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Old 04-02-20, 01:33 PM
Thor Thor is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Meriden near Coventry
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Worst case for classics is probably a limited supply of suitable fuels with high ethanol and bio-Diesel content or similar, leading to high running costs and so only use for shows and historic reasons. Classic cars will be to the roads rather like preserved steam locomotives are to the tracks.

I hope it won't be that bad, and that our leaders will realise it is not really about zero emissions but balanced emissions. Balanced emissions can include some air travel and some use of hydrocarbon-burning engines, as long as trees are growing healthily (etc.)

Pure battery electric vehicles are DEFINITELY not the answer for most vehicle uses at present. As Geoff says batteries are expensive, hard to recycle, and cause untold damage and misery where the special metals for batteries are mined. If you look at CO2 savings per unit of battery, proper hybrids are 13 times more effective at reducing CO2 than pure battery vehicles.

If you look at particulate emissions, the modern engines with particulate filters make those less polluting than battery cars because the dust produced from tyre wear exceeds the exhaust dust, and battery cars are heavier, so they have greater tyre wear.

Then there's the problem of electricity generation to charge the vehicles. The UK is proudly advertising that it is frequently not running any coal fired stations at all, but on Christmas day we nearly had power cuts. If the wind drops, and if more of our ancient stock of Nuclear stations go off line, we are stuffed AS WE ARE, never mind if we add a load of battery cars to charge up. We are already heavily dependent on the cables which bring power from France and Belgium, and I don't doubt the prices for those supplies will increase too.

Someone in Whitehall needs to wake up and smell the burnt out fuse !
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