Petrol Free Cars (Who wants one!!)

yup, told my wife 2 yrs ago the echo was the last petrol we'd buy. Will keep the diesel lux for offroad and get something electric for the shopping and school runs.

Hopefully the echo will, well it is a toyota, last until the price and performance of the non-petrols becomes a price that is reasonable.

LANDY

"I think so, obviously ... fuel cell (powered) could be one candidate, electric vehicles, could be one candidate, I think there's a lot of potential for the future for petrol-free driven cars," Mr Yasuda told AAP.

must be a smart man to think of that all by himself............lol!

Here’s a surprise:
the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted over the life cycle of a fully electric vehicle is almost as high as that generated by the manufacture, running and recycling of an internal combustion engine-powered car.
But there’s a kicker. Manufacturing an electric car generates even more carbon dioxide than making an internal combustion engined car does. That’s with one important caveat – the electric car only generates more CO2 in manufacture, and almost as much CO2 over its life cycle, if the original power source used at the factory, and to recharge the batteries, comes from coal-fire power stations.
That’s according to a 2001 study by the Institute for Life Cycle Environmental Assessment.
If 2001 seems like a long time ago, that’s because not many people are thinking about the total lifecycle costs of electric cars. Most of the attention seems to be on emissions only, rather than the entire cradle to grave costs of producing, running and then retiring an electric vehicle.
It’s a failure of attention that will have to be rectified if, as many people seem to agree, we’re going to move to a future that’s predominantly transported by electric vehicles (EV).
So why does an EV create more CO2 than an internal combustion engined (ICE) car if it’s manufactured using coal-fired power?
It’s the batteries. Batteries of all types are very energy intensive to make, and recycling them is a complicated, energy intensive business. With an ICE car, melting down an engine block is a relatively simple, but still energy intensive, process. Breaking down a battery is that much harder, and potentially a whole lot more toxic too.
According to this study, hybrids come second best when it comes to lifecycle costs which is an odd conclusion given that hybrids use the same batteries, although fewer of them, than a fully electric car.
The best performer for overall lifecycle CO2 emissions is an electric vehicle manufactured with, and powered by, hydro-electric power.
The study did not examine the lifecycle costs associated with building and powering an EV with atomic energy.
Coal is cheap and plentiful, especially in Australia, which makes the lifecycle costs of EVs even more interesting for us domestically than for other countries, like Japan, that rely heavily on gas-fired and nuclear power.
Simply moving to a plug-in, EV future doesn’t automatically mean that we’re moving to cleaner motoring. What it does mean is more CO2 emissions from our coal fired power stations, which essentially moves the pollution from the tail-pipe of the car to the exhaust stack of the power station.
And what this means is that an EV is potentially just as polluting as a petrol car. The devil is truly in the details here. So what do you think? Are EVs part of the solution to global warming and climate change? Or are we simply moving the source of pollution from the tailpipe to the power station?

Gday
Go Fred Flintstone ..............
Murray