Their aim was to demonstrate and promote the recently invented motor car. In addition, they celebrated the new Road Act, which that year raised the speed limit from 4mph to 14mph and removed the need for a man to walk in front of each motor vehicle waving a red flag. Quite a breakthrough for drivers of the day.

The cars taking part that day included those powered by electricity, steam and the internal combustion engine (petrol): back then it was a three horse race, technology wise. The internal combustion engine eventually won out of course. Fast forward to today and we take for granted the quite incredible travelling capability of modern cars. We Britons collectively drive 250 billion miles a year in our 30 million cars – all but 2,000 of which have internal combustion engines.

But the world is changing. Nobody can have missed the twin issues of Climate Change and fossil fuel depletion. Road transport in Britain is responsible for 20% of our CO₂ emissions, the main Climate Change gas. About a third of our oil imports are burned in our vehicles – some 25 million tonnes each year. Two excellent reasons to make a change.

On top of that, and perhaps more importantly for your average motorist – petrol and diesel are escalating in price and will continue to do so as the world runs out of oil. It was only two years ago that we hit the £1 per litre mark, at the time quite a traumatic event – how much further past that are we now – and how much longer before we hit £2 a litre? My guess is less than 5 years.

So we need an alternative to the car as we now know it.

And it’s ‘back to the future’ in fact – with electric cars making a comeback. So far the numbers are pretty small: a little over 2,000 of them in Britain. But all the major motor manufacturers have now either launched a fully electric car, or will do so later this year. You can go out and buy one, they’re just like ‘real cars’ – with some obvious differences.

Upsides and downsides of course. Upsides are a lack of pollution from the exhaust and the possibility of filling your car up at home – even making your own fuel from solar panels on your roof. The main downside is range. Cars hitting the roads this year will have a range of up to 100 miles, and to many of us this sounds like nowhere near enough. There’s even a name for the feeling many people get when contemplating electric cars – ‘range anxiety’.

The fact is we’re all used to driving cars that can cross continents. But we don’t use that capability. In Britain, 99.3% of all car journeys are actually less than 100 miles. Range anxiety is thus misplaced, though still having a very real impact.

People are also concerned about a lack of charging facilities on the road, somewhere to plug in. There’s actually a chicken and egg problem going on – one of the big reasons more people don’t buy electric cars is due to a lack of places to charge-up and companies are not installing places to charge-up due to a lack of electric cars on the road.

And that’s where our Electric Highway comes in. It’s the world’s first national network of charging points – it’s for electric cars and it’s on Britain’s motorways. We’ve completed phase one already, joining up the cities of London, Exeter and Manchester. Phase two will be completed this year and will see ‘top up zones’ at every Welcome Break motorway services in Britain.

They’re currently free to use, all you need – apart from an electric car, van or bike, is to register with us for a free smartcard (to access the chargers). We’ve created the Electric Highway to kick-start Britain’s electric car revolution – because we thought it needed doing.

Later this year we expect to install the first of a new breed of very fast chargers – from flat to full in 20 minutes. At a stroke electric cars will have overcome their only real drawback – their ability to travel great distances, and refill very quickly. It’s an exciting time for electric cars – perhaps on a par with 1896, when the new Road Act made cars suddenly rather more practical as a means of transport.

Nationwide rapid charging will achieve the same thing for the electric car.

[sociable /]

We’ve been discussing the charging of electric cars in previous posts and I’d suggested a vision of rows of charging posts and it taking 20 minutes or so to fill your car up while you surfed the net or otherwise chilled out. In a nutshell.

Two good counter points were made – we’d need big garages if it took that long to fill up (to hold all the cars) and why not swap batteries instead.

I think the case against swappable batteries is pretty clear, primarily that we just won’t need them and secondarily that it would be a huge undertaking to standardise car designs to accept a common ‘cassette’ and we’re talking maybe 100 Kilos each – that’s a hefty thing to just ‘swap’.

On the question of how many charging posts we’d need at these new garages, I pointed out that most of us (70% – I stand corrected that it’s not all) could charge at home each night and so would only need a ‘garage’ on long journeys. How long typical car journeys are, I thought, is going to be key to this.

I went away and did some digging and it’s altered fundamentally how I see garages of the future – I don’t think we’ll have any!

It turns out that less than 1% of all car journeys are above 100 miles. There are no figures above 150 miles, which is easily possible with today’s batteries – but it would follow that it’s a smaller number again. Some people talk of 200 miles being possible now – certainly in the future we can expect that. So far (far) less than 1% of cars on the road at any one time will need a filling station – as we know them.

There are 27 Million cars on the road today by the way – re-fuelled by under 10,000 petrol stations. Clearly we don’t all want fuel at the same time – except when there’s a scare on – otherwise that would be 2,700 car visits per garage per day. The fuel tank range of cars is a buffer, a vast rolling fuel tank. And so it will be with batteries. The big difference will be that we can fill up our cars at home and for most people (70%) and most journeys 99%+ that will be enough.

If just half a 1% of cars on the road were on journeys their batteries could not support (ie 200 miles or more) – which is a very reasonable ‘if’, then in theory, if it takes say four times longer to charge batteries than it does to fill with petrol (20 minutes versus five minutes) – we’d need four times one half a % of existing garages (if you follow). I make that 200 garages max, to simply meet the capacity – not taking location into account.

But if you factor in the probability of charging points in car parks and supermarkets – giving the chance to charge at your destination, for the return leg (doubling the range before a garage is required) I think we’ll need virtually no garages at all. Maybe a few on the motorway network – but then again, they can be in car parks.

Petrol Stations are destined to be extinct.

Where does this leave Oil companies?

With no liquid fuels to make and deliver (though they’ll try and foist Hydrogen on us first) and no retail outlets. There’s no future for them, except as reborn renewable energy companies. Or footnotes in history.

Roll on the day.

“Revealed: UK’s blueprint for a green revolution”

So – we may actually be entering into a second industrial revolution if the government gets stuck in with that £100 billion. They’re making all the right noises…

But … the fact remains – we have to cope with a planning system not fit for purpose. In 1999 the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities first identified that the planning process is a “grave hindrance to achieving the necessary growth in renewables”. Nearly ten years on and nothing has changed –the planning system still remains the most significant barrier to achieving the delivery of wind energy.

It’s the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons.

Lord Adair Turner suggested that there may be a tweak in the planning process to ‘unstick’ more wind projects following my little piece on Radio4’s PM on Friday.

The planning bill was debated yesterday – it’s been heralded as the cure for all planning’s ills but it still leaves the majority of wind projects in planning hell while at the same time smoothing the way for New Nuclear and nice new runways.

With all this on his plate Prime Minister Brown couldn’t quite stop himself from running off to OPEC, asking ever so politely if it would be possible to “keep the price of oil down a little bit please … while I try and sort out our little energy problem” … and also to ask them if they wouldn’t mind investing some of their trillions of profit in ‘our’ nuclear programme…

It also seems there has also been no better time to be looking at electric transport (well – it would have been better to be looking at it a century ago, but better late than never!):

“Electric cars given official green light to boost climate change goals”

Most eco-towns are being turned down or criticised for lack of coherent transport policy.

Dyson has just entered the electric vehicle game… (I hope his cars don’t suck!)
It turns out Dyson is not entering the electric vehicle game!

McCain puts bounty on batteries

For those people who travel less than 30 or 40 miles to work (well more like 15 or 20 if you can’t charge at the other end) – a sub £1000 electric scooter has arrived in the UK.

Finally there is an interesting piece from The Register – it’s an analysis of a draft book by Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Department of Physics, which attempts to do some real number crunching when it comes to looking at our future energy choices. The draft e-book is available here – it makes interesting and thought provoking reading if nothing else. I haven’t had time to check his figures though!

Simon – you make a couple of good points there. The idea of sitting around for 20 minutes while your car charges will be a bit of a challenge for some people, and it could require large numbers of ‘pumps’ or parking spaces. On the other hand we’ll all have ‘petrol stations’ at home, since we can plug our cars in every night and so the number of us using on street ‘petrol stations’ will drop perhaps massively. It would really only be when travelling more than 150 to 200 miles at a time – I don’t know what proportion of car journeys that is, but it would make interesting reading. And when so many of us have electric cars it’s easy enough to imagine fast charging facilities springing up in Supermarket car parks – I mean for how long will Tesco be willing to sit this one out? Even public car parks could have fast charging bays, and slow ones – for short and long stay parking. It’s quite possible that habits will change significantly and trips to the ‘garage’ disappear altogether.

Loads on the local grid are another good point, there’s definitely an issue to look at there. Electric cars shift the current petroleum load (in terms of energy) onto the grid anyway – and that’s a really big shift. Easier to strengthen that infrastructure though than build a new (hydrogen) one.

I don’t personally believe that swappable batteries are something that will work. It would require an incredible degree of co operation between car makers, and similarity of car design. Right now it would be nice if there was a common small appliance charging standard, for mobile phones and cameras etc – but instead we have a vast array of different ones. Bringing all car makers together would be far harder.

And then there’s the question of weight, these batteries aren’t light, it’s not likely to be easy to swap such a thing yourself.

Swappable batteries would be very unlikely to work in retrofit electric cars. And retrofit offers huge potential to reuse what we already have.

And finally one of the big advantages of the latest battery technology is you can shape the battery and distribute and fit it into parts of the car where it can assist to optimise weight distribution and centre of gravity – swappable batteries would negate all of that.

I doubt very much that the idea will succeed. It sounds good in principle though.
Cheers.

Has Tesla really killed of the myth of rubbish electric cars as Simon says? And are we just trying to make another Tesla as Peter says?

Tesla’s big success has been to convince so many people that they’ve actually done it. That their car is on the road and does what they say it would. I think they’ve created a new myth (for the few), that the Tesla works. It’s a great piece of PR. Hasn’t killed the old myth though (for the many).

Behind the PR – $150 Million spent so far, running 2 years late, only one car just delivered to the CEO – and this with the ‘gearbox problem’. New plan is to fix this later. Performance will drop. But we knew that, because the numbers don’t add up anyway.

Do we want to make another Tesla, no we don’t. But we share similar goals.

The current myth of electric cars lives on and it will be years before Tesla, or anyone else, gets it together in the UK (if they ever do). So we’re stepping up. It needs doing because it has not been done yet and we don’t actually have any time to lose.

If all cars in the UK were electric (and wind powered) we’d cut CO2 emissions by 12.5%

Cheers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz4mGpwJlSM

Transport is one of the really big issues we have to face up to – how are we all going to get around, post oil and post carbon?

I think the answer is electric cars, cars charged using wind energy – in fact I prefer to think of them as wind powered cars.

We’re building one right now – a car to smash the stereotype of looking like something Noddy would drive. An out and out sports car. Capable of 0 to 60 faster than a V12 Ferrari, able to top 100 mph for sure – and do 150 miles on one ‘tank’. All with zero emissions. Cake and eat it. Petrol head meets zerocarbonista.

We’re making this car with technology available in the world today. Throwing down the gauntlet to the big car companies. If we can do it – why (the hell) can’t you?

Work is underway, I expect this car on the road for the summer.

We’re keeping a film record as we go, hoping we might make this into a film for TV, if not definitely for our web site.

Watch this space! And Clarkson beware, or maybe not. I’ve a feeling he might like it…

e2a: check out the little clip of the video intro