UK ban on new diesel and petrol cars 2040

[Flo]

So there's talk of banning new diesel and petrol cars in the Uk by 2040!
Well someone has had a think about things and looked at what hasn't been thought through by our respected UK government.

The article points out a lot of the pitfalls but in sheer practical terms anyone who has a job which involves driving will be looking at this and thinking "well I don't want to be a taxi, deliver your takeaway ...."

Wonder how many people will be putting cash aside to get some of the last off the line petrol/diesel cars and whether the car makers will take a punt on keeping a few rolling off the lines to meet the requirements of the "luddites" whose needs are not met by these new fangled cars.

Hang on - it's the summer silly season in politics and this is the reaction to some court ruling which tells government to produce a plan - but doesn't say if it has to happen of course .....

[Green Aura]

I'm quite interested to see how this pans out. I have a 220 mile round trip to do any major shopping, which I do roughly every 2-3 months. Even the supermarket click and collect is a 40 mile round trip.

The current range of electric cars only seems to be about 80 miles per charge. I'm not sure how long charging takes.

Will this mean I'll have to book hotel stops x 3 to go to Inverness?

[Odsox]

Yeah, I'm pretty much the same as GA with Cork city a 200 mile round trip. At the moment there are a handful of charging points, but none of them at shopping centres
Then there's the trip to the UK. It's about 300 miles from here to the ferry and then another 325 miles to the in-laws house in Sussex, so unless they develop batteries that have a range of at least 350 - 400 miles that would take several days travelling (just like the good old days by horse & cart)

I always said that "It's OK for townies, but not for us country dwellers", but of course I hadn't even considered "townies" who live in flats, high rise flats and terraced houses with no garage/parking area. There will have to be a continuous line of street charging points like parking meters, or more likely under road cordless charging which would mean digging up EVERY street to install.
Either way there's a lot of upheaval coming.

[ina]

I also fear that charging up (overnight especially) will be open to all sorts of vandalism... Will it just need some kids with big bolt cutters to walk around at night and, er, disconnect dozens of vehicles from their charging point? Or is it even easier - just pull out the plug? How does that work?

The place I work at the moment has two charging stations, and at least one is used regularly. But it's a pretty secure site...

[Weedo]

City Centric knee-yerk reactions without acknowledgement of the broader consequences.
The NSW Government last year imposed an across the board shift from ULP cars to E10 (Ethanol) only, complete with a block for other fuel types on our fuel credit cards. They did not consider that E10 is simply not available in the majority of Western NSW and never will be available because there is no general market for it. They also mandated a shift down to small "economical" lightweight cars that included Western NSW where most of the drive includes gravel and small hazards like B Doubles, Road trains, cattle, camels, pigs and kangawallawombats. After an almost universal refusal to drive the things, numerous Occupational Health claims (try sitting in one of these matchbox toys for 8 hours) several written off to mobile, warm blooded speed humps they had to change the State fleet back. Now they are putting hybrid cars in the fleet with a maximum range of 300km! Interesting in a State where 300 - 400 km distances between fuel stops (and accomodation) is common.

[Skippy]

I expected the reaction to be negative on some of the other forums I use but I seriously expected this to be viewed a bit more positively on this one. We are talking about something that's the best part of a quarter of a century away , it's not like it's going to happen in a couple of years. I've seen and read quite a few of the arguments against and frankly the majority are straw man arguments. Not enough charging points ? There's a national grid covering pretty much all the country and twenty odd years to build charging stations. Drunks and kids might unplug cars while they're charging? Perhaps someone could invent a small lock , say a padlock. Pavements will be covered in trailing cables and be dangerous? Retractable gantries , posts similar to parking meters etc. I've even heard one comment that EV's are dangerous because they are silent .
Some seem to have almost deliberately misunderstood the idea and assume petrol and diesel are being banned whereas it's just the sale of new cars that will end in 2040. People are also making the wild assumtion that petrol and diesel will still be as widely available and cheap as it is now ( we passed conventional peak oil around 2005 and there are already diminishing returns on fracked oil) and our motoring needs will be at the same level or higher than it is now. One common theme is where all that extra energy to charge all those cars is going to come from. It will mean more power generation but because of efficiencies not as many as some might think. Cars rarely reach 20-25% efficiency whereas gas powered stations have reached 50-55% . To replace all the cars on the roads would take an increase of just 10% in our generating capacity, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-sw ... wer-demand and that's assuming we don't change our travelling habits. More localisation , better public transport especially in urban areas , car sharing /pooling could all offset any negatives. There's no arguing that petrol and diesel vehicle are the most versatile but improvments in EV's are being made all the time , range and performance are all getting better. By 2040 there'll probably be an electric vehicle with towing capacity to keep all those caravanners happy.

[Green Aura]

I'm not sure we're being particularly negative, Skippy. Expressing concern, even if some of it is a little naive, should be answered, not dismissed.

Of course the technology will improve over time, manufacturers will have to make sure it does if they want to remain in business. I can't find reference to the silence of EVs in this thread but I read somewhere they've had to introduce some form of engine noise as fatalities, or near, have occurred. Of course I can't be certain about that, the internet can provide some interesting info.

We already have several charging stations up here, although they are only on the main routes about 30-40 miles apart - many folk round here might have a long journey to reach one of those. As gas comes from the same place as oil, it too is of limited lifespan, so basing a whole technology on electricity means nuclear - especially as our current government is removing help for any alternatives.

More localisation and better public transport are great but ignore the fact that the society as it is now has been entirely based around the car for a generation or more. The petrol-based economy has enabled people to live further and further away from their jobs. Who is going to ensure provision of adequate public transport - privatised services have proven woefully short in most areas and is prohibitively expensive for many people. Particularly for those in rural areas - and you often need a car to get to the public transport. In truth, people will hang on to their fossil-fuel vehicles as long as possible - cars become less efficient as they age. Is it really feasible to resolve these issues in just over twenty years?

I think this was an easy piece of legislation for a government that has u-turned on virtually every element of their manifesto (this wasn't even in it and seems to come from nowhere). Although manageable in some EU countries that have better transport/energy infrastructures than in the UK it doesn't strike me that it has been particularly well thought out here, which leads me to the conclusion that is probably is not intended to be enacted. At least not by 2040.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong and that all the issues (of which only a handful have been touched on here) can be resolved.

[Flo]

Present practicalities influence how people view this subject. Someone on another forum (green living even) is looking at replacing a larger van of age and interesting identity (with more repairs now than original bits) - lives in very rural Wales indeed, works in a local hospital at present and has been offered a trial run in an electric motor:

"I'm looking at replacing Pudgy in the not too distant future and have been getting a lot of 'blurb' from various sources.

Nissan are really pushing their EV-200 electric van and have offered me a test drive. As it will be a commercial purchase for my business, they have offered me a full 48 hour 'borrow' of their demonstrator to see how it fits in with my business.

The base model (EV200 - Accenta) only has normal charging which is 12 hours plugged in overnight. Rapid charging (4 hours) costs another £900 on top. Pay another £1900 and I can have the 30 minute fast charging version.

My nearest rapid charging point is 19 miles away. The nearest 30 minute fast charger is 46 miles away. The cost of me installing a fast/rapid charger at home would be around £1200 and I'd need the incomer to the house, my metering and my consumer units uprated by Western Power at a cost of around £900.

12 hour, four hour or 30 minute charging...the capacity of the battery is exactly the same.

So, to avail myself of the test drive, I have to collect it from a Nissan Electric dealer. My nearest is Morriston in Swansea which is about 70 miles away. Range on a full charge...107 miles, but that is assuming relatively flat and straight roads at 40-60mph speeds. Of those 70 miles to mine from Swansea, 55 of them are narrow winding country lanes with hills and tight bends. According to the guy at the dealership, under those conditions I could reasonably expect a range of about 45 miles.

So, I wouldn't even get it home from the dealer for my 'trial', let alone be able to get any reasonable test of it under 'field conditions'. My run to the hospital and back is 70 miles (again, winding roads and hilly terrain) so I wouldn't even expect it to get me to work and back empty, let alone carrying any cargo.

Just for additional gag value, the base model comes with what they call the 'Cold Pack' as standard. This comprises a full colour reversing camera system (electrically powered, I assume, which is completely unnecessary as the van has mirrors and I can happily reverse on mirrors without technological aids), an electrically heated drivers seat and electrically heated mirrors.

Yes... that little lot will eat into the (already painfully limited) range and, as electric vehicles don't generate any waste engine heat, the cab heating is also electrical. To be fair, you can program it to preheat the cab while plugged in charging, but on a standard 13A 3kW socket what you gain from preheating the cab will be lost in battery charging capacity.

Best estimate (in winter), with the heater, seat warmer and mirror heating is that this van wouldn't even make it to Eco's and back from mine, and that's only a 20 mile round trip!

On a positive note, it does only cost around 2p/mile to run (so they say). I would guess that figure is nearer 10p a mile round here as you don't get anywhere as many miles per kWh as you would on flat straight roads. My petrol Peugeot gets around 30mpg average, which works out at 16p a mile. Not much difference there and not anywhere near enough to justify the £16k spend on a new vehicle. It would take me ten years to break even. The Citroen diesel gets almost 40mpg, so that costs just over 12p a mile to run...I would be saving even less on my motoring costs, hence it would take even longer to amortise the cost of purchase.

The Partner can do nearly 300miles on a full tank, which takes just under a minute to fill from empty. The Relay can do nearly 500 miles on a full tank.

Sorry, but I can't see any reason why I would possibly consider an electric replacement for my current technologies, especially as both my current vehicles are 15 years old so have more than paid back their front-loaded carbon from their original production (around 9 years). The emissions angle is completely irrelevant - the coast of West Wales with fairly constant Atlantic breezes and very low population density means that air quality round here is about as good as it gets in the UK.

For urban residential areas with very short commutes to and from places of work, electric is doable, but not in outlying rural areas where there isn't much infrastructure, and no long term plans to improve it any."

[Odsox]

We are talking about something that's the best part of a quarter of a century away

You're right, I shall be long dead by then so won't affect me at all.

[Flo]

I suspect the same goes for most of the present MPs which is why it's not well thought out.

[Skippy]

Sorry if I've offended anyone by calling their reaction negative. It's more that the majority of comments on forums , both this one and others , are along the lines of "they haven't thought about X , Y and Z , they haven't thought about people with caravans , seven kids , goats or those who have to travel from London to Glasgow every day to make a living" and there are precious few that look at as "we all know something has to be done and a quarter of a century seems a reasonable timeframe to iron out problems" . Better to put something into play now than wait until 2039 or when oil becomes too expensive to waste on frivolous journeys. One concern I do have is that the government of today or the next government won't be the one in power in two decades time and how those proposals are going to be diluted , changed or generally buggered about with is anybodies guess . Many of the present government might not even be alive by then. I will , or at least I should be , and even now I very rarely travel more than 15 miles from home work wise so having to travel even less doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Oh the comment about EV's being dangerously quiet came from another forum.

[Green Aura]

I very rarely travel more than 15 miles from home

Me neither. Our car leaves the drive once or twice a month. The problem really is that when it does it has quite a long journey, most of the time.

Although it has taken us nearly 10 years, we managed to get most things delivered, now, although T*sc* have decided in their wisdom to stop having a click and collect in our village and the next pick up point is 20 miles away (the next village on). We still need to go shopping occasionally though and travelling to visit relatives, in England would be incredibly difficult without a car.

We are talking about something that's the best part of a quarter of a century away

You're right, I shall be long dead by then so won't affect me at all.

I'm hoping I won't be but I probably won't/oughtn't be driving.