Electric Cars

[r3k1355]

do you think that instead of recharging batteries, there will just be battery dispensers at 'Petrol garages' where you just swap an empty battery for a full one? 

That would never work, the batteries would just get knackered by people man-handling them.

Just remember, the general public can't even share a toilet without ruining it.
You expect them to share delicate electrical equipment??

No chance!

indeed, Run has nailed the thing they have forgotten, I have a friend that works for western power and he said the grid has nowhere near the capacity required for the country to go electric cars.


they are getting there insofar as there's far less reliance on fossil fuel, there's always a bit of wind and the tide never stops, they need to work harder on harnessing these forces.


one thing I'm still not convinced of, all these precious metals and chemicals going into the batteries, is producing and transporting these (currently by using fossil fuels)  any less harmful than the pretty clean fossil fuel engines we have these days?

and what happens when the batteries reach the end of their lives?  can they be recycled efficiently and be financially viable?

The main one we have problems with is copper - but we probably use almost as much in combustion engines as we do in EVs and other materials are coming to be used in EV manufacture. It's coming whether you like it or not - there's no denying it now! The recycling of all of these is totally viable and we've been doing it for years. The energy used in the whole cycle still less than an IC car could ever hope to achieve and it resolves the air pollution at source - not to mention from here-on in it's only going to get better. We've been trying to resolve IC engine emissions for 30 years and look what happened in the end. Treating the emissions out of a 100 coal fired power station is easy in comparison to fixing the emissions out of billions of IC cars.

There's actually a surprising amount of usable copper about, issue is the cost of the stuff.
One of the reasons it's so high is because it is used as an investment vehicle, the Chinese are big in that area.

They buy up an entire warehouse of refined bight copper, then use that as collateral to obtain government loans.
That money is then pumped into property development which see's huge returns in China.

Once the government loan is paid off with profit from property the copper can then be used as collateral for another loan, rinse and repeat.
So there's literally warehouses of this stuff sat around all over the place, but it's only use is to secure finance for other projects.