I remember the days of big gas guzzlers, even small cars were hugely inefficient compared to 21c small cars. I remember cars breaking down all the time, using a starting handle, your girlfriend’s stocking for a fan belt, feeler gauge in pocket, no breathalyser, no seatbelts, no yellow lines. We’ve progressed in terms of safety and efficiency. We will continue to progress.
The vast majority of vehicles on the road today will be gone in 10 or 15 years time. They would be gone anyway, without the proposed change to EV.
Vintage & veteran cars will exist and will always be of interest, with petrol/diesel available to run them. They will perform off road, as they do now: glorified banger racing.
Here in the inner city, car ownership will decline, most will depend upon public transport, bikes and shanks’s pony most of the time. Car sharing/clubs is on the increase, why pay all the many £Ks/year to have your car parked out front for a couple of weekend getaways? Cities will be cleaner and nicer.
erm, I don’t know … you’ll have battery power to take you to the nearest trading estate for shopping and a recharge, you’ll have off-road recharging at home.
I wrote this elsewhere but it might be more appropriate here. These are very early days in the change over from fossil fuels so who knows what technology will turn up with? (who predicted computers would be used to write letters?)
The railways seem to cope with electric power quite well and I remember the trolley buses in London so I think that there is a good case for electric trucks travelling on long distance expressways.
It would be easy to run electric overhead wires over say the left hand lane on the expressway for a few km so that trucks could charge their batteries as they travel say on the Hume Highway between Sydney and Melbourne so that they would have plenty of battery power once they arrive in the city to get them to their depot.
It is just a matter of imagination and will
I suspect that my diesel Dmax will see me out as long as I can get fuel for it but what my kids or grandkids will be driving is a different matter
In a world where materials are precious and recycling is paramount, I wonder what will happen to all the old engines and vehicles, not to mention the hundreds and thousands of new conventional vehicles waiting at our docks and storage facilities.
Then there is the energy, materials and pollution created when replacing conventional vehicles.
Not to mention the electricity needed to charge the EV’s and to provide domestic heating when old gas boilers are replaced with electric heating…
The whole of the electrical generation and infrastructure will gave to be given a new approach and of course the use of hydrogen gas re evaluated as a domestic fuel. We all used hydrogen before (coal gas) so we know all the possibilities and as for stocks of cars held, they will soon go as they come up for sale. What we wont see is all the engine developments that were on the drawing board come into fruition, which could have provided even cleaner less polluting cars etc.
I think it is drawing a long bow to describe coke ovens gas as hydrogen, it definitely wasn’t, the Upper and Lower Explosive Limits for hydrogen are vastly different as COG is only about 50% hydrogen
