Diesels .... what does the future hold..

davemercedes

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Ah hah, hah ha ha haaaaaaah...

V6 no.1: 1986 Pontiac Firebird. <awful, dreadful>
V8 no.1: 1981 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am <much better car>

Both of the above bought while I lived in Floh'da enjoying the redneck lifestyle, hoooo boy!

V8 no.2: 1995 Ford Mustang GT <dreadful rubbish>

bought in 2005, sold in 2006. That was a horrid car.

V8 no.3: CL500
V6 no.2: E320

One bought end of '15, the other one late '16.

Even back then "gasoline" was still only about fourpence halfpenny a gallon -ish ;) so I'm glad you could take the opportunity to experience those Yank Tanks (I would have too, in your position!)
 

Craiglxviii

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Even back then "gasoline" was still only about fourpence halfpenny a gallon -ish ;) so I'm glad you could take the opportunity to experience those Yank Tanks (I would have too, in your position!)

When I lived in Florida it was $1.35/gallon... I think the first Firebird cost me $800 and the second $1200, they weren't in the best of nick. The 'Stang was bought over here, a grey market import to Japan then reimported here, so left hand drive and speedo in km/h! Only 185bhp though for a 5 litre V8, I thought it was ace but in reality it was shoite!
 

LostKiwi

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No it was, you should have seen him at 6am every day doing 80 up the A5 :D

M6 please Craig... I lived in Lancaster and commuted to North Wales each day....

I must admit to using the RRC more than a few times in winter as a daily even though the Audi was quattro. The RRC had far more 'presence' to get people to get out of its way in poor conditions. The FC101 Ambulance was used about 4 times - but at 9mpg I'd have needed a far better contract to afford it more often!
The FC101 rag top went a couple of dozen times till it was mentioned 'It wasn't suitable for the corporate image' and I couldn't park it in the company car park :)
I did suggest I park it on the grass bank next door but they didn't see the humour in that... Maybe thats why my contract wasn't renewed....
 
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Submariner1

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So how about people like me who are not British but have lived here since 1988 and contributed an extortionate rate in advance (called tax @40% for almost all those years)?

Or British people who have lived abroad all their life, return to the UK for healthcare and depart again?

Not to mention the myriad of permutations based on parents and grandparents and the right to abode they can bring....

Hey
You paid tax here so are absolutely entitled imo.
Likewise one has to make exceptions for ex Pats ( who are often working on behalf of the UK or UK companies.)
 

Steve@Avantgarde

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So I had a E300 Hybrid in last week as a breakdown, which at 81k miles, the hybrid battery had failed. Cost of a new one was £4600 exchange (not available) or £6600 for a new one.

Can any green nimby, with the brains of britain, explain how that is possibly more economic, green or cheaper than running a diesel. Because I cant.
 

Craiglxviii

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So I had a E300 Hybrid in last week as a breakdown, which at 81k miles, the hybrid battery had failed. Cost of a new one was £4600 exchange (not available) or £6600 for a new one.

Can any green nimby, with the brains of britain, explain how that is possibly more economic, green or cheaper than running a diesel. Because I cant.

The question is, what is the COST of that battery as opposed to its PRICE... you're talking price. What is the cost to the plant of that battery versus the cost of making the 2.2 I4 diesel engine into an approximation of the combined powertrain?

However it's a bit disingenuous as the same could be said of the diesel engine breaking down leaving just the electric powertrain...
 

Steve@Avantgarde

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Cost is irrelevant. No one pays cost price.

You can strip and rebuild an engine for half the cost of a new battery. Now you have an ICE and MGUH, thats 12k of running gear there and we havent added the driveline yet.
 
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d215yq

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So I had a E300 Hybrid in last week as a breakdown, which at 81k miles, the hybrid battery had failed. Cost of a new one was £4600 exchange (not available) or £6600 for a new one.

Can any green nimby, with the brains of britain, explain how that is possibly more economic, green or cheaper than running a diesel. Because I cant.

In this case, no. But there are many original Prius that have outlasted their diesel counterparts and still carry on today...On the way to work I drive past a scrapyard and while waiting at the lights it's amazing what has ended up there, much of it under 10 years old (a fair few W210s and E46 BMWs too) and that's in Spain where cars are kept longer than in the UK and don't rust and almost all are diesel.

My guess would be Toyota as pioneers made a loss on every Prius and wanted to absolutely make sure it worked and were successful. Mercedes and others have now tried to cut costs and make money on it, probably after a panic and rushed development as they originally thought it would never take off. Hence the engineering is rubbish, not the concept.

It's like DMFs: I've recently found out W124s were the first car to have DMFs but as they were developed properly very little is writtten about them as they last 250k miles so are rarely needed to be changed. Even though mine has all the symptoms of a broken one it still has done 40k miles in my ownership with vibrations and noises but no breakdown so I'm waiting til I can get a good deal on one before getting it done. Compare that to modern DMFs where they barely last 100k and when they disentegrate they destroy a myriad of other components/fail completely if not replaced. it's not the DMF that's the problem, it's the rubbish engineering of it.
 
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Craiglxviii

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Cost is irrelevant. No one pays cost price.

You can strip and rebuild an engine for half the cost of a new battery. Now you have an ICE and MGUH, thats 12k of running gear there and we havent added the driveline yet.

Cost is completely relevant. The plant pays cost price. That is the key issue- the economic cost of manufacture of the article.

The market sets the sales price. What people are willing to pay. That's why a Golf still sells consistently at the top end of its segment price wise when it's one of the cheapest cars to make out there (lean design and feckin' huge economies of scale...)

The cost price of the ICE will be around £1200-1500 for a V6 CDi, transmission around £800-1000 for an autobox. Ballpark figures- I don't have Daimler numbers on these items.

You can strip and rebuild an engine for half the price of a new battery. What happens when the market decides to push that price down lower to its cost? Say that battery cost is around £1500, for a £6k sales price that is not unreasonable at all (and pretty pessimistic, I suspect it's sub £1k). Again it isn't unreasonable to expect to see the sales price of it halve over time due to market demand... then all of a sudden battery replacement is £3k, which is your ICE strip and rebuild cost. The electric motors either are, or will be non-maintainable sealed oil-filled units with a defined lifespan; electric motor cost drivers are very well-defined and known and relate to the mass of copper used within.

From all of that it's quite possible to plot out the cost pricing trend of hybrid vehicles as a function of their desired performance vs their ICE equivalents; my very strong suspicion is that right now, the cost pricing of hybrids is around 25% more than straight-ICE cars, the cost pricing of pure EVs is a bit more than that, and both of those can improve to pure-ICE level with increased economies of scale driven by market demand.
 

Craiglxviii

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In this case, no. But there are many original Prius that have outlasted their diesel counterparts and still carry on today...On the way to work I drive past a scrapyard and while waiting at the lights it's amazing what has ended up there, much of it under 10 years old (a fair few W210s and E46 BMWs too) and that's in Spain where cars are kept longer than in the UK and don't rust and almost all are diesel.

My guess would be Toyota as pioneers made a loss on every Prius and wanted to absolutely make sure it worked and were successful. Mercedes and others have now tried to cut costs and make money on it, probably after a panic and rushed development as they originally thought it would never take off. Hence the engineering is rubbish, not the concept.

It's like DMFs: I've recently found out W124s were the first car to have DMFs but as they were developed properly very little is writtten about them as they last 250k miles so are rarely needed to be changed. Even though mine has all the symptoms of a broken one it still has done 40k miles in my ownership with vibrations and noises but no breakdown so I'm waiting til I can get a good deal on one before getting it done. Compare that to modern DMFs where they barely last 100k and when they disentegrate they destroy a myriad of other components/fail completely if not replaced. it's not the DMF that's the problem, it's the rubbish engineering of it.

I can confirm that they very much did not make a loss on the Prius.
 

Steve@Avantgarde

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Prius' although reliable are a poor example, their battery packs are huge, weigh a tonne, and were overly expensive to produce. Not only that, they didnt use Lithium Ion batteries either, so they were just as expensive and environmentally unfriendly to dispose of as normal car engine.

Sometimes a concept is overly complicated to engineer on a mass scale, however bright the idea, to make it reliable.

To make battery power as cost effective as ICE or diesel engines you have to consider the whole life of that vehicle. If, after 4 years and 80k miles, you have to replace the MGUH unit, at nearly the value of the vehicle once you include labour and tax, then disposal of the MGUH as well. If we were talking about an isolated incident then maybe we could let it all slide, but according to the parts ordering system, requests for MGUH units are quite high....
 

Craiglxviii

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Prius' although reliable are a poor example, their battery packs are huge, weigh a tonne, and were overly expensive to produce. Not only that, they didnt use Lithium Ion batteries either, so they were just as expensive and environmentally unfriendly to dispose of as normal car engine.

Sometimes a concept is overly complicated to engineer on a mass scale, however bright the idea, to make it reliable.

To make battery power as cost effective as ICE or diesel engines you have to consider the whole life of that vehicle. If, after 4 years and 80k miles, you have to replace the MGUH unit, at nearly the value of the vehicle once you include labour and tax, then disposal of the MGUH as well. If we were talking about an isolated incident then maybe we could let it all slide, but according to the parts ordering system, requests for MGUH units are quite high....

However the concept needs to be trialled in order to get proof of viability; once we have that we can then engineer the concept into a profitable engineering solution. Toyota are pretty good at this; the Prius is a competitive car cost wise and is sold at a profit. Toyota do not like loss leaders and are also excellent engineers, they also have a very heavy culture of cost management and progressive vehicle engineering cost reduction. What a Prius costs to the plant now will be around 20% less than what it did upon product launch- Toyota steadily take 2.5-3% per year out of the cost of everything that goes into every car they build.

Right now pure EVs are just very slightly more expensive to build on whole-life (8.1 years typical) than ICE cars. I just gave you a figure of ~105%, that isn't based on a finger-in-the-air guess.
 

mercedes13156

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My employer bought four Nissan Leafs when they came out at enormous cost per unit. Per unit with their buying power they could have bought three Fiesta diesels. Despite a 2p per mile cost of leccy, the battery costs £150 + VAT per month to hire. That would have fuelled two of the Fiestas for the month. The leaf was unreliable because if you jumped in with a full battery, it said you had 82 miles. Stick the radio on, use the wipers and the heater (this is Scotland) and all of a sudden you had a range of 50 miles which dropped like a stone if you hit a hill. There was a tremendous fear that the thing wouldn't get you back to the office so no one used them. Now you can't get a pool Fiesta unless you book a week or so in advance. The leccies sit at their charging points, add the cost of building them as well, largely unwanted unless you've no choice.

People hate driving them because they're silent and the number of people who wander out in front of them means that no one wants to kill some poor pedestrian. You can hear a fiesta diesel in the next street.

I'm sure it'll get better when hydrogen cars take off. Personally, I try not to use the pool cars. I prefer my old 203 220CDi whiich gives me 50mpg on a decent run with a fair amount of comfort. I think a lot of the arguments fail to recognise that by paying the vehicle tax you have an entitlement and who the f**k are the do gooders to tell me what to do. Go talk to the owner of a chinese power station.

I pay the tax on driving an old polluter, therefore I am entiltled by law to do so and I will continue to exercise my right to drive it. Then I'll buy another one and pay the tax on that as well. I fancy a 320CDi next.
 
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Craiglxviii

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My employer bought four Nissan Leafs when they came out at enormous cost per unit. Per unit with their buying power they could have bought three Fiesta diesels. Despite a 2p per mile cost of leccy, the battery costs £150 + VAT per month to hire. That would have fuelled two of the Fiestas for the month. The leaf was unreliable because if you jumped in with a full battery, it said you had 82 miles. Stick the radio on, use the wipers and the heater (this is Scotland) and all of a sudden you had a range of 50 miles which dropped like a stone if you hit a hill. There was a tremendous fear that the thing wouldn't get you back to the office so no one used them. Now you can't get a pool Fiesta unless you book a week or so in advance. The leccies sit at their charging points, add the cost of building them as well, largely unwanted unless you've no choice.

People hate driving them because they're silent and the number of people who wander out in front of them means that no one wants to kill some poor pedestrian. You can hear a fiesta diesel in the next street.

I'm sure it'll get better when hydrogen cars take off. Personally, I try not to use the pool cars. I prefer my old 203 220CDi whiich gives me 50mpg on a decent run with a fair amount of comfort.

I pay the tax on driving an old polluter, therefore I am entiltled by law to do so and I will continue to exercise my right to drive it. Then I'll buy another one and pay the tax on that as well. I fancy a 320CDi next.

And that... is a classic case of not understanding what EVs can do at their current state. Where I work now there are 40 various EVs, including Leafs (Leaves?) that are all used as commuting & family cars, the owners all think that they're superb and do exactly what they want them to do. One chap who's about 6 foot from me now, a very highly outspoken engineer, hated his for the first week. Then he adapted his driving style to suit and now wouldn't change back.

Remember, 80 years ago trams were called "silent killers" for the same reason, but there wasn't a call for trams to be banned for it...
 

SL63 Mark

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And that... is a classic case of not understanding what EVs can do at their current state. Where I work now there are 40 various EVs, including Leafs (Leaves?) that are all used as commuting & family cars, the owners all think that they're superb and do exactly what they want them to do. One chap who's about 6 foot from me now, a very highly outspoken engineer, hated his for the first week. Then he adapted his driving style to suit and now wouldn't change back.

Remember, 80 years ago trams were called "silent killers" for the same reason, but there wasn't a call for trams to be banned for it...

I thought they were going to put in simulated engine noise for safety. That would be easy to do, just use a speaker playing Metallica or Elgar, or whatever you prefer.

Silence is a very real problem, on my bicycle, pedestrians do not hear me coming and they just step out in front of me without looking so many times I have lost count. When I see one, I just give out a polite "I say" or "Good morning, What ho"
 
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Craiglxviii

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I thought they were going to put in simulated engine noise for safety. That would be easy to do, just use a speaker playing Metallica or Elgar, or whatever you prefer.

Silence is a very real problem, on my bicycle, pedestrians do not hear me coming and they just step out in front of me without looking so many times I have lost count. When I see one, I just give out a polite "I say" or "Good morning, What ho"

You joke, this is being discussed certainly for the eGolf.
 

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