THE WEAK LINK: BATTERIES

Cars rule our lives. From the dust of donkey-carts, cars made us kings of the road. But now the world faces a backward step.

Volvo, Mercedes, Volkswagen and all the others are planning to get rid of engines. Climate change! They are going for electric motors. No more will there be the things we understand so well. No more timing belts, no spark plugs, no oil changes – everything replaced by the utter simplicity of motors.

But the motorist faces a new problem. A big, big problem. Batteries! Battery power will usher in a totally new world, like our first day at school.

Many of us will cry. Journalists must prepare us for the worst. So what if the battery cars speak English? So what if you can stop at the entrance to the shoppingmall and say to your car, “Go find parking and lock yourself ”? This should not be reported in your magazine. It’s a smokescreen designed to obscure awareness of expensive and short-lived batteries.

The new Nissan Leaf has a 40 kwh battery. That gives me a number to describe my fears. What does 40 kwh mean? It means: if power is drawn at a steady, constant rate of one kilowatt, the “bucket” of electricity will take 40 hours to empty. But one kilowatt cannot drive a car, so we need to empty the battery at a greater rate than one kilowatt. A twohour draw will supply 20 kilowats, which is perhaps the power of a 300 cm3 motorcycle. Enough power to move a car. Allowing for occasional demands up to 100 kilowatts for 15 seconds or so and for some free- wheeling, and for some regenerative braking, you might have a useful range of 300 kilometres.

Please, these are only my thoughts and by no means factual for the Nissan Leaf. Now of concern to me is, what do replacement batteries cost and what life can the buyer expect from them?

My rough calculations indicate a practical life of only four years. Of course, charge and discharge times will hardly ever be equal. No matter, as long as we have some idea of battery life.

Future generations will find it incomprehensible that 2017 motoring magazines could describe the Volkswagen Up with its 55 kilowatt engine as being a “city car”. It will beat a 26-wheeler from Cape Town to Johannesburg and back while collecting speeding tickets all the way. No battery car will ever do this. Battery cars are the true city cars. Going Cape Town to Johannesburg when engines are history? Load your “true city car” on a train.

May I suggest that reports involving expensive batteries should answer the questions above and warn your readers not to be impressed by the ability of these cars to drive themselves, on their own, to fetch guests at the airport. That’s a smokescreen.

Charging car batteries electromagnetically from under the freeway, or from under parking lots, might never happen. And as for fuel cells, invented in 1839 by William Grove, and used by astronauts and nobody else: hydrogen as a motoring fuel is dead in its boots. Expensive to produce, transport and store. And being under high pressure, the smallest leaks are a constant danger. Static, as in your comb, caused the Hindenburg disaster.