Car (or bike) Chat!

[dave2010]

Friends came to see us last year - driving a very smart Morgan. When they left I suggested a small detour to get petrol rather than going to another garage with more expensive petrol. This was dismissed - quite reasonably as it turned out - as the small detour would have completely annulled the benefit of having the cheaper petrol.

I also warned about filling up en route, as petrol stations are quite far apart if one heads off towards the west, and that advice was I think accepted, as the car uses quite a lot of petrol, and hasn't got a very large petrol tank.

I would expect a modern electric car to have a better range - though I do have to admit the Morgan looked very stylish.

[struth]

Friends came to see us last year - driving a very smart Morgan. When they left I suggested a small detour to get petrol rather than going to another garage with more expensive petrol. This was dismissed - quite reasonably as it turned out - as the small detour would have completely annullled the benefit of having the cheaper petrol.

I also warned about filling up en route, as petrol stations are quite far apart if one heads off towards the west, and that advice was I think accepted, as the car uses quite a lot of petrol, and hasn't got a very large petrol tank.

I would expect a modern electric car to have a better range - though I do have to admit the Morgan looked very stylish.

ooh, whats a friend

cant remember my last visit

[Ninanina]

The Prius has just had it's yearly service & MOT..

Only needed offside anti roll bar bush, nearside last year so was expecting it... not that expensive as I got a discount on the repair

So yet another year of cheap motoring...

Shame I had to add a couple of wheel trims that had been stolen.... £400 for everything including new wipers all round included etc and a £20k courtesy car provided

Done over 15,000 miles in the Prus with just yearly servicing costs so no complaints so far... not even had to replace a bulb as yet..

It's definitely the most reliable car I've owned so far... they easily can do 250,000 miles without trouble so mine at 122,000 odd miles is nothing

[dave2010]

The Prius has just had it's yearly service & MOT..

Only needed offside anti roll bar bush, nearside last year so was expecting it... not that expensive as I got a discount on the repair

So yet another year of cheap motoring...

Shame I had to add a couple of wheel trims that had been stolen.... £400 for everything including new wipers all round included etc and a £20k courtesy car provided

Done over 15,000 miles in the Prus with just yearly servicing costs so no complaints so far... not even had to replace a bulb as yet..

It's definitely the most reliable car I've owned so far... they easily can do 250,000 miles without trouble so mine at 122,000 odd miles is nothing

Didn’t know you had one of those. Mine’s looking a bit battered, mostly due to inconsiderate b****ds who bump into it in car parks - when I’m not even driving, and last year there were the ******s who stole the cat converter. I’m thinking of retiring it this year as it approaches 130k. Not perfect, but mostly very easy to drive. I’m not sure I like the newer models as much as ours from 2007. The model after that seemed good - significantly faster IMO - but some of the newer ones seem less appealing, though I know people who like them.

Could do with heated windscreen (like Fords) and heated wing mirrors, and retracting wing mirrors, plus a better rear view camera, and also sensors as well as the camera. When we bought ours we could have had sensors as well, but the salesman suggested we didn’t need a camera plus sensors. With hindsight I think we were right, and the salesman wrong, and I note that some cars definitely do have cameras plus sensors now. Handling in high winds is not as good as some other cars, but it’s not the worst we’ve had. That honour probably belongs to a Toyota Yaris.

[struth]

Didn’t know you had one of those. Mine’s looking a bit battered, mostly due to inconsiderate b****ds who bump into it in car parks - when I’m not even driving, and last year there were the ******s who stole the cat converter. I’m thinking of retiring it this year as it approaches 130k. Not perfect, but mostly very easy to drive. I’m not sure I like the newer models as much as ours from 2007. The model after that seemed good - significantly faster IMO - but some of the newer ones seem less appealing, though I know people who like them.

Could do with heated windscreen (like Fords) and heated wing mirrors, and retracting wing mirrors, plus a better rear view camera, and also sensors as well as the camera. When we bought ours we could have had sensors as well, but the salesman suggested we didn’t need a camera plus sensors. With hindsight I think we were right, and the salesman wrong, and I note that some cars definitely do have cameras plus sensors now. Handling in high winds is not as good as some other cars, but it’s not the worst we’ve had. That honour probably belongs to a Toyota Yaris.

the chr is a good car but i would say that

[Alex_UK]

Could do with heated windscreen (like Fords)

I may be wrong, but I believe Ford held the patent for heated windscreens, which is now expired, so for years they held the monopoly but that's changing.

With hindsight I think we were right, and the salesman wrong, and I note that some cars definitely do have cameras plus sensors now.

I agree. Wife's Nissan only has a camera, my VW only has sensors - I much prefer the latter, I hate trying to rely on just a camera, especially at night.

[dave2010]

Yesterday I test drove a Tesla 3. Very good car. Didn’t get much chance to try it at speed, but it pulled away from an Audi effortlessly - though who knows if the driver was trying. Not much point in having a top speed over 140 mph though - it gets up to the legal speed limit very quickly, and with little noise. It was very windy, but that only affected it very slightly. Perhaps others would actually prefer a slower car, with less good suspension, but more noise to give a feeling of excitement. One area where it wasn’t so good was over potholes, most of which communicated directly with my rear end. Another annoyance I had was with the indicator switch, which didn’t seem to self cancel well after doing lane changes, but apparently that was my “fault” as I perhaps pushed the control,lever down too firmly. Certainly worth considering, though would probably make more economic sense for people driving into cities with environmental charges.

The base model at around £37k is only rear wheel drive - after that there’s a £10k jump to the long range and performance models, which I suspect are significantly better. I drove one of the higher end models.

[struth]

https://youtu.be/ZH7V2tU3iFc

An interesting test of some electric cars til they died for range etc.

[dave2010]

https://youtu.be/ZH7V2tU3iFc

An interesting test of some electric cars til they died for range etc.

Quite fun that. Range is perhaps a problem, though some petrol cars perhaps don't have a greater range (say) than the best of these. The Toyota Prius has a 45 litre tank (just under 10 gallons), while some other cars have bigger tanks (e.g. Audi A3, A4 - 63 litres (just under 14 gallons), Toyota Camry has 70 litres (15+gallons), Mercedes C class has 66 litres (14+ gallons)). These tanks should, in theory, give a range of around 500 - or more - miles for each. So for range all of these particular cars should go further by a significant factor than electric cars. Diesel cars - currently not so popular in the UK - might go even further. My friend's Morgan might, however, not go as far as the best electric cars, without a top up.

I wondered about how hydrogen cars might compare. They probably could do better than electric cars at the moment, and compare well with petrol and diesel cars. However, there are hardly any hydrogen refilling stations - mostly round London - https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/b...hydrogen-cars/

Hydrogen cars are less efficient than electric cars. As suggested earlier, if hydrogen is generated by electrolysis, it's probably more energy intensive than just using the electricity directly. However, hydrogen can be produced by other means, including waste processing, and steam reforming. This page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production shows that steam reforming is not great for CO2 release, with one ton of hydrogen produced releasing 9-12 tons of CO2. Thus producing hydrogen from fossil fuels or methane is not so great for the global environment, though if there's a choice between releasing methane, or CO2, then releasing CO2 is better - though still bad - because of its relatively lower impact on global warming. Overall, this does seem to suggest that unless there are specific reasons for generating hydrogen by other methods, that electrolysis, which can at least be powered by so-called renewable energy, may be the best approach. The Kvaermer process - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kv%C3%A6rner_process - might be a good method to avoid CO2 or other greenhouse gas emissions, though as it produces carbon and hydrogen, though I don't know how efficient it is. It may still require a lot of energy, so should be compared with electrolysis.

The time taken to fill up a car using hydrogen as a fuel is perhaps not much more than for conventional petrol or diesel filling, but given that there are very few places where this can be done at present in the UK, hydrogen cars would seem to have a very limited or restricted future. I did wonder if it would be possible to combine electric car technology with hydrogen car technology - I don't see why not. This might increase the possible range of a car, though could make for even more dangerous vehicles - with batteries which could explode, plus a gas which would be very inflammable if released from its containers.

[struth]

I think its a matter of planning a route more carefully. Most folk tho wont be doing 200 miles a day. The cost of buying/leasing is the problem compared to ice or hybrids. The Kia was the closest to its stated range at about 90% of stated in real life driving.