You will certainly lose all your friends because to justify your significant £7,000 purchase (£8,299 for the newer AC version), you will need to explain, loudly and often, that it uses no fuel, that you simply charge it up at night – using power from a power station incidentally – and you’re good to go 40 miles. Unless you use the lights. Or the radio. Or the washer jets. Which you will, a lot. In which case it’s only 30 miles, or maybe 20, before you coast to a halt . . . in the rain you caused by not buying a Range Rover.
There’s another thing, too. Children playing in the street can hear a Range Rover coming and know to get out of the way. The G-Wiz, on the other hand, is near silent, which means they may run in front of you to retrieve a lost ball. You may then hit them . . . causing your car to disintegrate and your legs to come off.
Even if I were a committed environmentalist I would not buy this car. It is too small, too dangerous and I’m sorry but it runs on juice from a power station, hardly a flower in the big green scheme of things.
Is this car the modern equivalent to the hair shirt? Read the piece from the Times and after you have had a good laugh you can consider just how useless a car that has a range of just 40 miles actually is.
Filed under: Carbon Trading, Cars, Engineering., England, Global Warming, Green Hypocrites, Leftism, Living with Nature, Political Correctness, Renewables, international politics
Don’t forget it’s as ugly as sin too.
Any alternative fuel systems you know of that are worth exploring, Iain? I’ve seen a car that runs on super-compressed air that has a range of 150+ miles, can do about 80km/h and emits water vapour. Still not ideal but better than this monstrosity.
Mark
As everyone knows I am building a sports car and the experience has taught me that the secret to efficient cars, even those that use petrol, is very light weight and a simple basic design,. Making all engine blocks out of aluminium would be a very good start in that respect. And the use of composites for body shells would also be efficacious.
Bio diesel clearly has some merit but I have my doubts about ethanol because it is so hydroscopic and has such a low energy density.
Cars that use things like compressed air or batteries really do not make much of a difference to the environment because all they do is transfer the emissions elsewhere at a large loss of efficiency.
That’s true, although I was actually thinking ahead to when there is no oil, rather than the reduction of any environmental impact. I like the sound of bio diesel too but I wonder about the volume of agricultural production needed to produce fuel for a nation of cars. It will be interesting to see what our children are driving in a decade or two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster
This one might be more up your alley Iain, goes from 0-100km/h in four seconds, top speed of 200km/h and can run 300kms-plus on a single charge. Be prepared to fork out $US100k though!
Yeah looks cute bit the range is still crap, the trouble is that were you to travel to the extent of it’s range and then want to charge it (assuming it has a built in charger) You would probably have to wait some hours before you could do the return journey.
That is why I suppose that some form of direct fuelling would be better than any mains recharging.
Also I expect that If you lived in a hilly region like I do that the range would be no where near their claims, even though they have regenerative braking. (Where the electric motor puts power back into the batteries when slowing down.)
Apparently the recharge time is about four hours on a mains circuit, not sure if faster speeds can be achieved with a dedicated recharging station. I agree the range is going to make long drives in the country or family holidays difficult, then again if petrol is $10 a litre or unavailable, it’s better than nothing.
PS. I hear talk that electric cars may have artificial noise generators to replicate the sound of internal combustion engines. Which reminds me of the now smoke-free English pubs which are pumping in artificial tobacco smells to combat the rampant pong of smelly Poms
I did hear something about the fragrance sellers looking at the Pub market now that smoking has been banned.
I have my car booked in with the engineer and have to pass a drive by noise test which requires the car to make no more than 74 db so I just wish I had the problem of the car being too quiet…
It’s tiny and the ability to run without fuel is useless when you can only drive to and from work on a bright sunny day.
Ride a bike people!
Making the cars lighter is, of course, a good way to reduce energy consumption. While aluminum engine blocks are light, metallo-ceramics and engineered plastics will probably be the answer there.
For this specific car, I think they should remove the motor and the heavy battery; replace them with pedals and this car would be a much better purchase.
Sorry lady but Bikes are not on when you live on a mountain like I do
Neo
Agreed that some of the new materials do have some advantages for lightweight construction but aluminium is still a darn sight better than cast Iron
Oh and welcome to my blog, both of you
Cheers
Iain, living on a mountain is OK – they make bikes with gears now.
Another great fuel saver is planning. I used to drop of my cleaning on the way to work. On the way home I would: work out, pick up the cleaning, and buy groceries. Now that I work at home, I use a bike to run errands close by. I went without my car for almost two weeks last month.
This is what happens when Yugo steals the plans for a Smart car.
Perhaps the eventual solution to recharging is standardized battery packs that can be swapped in an instant for a charged unit at roadside charging stations?
40 miles is still too frequent though…maybe 100 miles minimum and then swap battery packs.
The core of the environmental issue side of all this is not efficiency so much as the fact that there are simply too many people on the earth and more all of the time.
No one seems to be addressing this sensitive issue.
I think the little car is cute. Since I have driven 106,000 miles in 13 years that includes 2 roundtrips from Indy to Atlanta, one roundtrip NJ to Atlanta, and one roundtrip NJ to Indy. I average less than 24 miles a day grocery, pharmacy, Costco, church, etc. I think they should price them around $3000-8000 so they are affordable by everyone.
My two cents!
Nano