Thursday, June 29, 2023

DRIVING AND LIFE HAS RUN OUT OF GAS

 There is insufficient fuel to keep going.

Thank you.


John Crawford

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

THE AGELESS ALONSO - by John Crawford

By now I reckon Aston Martin Chairman Lawrence Stroll reckons he’s captured a 41-year-old superman as his number one driver. So far this year, six races and six podiums.



In Canada he scored P2 in wet practice alongside Verstappen; then won his greatest victory this year holding on to second in front of a hard-charging Hamilton.



This highly seasoned racer has brought a diverse set of racing experiences together – Formula One, Indianapolis 500, Off-road racing in events like the Dakar Rally, plus victories in the 2018 and 2019 Vingt Quatre Heures du Mans, as well as winning the 2019 Daytona 24 hours. Martin Brundle says Alonso has an uncanny knack of handling the car’s grip, and says he’s a master of putting the car on the ‘edge of adhesion’.

 

He’s still keen to race, and says he sees a top position on the F1 podium this year, and I think if anyone can do it, then Fernando can, and I hope he does.

 

The combination of Lawrence Stroll’s determination (and money), plus the brilliant engineering and support team Stroll has gathered together in the course of 2022 and 2023, has allowed the smiling Spaniard to push the previously mid-field Aston Martin team to third place in this year’s Constructors Championship.


As I approach my 80th year, he's my F1 hero!


JOHN CRAWFORD

Monday, June 12, 2023

GM CONQUERS THE TYRANNY OF LE MANS by John Crawford

No taking away from Ferrari’s first victory at Le Mans in 58 years, but GM also scored big this past weekend in the Vingt Quatre Heures du Mans.



Toyota’s Gazoo Racing Hypercar came home in second.


 

Cadillac #2 and Cadillac #3 came home third and fourth; with Corvette #33 winning the LM GTE AM class, its ninth class victory, on the centenary of the famous race.



I have to hand it to GM. Both divisions committed big resources to competition in the leading Hypercar class, and the first-ever mid-engined Corvette survived a tumultuous race, which included periods of rain and fog, to bring home the laurels for Chevrolet.

 

In all the years I attended Le Mans I loved hearing those big V8s thundering around the track. Another GM V8 made an appearance, and although it didn’t figure in the results the dark blue Chevrolet Camaro at least finished the race.

 

My friend Michael Simcoe, GM’s Executive VP of Design, emailed me from Charles de Gaulle saying that Corvette’s win was a great take away for him from the world’s toughest endurance race.


Well done Cadillac and Chevy!


JOHN CRAWFORD

Friday, June 9, 2023

THE JAGUAR PROMISE by John Crawford

As Jaguar heads, apparently, toward a future range of ‘exclusive’ battery electric vehicles, global Jaguar enthusiasts will be keen not only to see the whole proposition, but certainly what the mooted Jaguar 'GT sedan' will look like.


 

At this stage, it’s a case of “Who knows?” because that secret lies deep inside Design Chief Gerry McGovern’s brain.


However, there were some encouraging words this past month from JLR’s new CEO, Adrian Mardell. 


Apparently Mr. Mardell joined Jaguar more than three decades ago, when the star of the range was the venerable 1981 XJ6.


 

He has been quoted as saying: “This was something that’s “very personal” and “unfinished business” for him, having originally joined Jaguar 32 years ago.

“The Jaguar of 32 years ago is where we’re going back to and the right place for us to be." Wow!

Mardell acknowledged that JLR had been “quiet” over the past couple of years as it battled several key global challenges faced by the whole industry, most notably semiconductor chip supply.

However, presumably with the supply chains freeing up, and JLR making bucket loads of cash from its three SUV ranges the go-ahead for the new Jaguars has now been granted.

The future for the marque, at this stage, may be foggy, but at least it sounds like a car with a Jaguar badge (and hopefully, the Leaper) will emerge from Gaydon in the next three years!

I can hardly wait!

JOHN CRAWFORD

REFUTING ROWAN by Simon Evans

I didn’t think it would take long for the EV proponents and sympathisers to emerge from the closet after The Guardian published Rowan’s article on his disillusionment with electric cars.

 

So, as we all know, The Guardian is ‘big on balance’ (Ha, ha!), so it has produced an op-ed piece by some wanker called Simon Evans, who has attempted to refute Rowan’s claims using ‘facts’. Apparently, Evans belongs to a group called CARBON BRIEF which is an EV lobby group in the UK, and anything coming from him is likely to be laced with pro-EV statements, and could likely be taken with a pinch of salt.



 

It reminds of the incidents when Australian newspapers publish an ‘Electric Vehicle Supplement’ which is usually full of ads for EVs, and either edited by or promoted by the head of the EV council of Australia. Precious little balance there either.

 

I’m perfectly content to be accused of being a negative noddy against EVs, I don’t care. I am simply trying to point out that EVs are not THE silver bullet, just one step along the way to reducing emissions.

 

Oh, and don’t forget the elephant in the room, and that is the huge carbon footprint accompanying the manufacture of electric vehicles and their batteries. The EV apologists haven’t yet worked out how to refute those FACTS.

 

Rowan’s right – keep your old petrol car, and save some money.

 

JOHN CRAWFORD

Thursday, June 8, 2023

EV POLLUTION, MORE REALITY THAN RISK by John Crawford

As if to underscore the opposing forces of Yin and Yang, and the premise that for every action, there’s a reaction – or more colloquially: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” – comes a new study conducted by a team from The Wall Street Journal about the barriers for some carmakers on the production of electric vehicles.

 

Many in our societies falsely believe that the EV is the ‘silver bullet’ to drastically reducing vehicle emissions. If you are an Australian EV owner, then you can only re-charge your EV from an electricity grid powered by coal-fired power stations. Zero emissions? Nope!

 

And, you can forget about the argument that we are phasing out coal-fired generation in favour of electricity from renewables. In Australia, renewables cannot replace or even begin to supplement electricity supply from carbon-intense generation, or substitute coal-fired generators to maintain base load and consequently a stable electricity grid.

 

Because of the makeup of the combination of rare earth metals, plus lithium and other substances (cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, etc) necessary for the manufacture of EVs, this makes EVs very expensive to purchase.

 

The country making the cheapest and most affordable EVs right now is China – simply because it has vast reserves of all the minerals, elements and rare earth metals required for the manufacture of EVs.



This has forced conventional carmakers which are trying to add EVs to their vehicle ranges, to search out alternatives to some of these precious metals – and the search is not going well.

 

Whilst the race is on to find alternatives, there is another consideration which EV owners are not taking into account, and that is the total degradation of the landscape after the mining and extraction of these substances. More on this later.

 

The WSJ cites this latest challenge for EV makers as the ‘Nickel Pickle’.

 

Quote:

“To make batteries for EVs companies need to mine and refine vast quantities of nickel, but the process of getting the nickel out of the ground and refining it is particularly environmentally unfriendly.

 

Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves, and although it’s close to the surface and relatively inexpensive to mine, the nickel can only be found in large swathes of forests, so vast rainforests must be cleared.



Then the refining process demands a highly carbon-intensive process involving extreme heat and high pressure which leaves behind a toxic waste ‘slurry’ which is very difficult to dispose of.



One Indonesian miner received approval to expand operations into an area three times the size of New York’s Central Park.



The mine’s Australian owner, reported that the forest clearing caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 56,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of driving 12,000 conventional cars for a year – based on calculations by the WSJ.”

 

In April last year a report from Tesla said that EVs caused more emissions during the manufacturing phase than conventional vehicles, due to the process of extracting and refining minerals.


Tesla manufacture
Tesla added that nickel was responsible for more than a third of all carbon emissions generated from making common EV battery cells.

 

The push to extract more nickel has also created pressing new environmental concerns. The refining process involves dousing nickel ore in sulphuric acid and heating it to more than 200C at enormous pressures.



 

In addition, companies face questions about how to get rid of the waste. It’s difficult to safely sequester in tropical countries because of frequent earthquakes and heavy rains which destabilise the soil, causing waste dams to collapse.

 

A 2018 Indonesian law allowed companies to obtain permits to discard mineral waste into the ocean! However, as yet, this has not happened, due to pressure from environmentalists.

 

On the other side of the world in the Atacama ‘triangle’ in South America, the recovery of lithium ion from a lithium-rich slurry which sits in ponds on the surfaces, leaves the landscape completely degraded and unusable for any other purpose whatsoever.



 

Next time I want to bring to your attention the confusion and obfuscation which exists around the development of ‘blue’ and ‘green’ hydrogen – another plan marred by unacceptable environmental costs.

 

JOHN CRAWFORD

 

Monday, June 5, 2023

EV OWNER, ROWAN ATKINSON, ON EVs

I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.

Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV. There are sound environmental reasons not to jump just yet.

 

Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.


Combine this, perhaps surprising academic pathway, with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

 

As you may know, the UK government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres.


But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are about 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

 

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better. New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweightelectric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries. 

Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these. Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol. 

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, it’s a complete non-starter for trucks because of its weight; for such vehicles, hydrogen can be injected directly into a new kind of piston engine. JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years. If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks – and as a result every filling station stocks it – it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.

 

But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades. Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.


This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years. It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.

 

We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are nearly 1.5bn of them worldwide). In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less. As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.


A sensible thing to do would be to speed up the development of synthetic fuel, which is already being used in motor racing; it’s a product based on two simple notions: one, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine and, two, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be replicated by other means. Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea, but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile using wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide. With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars, rendering their use virtually CO2-neutral.


(Reprinted from THE GUARDIAN newspaper)