Graham wrote:
Subsidies on a used car purchase?
No, sorry I must have overlooked that we’re talking used cars…
Graham wrote:
A internal combustion engine will still heat its cooling circuit to 88 deg C quite easily whatever the outside temperature
No. That’s the whole point. What happens is the heat exchanger sees -20 degree air and gets cooled much more than in -5 (-5 and -20 is night and day in difference). If you turn the fan to max, it will never heat up. In the old days, we used to block off the whole radiator with a huge carboard plate in the winter. We still do that on Rotax engined planes btw, both the water and the oil radiator. Newer cars are better, better cooling circuits, but also much better efficiency. To heat up the compartment you simply need more heat than you can get out of the heater. If the heater is too large, the water will never get to working temp. If the heater is too small, there will not be enough heated air to heat up the whole compartment. A combustion engine is by law so to say, required to reach working temp, or it’s emissions would go bananas. This is more important than heating the cabin, and there is only so much heat available.
A C-172 is actually much better with the air being drawn around the exhaust.
Graham wrote:
I feel you exaggerate also on the (perceived lack of) range limitations. You might be happy to plan stops for charging on a 200km trip, but I contend that most people would not be – that is only 1.5 – 2hrs driving which I think most people would prefer to at least have the option to do non-stop. Yes most of my trips are 15-30 minutes, but I value greatly the ability to drive non-stop or at least without fuelling for many hours if the situation requires it. In practice, on a long trip, somewhere around 4 hours is likely to be the point which I stop because I want a rest from driving.The argument that range of EVs is not much of an issue is like saying that you could remove the 60 litre fuel tank from the average car and replace it with a 20 litre tank and people would hardly notice or care. That is demonstrably not the case.
You do not comment on the overall cost, I see!
You are comparing apples and oranges here, or rather trying to make orange juice out of apples. An EV is a car that you park at night, and as by magic gets filled up during the night. You wake up each morning with a full gas tank, in a pre-warmed and cozy car (or pre-cooled depending on where you are). No need to go to the gas station at all, ever again, except buying a hot dog 
As I said, if you cannot charge it at home, the whole concept falls apart in general. If you can charge at work for instance, then some of the concept is left, but poorly so I would say.
The reason it works is on average you will operate the car well within its range. 99% of the time, you don’t offer “range anxiety” a single thought. It just works, there is NOTHING to worry about. You don’t think about charging (having enough fuel) at all. It’s completely void of problems. And much nicer to drive. Less things that can fall apart. It just works, every day, all year round.
Then there are those cases where you have to drive longer than the range. Then a fossil car would be better in principle. Still, when you have done the jump, crossed over to the dark side, then you look at it from the bright side. OK, I cannot go directly. I have to charge a couple of times. How do I make the best out of it. You do that by a minimal of planning and a positive attitude. You find something to do while charging. You drink a coffee, eat a dinner, read a book, comment on EuroGA. You live your life. And seriously, if you cannot do that, you have some fundamental problems. Lot’s of people (just about everyone who has never tried it), think this sounds like a hopeless situation, and especially so if it can be prevented altogether by driving a fossil car. Every single one, when they get an EV and try it, they all say: so relaxing, so cool, I want to do this more.
There are exceptions of course. If you need to get fast from A to B to C to… over long distances, then a pure EV is not for you, not any existing EV at least. Unless you are that person, why not simplify your life? Why not make it happier?
The cost thing is a hopeless discussion. In Norway it is very favorable, ridiculously so. It’s almost as the EV pays for itself. Lots of incentives and dirt cheap electricity. Other favorable places are the USA and China. The rest of Europe or the world for that matter, I don’t know.
Graham wrote:
I contend that the average modern (petrol or diesel engined) car can easily keep its cabin toasty warm using heat from the engine cooling system alone, even at -20 outside.
Yes, but not by the heat exchanger alone. Why is this so hard to understand?
The outside air is -20. You have to constantly heat up the air from -20 to +20. That is 40 degrees of heating. In addition, the outside air is -20 the air outside the car cools it down like a super freezer blowing -20 deg air at lets say 100 km/h constantly. You cannot put it on recirculation, the moist will fog the windows in an instant. The air needs to be circulated all the time, new air (at -20) must be heated continuously. Yet another factor is the outside air is -20 It cools the water down at a rate:
In +20 : 90 – 20 = 70 degrees differential
In -20 : 90 – (-20) = 110 degrees differential.
Lets say at full fan power, the heat exchanger will warm up the air to +40 at +20 degree. At -20, it can only warm it up to 0 (not entirely correct, but in principle)
Besides, most of the heat goes straight out with the exhaust, not through the heat exchanger or heater. The Lycoming method is better in cold weather.
kwlf wrote:
I could imagine that an ICE car manufacturer might calculate that it is easier to burn fuel to turn the alternator to heat some cheap nichrome wire, than it would be to arrange to extract the waste heat from the engine
I don’t think it is. Most modern cars have electric pre-heaters so you have warm air as soon as you turn the key, but the lion’s share of cabin heat still comes from the engine’s cooling system.
The ICE is creating a load of heat no matter what and you’ve got the water-cooling pipework in there anyway, so it’s not much extra to pipe it through a heat exchanger and have it do something useful rather than just dissipating it to atmosphere. You would put a big load on your alternator if you used it to power an electric heater of comparable output.
kwlf wrote:
That doesn’t matter. If you can charge one battery in 5 minutes, you can charge 2 batteries in 5 minutes and get 200 miles range. If the battery chemistry permits it, then you can scale it up.
That could be tricky. Let’s say you have 4 of these batteries in parallel to be the equivalent of the 400 mile+ Tesla range. The Tesla S has a 100kWh battery, 100kWh in 5 minutes would (assuming 100% efficiency) require 1.2 megawatts of power.
The charging station would be epic. Power = volts * amps, so if we want to keep the current reasonable (let’s say, 100 amps) the charger would need to be 12kV at 100 amps. Both high voltage and high current.
Silvaire wrote:
Here’s a typical trip for me: a friend calls on Thursday night who is (it says here) 855 miles or 1400 km away. He suggests we drive there for something happening that weekend. We leave on Friday after work in my everyday ‘driver’ and stop wherever we feel tired, after probably 250-300 miles.
You don’t do that in your plane? :-) When I lived in Texas, if something like that cropped up – if the weather was good, my Cessna 140, if the weather wasn’t so good, the club Bonanza. No way was I driving 855 miles unless I really had no other option.
alioth wrote:
You don’t do that in your plane? :-) When I lived in Texas, if something like that cropped up – if the weather was good, my Cessna 140, if the weather wasn’t so good, the club Bonanza. No way was I driving 855 miles unless I really had no other option.
Depends on the timing, if the schedule is loose I love trips in the plane. For a long distance in a short time with inflexible schedule I don’t like the pressure, even while knowing you can do stuff like get a rental car, get home quickly when needed and return for the plane later.
I like road trips, doing them on a motorcycle in Europe is my primary hobby. Flying is also great but for me tends to revolve more around owning and enjoying the plane as an experience than using it for transportation, and I have no interest at all in flying trips in planes owned by other people.
Assuming my health and other circumstances still allow it, I anticipate doing more plane trips in 5-7 years or so, after I quit working a normal work week. The plan would be no plan, head off in a certain direction and let the trip form itself one day at a time, credit card in wallet, largely without reference to the calendar or completely fixed destinations.
alioth wrote:
The motoring lobby won’t allow remote disable of vehicles
If the vehicle talks to the manufacturer via the internet for software updates and usage data gathering, then it’s already possible (and trivial to give government a back door into it).
I’m not convinced it won’t happen. There are so many ‘legitimate’ reasons (disqualified drivers, insurance conditions, non-payment of road fees, congestion management, crime prevention) to have this sort of control.
alioth wrote:
(b) fuel becoming practically unobtainable is a while off, but it will happen.
Not just fuel, but it is part of the equation: this is why I don’t proceed with my aviation goal which is building an RV-8. I believe that long before I am ready to stop flying, our sort of flying will become pretty much impossible. So the RV-8 is not a good investment.
Graham wrote:
So the RV-8 is not a good investment
Sounds to me like a self fulfilling prophesy. You don’t ‘need’ law and rational legislature so much once you allow mixing of church and state.
Lots of RVs being built regardless by people who don’t buy the message, and will create their future for themselves.
