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Electric Defender


Glue

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Right.

Conversion cost: Approx £75,000

  • Range: 150 miles
  • Towing capacity: 2.5t
  • Weight: Approx 2.3t

Really.......

This is not the future - not even if they could half or reduce to a 1/3 rd of the conversion costs.

Not to mention the legal problems in many countries for the change in fuel type..

Nice.

No thanks.

I'll keep polluting the earth as long as I can. Sorry

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It's the same party trick to distract from the lack of practicality - 0-60 is an easy win in modern EV's as you can throw the switch and dump 200% power into the motor for the 5 seconds it takes to hit 60 before the thing melts into a glowing ball of copper.

Much like you can bolt a NOS kit to your ratty old motor and claim it makes 500hp - which it will, for ~3 seconds until a piston comes through the bonnet.

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Pretty sure when the first car came along it was expensive, short range and struggled with infrastructure. 
Frankly I’m pleased to see it being done. Will it get to a price point and practicality that suits all? I doubt it but proves it can be done and certain cases it is viable. Things tend to only get better from there.

I’d like mine to be electric but mine is already massively impractical so a bit more wouldn’t make much difference.   🙂

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Electric vehicles rely on a supply of electricity for charging. If we all suddenly decided to do electric then I doubt there would be enough capacity in the grid to power 10% of the country never mind homes, offices and industry. 

I test drove a BMW 3i and loved it but practically for me it is impossible as I cover too many miles. 

As Pete said it is only a matter of time however electric vehicles were around in the very early days and the oil industry put that on hold until very recently.

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1 hour ago, mad_pete said:

Pretty sure when the first car came along it was expensive, short range and struggled with infrastructure. 
Frankly I’m pleased to see it being done. Will it get to a price point and practicality that suits all? I doubt it but proves it can be done and certain cases it is viable. Things tend to only get better from there.

Not quite the same - the motors and controls etc. are all absolutely fine and well developed / very efficient, we've been using electricity and electric motors for quite some time, it's literally just that batteries are huge and awful and until that changes IMHO these things aren't going to be practical for the masses.

It's more like where we were when steam-powered trucks were a thing and no-one had made petrol or diesel engines yet, the concept was there but it wasn't practical for the majority no matter how much you improve your boiler design - it needs that breakthrough leap.

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17 hours ago, Glue said:

So the Americans have produced a Tesla powered defender...Here

 

17 hours ago, landroversforever said:

And a bit closer to home this one popped up the other day: https://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/4x4s/land-rover-defender-gets-450hp-electric-transformation

I wonder how the Americans managed to get 70 miles more out of 10 kWh extra.

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A tesla can do 300 miles on a charge. That will do most people. So we are getting there. A defender is just the wrong vehicle to begin with. There is always the bollinger if you want an offroader.

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1 hour ago, Simon_CSK said:

Electric vehicles rely on a supply of electricity for charging. If we all suddenly decided to do electric then I doubt there would be enough capacity in the grid to power 10% of the country never mind homes, offices and industry. 

I test drove a BMW 3i and loved it but practically for me it is impossible as I cover too many miles. 

As Pete said it is only a matter of time however electric vehicles were around in the very early days and the oil industry put that on hold until very recently.

Most EVs are charged at night, when electricity isn’t in much demand and so is cheapest.  I don’t know how much power would be needed, but I suspect if half of all cars were EVs and charged at night, the grid would cope,; it would require the power stations to generate at high output 24 hours a day, though.  Modern housing estates have a lot of small substations dotted about, so they may have been planned with this in mind.  But how many people would need to charge their car every night, or at least for extended periods at high rate?  It’s claimed that the average car does around 30-40 miles per working day, so that would be very quick to recharge, or could be done at a low rate for many houses throughout the night.  The problem is more for old properties with lower rated electrical supplies and properties without dedicated parking  (making plugging in difficult).

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33 minutes ago, Snagger said:

 it would require the power stations to generate at high output 24 hours a day, though.  

Surely that would put a huge strain on the grid and would quickly lead to a huge breakdown leaving no capacity to plug the gap leaving even greater strain on the grid. I am no engineer but even I know you cannot run at 100% capacity 100% of the time.

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Plus, post virus, we will have a significant proportion of the working population working from home, so the demand for transport will drop.

 

The truth is, using hydrocarbons to fuel our energy needs is not something we can do indefinitely. There is no new coal being made, nor crude oil. Leaving the whole climate change conversation to one side, we can't keep the lights on with coal and oil.  

Nuclear. Wind, solar, geothermal, whatever. We need to move. No choice. Us, our children, or their children, no choice.

In my view, we should do this as soon as possible, purely to reserve the hydrocarbons for other uses, they are essential for our chemical industries.

 

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No, Simon - daytime demand will go up a bit, but there is plenty of capacity for that - we have had days last summer that the grid ran without coal or gas power, just the renewables and nukes.  At night, the vast majority of offices, shops, recreation centres, factories, distribution hubs, educational facilities and even a large amount of hospital consumption is shut down, so that fees up the generating capacity for EVs.  Most of the night after dinner doesn’t even see much domestic demand - a few lights, the fridge and a TV are typical.  No ovens, washing machines, dryers and so on.

The problem is the distribution around domestic sites, as the current for fast charging cars is high. But if the times for fast charging are staggered, or more likely the individual cars are charged at a slower rate to take more of the night, then the total demand should be manageable with quite a large EV fleet.

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150 miles is plenty for the most of the masses. If oil ran out tomorrow (ignoring issues on planes and shipping) and I had to switch to an electric 90 (cost aside) I could do that no problem. If I drive 300 miles in one go I need to plan on some charge stops. Takes a bit longer but that’s okay.  It’s very usable right now. Not exactly ICE in all cases but it’s not like these things are milk floats.       


I think it’s partly people think like petrol stations but with electric I’m at home I’m refuelling, I’m at work I can be refuelling, I go shopping I can be refuelling.

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1 hour ago, mad_pete said:

150 miles is plenty for the most of the masses. If oil ran out tomorrow (ignoring issues on planes and shipping) and I had to switch to an electric 90 (cost aside) I could do that no problem. If I drive 300 miles in one go I need to plan on some charge stops. Takes a bit longer but that’s okay.  It’s very usable right now. Not exactly ICE in all cases but it’s not like these things are milk floats.       


I think it’s partly people think like petrol stations but with electric I’m at home I’m refuelling, I’m at work I can be refuelling, I go shopping I can be refuelling.

That's a good point, the recharge times are what put me off ( and the cost of buying an electric car ). It would be fine for commuting, but rubbish for long distance and car ferries. Apparently AC electric on some car ferries is different to grid mains electric. 

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5 hours ago, Daan said:

A tesla can do 300 miles on a charge. That will do most people.

I know you know what you're talking about more than most but that's not cutting it for me;

I don't have anywhere at home or work to reliably charge an EV, my commute is ~50 miles per day and there's no fast chargers on that route. At best I'm looking at loitering round a motorway services for an hour or more once a week compared to my current 5 minute fill-up once a fortnight. Assuming there's charging points available.

We park our cars on the street in competition with the neighbours :rolleyes: and the location means there's zero chance of a charging point being put in and I can't be running a cable across the pavement for people to trip over.

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3 hours ago, Gazzar said:

Plus, post virus, we will have a significant proportion of the working population working from home, so the demand for transport will drop.

 

Why,

Not all companies want their staff to work from home as not all workers want to.

I used to work for a hi-tech communications companie that allowed significant wfh policies but stopped them.

1st. they have so much property that they cannot sell that they have no benefit from wfh.

2nd. Snr management didn't like seeing the same places empty every Friday and Monday.

3rd. the teams worked better with face2face conversations.

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44 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

I know you know what you're talking about more than most but that's not cutting it for me;

I don't have anywhere at home or work to reliably charge an EV, my commute is ~50 miles per day and there's no fast chargers on that route. At best I'm looking at loitering round a motorway services for an hour or more once a week compared to my current 5 minute fill-up once a fortnight. Assuming there's charging points available.

We park our cars on the street in competition with the neighbours :rolleyes: and the location means there's zero chance of a charging point being put in and I can't be running a cable across the pavement for people to trip over.

That’s fair enough  but that’s all quite solvable.  Even spending an hour at motorway services once a week that’s do-able. Not ideal but do-able. Where as if we had to move to steam cars that I think is deal breaker stuff :-).

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Well, the Government publish the amount of oil going into road transport. If you work out the amount of energy that creates, from its calorific value ( I assumed diesel) , and assume an efficiency, say 25% that tells us how much actual work it does at the driven wheels. So to replace that work from batteries it's reasonable to assume much greater efficiency, say  80%, by the time you have lost it in the charger and the motor etc and that tells you how many Gigawatt hours of generated electricity you need. Last time I looked at it, which was a year or so ago,  and ignoring grid capacity  (!) 9 more Hinkley Points should be just enough to cover it.

The efficiencies might be a bit wrong, but we are still going to need a heck of a lot more generating capacity, whatever form it takes.

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Range is ok, seems to accelerate well, good that it's not burning oil.

But take an old out of date heavy farm cart and stick an electric motor on at huge cost and limited use - what's the point and who will buy one?    That's what Henry Ford realised before he went on to develop the clever model T. 

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35 minutes ago, Eightpot said:

Range is ok, seems to accelerate well, good that it's not burning oil.

But take an old out of date heavy farm cart and stick an electric motor on at huge cost and limited use - what's the point and who will buy one?    That's what Henry Ford realised before he went on to develop the clever model T. 

You’ve seen the 70th edition right ? 🙂

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The trouble with the debate is that, as always, there are organisations which are incredibly agenda driven deliberately spreading lies - the EV manufactures tell stories of unicorns and rainbows and a world free of pollution, while their vehicles use raw materials that are environmentally damaging to extract and still use fossil fuels to run the factories and power much of the electric grid, and boast claims of efficiency and practicality that ignore long range drivers and winter conditions; the oil companies and many manufacturers love to spread lies about the fire risks of electric vehicles, that you will never find a charging point, that their batteries are going to fail after three years and that they produce more pollution per mile than petrol or diesel, while saying how clean burning modern engines are (using faked figures) and how much more virtuous the oil industry is than the cobalt industry.

You really have to wade through a lot of PR and bull from both sides to try to work out the reality.  It’ll work for some users, and not yet for others.  Eventually, it should be viable for almost everyone, but how soon that will be is anyone’s guess.  But the concept is very good, and we’re nearly there.

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