Robert Llewellyn (teh envirof**) host of the U.K's Scrapheap Challenge (also Kryten from Red Dwarf) fires up on his blog about Electric Car bashing by Top Gear and the hype about hydrogen.

Oil is awesome it will be cheap forever

^ They are makin' hay while the sun is shining. I think that was the envirof**'s point.

Scrapheap challenge is great. I want an Aussie version though. Not like The Aussie version of Top Gear because that sucked, a good version please.

I hate videos; is there a text link about what Top Gear say about electric cars? They seem to be an OK idea from what I've read; am I doing it wrong?

im with teq, greenies on the bus, leave me oil to run my car until i retire plz.

Top Gear don't like electric cars because they take 12 hours to recharge, and rely on new infrastructure which is yet to be built.

Top Gear like hydrogen cars (Honda FCX) because it takes 5 minutes to refill the tank, and the only new infrastructure is an extra bowser nozzle at your local servo.

I don't really get how someone can take anything on top gear seriously... this dude is so easy to troll, wonder if he uses a forum.

Top Gear like hydrogen cars (Honda FCX) because it takes 5 minutes to refill the tank, and the only new infrastructure is an extra bowser nozzle at your local servo.

Well, except for all of the infrastructure needed to produce, transport and store the hydrogen, none of which currently exists?

scrapheap challenge is pretty awesome sometimes. other times the challenges are boring and s***e.
the host's poetic alliteration gives me the s**** but the chicky co-host is a lot hotter than the original dyke haired minger.

more news on the hour

Which you can only use at your house, currently. What if I want to take my car out to Roma. I can find petrol and diesel there, but I can't charge my car, and if I do charge it, I'm stuck there for hours.

With hydrogen you will still just pull up to a servo, fill up and be off. And if electric cars are no good for long distances, I'd need an extra petrol car. And if petrol gets too expensive?

Which you can only use at your house, currently. What if I want to take my car out to Roma. I can find petrol and diesel there, but I can't charge my car, and if I do charge it, I'm stuck there for hours.

But it's not like adding that infrastructure into gas stations is challenging, surely - throw down an extension cable, throw on a power board, whap a power meter on it and bam - done

Charging batteries is pretty slow currently. Will you want to sit at a servo for 6 hours to recharge your car? Will the servo have room for all these cars to sit there charging?

You'd have to charge your car at a hotel overnight, or servos will have to be able to swap out your flat batteries for fresh ones.

But is it really much harder than drilling for oil, or mining, transporting and consuming coal, gas or uranium at a power station?

Yes, much harder. And excessively energy intensive, comparitive to all of the alternatives you have suggested. Biofuels are similar in this respect, in that they take more effort to produce and refine into a useful fuel than they are worth in returns overall - at least, so far.

Natural gas and petroleum would not be worth using as fuels either, if gathering and refining them cost more energy than the product generated by the process.

power meter on it and bam - done

more like "BA wait for it" several hours later "AM!"

Can't quickcharge them with more amps because the batteries will explode

To be fair, producing enough electricity to produce enough hydrogen to supply the world's cars will probably require more power supply too.

To be fair, producing enough electricity to produce enough hydrogen to supply the world's cars will probably require more power supply too.

I'm not advocating hydrogen as it stands, either.

And is the electricity used by the cars that much less than the amount used to generate molecular hydrogen - I assume the idea is electrolysis of water still?

Most hydrogen produced today is (ironically) from fossil fuels. Hydrogen via electrolysis is nowhere near an option, unless something like controlled, net-generating fusion becomes available and energy itself is significantly cheaper.

last edited by Hogfather at 17:13:33 28/Nov/09

I can believe that happening if everyone woke up tomorrow and their cars had transformed into Tesla Roadsters! But I suspect any large scale deploy of electric cars won't happen overnight so there'd be time for people to display adaptability.

But we need solutions NOW, because the world is being f***ed RIGHT NOW by carbon, right? Its that serious that we can't delay ETS legislation and NEED TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW ... right?

Because if that is NOT the case, and we have time for 'gradual' uptake, then we can wait for oil production to peak and alternatives become attractive (and developed) as required and through the normal industrial research and development process, with economics and demand as the boring old driver rather than needing to save the f*****g world by 2012.

last edited by Hogfather at 17:17:56 28/Nov/09

Fair enough if you live and work in an office in a city, electric cars might suit you.

However anyone who lives or works outside a city (ie. I live in Brisbane but work in western QLD in 14 day blocks) will have no use for an electric car. So once petrol becomes unfeasible, we need another option.

Interestingly, the reason I work in western QLD is to extract natural gas, which is the current best method of producing hydrogen!

I only started recently watching Top Gear cause of BBC channel that has it on every arvo around when I'm getting home, anyway I'm not really into cars for starters but didn't really mind the show at first....until I realised how contrived and over the top every single show is, these guys are annoying tossers after a while..

haha that top gear episode was hilarious, and they absolutely were not taking the piss out of electric cars - they do the exact same thing with every single one of the projects they do. it's completely over the top, far-fetched, unrealistic and just good fun to watch

this guy is a total douchebag for taking offence at it

Yeh Top Gear is very much an entertainment show I don't think it pretends to be informative.

imo ... bring back horses and riding goats.

But that is the vast, vast majority of users, surely..

You're making a habit of making silly blanket statements lately trog.

What about industrial users - freight, waste removal, tradies, the farm machinery that produces our food supply? What about all the everyday people who don't fall into your 'vast majority' of sub-100k per day commuters - couriers, pizza delivery dudes, taxis, sales reps, non-city dwellers? What do you propose that they do?

Trog went on in his post to qualify his statement by explaining that moving this majority of moter vehicle users to an alternate energy powered motor vehicle leaves a cheaper supply for other users who still require petrol vehicles. I'd presume he meant until the technology developed for one type of consumer can be applied to others.

"meaningful"
.25% is meaningful with an interest rate, yet 15% with emissions is not ?

And this is not just about emissions, it's also about oil being a finite resource.

Random red herring, if oil wasn't so valuable would we have bothered with regime change ... errr... I mean WMDs in Iraq ?

kryty was legend, now iz greeny whinger

well, I don't have any statistics to back this up..

Statistics aren't proof of anything anyway

natural gas is an immediate alternative to oil that springs to mind for the >100 K per day crowd . It has comparable energy density, can be easily refilled, has existing infrastructure in place, burns cleaner, has 2/3 the emissions of oil half of coal, and we've got loads of it. It's also cheaper to tack on some carbon capture mechanism than by burning coal, and, it's more efficient in electricity generation.

There is rapid urbanization going on in the world today (I think something like 80% live in cities now?). Some monstrous statistic. Electric cars = functional.
It may only be 15% now but there are millions of NANO TATAs or whatever they are coming online, which are of course fuel efficient, but there will be so many of them! Mumbai has 18 million people. They all want cars, and will get them.

T Boon Pickens is trying to do the same thing, with his US $40B wind farm in Texas, backed by natural gas. With the offset from wind, and since they've like us discovered huge deposits, he's pushing to convert the trucking / fleet networks to natural gas, and reduce the half trillion annual outgoings in oil consumption.

Buffet is betting big on coal however. Coal is and always will be the elephant in the room..

I think his point was Natural gas could bridge the divide between moving to electric vehicles for the vast majority of the population
for most of us moving to electric wouldn't have any real impact - we just commute like normal and never really notice the difference until we did a long trip

but you can't just convert a semi to electricity, it wouldn't work (unless its carrying f***tons of b82rez also)
so lpg as an interim step between moving away from oil to a more permanent electric solution is a logical step in my opinion

electric motors can be incredibly powerful, less moving parts and easy to service/maintain etc
nothing stopping us from using them in heavy industry right now except for the power requirements - which is where a hydrogen/fuel cell idea comes in

anyone whos whinging and saying its too hard is in for a real surprise when, one day the powers that be just say "look, there is no more oil for the general population - we're keeping whats left to protect the country and you guys are pretty much on your own from here"

I predict looting

Oh yeah, Autocar really did review their car:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle/AllCars/245199/

So when u drive from were you live (which I assume is pretty close to the city) to the city you see alot of other people driving to the city, wow what a suprise.

My point IS, that a big chunk of the people that are on the roads are commuters driving in or around morning and afternoon peak hour on their daily commute to and from their work place. Not all those people work in the city; it is merely a convenient example as it serves to illustrate my point - peak hour traffic is most noticable on inbound city routes in the morning, and outbound city routes in the evening.

You have a very small perspective on this subject and I can tell you there are alot of other people that drive alot further, maybe not everyday, but frequently.

Yes, we already covered that, and seen that electric cars do not suit everyone, every time.

My perspective is small because I basically never drive anywhere unless I have to - but it doesn't mean that commuter traffic doesn't exist and isn't a big chunk of traffic!

Oh yeah of course it is, and most of those people could probably do there trips to work with small electric cars, but what happens when you do need to go further?

You take a form of transport that is not an electric car?

You sit around and wait for the car to charge? What happens when you want to go further than 100k? like for a weekend drive to noosa or up north to the zoo or something, theres no public transport to these places.

Well the "real world" range of the Roadster, according to the FAQ, is 244 miles (390.4km). So if you need to drive further than that, then yes, you'll need another car.

Fun fact: Internode ISP CEO Simon Hackett just set the world record for long distance driving in an electric car: 501km (313 miles), on a single charge!! Awesomesauce. I claim some credit for that record as an Internode customer.

How much does it actually cost in electricity to "fill" the car for a 100k trip?

From the Tesla Roadster FAQ: "It costs most customers roughly 2 cents per mile or $5 to fully recharge their Roadster, although the exact price varies depending on your utility rates and the time of day you charge. By contrast, other premium sports cars cost about $2 per mile."

That is obviously US-based, not sure what we get charged for electricity.

Could the current grid cope with hundreds of thousands of cars being charged each night/during the work day? Wouldnt it just cause the price of electricty to go up even further with the power companys saying that they have to spend money on extra infrastructure to cope with the extra power demands?

no doubt, just like the price of oil went up recently when it was in greater demand

Government corporations with large commuting workforces should be leading the way, equiping there car parks with charging outlets and making deals with a couple of electric car companys to supply the cars. Supply the cars and the electricity as a package that the workers can salary sacrific with no frige benefits tax.

Sounds good to me, though I'd prefer they start on a small scale in a study and see how it goes to evaluate it carefully

Also, I have no doubt that they government would eventually put a tax on electricity used to charge car's just like the current fuel excise. They wouldnt do it soon, but eventually when electric cars start to outnumber petrol cars.

Chevy volt does seem pretty cool, pretty simple solution to most of the problems as you said.

The first 10,000 Volts will cost US$40k

So we will see it in 3 years and it will cost double cause Its Australia.

Yeh the Volt will be interesting. I have doubts because I don't really trust the American car industry to make anything decent any more but the Volt - on paper - sounds very interesting.