Bonus Article - The future of petrol cars

With General Motors going to offer the Chevy Volt and Tesla offering their Tesla Roadster, alot of petrolheads are worried. Will all the fun go away in the future. Will this mean an end to the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). Will these silent electric vehicles take over? The answer is: Maybe eventually. We are now talking 10-20 years for electric vehicles to replace 40% of petrol / diesel vehicles in South Africa. This all depends on a few things:

1. The development of Lithium Ion / other batteries - At the moment, a battery pack weights 350KG on average and it takes up lots of room. Many companies like to compare the size / weight of the electric engine to the ICE (Combusion Engine), but they forget to mention the size of their batteries. Another interesting point is that the batteries have a life of 100,000 KM and according to many sources even half of that. Then you have to replace the battery pack which is rather expensive at the moment. In the future, the best way is to make use of fuel cells to generate the electricity needed to run the vehicle. This will initially be ridiculously expensive and will take a good few years to master. Some experts say it may take 15 years to be available to the public.

2. The cost of Electric Vehicles - Another major issue with electric cars is that they are overpriced. I mean $100,000 for the Tesla Roadster in the USA. I wonder how much it will cost here in South Africa. $170,000 is a wild guess. That is over 1 million rands.

3. Availability of Lithium resources & Problems with Lithium need to be addressed:

In my opinion, if all sources of lithium are worked-out there is probably enough of it to go round to make 600 million cars, as there are now. It should be noted that there is an increasing demand for the metal to go into laptop computers and mobile phones, and it is anyone's guess what that total demand might amount to.

Another potential problem is that some kinds of lithium battery contain a phosphate component and I have discussed recently that there are likely to be problems with mining a finite source of rock phosphate which is mainly used for agriculture. As a rough estimate, assuming one phosphate anion per lithium cation in a lithium-iron-phosphate battery (the strongest contender for EV's) 600 million cars would need around 148 million tonnes of phosphate or about 15 million tonnes a year assuming we could equal the world annual total of 60 million new cars annually. That is to be compared with the total phosphate mined for food production of about 140 million tonnes, and so we would need to sacrifice a good 10% of that, while a hungry population rises.

4. Pollution problems - It has been proven that in order to produce Lithium batteries, and electricity that will run the electric vehicles, including the difficult destruction of old Lithium batteries, it makes just as much CO2 pollution out there. This is especially due to the fact that electricity is also made from coal powered stations all over the world.

5. Hydrogen issues and costs - The only thing that could eventually work is the Hydrogen powered fuel cell electric vehicles. But that is if the cost of Hydrogen would drop and not cost many many times the price of gasoline. Also Hydrogen fuel cell technology has not been 100% developed properly. It can also be highly dangerous and it is also complicated working it in a car. Alot can go wrong.

6. Silent killers - A few people have been killed and many injured due to the silence of electric vehicles on the roads. Pedestrians cannot hear the cars in many instances. They must actually make a sound generating device to sort this problem out.

7. The range of Electric Cars - Many promise 300KM on a single 7HR charge which actually takes 30 hours on a normal house plug (even the main electric phase takes 30 hours to charge). Who is going to wait 7 hours at a charging station or even 3 hours. Even 1 hour is too much. You can ofcourse fit in a high power charging station at your garage which will cost you an arm and a leg. Then you charge your car for 7-12 hours. What happens when you arrive in Cape Town. Where are you going to charge your car? What about Trucks and other transport companies. They will never work. Trucks / Buses will remain diesel for many years to come. It is so much easier to get Ethanol and other natural fuels to work with the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). It will cost just the same as electricity in the future to use alternative fuels.

If all the above can be sorted out, then yeah, I guess electric vehicles have an advantage in the future. They still have a long way to go.

Until then....

BRING ON THE 4 BARREL HOLLEY CARBS!!!

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