Who's laughing now....

You can RANT and RAVE to your hearts content here instead of clogging up the Q&A Technical Forum!
Report any offensive posts to [email protected]
User avatar
Major_Tom
Posts: 9094
Joined: Mon Jul 28, 2008 8:21 am
Car(s): 2.0S

Re: Who's laughing now....

Post by Major_Tom »

Andrew 2.8i wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 6:52 am
andyd wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 5:14 am but the government may make it hard to run an older car to push you away from them, either very high petrol and diesel prices, put tax up to £1000 a year or scrap the current 40 year tax/MOT exemption :?
The government want to push people away from non-environmental cars now, but they still do the MOT and tax exemption.

I can see fuel prices going through the roof though. That's to be expected as the cost of the infrastructure and supply will be the same, or higher, than it is now but they won't be selling it in the volumes they sell at the moment.
With most of us covering only a few thousand miles a year, that might not be an issue.

Andrew.
The refineries will still be working hard for plastics and planes (those things flying over head constantly that burn thousands of gallons of fuel on every trip that very few folk talk about in relation to pollution) so petrol will still be around I'd have thought. Plus diesel for the army and the trains and agriculture will still be needed.
I'm the one who leaves all those shoes in the carriageway.
User avatar
stevemarl
Donator
Donator
Posts: 4906
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2012 6:31 pm
Car(s): Capri 1.6 laser

Re: Who's laughing now....

Post by stevemarl »

Major_Tom wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 10:34 am The refineries will still be working hard for plastics and planes (those things flying over head constantly that burn thousands of gallons of fuel on every trip that very few folk talk about in relation to pollution) so petrol will still be around I'd have thought. Plus diesel for the army and the trains and agriculture will still be needed.
Absolutely right, refineries don`t just make petrol, so there will always be a hydrocarbon industry.
I think the biggest problem by far will, as said, be the charging infrastructure: people are fighting over parking spaces now, how on earth are they going to go on with a block of flats for example? And I can`t see the charging time ever coming down to the 30 seconds it takes to refill liquid.
Hydrogen cell would have been the way to go, fill up with liquid hydrogen just like petrol - but it would have (initially) been muvh more expensive than the already available lithium stuff. Also the production of hydrogen does require a lot of energy - and guess where that comes from???
I `m sure there will always be a market for petrol though, even if it means buying as one would Calor Gas for example. Their target is zero new petrol cars by 2030, but I think there will be a large number still sold in it`s last years simply because of the fuelling problems mentioned. You then have to allow for the fuelling of what will still be a very large number of `legacy` vehicles. I don`t think it will be an insurmountable problem in my lifetime anyway (but then I`m not 17... thank God!!!)
(I may be wrong but I`m sure the first model Ts were run on ethanol as that could be bought from your local small town apothecary, long before anyone dreamed of a network of `gas stations`? It didn`t stop Henry.)
Post Reply