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I got the "oops, we ran into some problems" message.
The site is fulla bugs - call Rentakill!

Although i tried to reply to 'Elsa' on that thread and got the error message, too, so it seems to affect certain threads and not others.
 
Glad it's not just me! I had the same thing yesterday. Seems OK if you reply to the thread, but if you try to quote anyone's post and reply, it just throws up an error.
 
Since bod will throw up a hair ball if i post back on his car selling saga thread, i'll post this about Henry Ford, who had a bright wheeze to manufacture a car that would run on hemp ethanol fuel.

Ford_HempBodyCar.jpeg


The Hemp Body Car was made almost entirely out of hemp...and was designed to be lightweight, durable, and cost-effective. The body of the car was made from a mixture of hemp fibres, soybeans, straw, and resin, while the chassis was made from a combination of hemp and steel.

Lighter than a production car chassis, it would've made a funky vehicle for the 60s. Big Oil, sadly, had other ideas...
 
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I do often wonder about that. A much more sensible use of crops than biofuel (IMO). However, I'm not sure I'd fancy getting one through a modern crash test! The thing is, I don't mind so much, making cars out of steel or aluminium. They're both readily recyclable anyway. It's burning stuff that I think we need to focus on, primarily.
 
My gut feeling, is that battery electric is the best we've got so far. About 1/3 of UK homes (which I accept, is a lot!) don't have off-street parking. However, of that 1/3, about 1/4 don't have any kind of car anyway - EV or ICE, so we're probably only looking at about 25-ish percent of UK homes that can't park off-street. Of those, a number will have electricity supplies that aren't suitable for a 7kW charger, although all of them will be able to charge from a 3-pin socket on a "granny" charger, albeit very slowly. For on-street parking, there are currently grants available to help with the cost of a pavement gulley or gantry, or bollard charger:


Somehow, this is seen as an insurmountable problem in the UK, whereas elsewhere in Europe (where far more of the population live in flats and apartments), they seem to just be getting on with it. I guess that's just part of the general British "can't do" malaise that has seen us shrink on the world stage for the last hundred years or so. :cry:

Biofuels? Well, my feeling is that we haven't enough space (either as a country or a planet) to grow enough to meet our needs AND feed ourselves. Plus, of course, you still get "some" of the pollution that you'd get from burning oil anyway.

Hydrogen? Again, it's "a thing". We have to split it between hydrogen fuel cell and hydrogen combustion. The former is somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 as efficient as just putting the electricity straight into the battery of an EV. The latter, is absolutely terrible - maybe half as efficient again. If I took 1 kWh of electricity and stuck it in my EV battery, it would get me about 3 miles. If I took that same amount of electricity and used it to make green hydrogen, then stuck that hydrogen in the tank of a hydrogen fuel cell car, it would get me maybe between 1 and 1.5 miles. If I burned that same amount of hydrogen in an ICE like JCB have just developed, it would get me between 1/2 and 3/4 of a mile!

The problem is the staggering amount of energy you need to get hydrogen in the first place. The easiest way, is to get it from hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas mainly, but you could also get it from oil). However, that's not actually saving us much in terms of CO2 emissions. We might as well just carry on burning petrol and diesel, while it lasts. What we really need, is for some cheap, limitless, and green source of electricity. If that's renewables, then by their nature, the output is intermittent. If it's nuclear fusion, we're still some years off having that.

50 years from now, things might look different, of course, and if something better than battery-electric comes along in that time, I'll be all over it, but I don't think there's anything on the horizon just yet, and unless we like floods, hurricanes and wildfires, or being increasingly dependent on hostile political regimes who don't seem to like us very much, we're going to have to move away from oil in the next few decades.
 
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I do often wonder about that. A much more sensible use of crops than biofuel (IMO). However, I'm not sure I'd fancy getting one through a modern crash test! The thing is, I don't mind so much, making cars out of steel or aluminium. They're both readily recyclable anyway. It's burning stuff that I think we need to focus on, primarily.

Perhaps a kind of technology could be developed along the principle of an auto-parking device in some cars, giving a warning or automatically slowing the vehicle if danger of a collision was present. All very sci-fi for now, but the kind of imagination Henry Ford showed in developing his Hemp-Car is always useful to see what is, or is not, possible.

Hemp had all kinds of uses before WWII, and the advent of Dupont Chemicals: they deployed all kinds of disinformation on hemp growers, linking them with production of cannabis, and got Congress to legislate against the industry...which had to be rescinded in 1941 when the Navy need rope - lot's of rope, to supply their ships. The ban was imposed immediately after Japan was defeated, but the link between cannabis and hemp remains fixed in popular imagination to this day.

As further research is done on bio-fuels it's worth remembering the humble hemp plant had a small role to play in developing cars and may still be useful today.
 
Hell, no, not science fiction at all! As of 7/7/24, all new cars registered in the EU, needed to be fitted with a collision warning radar capable of detecting other vehicles. This will automatically apply the brakes if it detects another vehicle (or similarly large solid object with a decent radar echo) and thinks there's going to be a crash. From 7/7/26, the same system will have to be able to detect pedestrians and cyclists too. GB hasn't adopted these regulations (at least... not yet), but most of the new cars sold here are built to the same spec as the EU market because manufacturers can't be bothered disabling it.

The systems have been around for about a decade now, and as many folk with newer cars will attest, you do get the odd "false alarm" where the vehicle will dab its brakes for no good reason, but the technology is improving all the time. There is talk in regulatory circles, about maybe being able to ease-off on the crash protection requirements a bit, once a reasonable percentage of the vehicle fleet is equipped with this technology.

So yes, it's already being thought of in those terms!
 
Hell, no, not science fiction at all! As of 7/7/24, all new cars registered in the EU, needed to be fitted with a collision warning radar capable of detecting other vehicles. This will automatically apply the brakes if it detects another vehicle (or similarly large solid object with a decent radar echo) and thinks there's going to be a crash. From 7/7/26, the same system will have to be able to detect pedestrians and cyclists too. GB hasn't adopted these regulations (at least... not yet), but most of the new cars sold here are built to the same spec as the EU market because manufacturers can't be bothered disabling it.

The systems have been around for about a decade now, and as many folk with newer cars will attest, you do get the odd "false alarm" where the vehicle will dab its brakes for no good reason, but the technology is improving all the time. There is talk in regulatory circles, about maybe being able to ease-off on the crash protection requirements a bit, once a reasonable percentage of the vehicle fleet is equipped with this technology.

So yes, it's already being thought of in those terms!

Up to what speed would something like that be effective?
I wouldn't like to be pounding a ton up the M1 and have the brakes suddenly lock up.
 
Up to what speed would something like that be effective?
I wouldn't like to be pounding a ton up the M1 and have the brakes suddenly lock up.

That's not an easy question to answer, I'm afraid! Rather than using the word "effective", can I use the word "active"? It's just because there comes a point when (as Scotty would say), "ye cannae change the laws o' physics cap'n"! The regulation demands that it be "active" up to 60 km/h (37 MPH). So, primarily intended to be an urban thing. However, that's just the bare legal minimum. Tests are conducted at Most manufacturers will have it active at higher speeds too, because the EuroNCAP tests are (I think) done at some slightly higher speeds. They're not a legal regulatory requirement, but a voluntary scheme that lots of manufacturers participate in.

Also, the system has more than one way of being "active". It has "first phase" activity (just warning the driver - usually a beep and a big, red "STOP" light on the dash), then it has "second phase", where it gives "some (about 35%) additional braking over and above what the driver is giving, if it thinks there's going to be a collision, and then "third phase" where it gives the brakes anything up to another 60% over and above what the driver is doing. However, even that is an over-simplification because it treats coming up behind a stationary vehicle differently to how it treats coming up behind a vehicle that is moving, but you're gaining on it at a rate that makes it think you might hit it.

Here's the new regulation (which includes cyclists and pedestrian detection) if you're curious?

 
Since bod will throw up a hair ball if i post back on his car selling saga thread, i'll post this about Henry Ford, who had a bright wheeze to manufacture a car that would run on hemp ethanol fuel.

Ford_HempBodyCar.jpeg


The Hemp Body Car was made almost entirely out of hemp...and was designed to be lightweight, durable, and cost-effective. The body of the car was made from a mixture of hemp fibres, soybeans, straw, and resin, while the chassis was made from a combination of hemp and steel.

Lighter than a production car chassis, it would've made a funky vehicle for the 60s. Big Oil, sadly, had other ideas...

Anything like the Cheech And Chong van that was made out of cannabis. When the exhaust got too close to the bodywork, causing it to smoke the following motorcycle cop got stoned. :LOL:

 
That's not an easy question to answer, I'm afraid! Rather than using the word "effective", can I use the word "active"? It's just because there comes a point when (as Scotty would say), "ye cannae change the laws o' physics cap'n"! The regulation demands that it be "active" up to 60 km/h (37 MPH). So, primarily intended to be an urban thing. However, that's just the bare legal minimum. Tests are conducted at Most manufacturers will have it active at higher speeds too, because the EuroNCAP tests are (I think) done at some slightly higher speeds. They're not a legal regulatory requirement, but a voluntary scheme that lots of manufacturers participate in.

Also, the system has more than one way of being "active". It has "first phase" activity (just warning the driver - usually a beep and a big, red "STOP" light on the dash), then it has "second phase", where it gives "some (about 35%) additional braking over and above what the driver is giving, if it thinks there's going to be a collision, and then "third phase" where it gives the brakes anything up to another 60% over and above what the driver is doing. However, even that is an over-simplification because it treats coming up behind a stationary vehicle differently to how it treats coming up behind a vehicle that is moving, but you're gaining on it at a rate that makes it think you might hit it.

Here's the new regulation (which includes cyclists and pedestrian detection) if you're curious?

Thanks, i'll take a look - i imagine it'd work along the lines of a driverless car, although they're not perfect someday they'll be able to develop a system that allows you to go as fast as the speed limit allows before an inhibitor cuts the vehicle speed to a safe level for the type of road ahead. The perfect alignment of Health and Safety combined in an EV.
 
Hell, no, not science fiction at all! As of 7/7/24, all new cars registered in the EU, needed to be fitted with a collision warning radar capable of detecting other vehicles. This will automatically apply the brakes if it detects another vehicle (or similarly large solid object with a decent radar echo) and thinks there's going to be a crash. From 7/7/26, the same system will have to be able to detect pedestrians and cyclists too. GB hasn't adopted these regulations (at least... not yet), but most of the new cars sold here are built to the same spec as the EU market because manufacturers can't be bothered disabling it.

The systems have been around for about a decade now, and as many folk with newer cars will attest, you do get the odd "false alarm" where the vehicle will dab its brakes for no good reason, but the technology is improving all the time. There is talk in regulatory circles, about maybe being able to ease-off on the crash protection requirements a bit, once a reasonable percentage of the vehicle fleet is equipped with this technology.

So yes, it's already being thought of in those terms!
I had that radar system in my 2009 A6.
Never activated by mistake.
was able to "see" motorbikes but I've never been close to run a pedestrian over, so don't know if it would see them.
This radar system was also able to follow cars at a set distance when cruise control was activated, braking and speeding up accordingly to car in front.
Made a very relaxed drive.
 
Thanks, i'll take a look - i imagine it'd work along the lines of a driverless car, although they're not perfect someday they'll be able to develop a system that allows you to go as fast as the speed limit allows before an inhibitor cuts the vehicle speed to a safe level for the type of road ahead. The perfect alignment of Health and Safety combined in an EV.

The same raft of EU regulations that brought this auto braking system in, also mandates something called "Intelligent Speed Assist". Basically, it uses GPS and traffic sign recognition to limit the car's speed to whatever the limit is, in a particular area. That's on all new cars registered in the EU as of last July. At present, the system can be disabled by the driver, (or in an emergency, pressing hard on the accelerator to overcome the detent) but there's also a "black box" that records the fact that the system has been disabled or overridden. The regulations apply to EVs and ICEs. There's no distinction between powertrains.

Now, that's not QUITE what you said, because you talked about limiting the car to a safe speed for the type of road ahead, but it's clearly where things are headed.
 
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