The EV hurts the planets narrative is so flimsy, it doesn’t take much mental effort to see through it for those that aren’t wilfully blind.
“EVs charge using coal.” Yeah, currently. But as renewables become the dominant form of energy in the grid they’ll be charging on green energy. In fact when charging infrastructure is installed at workplace car parking, the EVs will help balance the grid by providing a stronger daytime demand which will support more large scale solar.
Even in the short term EVs are vastly more efficient than petrol or diesel engines. The net carbon emissions for an EV are less than a ICE, even if the electricity is partly coal or gas sourced.
“EVs use raw materials and raw materials hurt the environment.” Yeah, so ICE vehicles are made of bamboo and positive thoughts? EVs use resources that don’t have a scaled up supply chain, but they don’t use much of it. Even scaled up the mining volumes are minuscule compared to iron and copper. Resource intensity will drop as manufacturers save $$$ by inventing components that use less raw material.
“Batteries can’t be recycled.” Sure. That immense amount of highly valuable raw material is just going to get thrown away and nobody is going to see that waste stream as a metaphorical gold mine. If you believe that one and any other recycling based fear mongering, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you for a bargain price.
“EVs don’t work for this very rare trip that I do once a year.” Ok. Fine. Spend an hour at a nice park and have a pleasant lunch while the car charges up.
I am in China now. I wondered why some cars have blue number plates while others have green. At first I thought they could have been from different provinces, but no: they had the same characters for that.
Different dates? nope, the rego numbers were intermingled.
At last I asked a local: the green ones are for EV cars. I reckon the green ones are about 1 third of the cars on the road in this city (which is just a Tier 3 city described by a local as conservative, so probably uptake is higher in more populous places).
Info on the BYD Sealion 6 PHEV released today
Base model Dynamic is $48990 before onroad costs.
Premium is $52990
92km (Dynamic) / 81km (Premium) electric range means a good chunk of 9to5ers could do their working week completely on electricity.
Haven’t seen whether it’s V2H capable. I assume not, but one day when cars like this are, you could power your house off it overnight and it wouldn’t use too much of your 18kWh or larger capacity future battery.
As I posted before, I just had a week or so in Zheijiang - about 60% of cars on the road in Hangzhou (a major city) were EVs. They are easily identifiable because they have a green licence plate vs the blue plates of conventional cars.
So not only is China leading in the manufacture of EVs, but also in their uptake and very significantly in the public awareness of them.
Guess you were at Zheijiang University. Visited there some years ago, very fine University with great facilities. I remember asking a Professor about when it was built, he smiled and said not the long ago in 1897 !
After my talk there we we got in a car and we were driven along a highway for about 10 minutes to meet for a banquet.
It was in another building on the same campus!
Also visited the Second Hospital there. I asked how many patients they dealt with per year. They had to go and check their figures… then came back with the number of 8 million. (The hospital the day before in a neighbouring city only treated three million).
Think I told you about sitting next to Professor of Chem Eng at Beijing University and asked him how many PhD students in his faculty. When he said about 1000, I said that I just meant PhD candidates and he advised that is what he meant. They have to pick 1000 candidates from 30,000 highly qualified applicants.
Yeah - it is daunting to realise there are more geniuses in China than there are people in Australia. And there is incredible competition to get into the best University on China.
(But with full disclosure - I am/have been a Professor in Beijing University).
Toyota, Mazda & Subaru held a joint press conference in Tokyo yesterday announcing they will join together to develop next generation ICE engines running on Hydrogen & Bio Fuels with Hybrid tech
Have a local friend who lives on a few acres who makes his own biofuel and runs his Holden Ute with it for many years. Not sure where he gets his raw materials but he has a shed with a large bioreactor churning away. He reckons he lives completely off the grid with solar and a small wind turbine. Grows most of what he eats.
Works as a teacher at a local school and is a very conservative looking bloke, no earrings or tattoos. Probably votes National.
Working on converting his Wife’s old Ford Raider to biofuel, guess it must not be that hard.
