Future Cars from 2030

What will power the cars in 2030

  • Battery

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • Hybrid

    Votes: 2 20.0%
  • Hydrogen

    Votes: 2 20.0%
  • Synthetic fuels

    Votes: 1 10.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 1 10.0%

  • Total voters
    10
  • Poll closed .

F1Brits_90

World Champion
with the recent news fully petrol/diesel ban from 2030


what is going to power the cars in less than 10 years that we will all be driving then. for me clear favourite is battery. but i worry about battery technolgy it has come on leaps & bounds will only make more progress & PU's are easy to service. but infrastructure isnt there yet, theres only 71 where i live & leaving your car outside of a supermarket or costa coffee for 8hrs unless you work there, is impractial & national grid would need to cope for increased demand for electricity if we had home chargers

but alternatives are current hybrid, hydrogen which im sure james may was chatting about what feel ages ago maybe as long ago as 2008 or synthetic fuels which F1 will be trying soon
 
Synthetic fuels are a no no as they need acres of land which will cause deforestation as there's no land to grow the plants at present and even less in the future as there will be a greater need to produce more food. Battery technology probably won't be there either, so despite the ban which appeases the green lobby it will be delayed like many government decisions over the past century, targets are set but the practical applications usually cause setbacks.
One must remember all these activist groups do tend to use fossil fuels and their derivatives to protest, even they can't do without them, so neither can we.
 
The push will be for hydrogen based on the argument that you can produce the gas using renewable electricity. What they haven't yet explained or fully considered is that when you burn hydrogen it converts to water, and water vapour is one of the worst green house gases - The water vapor feedback » Yale Climate Connections . At the moment water vapour is a bi-product of the warming effect of CO2, what will happen when the 2.6 billion vehicles used daily all start belching it out across the planet?

Secondly, to produce hydrogen you split it out from water, creating oxygen. What's wrong with that you say, we need oxygen to survive. Yes indeed, but the level of oxygen in the atmosphere is balanced and we have seen that throwing a few hundred ppm of any chemical in to the atmosphere can have very severe, unintended consequences. Oxygen is an incredibly reactive gas, what will be the effect on the delicate environmental balance if we start belching tonnes of O2 in to the lower or upper atmosphere?

Yes, we need to stop using hydrocarbons at the level we currently are but we also need to recognise that ANYTHING we do will have an impact on the planet. Tidal electricity affects water currents and destroys fish breeding grounds. Wind power changes weather patterns by altering air currents and also impacts on the migration of birds. Solar energy takes up huge swathes of land which are then no longer available for the production of food and creates hot spots because you are concentrating heat in very small areas.

I have no idea how we square this circle. I suspect the best option is to reduce the population and reduce consumption but no one is brave enough to bring those discussions to the table as pushing birth control makes you sound like a fascist with all the religious groups will up in arms, and reducing consumption interferes with the capitalist system and would threaten the super rich.
 
All very well FB , but at the present but CO2 is also a problem with fossil fuels and we are taxed to reduce it, however despite the levels increasing as yet no one has yet stated it is upsetting the atmosphere, only global warming. I would assume that if deforestation continues then the removal of CO2 would decrease and the increase in oxygen from hydrogen fuelled vehicles will offset this, the attention seems to be based on cars and light commercial vehicles, aircraft and ships will continue to use fossil fuels. My suspicion is that even the youngest member of this forum will not see the end of fossil fuels for some forms of transport or generation of power before their demise.
 
Dartman CO2 is part of the problem, but government and regulators are looking at whole host of different atmospheric emissions; VOC's, methane, NH3, fugitive emissions, aerosols from factories, in fact just about anything which goes up in the air. This is from a global warming perspective and human health (PM2.5's and PM10's which cause issues in the lung - this is why log burners are to be banned).

This link will take you to the Clean Air Strategy - Clean Air Strategy 2019

I agree that we will always use hydrocarbons. However, these can come from renewable resources, from waste products and even from the reprocessing of CO
2. In fact I am aware of work being done to use captured CO2 to produce ethanol, which could also be used as a fuel. The question there is whether the energy needed to convert the CO2 releases more than it uses or saves.

My comment about oxygen was about the potential for this to react with other atmospheric chemicals. A small change in the balance can lead to very significant effects in the atmosphere, even if only a few vehicles are converted to hydrogen. There are many unknowns here and what we will be doing is running a live experiment with our planet.

What is clear is that we need to stop burning and releasing hydrocarbons at the current levels, not just find renewable resources.
 
Electric cars aren't the answer since nobody has yet devised a means of dealing with the worn-out batteries. Recycling is VERY expensive and the lithium reclaimed via recycling costs many time more than lithium that is freshly mined. Unless the economics changes dramatically, going electric will mean absolutely huge numbers of batteries winding up in landfills and causing lots of contamination.
 
Are we being conned by EV hype, there are figures for range but how is that figure derived and what is the average for each make and model, perhaps it should be quoted like consumption, ie urban and extra urban, but in classes dry summer, wet summer and Dry winter and inclement winter. I have followed quite a few EV's recently and non seem to achieve the speed limit, all being 3-5 mph below the speed limit, are the speedometers reading high and thus the distance travelled shows higher than the actual thus giving an apparent longer range.
 
Last edited:
Are we being conned by EV hype, there are figures for range but how is that figure derived and what is the average for each make and model, perhaps it should be quoted like consumption, ie urban and extra urban, but in classes dry summer, wet summer and Dry winter and inclement winter. I have followed quite a few EV's recently and non seem to achieve the speed limit, all being 3-5 mph below the speed limit, are the speedometers reading high and thus the distance travelled shows higher than the actual thus giving an apparent longer range.
I was cruising down the highway at 100 mph in my Tesla yesterday. Had no issue with range.

Some Tesla owners are driving super conservatively because they want to get a perfect safety score to qualify for the FSD pilot. Seems dumb to me.
 
Last edited:
The ones I followed weren't Tesla's and their speeds varied but non of them held either 30 or 40 mph for more than a couple of seconds indicating possibly that they were exceedingthe speed limit.
 
The ones I followed weren't Tesla's and their speeds varied but non of them held either 30 or 40 mph for more than a couple of seconds indicating possibly that they were exceedingthe speed limit.
I don't now this seems like a ridiculous thesis that you have. EVs are not slow relative to petrol vehicles.

Like any type of vehicle there will be some which are under powered (e.g. Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500e, Mini E, etc) and some which have an abundance of power (Tesla, Porsche Taycan, Mercedes EQS580, Audi E-Tron S).
 
Last edited:
You live over the pond and have very different driving styles and road layouts, there is no thesis about EV being slower than gas or diesel versions, my observances are based on experiences following the small EV's we have over here like Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe, this may be due to the drivers or some quirk in the cars design, I have both a normal speedometer and a digital readout and I notice the digital readout HUD always reads in advance of the analogue instrument in the dash until I reach the desired speed when they coincide.
The car I'm driving at the moment has a very ergonomically friendly cruise control which I tend to drive on whenever possible but it does tend to emphasise the variations in speed of other drivers as they talk or admire the view.
 
The way the world is moving, we will naturally make fewer and fewer journeys. Lockdown has shown companies that working at a distance is now, more than ever, a realistic prospect.

I know a lot of companies see a time over the next 20 years or so that car ownership will be significantly reduced and most people will lease or hire a car for a specific journey / length of time.
 
Back
Top Bottom