I beg to differ EV tech is not 'Pie in the Sky'. Thats far too positive.

It's the possibility of one day there may be Pie in the Sky.

It's fine for people who really don't need a car but for ordinary mortals as much use as a chocolate nuclear reactor containment vessel.

How do we get all that energy into the battery? With domestic supplies it would take days to charge such a battery fully, three-phase supplies would be required in every household, the national grid would collapse under the load, We are building windmills when we should be building nuclear power stations, the population is expanding at an unprecedented rate due to immigration - the case for electric cars in the UK looks shakey even if there was a viable battery to power them.

I think that in the future most cars will be propelled by electric motors, although only a minority will be pure battery electric. There's still the battery range problem, but for uses where range isn't a problem - e.g. urban commuting, local use in rural areas, electric cars would be ideal.

But for mainstream use, the range-extender hybrid, along the lines of the Chevrolet Volt what I think will become the norm. That is an electrically propelled car with a range on batteries of, say, 40 - 50 miles, with an auxiliary on-board generator driven by a small diesel engine (as opposed to the Volt's petrol engine).

I think this is part of the reason why manufacturers are looking to develop small, light 3-cylinder engines - both petrol and diesel - they would be ideal for use driving generators in hybrids, where they can work at optimum speed, not mechanically linked to road wheels. Also, these small engines would allow more choice in where they can be located in a hybrid.

Electric cars produce zero emissions and more importantly, in themselves they consume no fossil fuels. Of course that's only half true, as they pass that problem up the line to the electricity generators. One day we'll have to be reliant on renewables for electricity generation because all the finite resources will have become scarce - including uranium for nuclear power stations (I've seen 80 years at current usage rates quoted).

I'm not really bothered about the climate and emissions, I've yet to see any convincing evidence that we have caused global warming (which ceased 10 years ago according to the official graphs!). BUT we are using up the earth's finite resources at an ever increasing rate and they will become scarce and prohibitively expensive within decades.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 21/02/2012 at 10:59

Nah we're not doing too badly on nuke fuel supplies. The Chinese and Indians will be rabbing as much uranium as they can in the next decade because their nuclear plant build rate is phenomenal at the mo, but we've got other fuels and there's reprocessed stuff too.

Diesel-electric has been around a long time, and is proven technology in trains.

Because the efficiency gain obtained by running the engine at a constant speed and load is almost entirely wiped out by the thermodynamic losses incurred by running a generator to charge and discharge a battery to drive a motor to turn the wheels.

Diesel electric is used on trains because the electric motor can provide maximum torque at zero RPM. Slipping a clutch isn't really a viable option to get a 5000 tonne freight train started on an incline.

The problem of trying to rapidly charge and discharge a battery corrosponding to driver demand for acceleration and deceleration is very hard on the battery. All these 'solutions' look good as basic concepts. Then again an adiabatic, frictionless Internal Combustion Engine looks good as a concept. The status quo has not arrived by accident.