More Electric Car B/S

More interesting revelations have emerged into the public domain about electric cars which proves all the bluff and bluster about them is plainly untrue and the powers that be have a vested interest in you buying something at twice the price for only doing half of what you want.
To begin it is apparently now the weight and while I mentioned this years ago it is coming to the fore again in two main forms, blowing/exploding tyres and collapsing car parks and according to the Institute of Structural Engineers it was the weight of electric cars which caused a New York car park to collapse and they gave two main reasons.

1) The car park was designed and built in the late 1960’s early 1970’s and designed and built to cope with the vehicles of the day.
2) Electric cars are disproportionately heavier and this massively disrupts the buildings spot and even loadings so this needs explaining.

When a building is designed it has two structural loadings applied to the calculations and these are evenly loaded where a specific load is spread evenly across a storey and this is repeated across each storey and parameters or load limits set, this is followed by point loadings where a large load is applied to one specific point. These factors are calculated to determine the design and construction of any building and one article mentioned a Mini being a popular vehicle of the day and weighed 620 Kg and a small modern electric car weighed 2200Kg so one vehicle is applying 3.5 times much more weight to approximately the same area. One clown tried defending the electric car by saying the Mini was a saloon and the small Kia was a hatchback, total idiot.

What actually happened and why did a car park collapse? From information gleaned to date it appears that a number of electric vehicles parked in one spot which overloaded the point loading parameters and as the building tried to transfer these loadings they couldn’t and the building collapsed. This behaviour is not uncommon as in many multi storey car parks a familiar pattern emerges as people are basically lazy and they congregate around an entrance or exit on the ground floor and get further away as the car park fills, as they move to the first floor people park next to a lift or stairs and this pattern continues until the car park if full.

Next are the tyres and many reports have been made public about electric cars constantly blowing tyres and official figures from tyre retailers confirm this and to explain this simply I drive a large 4X4 and it is like putting this on the roof of a small electric car and expecting it to drive around without problems on its small tyres.
Much of the issue is down to environmentalists and wannabe experts forcing tyre manufacturers to make smaller and cheaper tyres and to cut their factor of safety margins to cut the amount of materials going into a tyre and claiming there is less to recycle; right up to the point a tyre explodes and it kills a family member of theirs and their attitude suddenly changes, their eco credentials suddenly go out of the window.

When any car is moving in a straight line any loading goes straight down onto the road and the force is determined by the mass (weight) of the car and the contact area of all four tyres to give the weight loading into the road, when a moving vehicle turns this loading on the tyres increases massively and it also changes to acting in two directions. When you turn the steering wheels to go around a corner the same force pushes down into the road and as the car tries to go straight on the load is also applied to the side of the tyre and effectively tries to tear it from its rim so now you have a downwards and sidewards load applied to the tyre and this load does two things, it keeps load applied until the tyre loses grip and the car skids or the tyre cannot take the loads and it explodes. Here is the conundrum??? Eco tyres are weaker and have less material in their construction and this makes them weaker and less resistant to impacts and the continual impacts from poor or pot holed roads damage the structure of the tyre much easier and they have a much lower factor of safety which makes them pop or explode as any tyre in use gets hot and the air inside it gets hot and expands.

What is the answer? Drive a large 4X4 like mine as they are tyre friendly, it may be large and heavy but it also has large tyres to spread that load and it actually applies less load to the road surface than most electric mini sized cars and as its tyres are NOT eco friendly they also last, most small battery cars tyres last less than 15,000 miles while my large 4X4 tyres designed to go off road and absorb numerous large impacts with its Kevlar reinforcing which cost twice as much in materials and energy to make, but last for over 100,000 miles.
Whose tyres are eco friendly? Small electric cars will be on their 7th set of tyres to my one set.

One other point worthy of mention is something called “torque” which in simple terms is the ability to turn or the amount of turning power something has and again in very simple terms power is basically torque X speed and a the lower an electric motors speed, the more torque it produces to get it to speed. In any form this is acceleration and the resistance the torque has to overcome is the mass and rolling resistance something has to get it to a specific speed, so let’s say 30 MPH for the sake of argument. When anything accelerates it had to overcome this resistance and it uses torque to do this and to generate the torque you use more petrol or diesel and for an electric motor it hammers the batteries and is the reason any car uses a lot of fuel or battery around town as it is constantly stopping and starting while something travelling at a constant 70 MPH on the motorway gets more MPG or uses much less battery.
This torque causes more issues with battery cars in that it adds a third loading to a tyre in that it has so much torque that it tries to twist the tyre on the rim, to a rotational loading to add to our two loadings and this excess of torque trashes tyres as well as any gearbox, drive shafts, brakes, and steering components.

Brakes are another issue as they are stopping much more weight and this means the electric supermini has to have van sized brakes simply to stop the vehicle and when you brake you get a condition called “dive” where the front of the car dips and this applies even more loading to the tyres. Brakes are much larger and subsequently use more materials and ae certainly not more eco friendly as the vehicle weight makes them wear faster and as they are metal impregnated in resin the metal dust and particles go into the atmosphere.

One thing not yet mentioned is the safety risks of electric cars and it is not yet fully understood and in the public domain yet and this is electrocution as electric cars work on 400-800 volts DC and they, and most other ICE cars are made from steel and this is a conductor of electricity. Official figures show an average of 10 vehicles are involved in motorway accidents and generally these are the worst because of the higher speeds and much more vehicular damage is sustained but petrol and diesel engined vehicles have fuel tanks unlikely to rupture. In any accident the first instinct is to get out of your vehicle and your door handle is most likely metal, if it isn’t and the door is damaged you touch it to push it or hit or kick it to open it and you will likely tell other passengers to do the same so do the powers that be know these risks? Yes they do as all fireman attending car accidents have to now wear insulated clothing before they touch any car irrespective of whether it is electric or not. Strangely Governments conveniently ignore these facts and think if they ignore them people won’t question them and they can fob the general public off again and kill them as well as electric car owners killing people in the Congo where most of the cobalt comes from to produce their environmentally unfriendly batteries.

As one environmentalist famously said “keep your old diesel car and limit your mileage” as this is the most environmentally way to travel by car.

I agree, I too drive a 4x4 pickup . Had it 9 years now and from memory its
had 3 new tyres. Whilst not recently ,i used it to tow a heavy boat long
distancies and made twice weekly trips towing a large trailer loaded with
steel. in 9 years its only had 1 new starter motor / new brake pipes and
underseal.and a cam belt.

Its a big diesel ,but being old school i drive it as a diesel not a petrol,
and get over 30 mpg. & thats where most people get it wrong ,you achive
nothing by high revs except low mpg. i rarely take mine over 2500 revs.