I have a new car. It’s rather clever. As I’m driving along it can recognise nearby vehicles, people, cyclists, traffic cones…
But I was somewhat amused yesterday to discover that it can also recognise wheelie-bins.
(Click for a larger image.)
I’m trying to imagine what I would have thought, back in the days of my old rusting Minis and Hillman Imps, if you’d told me that one day my car would have a built-in ability to recognise and draw pictures of the waste-disposal facilities it was passing…
Yesterday was an interesting day for me: I part-exchanged my old electric car for a new one, and got a vision of the future.
I had a great fondness for my old BMW i3, despite its foibles; we had been through a lot together in the pioneering early days of EV ownership (that is, about five years ago!) But it definitely represented the past, and, given that part of my plan here has been to try living in the future, it was time for a change. Before selling it, I charged it at the new Gridserve Electric Forecourt (and almost had a charging experience reminiscent of the early days!). But everything worked out in the end.
Here’s a video.
If you don’t want to see me reminiscing about my experiences with the i3, you might want to start 7 minutes in!
The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.
It has no fewer than 36 rapid chargers, and most of them are very rapid; there are a dozen that can supply 350kW (which almost nothing can actually consume, yet, but they’re future-proofing). 350kW, to give you an idea, would gain you about 25-30 miles of range for every minute you’re plugged in. There’s a bank of the Tesla v3 superchargers, too, which can do up to 250kW.
Now, you might well ask, how can you supply this quantity of electricity, even with that many solar panels? Well, the answer is that, as well as a good grid connection, they have an enormous battery pack next door and a solar farm just down the road. While you’re charging, there are cafes, loos and shops available.
I haven’t visited yet, but it just so happens I’ll be in that area next week, so I may well take a look.
Oh, and they’re hoping to build 100 of these.
In the meantime, there’s a Fully Charged video about it, which will probably be available to the general public about the time you read this:
Update, a bit later:
I did visit here the following week, just after it had opened to the public; here’s a clip from my vlog post at the time:
We’re staying in a throughly delightful B&B in Devon, on a working farm. This is the view from the front door:
Rose was greeted by the welcoming committee in the car park.
We drove down here in our little electric car. We’ve had it now for nearly five years, and have clocked up 30,000 miles, which I realise means we’ve put about eight megawatt-hours through its battery! That sounds like quite a lot, so I should point out that it represents total fuel costs to us of about £20 per month, and in our case that fuel was almost entirely from renewable sources; mostly hydroelectric, with a bit of solar and wind. So for the last five years, we’ve been driving around powered by sun, wind and rain.
One thing that helps with the efficiency is keeping your tyres pumped up to the correct pressure. I carefully did that a couple of days ago before setting off. But I couldn’t help noticing this morning that our very genial host, Rob, was doing the same, but he has a rather more powerful tyre pump than I have!
I note that the number of public electric car charging points in the UK has roughly followed Moore’s Law recently: doubling about every two years.
I don’t think that can hold true for quite as along as the original law, but it’s encouraging none the less!
In the U.S.A, cars with manual transmissions were just 1.1% of car sales last year.
Cars with electric motors were 1.6%.
Slowly but surely, the revolution is happening…
Today, I got to ride the Flit Electric Bike! It was great fun!
Actually, it was much better than that; I was invited to visit their office in Cambridge and got to spend quite a bit of time meeting the team and distracting them from what they ought to have been doing. But they were great people, and very patient as I quizzed them endlessly to find out more about what I think is a really nicely-designed product.
A bit of personal background: I own an elderly (non-electric) Brompton folding bike which I got from my parents, and there’s a story behind why I’m particularly fond of that brand. My father had bad arthritis in his ankles meaning that, from an earlier age than one might expect, walking any distance was difficult, but he could cycle just fine. Some of us got together and gave him a Brompton, little knowing that it really would prove to be quite a life-changer. He could take it with him almost everywhere he went, and it allowed him to join in on family walks, get exercise, and see new places in a way he never could have done without it. For him it genuinely was a mobility vehicle, and I think it kept him out of a wheelchair for probably 10 years longer than might otherwise have been the case. My mother also got one soon afterwards, and until fairly recently, their car always had two bikes in the boot. So yes, I have a soft spot for this brilliant bit of British engineering, designed by a Cambridge engineer and finally brought to market after a long hard struggle.
To be fair, almost everybody loves Bromptons, though for most people the value is that you can cycle at all on something that folds away so ridiculously small; it’s not really the bike you’d probably choose to ride just for the joy of riding. There are compromises in rigidity, in cycling position, etc., which are apparent when you compare it to any regular bike (though I gather newer models may be a bit better than my ancient and well-travelled example!). And when Brompton came to build their battery-assisted version, they didn’t want to change too much of the basic design which had been so successful for so long. They did an ingenious and careful job of electrifying it, but it was always a retrofitting exercise to an existing layout.
The Flit bike, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up as an electric bike, yet it folds almost as small as a Brompton, and weighs a bit less than their electric model. At present, it’s also cheaper, because Flit are selling direct; you can’t yet walk into a dealer and buy one. And in fact, even buying direct, you’ll need to be patient; they expect the first batch to ship in July. So the one I was trying was a pre-production model, but they’ve managed to sell quite a number through their crowdfunding campaigns, initially on Kickstarter and now on Indiegogo, which is impressive given that very few of those people, presumably, will have had the opportunity to go and try it out just a few miles from home, as I did!
But I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. I found it great fun and comfortable to ride, a good weight to carry, and easier to roll along the floor than any other folding bike I’ve tried. I can definitely see that if you lived a few miles from your nearest train or bus station, this would be a great way to get there. Or, say, to carry in your motorhome or yacht for trips to the nearest pub or grocery shop. OK, so it doesn’t fold quite as small as a Brompton. And it doesn’t have the load-carrying capacity of, say, the much larger and heavier Tern Vectron. Both of those are fine machines, but the Flit is noticeably cheaper than both of them at the moment and (in my opinion) nicer to ride than either.
I shall watch with interest as they ramp up production, and follow their blog, and I hope they have the success they deserve!
]9 Alex Murray
My thanks to Alex Murray, the Managing Director, for the invitation. (I first heard of Flit, by the way, on this excellent podcast, which I recommend for anyone interested either in bikes or startups or both!)
A recent BBC article is entitled “Electric cars: Best and worst places to charge your car”.
Extract:
The government has published new league tables showing which regions of the UK have the most charging points for drivers of electric vehicles. The most per 100,000 people are in London, followed by Scotland, while Yorkshire is the worst by that measure.
Outside London, Orkney and Milton Keynes have the most. But Barrow-in-Furness and Scilly each have none.
There’s a nice map showing the current state of play.
A bit later, though, the article starts to introduce some rather worrying numbers:
The government wants the UK to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Scottish Power estimates that in order to achieve this, the UK needs to have 25 million charging points for electric vehicles – the equivalent of installing 4,000 a day – and 23 million electric heat pumps to replace domestic gas boilers.
Mmm.
This is a topic of great interest to me, and the underlying data is useful, but the article is somewhat flawed almost from the start. The first thing to notice is that it never distinguishes between public and private charging points. In fact, if you look at the source, the league table is talking about public charging points, where Scottish Power are talking about public and private ones.
Nonetheless, it is indeed a lot of charging points, though the article’s second error is in ascribing the figure of 4000 installations per day to car chargers: in fact the numbers are about 2000 each for chargers and for heat pumps.
Then they hammer home the size of the challenge with this:
And all at a cost of nearly £300bn.
Wow! Another big and scary number. How on earth are we ever going to do this?
But let’s think about it for a moment…
Many numbers are not quite so scary when you consider them rationally and in context.
25 million is approaching the current number of households in the UK, and, yes, if we don’t have petrol vehicles, most people will probably want to charge their cars at home. That’s also why the heat-pump number is on a similar scale.
But remember, we’re talking about a target which is 30 years away.
According to this article, the UK installed 1.7 million new boilers in 2018! This makes sense, if you think about it: how many households are there, and how long does a boiler last? If that rate continued, then between now and 2050, 51 million new boilers would have been installed anyway.
Switching to heat pumps may be slightly more involved, but it sounds a bit more plausible now. And installing charging points only needs to happen at half the rate of central heating boiler replacement!
But that, of course, does not make for such enticing journalism.
Wait, though – what about that enormous £300-billion cost?
Well, there are about 70 million people in the UK, and that cost will be spread over 30 years. So that’s £142 per person per year, or about 39p per person per day.
Would you pay that for a carbon-neutral future? I would!
Let’s get on with it!
It’s hard not to feel warm fuzzy feelings about the small team who are producing the Lightyear One.
This is a new electric car which grew out of the team at Eindhoven who won the Solar Challenge a few years ago, and it’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First, they’ve focused on efficiency, meaning that the car travels much further on a kilowatt-hour than, say, a Tesla. And secondly, all the roughly-horizontal surfaces are covered in solar cells. This is a car that really can charge itself.
It doesn’t do it very fast, of course; we’re still a long way from just driving around on pure sunshine. It does have decent-sized batteries, and you can plug the car in and charge them just as you would on any other EV (and get a range of over 400 miles).
But, on a bright sunny day, the solar panels generate a bit more than a kilowatt. And because of its efficiency, that translates to about 7 miles of distance per hour of sunlight. That may not sound like much, but it’s roughly the rate you would accumulate miles from a standard 13A socket with a traditional EV.
And think of it this way: if you live in a sunny climate and park in the company car park for your eight-hour working day, it might well manage your trip home and back to the office again without you normally needing to plug in at home at all.
Yes, it’s expensive, and yes, it’s not production-ready for a year or two, and yes, most of us, even if we have that much cash, don’t have that much sunshine. But the key thing is that they’re making a car that is significantly more efficient, puts less load on the grid, and is, I think, rather beautiful.
I hope I may own a Lightyear one day. I’ll call mine ‘Buzz’.
Fancy some fast, green, silent, smooth, aquatic transport? Me too. So the approach taken by SeaBubbles is really attractive.
They’re making electric hydrofoils which, once you get above about 6 knots, rise up and lose 60% of their drag.
They’re about the same size as a car, and the battery has the same capacity as my BMW i3. This would give you enough range, on their figures, to get you across the English Channel.
Here’s some nice footage of their tests on the Seine; they’re keen to promote them as water taxis. As they point out, many waterways have speed restrictions that wouldn’t allow you to get the most out of your SeaBubble…
They haven’t announced pricing yet, but I fear they’d be well beyond my reach, especially since I’d also need to buy a cottage by the side of a fjord to appreciate it fully.
But I hope I get a chance to ride in one!
One YouTube channel that I’ve been following for really quite a long time is Fully Charged, a series discussing electric vehicles, home power generation, renewable energy and other related topics. It does so in an amusing and light-hearted way, not least because it’s hosted by Robert Llewellyn, also known for his roles in TV series such as Red Dwarf, who’s a naturally engaging host. More recently he’s been joined by the motoring journalist Jonny Smith, previously a presenter on Fifth Gear. They make a great couple.
This weekend saw the first Fully Charged Live event, a two-day gathering at Silverstone organised by the team, with talks, exhibitions, demos of electric vehicles, and much else besides. This was quite a leap of faith for a small, self-published show – it was a big financial commitment and they were very nervous about whether it would be a success, but it seems to have been resoundingly so, to the extent that the catering and A/V facilities were rather overwhelmed on the first day, and extra arrangements had to be made – things went much more smoothly today.
Robert told me that they’d sold well over 5,000 tickets in advance and quite a lot more were bought at the event. Many people, like me, came for both days, so there must have been a good three or four thousand people there, I imagine, and the feeling of goodwill in the air was palpable; everyone wanted it to succeed.
There were lots of interesting vehicles to see; the Jaguar iPace was naturally getting a lot of attention, not surprisingly: it’s the most interesting big cat since the E-type, and the first I’ve actually wanted to own.
When it’s about 10 years old, I might be able to afford one.
In the meantime, I got to try out a couple of electric scooters, which were great fun — I think we’ll see more of those — and there were some lovely electric conversions of classic vehicles: I was particularly taken by these:
I, on the other hand, was staying nearby in my recently-acquired and non-electric campervan (of which more in a future post). This meant, that despite actually owning an electric vehicle, I actually turned up to Fully Charged Live in a VW diesel. I was joking with people that I needed a bumper sticker: “My other car is electric!”
I also got to meet Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield, whose Transport Evolved news show I’ve also been watching and supporting (in a very modest way) via Patreon for some time.
All in all, a fun and informative event. I wish it every success for the future, and will wear my T-shirt proudly.
On Wednesdays, there’s an interesting group of catering vans that collect at the far end of the West Cambridge campus, and I like to go there for lunch.
But it’s a bit of a distance, and the weather today was bad, so it was important to find the most appropriate method of transportation…
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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