I looked at your profile, I normally don’t bother with profiles but I’m glad I did. We chatted about model trains before. Since my daughter was little we’ve “played” trains, eventually with a room dedicated to a Lego land with a railway. On a trip to Germany in 2016 I discovered the ‘train set’ below. My daughter and I visited it again in 2021. I think you might like it 
My daughter in front of the Provence scenario (masks seem so passé now 
)
The control room.
If you honestly think that the words bastard and shit are ‘bad language’ you have obviously led a more sheltered life than me!
D’oh… I just used the same GIF in another thread without having seen this. Plus I like your first gif more 
very true, thou shalt not blaspheme
hi, thanks for train link.
| John_Scully Patron
21 September |
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I looked at your profile, I normally don’t bother with profiles but I’m glad I did. We chatted about model trains before. Since my daughter was little we’ve “played” trains, eventually with a room dedicated to a Lego land with a railway. On a trip to Germany in 2016 I discovered the ‘train set’ below. My daughter and I visited it again in 2021. I think you might like it
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My daughter in front of the Provence scenario (masks seem so passé now )
The control room.
Wunderland Hamburg: A Paradise for Model Railway Fans | Full Documentary
I was actually looking for the full scene as it makes me laugh so much, where there’s like 30 or 45 seconds of him just going backwards all the way to his house, eating his dinner, and even getting into bed backwards he’s so traumatised by what he’s just seen. Sadly only this very first part of the scene was available as a gif but it fitted perfectly I thought 
If John Major’s Spitting Image puppet was grey all over then Starmer’s would be transparent.
I just want a competent politician looking out for the country not themselves or their mates - we don’t need an entertainer.
Yeah, politics in the UK has become showbusiness for ugly people. It’s supposed to be dull so that only those genuinely interested in it will do it, not those looking to make a name for themselves by appearing on TV and then write books, do after-dinner speeches, etc…
The hidden bit about the “change” to the EU deadline of 2035 for an end to new ICE car sales is that 2030 is still the deadline for 80% of UK car sales to be EVs - they simply omitted to say that bit.
In other words, Sunak’s supposed populist announcement is fairly toothless, & any car manufacturer worthy of the name will have already been planning towards 2030, & who would want the expense of keeping ICE production running in parallel for five more years?
Not encouraging better standards for housing is incredibly short sighted - downright criminal really.
As to the rest of the changes, some were non-existent. There was no policy to tax meat*, or force people to have 6 or 7 recycling bins. However, such things appeal to the sort of people who think that the Daily Mail, Daily Express, & The Sun are actually newspapers.
*Although, IMO, that would be a good thing, along with UPFs (Ultra Processed Foods)
They only ever set 2030 as an arbitrary date to out do the EU and score points. Now they see a short term gain to increase re-election chances, they change it to 2035. Meanwhile businesses that have pulled the stops out and invested millions to meet the 2030 deadline are now left holding their hands in the air!
These stupid goals set by Johnson and others since have no research behind them, they are just attention grabbing.
They want the poor to ditch their cars and use public transport but it virtually doesn’t exist anymore and what does, is expensive and unreliable.
They want mass conversion to electric cars but the charging infrastructure is not there, neither is the generation capacity to supply electricity. Meanwhile demand for copper, cobalt, lithium and all the other materials specific to EV’s is devastating large areas of South America, Australia and Africa.
Making our houses and cars run on electricity is a quick fix, short term, ill thought out solution . We need to use less energy by increasing efficiency. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the internal combustion engine it is our choice of fuels that are the problem. Synthetic fuels are being developed that will reduce the lifetime pollution of an internal combustion engine from manufacture to recycling to below that of an EV( not difficult as Volvo agreed that an EV already needs to exceed 70,000 miles before it’s carbon footprint ,including manufacture ,is lower than a combustion engined car)
Homes need to be insulated properly and the wasted energy from heating, cooking etc needs to be recovered and re-used rather than the majority of it being lost to the atmosphere.
In 20 years time, the same discussions we had about diesel cars will be rehashed when we revisit the disastrous decision to electrify everything and the consequential stripping of the planet’s resources to meet the demand for the consumers need for a new car every 3 years.
There should be a mix of sustainable energy sources ( obviously not including fossil fuels) including but not exclusively electricity.
That’s not quite true, public transport is great in their London bubble and nowhere else matters.
This is thread drift, but I have to correct your spewing out of anti-EV nonsense.
Partially true, but it is increasing apace.
Actually it is, especially when the reductions due to less fossil fuel production are taken into account. Also, look at the possibilities of the massive amount of energy stored in static/unused EVs that can be used to support the grid through spikes in demand (including other EVs being charged).
Spoiler alert; many things used in modern life also use those materials. Cobalt is used in large quantities by the oil refining process. I’ll bet your phone & laptop batteries have lithium in them…
P.S. Such is the concern amongst battery manufacturers to be greener there are massive efforts being made to reduce/remove the contentious metals from EV battery production, but also remember that they can also be reclaimed from batteries when they finally have to be recycled.
Not at all. Electricity can be produced from many different energy sources, many of them renewable. Using gas or oil is rather putting all your eggs in one basket, & such things still need electricity to operate. Homes can also produce there own power via solar PV, which also flows back to the grid if the home demand is low.
I totally agree.
Well, apart from the shocking inefficiency - the best IC engine ever made is no more than 35% efficient, the rest is wasted as heat.
Even taking into the manufacturing & transporting of these synthetic fuels? They are still not zero tail pipe emission, & do not increase the efficiency of the IC engine itself.
…which is a misleading & generalised statistic, as the true figure will vary widely depending on the carbon footprint of the electricity used to charge the EV in question.
Again, I completely agree.
Hmmm…yes, but electricity is produced by using some other form of energy - it is not mined or grown. The only viable primary energy sources that will slow down (& hopefully stop) the self destruction of the human race are sun, wind, hydro, tidal/wave. Those will need to be linked to storage through the use of things such as small private batteries (used/second life EV ones are good for that), grid scale liquid metal batteries, as well as pumped & gravity solutions.
London is the exception regarding public transport. The UK, as far as I am aware has a long way to go regarding green electricity production and the Volvo average figures for carbon footprint breakeven are much higher for the UK. In fact most EV cars using existing electricity production in the UK will never reach the breakeven point due to accidents and lower mileage. ( don’t include things like the Drax power station in the green energy figures!) The charging infrastructure is getting worse in relation to demand for it. Early EV adopters had more charging stations available to them than the current ration of cars to stations. The govt has left the whole infrastructure development to private enterprise and at the rate of development, the consumer is going to be extremely frustrated by 2030 if development of charge points doesn’t accelerate.
Uh? Are you suggesting the EVs are more accident prone & are used less? Evidence please.
…but don’t forget that 64% of homes have some means of off street parking & therefore home charging is easy & adequate for most people’s daily needs.
The availability & reliability of rapid chargers needs to improve, of that there is no doubt, but a lot of EVs do not require those for most of the time.
There needs to be a lot more basic Level 2 charging available in public car parks, retail centres, supermarkets, work places etc.
Charging around 13kWh during a 2 hour shopping trip is well worthwhile, at a cheaper rate than the rapid stuff you only need on long trips.
Greater Manchester has just started by bringing back all buses into control of a local authority controlled transport company, similar to Transport for London. It wants to do the same for trains and trams as well in the near future. The aim is to create an integrated public transport network where all the parts work together. Public transport use in Greater Manchester has plummeted in the last 20 years due in large part to a fragmented and reduced service and an incompetent train operator.
EV’s are not more accident prone but are more expensive to repair due to the higher risk of battery damage in an impact. Most cars get damaged in their lifetime but the cost of repair combined with the poor residuals of an older EV make them cheaper to write off than repair. If 64% of homes have off street parking, many do not have sufficient for all the cars in the household and that still leaves 36% who don’t!
I am not anti EV but given the absence of a viable public transport system in the majority of the UK, I don’t think an EV will be a serious replacement to the existing ICE cars that most people rely on for their transportation.
So if EV’s are not the one size fits all solution to get people out of their polluting cars,then surely the addition of a properly funded national public transport system is?
This is the thing. Most commutes and shopping trips are short so one doesn’t really use a lot of kW daily. I have a 22kW rapid charger beside the garage and the car will take 11kW but I normally only use the plug in one in the abri, which gives me 2kW which is more than adequate to recharge overnight for our daily trajets, I also think it is gentler on the battery.
I saw chargers built into bollards and lampposts in London recently. I don’t think the charging infrastructure is as bad in the UK as some would have one believe. And it’s improving in leaps and bounds in Western Europe. Anyway, if the UK infrastructure is weak, it’s only the bloody Tories to blame, yet again. They could have pushed it, as Brussels is now doing for main EU highways.
I’m off to Pisa tomorrow and then onwards to Milan and Como so I charged to 100% but, once again the plug in charger was sufficient for that overnight. I’ve come to the conclusion my “fast” charger is really only needed if I have to head off on a long trip at short notice. Even then, it would probaly make more sense to just get to an Ionity chager and whack in at the 200kW the car will accept.
How are poorer people supposed to afford EV’s anyway?
So far as I can tell, government subsidies for EV’s have also had the effects an economist might suspect… The cost of EV’s seems to have miraculously increased by the amount of the subsidy, actually quite rapidly. So the true transfer/support of EV subsidies has been to the car industry, not to the consumer.
The more EVs that are sold the stronger the secondhand market will get. With decent maintenance any car can last twenty years, so even with an ICE ban from 2030 there would have been ICEs around to 2050, and beyond. Nobody is being forced to go electric.
I should add that it used to cost me +/- €100 to fill my last ICE car, it now costs me about €8 to “fill” my EV. The ICE probably had 1 ½ times the range as the EV on full “tanks” so even saying twice the range then €100 plays €16, that’s got to be interesting to people on lower budgets. Even only filling up once a month that’s a saving of €1000 a year of after tax income.
In France at least the EV subsidy is capped at a reasonably low level where there is competition to stop price gouging. Furthermore many EVs are still just electric versions of ICE cars so comparing the cost of a petrol or diesel version to an electric version and factoring in the cost of an ICE engine and gearbox vs a electric motor, battery and switchgear should reveal if profiteering is taking place.
