General Chat

The proposed ban on fossil fuel car sales from 2040 has the potential to outlaw car ownership for the poor. Many on the lower end of the income scale live in properties that do not have a garage of private parking area and leave their cars on the road.

For example several people who live on the main road near us have no garage but have yellow lines outside their house so park in our road a hundred meters or more away.

How are they expected to recharge an electric car without running a cable across a pavement or even to the other side of the road, always assuming that there is a socket available to plug it into?

My OH got all worked up about it Brian
when he saw it on the news, told him to
calm down by the time it comes into force
he will be 98 that's if he lives that long.

Another case of someone not thinking fully about it before stating their intentions.

Gove proves once more that he is incapable of connected thought or understanding law. He is of course in kindrid company. Meanwhile the nox disaster which has led to the Supreme Court ruling rolls on without any meaningful resolution. Indeed electric trains for the Gwr and the North are to be replaced by diesel.

Starting from now there is no way that the UK can install sufficient extra electrical power by 2040. Then there is the small issue of fuel tax.

Government by gimmick , not that Labour offer any improvement.

Would we need cars?.......food delivered to your home.....work from home.....etc etc....then the delivery trucks would just plug in at their depot

I don't think many of us need bother about it. I, for one, would be nearly 100 and even if still here will certainly not be bothering about driving. :-D :-D

Certainly brings your age home to you when they start talking about 30/40 years time.

Toyota, Honda & Hyundai have all produced hydrogen fuelled cars. By then perhaps they will be a credible & cheaper alternative to all-electric powered cars?

Will we still need private cars? If you live in a city & town and only want to travel where public transport takes you, possibly not. As it stands, I'd much rather jump in a car & take 15 to 20 mins to travel to our nearest town, than have to time my journey to fit around the hourly bus which takes twice as long. By the way, there's a 2 1/2 hour service gap in the afternoon as the busses juggle timetables for the school out-chuck service.

IMHO plug-in electric cars are a dead end and once again the Government is backing the wrong horse.
As DetEcTive says, hydrogen looks to be a more flexible long-term solution, either in a combustion engine or a fuel cell.
And as an interim, what happened to LPG which still produces CO2 but I presume not NO2, although Rollo will undoubtedly be able to advise in that one?
In the short term, better traffic management to enable vehicles to keep moving in cities at an efficient speed rather than sitting in traffic producing fumes would at least reduce the problem.
If flexible solar panels are produced it may be that electric cars are covered in them so as to recharge or top up batteries on the move or when parked or in jams during daytime.

Our new to us 3 year old car has an eco function. Basically it means that if you've been stationary for a couple of minutes, the engine cuts out. It restarts when you engage a gear or press the accelerator.

Something similar fitted to all new vehicles would help to lessen emissions in jams.

Perhaps all the parents who drive their kids to school could be encouraged to damn well walk the relatively short distances. I am referring to townies BTW.

Although having said that we used to walk ours to school and it would take up to 30 minutes each way, that included time to nose around into the fields too.

We have a new diesel car every three years (cripmobile) and there are very good innovations included in the new models.

I absolutely agree that providing charging stations would be an urban nightmare and in rural areas too.

However, how many times have you sat in a traffic queue behind a vehicle that was spewing out noxious smoke? Start with getting those off the roads.

If they want clean air does that mean that any lorries
delivering out with our country will not be permitted to
enter if they still use petrol/diesel and will we have electric
planes/ helicopters/tractors etc....laughable

Brian - LPG is extremely dangerous if the tank is ruptured - it sits there, in liquid form, under the vehicle and bursts into flame/explodes..
Compressed Natural gas, on the other hand, if the tank was ruptured, would float up and disperse, therefore being less likely to catch fire.

Both are pollutants - but then so is the process of making electricity :-S

The problem is that everyone is looking today's technology and trying to project how this might look in the future.


Yes, it is correct to have policy which aims to reduce or even eliminate emissions but who says it has to be re-chargeable lithium batteries? For all we know it may turn out to be nuclear powered plutonium cells than don't require a recharge.

Reality is that we simply have no idea how things might look in 25 years time.

The £250,000,000 that the government has earmarked is nothing more than a joke. It amounts to little more than a one off contribution of £4 per person. Final cost is likely to be in the order of hundreds if not thousands of £billions.

Joan - fully charged cars have a max range of 300 miles, so let's assume 250 for practical purposes. Assuming ambulances, fire engines, busses, lorries etc have a larger battery capacity, they'd probably be about the same.

Without any govt vacuous promises the market will shift towards electric vehicles. It has made this eye catching announcement, utterly devoid of substance, hoping to divert attention from its paltry and illegal response to the nox problem right now. The matter will soon be back before the Supreme Court. The EU side of Brexit has noted Ukgov unwillingness to comply with the rulings of its own supreme Court and as a result will not give an inch on E.C.J. jurisdiction.

There is no shortage of accessible lithium. The batteries can be recycled. Moreover battery performance will improve a lot plus other technologies using common elements are being researched.

Cars etc can be charged at home, at charging points etc - this is already possible in France the electric grid is ubiquitous. The number of filling stations is likely to shrink drastically. By using GPS Road usage can be monitored for tax purposes with the bonus of charging by time/location and self enforcing speed limits.

Electrical power will prevail over Lpg and hydrogen because ii it is safer and can be carbon neutral. 100% émission free. Buses, Hgv etc can easily run on electric power. Some already do. Electric motors have a very long life - 50 years + - and married to aluminium bodies the replacement cycle could become an industry headache after the initial phase is over.

As with the shift from horses to powered vehicles after ww1 the problem for the govt is not issuing absurd cut off dates but managing the transition. Without far more coherent transport policies there are going to be a lot of very angry losers.

Home working is not going to catch on very much because the simple fact is that people work better in teams and groups. Otoh very high speed Internet will greatly reduce the need for large numbers of people to work in large city office blocks. Already the Shard is still half empty and there are no tenants for the Deutch Bank folly.

but how can a washing machine or any mechanical appliance be repaired "over the Internet" it requires hands on activity, not all of us push characters around a screen as a job of work,

Most if not all of the control systems of stuff from washing machines to cars to space vehicles are now digital and can indeed be diagnosed at a distance and to some degree be fixed. Stuff is rairly repaired in the classic way just faulty modules replaced.

Industry is very busy further automating not only manufacturing but also fault diagnosis and repair. Brexit or not mfg industry is unlikely to be a big source of well paid jobs.

The C18 was utterly unprepared for the industrial revolution. Some countries have shown some awareness of what is about to happen but def not Anglo saxon politicians on either side of the Atlantic.

yes Rollo but teletransportation of spare parts is not a go-er yet... still needs physical intervention..


so unless amazon can deliver by drone the neccessary components and knowledge...

your appliance is so much scrap material...

In a state of the art modern warehouse the picking is all robotic right down to a pallet going into the truck. Amazon's people intensive system is way behind the curve. Automated trucking will happen within 20 years.

Delivery by drone is impracticable in volume.

It is not economic to repair a lot of domestic kit mostly due to the high Labour content Inc travel. Picking up items for robotic repair is far cheaper.

The future for the semi skilled and average white collar worker is bleak. Radical new ideas are badly needed.

The old think none of this affects them. They could not be more wrong.

The problem with robotics is, one 'hack' or electricity failure, and they're (to put it politely) done! :-D :-D :-D :-D