just want the science to be wrong then sorry but reality doesn’t care about what we want.
As for whether man has an influence on the climate, just look at the much higher temperatures in the cities than in the countryside. The only solution is reduce the size of the human population.
Hydrogen has to be the short-term solution - not electricity. If all cars were electric and every owner charged them up over night, the electric grid would melt.
Anyway, the owners club is probably not the right forum to discuss.
Maybe you’re right. The problem with not doing anything with batteries at all is that we will not really make much progress in finding new tech and ways of using it. 60 years ago we could have said, let’s stop using ICE because it’s slow and inefficient. Hell, we could have said it 30 years ago and 20 years ago. But because we kept using it, we also learned a lot to improve ICE to where we are now.
I really think that is the way forward. Things don’t go forward by infinite research without any form of use. Solar panels really wouldn’t have the efficiency they have today if we didn’t use them 20 years ago. It’s not even that long ago that production of a solar panel produced more CO2 than it prevented in producing electricity. We wouldn’t have gotten there if noone would use them before we reached that point.
And then there is the everlasting discussion about the use of an ICE; by far most people don’t rely on 20 minute charging as most people only incidentally travel so far that a 20 minute top up would be a problem. But that’s another discussion with a lot more to discuss.
The electricity needed per mile of driving in hydrogen is a lot higher than for charging a battery so using h2 is not really a solution against a melting infrastructure. Personally I think we should move towards decentral energy storage, a electricity storage facility in your neighbourhood to store over production of green energy. I can see storage becoming a bigger problem in the near future than production. But luckily some very nice solutions are being tested as we speak.
Your own solar panels, smart charging and increasing electricity production (and probably some modifications to the infrastructure) could also be the combination to solve the problem. But make public transportation more attractive could be too. Or different means of transportation; personally I would use the bike for a 5 mile commute but there are many using car. An electric scooter would need a lot less electricity.
