Barry, are you speaking of old cars modified for racing/rally or oldtimers for street use? Here in Sweden when a vehicle reaches the age of thirty years it is considered to be a classic vehicle, the annual safety and emission inspection is now change to every second year and the vehicle tax is removed completely. When the vehicle is fifty years old the safety and emission inspection is totally taken away. In other words you can do any kind of modifications like installing a very high performance engine in a more than fifty year old car. To counteract the sale of modern high-performance cars that are considered to have large emissions, the authorities have introduced a very high, up to ten times higher, vehicle tax for the first three years. This affects cars such as Porsche, Ferrari, Corvette, Mustang, Rolls Royce, Mercedes, larger BMW and more. Recently I tested a Renault Zoe electric car. It has 135 hp and will do 0-100 kph in 9.5 seconds but the top speed is limited to 140 kph (87 mph) which I find totally unacceptable. The battery costs appr. $ 8500.oo and you can buy the car with or without a battery. The alternative for a car without a battery is to rent the battery!!!
Åke
PS You may understand why I keep my old 928 cars. The rather high fuel consumption is offset by zero vehicle tax. The gasoline price in Sweden is currently about $ 6.40 a gallon

 

These are 2 particular problems that are much more acutely felt all over Continental Europe (not just Belgium) than in the US. The fact that the inspections get more and more strict is mostly politically motivated by the left to get cars off the road. Classic cars should be at least exempt of the current emissions requirements because there are just so few around that it doesn't really make a difference anymore compared to the other sources of pollution. (The requirement for classic cars should be the emissions standards in force when the particular classic car was released.) Both of these represent to me a kind of a harassment and a creeping "Enteignung" of ownership rights.

To me these acts seem hardly justifiable in any scientific way. Or at least, I have not scene the proof that classic cars are relevant with regards to climate change or pollution. It's simply the political wind being fanned by the emotional and religious positions surrounding the climate change debate. Now, we could focus on international cargo ships which spew out more CO2 than all the cars in the US combined, but this isn't nearly as fun for the left as cursing some rich guy in his Porsche. How about contributions to an environmental clean-up fund for any items imported by ship? (Note I did not say tax to give more money to politicians.)

OT RANT/
Coming back home, I am not at all upset the that EPA was shaken up these last years. Don't get me wrong I am for clean water and air, but there seems to be a complete lack of focus when our political class allows fracking and then chases classic car owners. And, how can it be that thousands and thousands of cars got delivered by VW that did not meet the current valid standards? What, can't these guys even measure things once in a while? Do they rely solely on other people to respect the laws they help create without even doing some spot checking? Com'on the EPA did their job as badly as VW and some of those guys belong behind bars just as much as the "rogue engineers" ... errr I mean executives from VW.
END OT RANT/

 

Not because he was wise, just because it was already happening.

Most of us just dont pay attention.

 

I don't think the internal combustion engine is going anywhere. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if EVs never make up the majority share of all registered autos on our roadways anytime in the 21st century.

It's a matter of economics. I think a lot of people really underappreciate just how efficient and inexpensive oil is as a driver of energy. Without oil, there wouldn't be 7 billion people here.

To that point, I ponder a different question.. How long until our planes, trains, and commercial trucks become EVs?

 

Easy to see the fading of 80s muscle cars when the generation who coveted them die off. The 928 is,IMO, more loved for its looks than for performance...still a purty old car and will remain so. If you love it, keep it and let the kids decide what to do with it later.

 

Since climate-change came up in post #32, I must state that I believe in climate-change 100%!

For example, how many cars were on the road prior to when climate-change occurred and the glaciers formed, covering the earth and wiping out most of the world's highways?

And how many cars/snowmobiles were on the road when climate-change occurred yet again, which then melted all those glaciers?

So one can easily see that there is climate-change, and it can be violent at that.

Most importantly, it is also easy to see that it has absolutely nothing to do with humans, and has been going on since the earth has existed.

 

Ake, i'm speaking of road legal cars ….that can be used for street any time.
The white "rally" car i'm building is NOT road legal : there is a "safety" inspection by our racing authorities ( RACB ) which give you a approval ( called the yellow book ) on all changes made and verified as being better than oem. With that book we must go ( every 6 months ) to the official inspection which disapprove the car on all those remarks in the yellow book ( not oem ) but also look further as play in suspension parts , steering , shocks, brakes being equal etc... the tech items RACB doesn't inspect. So we get a "red" paper , only for "rally". And with a special rally insurance we can participate rallies , even drive to and back home ., but nothing more. Of course the "red" paper may not mention more shortcomings as there are in the yellow book.

 

trains have essentially been EV for many years now with electric motors for locomotion. The diesel engine can easily be replaced with batteries.

 

Charge density of batteries isn't quite there yet. Plus we'd need the charge to put in them. Eventually wind farms will be environmentally acceptable, especially when the alternative is sitting home in the dark with empty shelves. Lots of logistics to work out. So long as electricity comes from outlets and not from some large-scale generation facility right there in your own back yard, all-electric transportation sounds amazing swell.

 

M\y question, can we really mine enough non-renewable lithium to make the volume of batteries required to go full electric for everyone all the time? For me, the whole electric car thing is kind of a joke, We are using more non-renewable resources than ICE.

 

it'll be little nuclear reactors Brad; breeder reactors.

 

This is assuming lithium will always be necessary at current quantities. There are many new technologies that could greatly lower the need for lithium or eliminate it all together. No telling what this market will look like in 10 years. 10 years ago if I told you Tesla would have a higher market value than GM and Ford in 2020, what would your reaction have been?

We are in uncharged territory and the technology is moving rapidly.

Lithium recycling is probably the next big technology jump that will change the scope of producing EV's.

Not necessarily. When we burn up crude oil, it's gone. Also the 10% - 15% ethanol mandated by our Government is not making the case for ICE any better. Producing fuel from corn is horrible for the environment.

We have yet to fully know how long these batteries will last and / or how much they can be recycled and put back to use. There are already Tesla's with over 200,000 miles on the original battery. Battery capacity at this mileage is reported anywhere from 75% - 85% from new. It's not like one day "poof" they stop working. Toss in someone with solar panels at home etc.... you get the idea.
Friend of mine is on his 4th Nissan Leaf since 2010 (he sold the last 3 to relatives). He hasn't stopped for gas in 10 years and with solar panels at home and at his business, few of those kilowatts came from the grid.

There's also a lot of misinformation floating around as to the true cost of producing electric cars. This guy goes into such details pretty good and is someone I consider an neutral source. If anyone is not familiar with this YouTube channel, give it a spin, one of my favorites:

 

I recently watched a video of a guy that went through the many things he likes about his EV. He got up to around ten things, then said "Note that I have not yet mentioned anything about being green." His point and mine is that while much is made of EVs being green, it's not the only reason to drive one. It may not be important at all. The politicization of climate science has got some people reacting to EVs as though their owners were flying some sort of enemy flag. Maybe, maybe a little, maybe not at all. But those who won't buy an EV because they don't want to be seen with this flag may be cheating themselves out of a great car.

As an owner, I can confirm that EVs are certainly not jokes. They're great cars. I'm not saying you should get one. EV owners know EVs, and seem preachy as they try to correct misinformation about them. They might get annoyingly pushy about them since they probably really like them. Just like Apple users between 1984 and 1995 - PC people really disliked both Macs and their owners - then jumped on Windows 95.

Lithium is not the scarce material involved in EV batteries. I think lithium carbonate is simply scooped up from dry lakebed in South America, or something like that. Presently, cobalt is the natural resource of concern, though more as a disagreeable human rights issue than renewability. In any case, car batteries can be re-purposed as stationary batteries, and then recycled like most batteries.

EVs are greener than ICE according to the analyses I've read, and also the fairly simple calculation anyone can do themselves regarding carbon emissions. It is especially not true that electricity generation for EVs produce more emissions than from ICE. It gets close in states that mostly burn coal, Wyoming and West Virginia, but not elsewhere.

It is absolutely true that battery production must take huge leaps to go from the present 2% penetration to 100%. Despite Tesla's dramatic efforts, they are presently limited by their cell production. Ramping up production may indeed reveal some serious resource problems.

 

@Hacker - There's always a cost with energy. even though he hasn't stopped for gas for 10 years, he made the up front investment in solar panels, which have problems of their own. (e.g. not good for all climates, locations, heavy upfront cost, long ROI)

 

Driving 12,000+ miles a year and never stopping for gas, oil changes, coolant flushes etc... is a pretty darn good trade-off. He already had the solar panels before the EV's. They are working fine in Wisconsin which isn't the best location for solar panels. It's not like solar panels are only useful if you have an EV.
Good thread in OT discussing this, a couple Rennlisters currently jumping into the solar world:
https://rennlist.com/forums/off-topi...-the-home.html

The only reason why my wife want's an EV is to avoid stopping for gas, especially in winter.

We're only 7 years into the modern age of EV's (Model S came out in 2012). The next 5-10 years should be interesting form a technology point of view.