Electric cars.

I agree with you @simone_in_wiltshire , as well as with many of the other comments already made. It's well known that the creation and disposal of the batteries is a disaster.
The problem is - no one seems to work anything out for the long term future any more. 5 years ahead seems to be about as far as they can manage to look, if that. It'll be someone else's problem by then...

 

There are some hopeful signs - Cornish water lithium mining, V2H and V2G, load management battery banks made up of old BEV batteries, increasingly efficient battery recycling, BEV batteries lasting longer and longer, the emerging BEV battery cell replacement and repair businesses...

 

Irrespective of the range a battery may have, we need to get away from being virtually entirely dependent on China for supply. Any item with a single source of supply should be of concern. If that single source is China we should be very worried.

 

Are those buses fully electric?

These new models by BYD only have small batteries with a range of 55-120km depending on the model. It's these new 5th generation engines that they say where it preforms on mileage. If they say it is capable of doing 100km to 2.9L of fuel, that is putting it at being capable of doing just over 90mpg.

They said in reports that BYD had overtaken Tesla as being ranked N01 in sales of electric cars, but as Tesla don't do PHEV then the report is misleading. BYD are selling more PHEV than BEV and that gap is widening, so even the Chinese are not totally convinced with the BEV market.

 

To late in the day for that, the horse as well and truly bolted. European policies can take bulk of the blame. Europe as a continent imports more C02 emissions than any other continent, Sweden can have bragging rights of reducing their C02 emissions per capita internally in Europe, but by doing so they they have one of the highest carbon footprints on imports.

 

I completely agree. A relative had one and regretted it. Not only that, but the other thing they are attempting to hide is that if it breaks down (which many have), with no power to the car, you're locked in. A poor elderly man was locked in his for 6 hours waiting for AA to get to him. He was OK, but so many things could have happened. Frightening.

 

Fuel (electric) costs nothing if you have your own solar supply. But I'm sure any government will look at getting your money off you some other way....

 

Somebody quite recently suggested that electric vehicles should only be permitted to charge direct from either solar panels or wind power. Any other method which draws power from the National Grid is not 'zero emission' electricity. I wonder how far people would be able to drive if that was the law?

 

If we put in the effort as we did for covid, we might get there quicker... Kids both have electric cars and still sell back to the grid and charge their cars for free, it can work. But we do need the infrastructure and that won't happen unless we have people thinking a bit more. We don't have a car, live very rural and enjoy life, but would do more so if the planet was safer - alternatively get us off here to the nearest other safe planet!!

 

It is exciting to see that CCS bidirectional DC home charging is, at last, in sight.
Hopefully this will become mainstream in the next few years, with more car batteries providing flexible storage, not just for people's houses, but for the grid more widely. It's been quite absurd that for years it's been only a small number of chademo based chargers doing this on a trial basis.