Its a similar situation with a shredded tyre.

Thats why I hate cars without spare tyres for long distance driving through europe, where on a Sunday you could be stuck in rural France and that's as far as you can go. Worse In the middle of the highlands or Wales without a phone signal.

Runflats I hate with a vengeance; they ruin the ride/handling of any car fitted with them and they usually wear badly on the inner edges too (reinforcing my asymmetric tyre conspiracy :Suspiciou ). But that is what you have to do to avoid being stranded (I've seen them driven flat for 100+ miles, it's not a pretty sight but the car got home, worryingly the driver didn't realise :eek: ) . The most hateful thing of them is that ICE cars without a spare don't really have any bigger boot space or weight saving compared to their spare tyre-equipped predecessors...they just wasted the space (you can hang a few immigrants from under the rear floor of many VAG MQB platform cars :cuckoo: ).

Obviously BEVs have that space utilised for batteries. But the cynic in me suggests deleting of spare tyres without increasing boot storage on ICE cars was done to gently ease consumers into the eventuality that the later hybrids/BEVs models would need that tyre space for batteries and inverters etc. (eg; Compare a R50 Mini One boot to a Pug 107; latter is a smaller car with a bigger boot and spare tyre!) Bit like active braking/brake assist (where brakes are applied harder than what the driver is doing with the pedal) will eventually become brake-by-wire. And over-assisted electric steering with little feedback unless it wants to prompt you to steer in a particular direction will also become steer-by-wire.

Hardly surprising now the days are colder and councils who introduced half-baked schemes that reduced overall road capacity caused huge tailbacks with more stop/start traffic and vehicle idling (catalysts don't work on idling cars - need to be driving 40mph+ to minimise tailpipe emissions).

Schemes like the Thames tunnel which increases road capacity is urgently needed to cope with a increasing overall population with a added increase of the current population travelling further to/from home.

PS what is bad news for my Asthma is the increased use of wood burners.

Cant fathom why they try to phase out gas heating whilst still allowing these to be installed and used :mad:

Cities and towns should have their volume of traffic reduced significantly.

Zero emission vehicles should be prioritized at the expense of ICE. Ultimately reducing traffic numbers encourage cycling, walking.

We've only used our woodstove once in the last couple of years. That's when I found the staff huddlled in the corner of the cellar. :lol1:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-b1769879.html

What you should be driving if you Actually had an environmental conscience


( pity most of dont get sun )

Here's a bit of revelation:

My 'leccy currently costs 16.85p per KWh inc tax but not standing charge.

I needed to heat my garage and bought one of those Chinese diesel heaters (Webasto copy) to bide me over until I sort out a more long term solution (when I can bag a cheap enough ASHP).

The diesel I'm currently running it on costs £1.07 a litre.

Now roughly the energy content of diesel is roughly 90.9ml per Kw.... In other words that means it's costing me 16.18p per KWh to run using road diesel. I'm yet to get a jerry can of red diesel or fuel oil which is even cheaper (It'll run on anything but the limiting factor is lubricating the dosing/metering pump).

So STILL per KWh road diesel is cheaper than standard rate electric per kilowatt. Efficiencies are tricky to compare; I can assume resistive heating is close to 100% and this heater is said to put about 550watts out the exhaust on full power (5kw), that equates to 89% which appears to be plausible from my tests; I'm currently running it at 1.42kw to maintain room temperature which results in much lower exhaust gas temperatures, but even then I could recuperate exhaust heat quite easily with a bit of fancy plumbing.

Anyway. Point being cost saving of using electric over diesel is only because of reducing the costs involved in either obtaining that power (solar/wind vs. red or diluted waste oil/WVO )or by improving the efficiency of using it. Otherwise diesel still a cheap source of power despite paying the full tax on it.

So given that little revelation it's quite plausible that a Audi A2 1.2 tdi or Lupo 1.2 tdi with prudent selection of filling stations could be cheaper to run than a Leaf or other similar sized EV if the owner isn't savvy on using solar or lower tarrif electric.


Next "experiment" will be converting a 12kw direct-fired LPG space heater(100% efficient but I'll die from CO poisoning when using it in a enclosed area) to indirect heating (%efficiency unknown). This will be tricky to test, probably will have use weighing scales. And it's a fixed rate burner so can't be ran continuously without overheating the room. But I suspect that even with reasonable efficiency it will still be a more costly fuel than diesel or electric purely due to the lower calorific value.

Unfortunately you're polluting your local environment with emissions.

Add an electrical heater of some sort. I tend to only run a small electric heater with blower in my current garage. It directs to the area I would work in not the whole unit. Don't want the mice thinking its Tenerife in winter in my shed

Most EV owners are savvy with regarding electrical tariffs. Well, the EV forums are littered with electrical supplier, solar, battery back up threads.

Heat pump powered by own solar is the way to go!

That is exactly how ours will be setup. Once a winter season of usage data has been compiled, I'll assess how much battery backup is required to run units overnight.

16amp power supply and the garage needs at least 4kw (triple garage) of heat meaning not enough power for anything else (compressor, welder, vacuum etc). So current cost effective choices are Wood burner or propane. Diesel burner is very clean. 25mm exhaust pipe, it barely puts anything out; just heat. Wood burners just pure nastiness and far far more polluting...but I can pick up a workshop stove for just £100

Far far too expensive at the moment. It's a garage not a house!

What ever happened to CND ?
- you hardly hear of them now that weve been told to clean up our streets of fumes

Local urban/city pollution by vehicles
 

After a recent coroners verdict on how a little girl with severe asthma died due being exposed to life threatening particlulates and NOX
Labour led councils are actively stalling the introduction of clean air zones in their districts
Bristol, Leeds, Rotherham and Sheffield guilty of killing the locals

That Coroner's report on the girl's Asthma related death is full of complexities.

She is probably one of the very few people who may have actually had tests to try and find what triggers her asthma. Most people don't. Hence Asthma is the most vague description of a umbrella condition that could be triggered from food stuffs, mould spores, dust mite faeces right through to particulates from burning wood or any other combustible.

Current asthma treatments still focuses on the likes of immunosuppressants without much investment in research or better treatments (a minuscule in comparison to what's invested in to cancer research and treatments) which is a worry in this current time when we are taking medication that suppresses the lung's immune response whilst currently facing a virus that causes lung issues. Rather than better identifying triggers and finding alternative or improved treatments, asthma knowledge and treatment is still very much behind the times with some GP's still use stuff from the 1960's (like Salbutamol) without bothering to allow referrals to any specialists.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...old_but_is_not

Saying pollution is a trigger isn't really helpful without proper identification of the localised source. Just as Asthma is a vague umbrella term, so is pollution. VOCs from a new bin liner is pollution, as is my farts from last night's curry, but the former is more likely to cause a asthma-related immune response.

This little girl could have lived in a draughty old house right next badly phased set if traffic lights causing a mass of idling vehicles. We just don't know. Anyone who has the delights of frequenting a bus station, busy taxi rank or a large multi-platform train station like Birmingham New Street with idling diesels should be aware of the pollution just by the taste in the air. If the air quality is that bad where she lived then root causes need to be identified. For example next to my workplace is joinery who use a industrial wood stove for heating and disposal of waste; You should see the crap it chucks out yet complaints to the council continually go ignored, yet this is a root pollutant source and nobody official is bothered. Next door we test particulate levels of diesel engines everyday, and remove from use the ones that create excessive pollution (the root causes), meanwhile next door just chucks it out their chimney all day everyday.

I hate to judge here but I do ask what efforts were made to help that girl's living environments. And if it was so bad why did the parents not move to a different area? My parents went to great efforts to remove asthma triggers in my home; at a time when the NHS wasn't really helpful in identifying root triggers (and still is to some extent). That involved short pile carpets deep cleaned on a bi annual basis with a karcher wet vac. Proper extraction in bathroom and kitchen to prevent humidity travelling to the rest of the house. Vacuum cleaner with Hepa filters (yes Hepa filters did exist in the 1980's!!) as well as a NSA air filter unit in my bedroom.

Without the information of what was or wasn't done to try and help that girl's condition we can only guess. But let's assume it was the typical 50's semi detached of which I could list a massive load of issues with the original design and thing done in later years to improve heating efficiency that actually creates poor air quality inside the actual house. Whilst parent have little control of the air quality at a school or route to and from it, they do have some mitigation control over it inside the home. Unless it was council provided or rented; And that's a huge can of worms over who pays for that.

The EV tax bombshell is coming...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55358100

Im hoping for pay per mile additional fuel tax

That would be the fairest solution and help with the real problem of people using their cars too much. However I suspect it will be too difficult to police and there will either be a tax on charging or an annual fee.

Mileage recorded at MOT time and dealer servicing before that ?

Course want affect andy cos he never sees one apparently

But it is the city/urban commuters (i.e short distance sub-30min) that cause the most pollution; By driving at peak times with cold engines, idling and accelerating/braking in heavy stop/start traffic (as opposed to continuous 50mph+ with a hot engine).

Pay per mile will let the most severe polluters off the hook.

Lockdown has proven that many people don't need to drive at rush hour to the same place to sit at the same desk everyday and drive back again.

I expect that certain roads at certain times will have varying charging bands. So commutes could be very pricey into work and home.

Now with the seismic shift in city/town working methods, commuting in the traditional semse will die away.

Those who are still required to go into a workplace should be carrot/stick into EVs asap

I very much doubt one year of virus will kill off commuting forever !

You're joking. Firms were already dabbling with the idea before covid With being forced due to Covid. They realise it is more than workable. My sister, goes into a city once a month now, works from home. Her husband was in an small office for vehicle warranty insurance. He is due to retire in 18 months. He hasnt been in to any office in a year. My daughter's boyfriend has been working from home for 9 months, no office visits to central London and no plans to open office until spring. He works for big utility in their environmental sector.

Just look at financial sector in London, complete ghost town. Its happening all over the world.

Vast swathes of workers will be home based for the most part, once a month visit to office

One of our offices has already closed, another one is well on it's way, or we're going to be handing back 2 floors to the landlord. One of our customers who has office space near London Bridge have been told they may need to leave as the building on it's current occupancy is not viable, so their landlord is looking at closing the whole building down if things don't improve. I'll end up doing 1-2 days a week in the office tops, with no fixed desk anymore. I suspect many other former office dwellers will be the same.

At the start of 2020 my company had 8 offices in the UK. Since March we've closed 3 and will be closing our main office in the Midlands when our lease ends in April 2021. Before COVID, our Midlands office had nearly a thousand people working in it. The majority of our employees are now home based but have offices within an hour should they wish to meet colleagues.
Commuting may not have been killed off, but it's most certainly been greatly reduced.

DPB, there you have three posts clearly demonstrating the monumental shift in working patterns currently underway.

I spoke to my friend who works for the inland revenue, she has beem told that she will be working from home permanently. Her regional office is being scrapped.

Anybody working hmrc will never get to work in London again if they go regional afaik

EV market in the UK
 

Continues to rapidly increase.

The UK’s plugin electric vehicle market hit new highs in December 2020, at 23.4% market share, up from 6.6% in December 2019. The Tesla Model 3 was the UK’s best selling auto of any kind in December, with 5,798 vehicles delivered. 2020’s overall plugin volumes grew 2.4× over 2019, despite the UK auto market being down almost 30% in volume
Wont be too long UK catches up with Norway. who have more EV vehicles than ICE on the road now

Cant really compare the two countries - vast differences

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-i...cles_in_Norway


12x population as well

Eh,. yes we can.

The shame is, UK hasnt been able to match the EV take up of EVs like Norway. On a positive note, UK numbers are extremely encouraging. Possibly 2030 for ice ban could be brought forward again, maybe 2025.

Er...likely cos we dont have the infrastructure in place