BMW falsehoods

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Hammonds crash was 2017 and not a Tesla.
see here amongst many other reports and YouTube videos. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...r-top-gear

[boater sam]

Lithium batteries when they are slightly overcharged vent flames. Boeing 787 Dreamliners found that out. Now the battery packs are vented overboard I am told.
I'm surprised that CNG, compressed natural gas, has not been exploited, its common in Thailand for public transport and trucks. Seems to cause few problems.

[beamcurrent]

My wife, Anne was looking for a new car and chose a BMW i3 last spring. It has a real range of some 130 miles in summer and perhaps 105 miles in winter. These compare well with the published ranges. Of course a lot depends on how you drive/heater/aircon and so on. But she is pleased with it.

It has the "reserve" engine option, but so far we may have used as much as 3 pints of petrol. Indeed every now and then the management computer starts it up for a short while as it gets so little real use.

I am not sure if battery is the way to go, all systems have some disadvantages. Battery is OK for short runs but no good to go on a long run. My discovery gets used then!

Somebody needs to find a way of converting solar electric into a liquid fuel with the properties similar to petrol. Ho Hum!

Brian

[peter scott]

Electrolysis to hydrogen?

Peter

[Murphyv310]

Laugh you may but I'll stick to NASP (non turbo petrol engines) as a properly designed non turbo petrol engine is cleaner than all the hype of tiny 3 Cylinder petrol units and modern diesels.
The Panda does all what I want, its galvanised, a tried and tested 4 cylinder engine (FIRE) that has been used in many cars, even by Ford in the Ka 2, it doesn't have a distracting screen or so many gizmos that can go wrong, I fill up once a month and 46mpg round town to me is great. Laugh you may at a Fiat but so far I'm laughing at so many who pay a fortune for running costs, faults, fuel and insurance. I keep a very close tab on car expenses and I don't have any complaints.
This makes interesting reading https://www.driving.co.uk/news/eco-engin...ons-index/

If I had the cash I'd have a Panda 4x4...... Defender eater.
https://youtu.be/cgn2AG3WY-8

[ppppenguin]

Brian, I also test drove the i3 and it's a lovely car. But it's fairly small car and even with range extension the total range was only 200 miles at the time. Since then it's a bit further. Great (if expensive) car to have in a multivehicle family but wasn't right as the only car in my household.

The bigger battery packs of full electrics (the i3 is effectively a full electric with an optional petrol powered battery charger) are obviously less affected by auxiliary loads like aircon etc. Can the battery be preconditioned (warmed up!) from mains on cold days if you know when you're going to drive away?

From what I've read, you can reasonbly expect 80% or so of claimed range on a full electric car so Anne's car is doing fine. If I'd got 80% of claimed range I'd have been happy. Perhaps the shallow plug-in hybrid (most of them, the i3 is an exception, possibly unique, as a deep hybrid) is a dead end. Possibly not giving much benefit over (say) a standard Prius which just uses the battery for load levelling. The CO2 figures for a shallow plug-in tend to be 30-50g/km, as against 70-100 for non plug-ins. This is clearly as much a consequence of the test methods as the design of the car. This might not matter too much except for company car tax regime, C charge and possibly other political decisions where the declared CO2 matters.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
CO2 is a naturally occurring gas, levels have risen over the years, but the worlds natural filter has been decimated over at least the past 100 years. Rain forests have disappeared, forestry in many countries have also been badly eaten into and not managed properly. Northern Russia has about a fifth of the worlds forestation but it has now the biggest reduction in size worldwide, the Kremlin does nothing about this partly due to crooks who are to blame and an apparent lack of interest.
It has been debated many times that the rise in CO2 will continue no matter what we do to transport and industry due to mans greed and devastation of our planets balance. God help our grand children.

Oh and let's not forget the deforestation caused by the use of Palm oil, again this deforestation is effecting the planets filter.
Personally I think cars are the tip of the iceberg, car emissions need to be more broadly calculated, the obsession with CO2 needs to reexamined to include NOX & particulates, particulate filters are ineffective as the push out loads of soot on regeneration.

[beamcurrent]

You can precondition the i3, there is a phone App to set it up, nice and toasty and fully defrosted on a cold morning.

Brian

[ppppenguin]

Brian, does preconditioning the car (defrost etc) also warm up the battery?

As for environmental problems, it's hard to know the balance between the reduced CO2 from diesel and its other problems. Nothing is entirely good or entirely bad. Doing a full energy and environmental audit of any activity is very hard. For example we want warm and cosy homes. So we insulate them. The insulation has embedded energy and other environmental costs. These are likely to be much smaller than the extra energy you would consume heating the house otherwise but it's not easy to assess. A more concrete example. My house walls are mainly 9" solid brickwork. Thes are lossy. In most parts internal insulation (easy and cheap) isn't feasible. External insulation is expensive and can cause damp problems. Rate of return on cost would be poor as far as I can tell, unless I was doing a major external refurbishment where the cost would partly absorbed in other work.

Coming back to car emissions. The published results on CO2, fuel consumption etc don't reflect real life experience. We simply don't know whethere there's more harm from some extra CO2 or NOx and particulates.

[Terry]

I think you'll find that the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth have done a lot of work on external insulation techniques.

Interesting place to visit if you are in West Wales for any reason - even the lift from the car park up to the main site is water* operated!

* Unlike the hydraulic lifts which were popular in large buildings in the City of London many years ago, which were raised by pressure from Artesian wells and dumped large quantities of water for each descent, this lift uses water for the counterbalance with just enough water being added or removed to achieve the correct imbalance state required.