Nissan Leaf: Future or Failure?

[VaderDSL]

They should have overhead lines on motorways which you can extend a bumper car esque cable to charge from giving you the ability to travel larger distances charge up on the motorway then zoom around on the A roads doing whatever, should cut down on the need for so many charging stations

 

[Kutter]

GE are offering a free charging station for people who buy the first 200 or so of their electric car over here.
We are all going to have to change from petrol at some point, they just need to get something thats going to give you more than 90 miles on one charge.

 

[Emphacy]

Of course, there's then the fact that there's no engine noise. Whatever happened to the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel for cars?

I think the 'hydrogen fueled cars' idea went down after they realized there was no efficient way of storing the hydrogen.

After all you don't want a tank of an extremely explosive gas mounted to a a bunch of moving objects, especially with the drivers these days!

 

[Tute]

GE are offering a free charging station for people who buy the first 200 or so of their electric car over here.
We are all going to have to change from petrol at some point, they just need to get something thats going to give you more than 90 miles on one charge.

So why not get to work on something proper rather than what feels like a rushed idea?

The main reasons petrol is so popular:

- Affordable (relatively).
- Accessible (stations everywhere)
- Easy to use (put it in the tank and let the engine do the rest)
- Range (anywhere up to hundreds of miles for cars)

They've got to hit all these bases, if they don't then there's just no point. The leaf covers the first base (ish, i'd still argue that it's expensive to buy and there's no evidence of what difference it makes to the electricity bill) but it gets NOWHERE near covering the other three.

I think the 'hydrogen fueled cars' idea went down after they realized there was no efficient way of storing the hydrogen.

After all you don't want a tank of an extremely explosive gas mounted to a a bunch of moving objects, especially with the drivers these days!

A tank of explosive gas you say? What... like... er... petrol?

 

[rypt]

Because you need mass manufacturing in order for costs to come down, as such you need to start building and selling the cars then you can stick more batteries until battery tech catches up

 

[GreatAuk]

Was my 1st year mechanical engineering thermodynamics notes. 'fraid I binned them though and sold the text books for the moneys.

Oh well, at least not all our electricity comes from coal then.
According to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=7286
In 2001 37% of our electricity came from coal/lignite, 23% from nuclear (very low CO2 emissions), and 37% from gas (see below).

According to this: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2report.html
'Pounds of carbon dioxide per kWh (in 1999)'
Coal 2.095
Gas 1.321

So, if switching to electric vehicles has a 1% efficiency increase when using coal power, there will be 'more' efficiency increase when taking UK electricity generation as a whole.

- Seems like a step in the right direction to me.

 

[GreatAuk]

They should have overhead lines on motorways which you can extend a bumper car esque cable to charge from giving you the ability to travel larger distances charge up on the motorway then zoom around on the A roads doing whatever, should cut down on the need for so many charging stations

Or manufacturers could have extra battery packs. - Charge one at home while you drive with the other one, or even in the future have one standardised 'battery unit' that all cars could utilise, and just swap batteries at a 'swapping station', where the old batteries would be charged.

edit: Or if there weren't too many (like 10) mainstream electric vehicle manufacturers, each station would be able to have a manufacturer specific battery stock - then people don't all need to agree on which battery design is best.

 

[Tute]

Because you need mass manufacturing in order for costs to come down, as such you need to start building and selling the cars then you can stick more batteries until battery tech catches up

Yeah but you're not going to get mass market adoption if the product is rubbish to begin with.

 

[DAnDan]

I think the 'hydrogen fueled cars' idea went down after they realized there was no efficient way of storing the hydrogen.

After all you don't want a tank of an extremely explosive gas mounted to a a bunch of moving objects, especially with the drivers these days!

The ideas are still going strong, there's massive amounts of research going into hydrogen fuel cells at the moment. As for storing the the hydrogen, chances are it won't be as a gas, far too inefficient .

 

[hohum]

I'm not sure how charging points along streets would work in the future, considering any nearby scum would happily unplug your car from it while you're away (or if they can't do that then they'd damage your car and the charging point).

 

[rypt]

Yeah but you're not going to get mass market adoption if the product is rubbish to begin with.

I disagree, the Tesla Roadster sold, Hybrids are selling, Leaf and Volt will sell

Give it 5-10 years and we will be seeing some real competitors

 

[DAnDan]

I disagree, the Tesla Roadster sold, Hybrids are selling, Leaf and Volt will sell

Give it 5-10 years and we will be seeing some real competitors

I'd put good money on there being a serious selection of electric motor cars in around that time; I think the technology for providing the energy will be fairly different to what it is though, hopefully anyway.

 

[flibbage0]

I disagree, the Tesla Roadster sold, Hybrids are selling, Leaf and Volt will sell

Give it 5-10 years and we will be seeing some real competitors

Tesla Roadster only sold because it was the only electric sports car.

Hybrids are selling because of the image and the fact that they still use petrol which is readily available.

Anyway hybrids are bullsit.

 

[Tute]

I disagree, the Tesla Roadster sold, Hybrids are selling, Leaf and Volt will sell

Give it 5-10 years and we will be seeing some real competitors

They're selling because the eco-hippies will buy them in droves. Oh, and Leaf/Volt/Tesla are NOT hybrids.

When they run out, you'll need to sell them to people who actually buy a car based on it's pros and cons rather than those who ***** £20K on a car to save £100 a year on tax.

And those kind of people are going to be hard to convince if you're not hitting the bases labelled above.

 

[rypt]

Realistically the only thing we can do for generating electricity right now is nuclear ... unfortunately our government are morons


Also Tute, Nissan and others will start taking a small hit on them and selling them via lease once the initial wave is over.

 

[flibbage0]

Nuclear cars

 

[DAnDan]

Nuclear cars

Can we then complain about the rising cost of uranium?

 

[Tute]

Also Tute, Nissan and others will start taking a small hit on them and selling them via lease once the initial wave is over.

I still maintain they'll need to make the cars themselves more accessible in order to shift them.

I have to admit, I don't see what was wrong with the way of the hybrid? Sure, I wouldn't buy one, but at least it does have mass-market appeal.

 

[geekyEd]

Short term failure, who is going to blow £25k on a shopping trolley when a fiesta can be had for 10k?

Not exactly going to save 15k in its lifetime is it. I doubt even the eco nuts will bother with this one.

 

[Dolph]

The cost mean this is likely to fail. Part of me would love an electric town car, but the cost is just insane at the moment.