"As modern motoring evolves, one of the aspects I’ll miss is the roar of a well-tuned V8 engine. And there are other things I’ll mourn the loss of, too. Like the well-turned and quite salty expressions from a mechanic under an old diesel estate car as he adjusts the steering assembly with a ten-pound lump hammer.
By Robert Llewellyn on May 6, 2011 1:13 PM
Oh happy days.
I was reminded of this oily world when I visited a local friendly mechanic to make use of his big scissor-lift jack. I needed to make it possible to film the remarkably unremarkable underside of the Nissan LEAF.
I wanted to show what the underside of an electric car looked like and I can tell you very quickly, there’s not a lot to see.
I can still remember the first time I saw the underside of an old car when I was a nipper. It was a distant relative’s Morgan two-seater tourer and it was likewise hoisted into the air on a mechanical lift. The underbelly of this old car was a magnificent display of drive shafts, dripping oil, elaborate exhaust systems, brake pipes, massive filthy gearbox and lots of grease, dirt and drippy black stuff.
The underside of an electric car is just a smooth, plain dark grey slightly ribbed sheet. There’s no pipes, drive shafts or butch steel chassis structure visible.
It’s all really simple, neat and tidy underneath, and after a more detailed inspection I found a tiny hole in the ‘under-sheet’ which gives you a tantalising glimpse of the electric motor. But I know from seeing the LEAF motor in a display case at a car show that an electric motor isn’t much to look at. Sort of like a metal watermelon with some chunky wires going into it.
Obviously, the opinion of my rather salty mechanic mate was less than complimentary when he glanced underneath the LEAF. When I’d arrived in it he said, ‘I couldn’t bear that, it doesn’t make any noise.’
He’d just been welding the chassis of a 1967 Land Rover, or “a proper man’s car, not some namby-pamby sci-fi buggy.” I’ve judiciously removed the five expletives he managed to cram into that sentence, his swearing having reached a peak of obscenity I can only stand back and admire.
So, I’ve been driving the LEAF hard and it’s holding up remarkably well, it really does the job. I’ve done over 250 miles in it in the last two days, stopping here and there to re-charge while we’ve been filming different locations.
At the Nissan showroom just outside Oxford I used the fast charger the other day and that really does the business. We arrived at the showroom with the battery showing just over half full, 12 minutes later it was reading 90% full. We left it a further 15 minutes and it was up to 100%.
I’ve learned that it initially gives the batteries a full 440 volts and 60 amps with the fast-charge unit making a lot of noise during the process – there are clearly some big fans doing some serious cooling inside the box.
As the charge level approaches the 80% the voltage and amperage from the charger slowly drop to protect the battery. So the last 10% takes longer than the first 80%, but it’s still pretty quick. Smart stuff.
I’m hearing good reports that these fast chargers will be appearing at motorway service stations all over the country and, if that’s the case, it will make a really big difference.
But the simple fact remains, other than the slightly limited range of a current electric car, there really is no difference in the day-to-day driving experience. They are so simple to use, and mechanically so simple to maintain that I can see my trips to converse with foul mouthed mechanics are likely to decrease.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but you can imagine that in 20 years’ time, you’ll pop down to a pristine showroom where a man in a short sleeved white shirt with pens in his top pocket will pass a tablet PC over the maintenance nodule of your car and re-boot it. That’s it. No oil drips, no filthy broken exhaust pipe clanging onto the concrete floor after he’s cut through the rusting supports with an angle grinder. But most of all, no filthy language to soften the enormous bill you know is coming."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... onkey.html