THE WEEK IN Zero Emission Vehicles
Week of November 28th 2022
1 The good and the great of electric vehicles gathered at the Excel centre for the London EV Show. As far as car EOMs/ dealers there was Tesla, Nissan, Ford, Maxus and JLR present. So, in fact, the majority of EV manufacturers were not present at the EV show.
Gracing us with their lack of presence was, of course, Toyota, who, despite cornering the hybrid market with the Prius have decided that these are not worth including in this show, nor is their world-beating (!) Mirai hydrogen car. Or, indeed, their own EV which did make an appearance earlier this year at the British Motor Show. Apparently they have a new version which does not lose wheels they way the first version did. But we don’t know because they didn’t exhibit it.
Plenty of ancillary companies were there including a niche company that produces low carbon concrete blocks into which charging posts can be mounted. Niche, indeed, but I believe they’ve cornered the market.
Did anyone ask exhibitor Payter — who provide the contactless units that sometimes accept your payment card at a charger — why they can stick a card reader on every vending machine in the country without a problem but getting one to reliably work on a charger seems to be a near impossibility?
2 One Linked-in one post went viral after an EV driver sent his car back after 6 weeks because it was a “Pain in the A*se”. Further investigation identified that he was dissatisfied with the range (he had a lead foot), the charge speed (he couldn’t understand why it didn’t charge at 150kW all the way to 100%) and the efficiency of the car (he got an inefficient Audi eTron and wondered why his lead foot and the poor aerodynamics meant he wasn’t getting the advertised range). The number of comments and reposts brought all the old myths and FUD out of the woodwork. “Hydrogen is the way forward”, “the batteries will die on you”, “You can’t go more than 100 miles without needing 8 hours to recharge” All the old classics. Looks like the education initiative is still very much a prime pre-requisite in EV adoption.
3 On the subject of Zero Emissions, noted ‘environmentalist’ Andrew Neil lamented the fact that relying more and more on wind is a problem. With wind dropping to a meagre 1% of generation on Monday it meant that we had to go to expensive gas and coal for almost 70% of our energy. In a spectacular shot into his own foot he barely acknowledged that when this ‘useless wind’ is generating 50%+ — as it was recently — we don’t have to buy all that expensive gas and coal, thereby reducing overall energy bills for Britons. Perhaps he wants everyone paying more? I don’t know…
As expected, the hydrogen lobby came out in support of him. This time in the form of fossil-fuel apologist and Fuel Cell vehicle enthusiast (despite not actually having one himself) Dick Winchester, who pointed Neil to an article about how Sweden has ‘solved hydrogen’. That article discussed a single custom-built school, with on-site solar which powers an on-site electrolyser and storing hydrogen at 300 bar (4000psi) in a tank. Yes, that’s a tank containing explosive gas at 4000psi, situated next to the school.
The implication is that this one, custom-built solution in one school has ‘solved the hydrogen problem’
The article was written by *checks notes* Dick Winchester.
4 Shell Recharge solutions boasted this week that they are “proud to share that more than 500,000 EV drivers are now using the Shell Recharge app to manage their EV charging journey!” Nowhere in their article did they state whether this was 500,000 app downloads, 500,000 openings of the app or 500,000 charges started or stopped via the app. All very different things. Further investigation revealed that the 500,000 was actually the number of users that logged-in to the app at least once.
… in three years.
5 Tesla seemed to be moving to a market-based pricing with their supercharging across Europe. Their tariffs change by time of day and have been updated every week for the past couple of weeks. In the UK it can be as little as 48p/ kWh without a subscription for Non-Tesla owners. A survey they pushed out recently had a question asking if tariffs to match the wholesale pricing was something users wanted. Seems they’ve kinda gone down that path already despite not knowing the answer to the survey. Will other CPOs follow suit?
6 Lightyear, the Dutch high-tech company developing the world’s first solar-electric car, has started production of its first vehicle, the Lightyear 0, at Valmet Automotive’s facility in Finland. The car has a ‘smaller battery’ (at a mere 60kWh — slightly bigger than, roughly, half the battery cars on the road today) but aims to reduce the amount of charging needed by having the car use solar to recharge alongside a really slippy aerodynamic body. A prototype went 440 miles on a single charge recently. Larry, the diesel driver from Solihull, still reckons it’s not enough for him to swap his BMW320D ‘cos he can get 600 miles from that and he does that non-stop everyday of the week.
7 The 150,000th Ford Mach E rolled off the production line at the Cuautitlán assembly plant in Mexico this week. “When we put the pony on this Mustang, we knew we’d have skeptics” said Darren Palmer, vice president, Electric Vehicle Programs, Ford Model e. Porsche decided to name their small Chelsea Tractor the Macon rather than the 911 SUV for the same reason.
8 Ford plans a £150m electric vehicle investment at Halewood in Merseyside. The factory upgrade will allow the company to produce electric drivetrains for its upcoming range of cars to be sold in Europe — and the the UK especially — when the ban on the sale of new ice vehicles comes into force in 2030. This sounds great except that a similar announcement in October 2021 was for an initial £230m and that included Government help from a BEIS fund. This latest ‘investment’ includes a big chunk of cash from UK Export Finance, through their Export Development Guarantee. I wonder how much Ford themselves have actually committed?
9 The Tesla Semi was revealed to the public today a mere five years after it was first launched at a Tesla event. One was shown pulling 82,000 lbs in a 400 mile journey up hill and down dale between Fremont and San Diego. Tesla conveniently forgot, however, to release the breakdown of that load, only mentioning a total weight of 82,000 lbs during the event, but it never confirmed the weight of the Tesla Semi or load capacity. If the batteries are 15,000lbs and the truck itself is 20,000lbs then the difference between that and the 82,000lb maximum is your payload. For context a Hummer battery weighs in at nearly 3000lbs and that’s for 200kWh. The Semi battery is rumoured to be five times that capacity. Do the maths.
10 Four hydrogen things to end up on: Rolls Royce announced the first successful test of a hydrogen powered jet engine. And by successful test they mean they fed liquid hydrogen from a big tank to a static engine in a lab (something that actually was first accomplished years ago). No news on whether this will ever make it into a real plane given the volumetric density issues associated with liquid hydrogen. Plus, they’re burning it so they’re creating oxides of nitrogen which are very potent greenhouse gases, so there’s that. Let’s take a high greenhouse gas activity and replace it with an ultra high greenhouse gas solution. What could possibly go wrong, eh?
11 Centrica — the company that owns British Gas — announced that they’re looking at hydrogen for their fleet. They’ve signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ryze to ‘jointly develop hydrogen production projects on existing Centrica sites and work with third-parties to build production on their sites too.’ For those keeping track Ryze was created (and is run) by Jo Bamford, of JCB fame, the man who created a hydrogen-powered JCB digger. No word on whether Centrica — the company that trades energy and natural gas and is looking to push hydrogen as a heating source in gas boilers — will be using electrolysis on site to create the hydrogen or creating grey hydrogen through steam reforming of natural gas. Hmmm…
12 Honda have announced a hydrogen-powered car. It will be a fuel cell version of the Honda CR-V and production will start in 2024. Just to let you know how confident Honda are that the fuel-cell drive train is the right way to go they are also adding batteries and a plug-in charge port in, presumably so that if you’re outside California you can actually drive somewhere without making a huge detour to the only US-based hydrogen pump outside that state. In Hawaii.
13 Finally our good friends at Toyota have managed to persuade the British government to give them £11.3m to develop a fuel cell Hilux truck. The government said that “hydrogen vehicles were better suited to isolated settings like farms and quarries, where pickup trucks are already commonly used, and the infrastructure for electric vehicle charging is impractical.” They neglected to add “.. and fuel cell vehicle infrastructure is non-existent” £11.3million buys you a lot of electric infrastructure and not a lot of hydrogen infrastructure.
