EV's by 2030, a pipe dream or

[Suff]

The problem crommers is that nobody pushing H2 ever seems to want to come clean about the infrastructure required to deliver it. It would require a full rebuild of every filling station in the country, the deployment of tens of thousands of local renewable hydrogen factories and hydrogen transport would be quite difficult, possibly requiring a gas pipeline backbone which would spin off to every fuel station.

Hydrogen looks good in the blurb, but when you get down in the thick of the detail, creating, storing and transporting cyrogenic hydrogen is possibly more difficult than sorting out the grid for EV's. Also nobody ever seems to think about the fact that if we refresh our grid to support EV, everyone benefits, everyone can partake of solar or wind, if they want to and the grid will be able to take it and use it. Putting the UK decades ahead of many other countries who are balking at this effort.

There has also been a lot said about using Hydrogen for renewable energy storage. Until you go and dig up real figures which show that H2 as a storage fuel for renewable energy has a 30% round trip performance. Cryo Air, however, a UK led initiative, has a 60%-70% round trip efficiency, doesn't leak like hydrogen and is not dangerous if containment leaks and there is a venting event.

The biggest problem with going EV and moving to EV is vested interests in existing infrastructure. Essentially people stand to lose their shirts if they jump the wrong way. So they want to stop us moving, Fossil Fuel is safe, for everyone but our descendants.

[cromwell]

I saw an interesting program the other day. A firm in Wales was converting a Fiat 500 (the original model) to run on batteries. Only a 60 mile range but it is a city car and the customer lived in London. So for that purpose, short journeys, it was a good option (apart from the cost to convert, obs. Which was above five figures).
But it did work well.

[Suff]

With an average figure of 20 miles per day, batteries don't have to be enormous. However with an occasional longer drive and the requirement to charge only occasionally when commuting, it pushes the distance requirements quite significantly.

There are benefits, smaller batteries charge faster. But there are downsides, Li batteries take as long to charge the last 10% as they do to charge the first 80%. Again, larger batteries give a fast 80% charge and you can skip the last 20% if you don't need it.

Longer range, say 300 - 400 miles would allow the vast majority of people to do their daily commute and charge the vehicle twice a week whist still doing the 20 mile a day commute and charging in the range between 60% and 80%.

60-80 is the sweet spot for longest batter life.

It takes a bit of thinking about, but consider you go to work on Monday and plug your vehicle in at the work charge point. Then you charge it again Thursday. Unless you go for a run at the weekend, you don't need to charge more.

Businesses can give daily slot allocations to charge points, move your vehicle when full, your mobile tells you when it's full.

It is a whole world away from the petrol station we are in today.

[Workingman]

Yes, because EVERYBODY who drives to work works for a company with a HUGE car park with LOADS of charge points and FREE electricity. Try a day on planet Earth FCOL.

Anyway, we are giving up cars and use an app to call for a driverless pod to take us hither and dither, aren't we?

I have watched too many episodes of Tomorrow's World and seen so many future promises fail to take this nonsense seriously. "Scottie, are you there? I need beaming..."

[Suff]

As have I watched so many episodes of TW WM.

However what is happening, today, right now, on the streets of America, was suggested to be 10 - 20 years away. That assessment wasn't made 10 or 15 years ago, it was made in 2018.

So let's take a few seconds to think about the progress that has been made by a dedicated team who don't have to make profits for shareholders and are looking at the holy grail of self driving vehicles.

Fist of all was the hardware. OK we know that our pint of grey mush outperforms almost every computer on the planet for learned behaviour and independent reasoning. True, so when the Tesla engineers looked at the problem, they realised that a computer with 21 TOPS (trillion floating point operations per second), was simply not going to hack it. A Tesla vehicle has 8 camera's pushing out 30fps video. Or 240 images a second. The computer couldn't handle 200 images per second, let alone think about anything whilst doing it.

Tesla pushed out new hardware, 144 TOPS and over 2,000 images per second. Suddenly the computer can take full motion video from 8 independent camera's and project multiple potential paths based on the road and other road users.

The technology went from looking like a What the Butler saw machine and using it to predict how to drive, to having 8 personal video feeds and being able to drive based on that information. Remember we have two eyes and neither are in the back of our heads, we need to look at the mirror for that.

Then Tesla realised that we see, recognise and label naturally. That we use that seeing, recognition and labelling in order to predict the possible actions of what we see. So Tesla realised they needed to create a "super human" to be able to label, allocate properties and contain the accumulated knowledge of these "objects" as relates to driving. This super, super, computer based AI, will do the learning, distil it down into knowledge and "train" every other AI. It will take decades of driving knowledge and create a "knowledge update" for every vehicle AI to use.

Hence TW comes to self driving. Not 20 years from now, but right now and getting better, every 5 days, in beta.

On the charging infra, let me reiterate. We will need ALL of that 25 years from now. Yes, 10 years from now it will become important to have at least half of it rolled out. But it will take another 15 years from then for it to be complete.

The only reason that charging infra won't be there is because we couldn't be arsed to do it.