Howard wrote:Ody
Can I compliment you as the originator. This thread has made me much more aware of vehicle pollution issues.
This news is somewhat surprising:
https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-ne ... en-sharan/I'm guessing Addison Lee have fully researched future pollution control issues in London. They seem confident that their vehicles will be low emission.
Presumably they will only keep their cars on the fleet for two or three years and Euro 6 standard vehicles now produce much less NOX and CO2.
An order for 1,200 diesels isn't a bad vote of confidence for VW! There's life in ICE vehicles yet!
And it is interesting that the design of the rear doors is a key factor in the fleet purchase decision. Let's hope they don't let the rain in
.
regards
Howard
Hi Howard,
Thank you for your kind complement.
To me the news is exactly what I expect and why things are difficult for legacy.
Addison Lee know that emission limits are coming but feel they can make a good turn in the short term on some new diesels which will have the urea supplement that dramatically cuts diesel emissions at relatively low cost as its a low cost consumable and cars won't run with out it and so they can get along with current legislation.
For VW it creates a dilemma as if then are to run with battery they have to begin to scale back ICE, but when they are getting orders like this the conservative board members will argue that there is no need to rush to battery and they will vote against short term battery capex. The arguments for delaying battery is also strong if one believes that the solid state glass batteries are likely to be commercial. I have no idea about that. Prof. Goodenough who invented them has a patent application in progress for them and they are going through peer review analysis, but as far as I can tell no one is making them on a commercial scale. I find this very puzzling as if they are as good as Prof. Goodenough claims as do several others more familiar with them than I am, why is someone not licensed to make them?
I expect legacy auto to be caught in this ICE v battery dilemma and to do as little as possible and in the meantime I expect Tesla and the Chinese to get bigger and the politicians to decide that ICE have to go leaving VW scrambling to scale up batteries.
Meanwhile if these solid state batteries are any good one can expect Tesla and the Chinese to start using them which if the lab. numbers are anything like what one will see in practice will lead to something like double the range of a Tesla and make ICE obsolete. I am reasonably confident that Tesla and the Chinese know much more about these batteries than anyone making me a little nervous that they may not be as practical as Goodenough suggests, or perhaps there are other technologies that are better which some of them are working towards.
It is an interesting area, one where there is a strong marketing and mind set battle along with a technical one of information and mis-information being banded about.
Also is all the potential of self drive and whether that will be better than human drivers.
Personally I expect that within 5 years no one will be buying new ICE vehicles in the prosperous Western economies. I am also minded to believe that robotic driving will by then be replacing human drivers and that the politicians and insurance companies will so like the resultant reduction in costs and human death that the prosperous nations will rapidly move to robotic driving.
In the grand scheme of things I expect the potential water ingress into Model 3 to be an minor foot note that will quickly be forgotten. Remember when we had the first of several Apple-gate phone scares and technical troubles and everyone said no one would buy iPhones, they would all buy Samsung and that seemed plausible but the fires caused by Samsung failing batteries proved real whereas Apple Antenna gate etc proved to be fleeting things that the media blew up to ridiculous levels and then forgot about.
Regards,