Not sure so I ask our British friends.

It what I saw as news stated by 2030 you will eliminate gasoline and diesel cars and trucks? Nothing said about motorcycles. True or false

'The Government has set its sights on banning the sale of petrol vehicles by 2035 – but fear not, motorcycles will be exempt. In July 2017, the Government pledged to end the sale of conventional new diesel and petrol cars and vans by 2040'.

This is a quote from a Google search. I haven't heard anything about motorcycles personally.

Have other members been watching this?

There is a headline saying a ban on selling new petrol / diesel cars from 2030, but when you read a little further into it hybrids can still be sold and HGVs, Motorcycles etc are so far excluded.
The future is undoubtedly not petrol/diesel and electric is very tempting as the energy can be generated cleanly and make use of the "spare" overnight capacity - you can't for example switch off nuclear power stations.
The problem will be distribution. Much of the existing housing stock doesn't have the infrastructure for all houses to have a high capacity charger car charger or off-street parking to stop people falling arse over time on trailing cables across the footpath..

[quote="steve_h80"There is a headline saying a ban on selling new petrol / diesel cars from 2030, but when you read a little further into it hybrids can still be sold
[/quote]

Then reading even further, "if the BMW X5 hybrid runs out of battery and runs just on petrol, the release of CO2 is eight times higher than official readings." Two other hybrids tested released three to four times higher CO2 amounts than the official test results under the same conditions.
I suppose you would need to keep a 'full' battery, but wouldn't that restrict the range - if you were that concerned about emissions?

Sinclair C5's everywhere i think it will be a right laugh, cannot wait. Rolls Royce Jaguar, Bentley, Aston Martin all vying to put gold knobs on a C5 variant and sticking a few zero's on the asking price accordingly. petrol will be 100 squids a gallon and Mad Max will be hijacking the tankers.

Joking aside I cant see battery production and disposal being very good for the environment. You know what winter does to batteries , imagine the issues with cold starting not to mention flooding would do to motors , batteries, electrics.

Anyway I think we will have bigger problems to deal with come Covid 20 , just be sensible and enjoy life while you can.......

Thank you gents, here they are trying to place wind powered generating units in our Lake Erie, the blade rotation spread on these are near 400 feet, the units to be placed in one of the major flyways and so far without much input to the damage it will cause. The blades on these monsters have little use after their primary use and need to be buried in landfills, but where.

OH don't worry they'll ban motorcycles long before then. Unsafe death machines and self driving stuff will never see US. Sheepeople will obey.

I've ridden in a Tesla fast quiet very nice.

Pro's and con's for both but offer us a choice. Big money big payoffs. Save the World while China and others keep burning their cheap coal while WE have to pay for mandates. FFFF

Winger61 wrote:

Then reading even further, "if the BMW X5 hybrid runs out of battery and runs just on petrol, the release of CO2 is eight times higher than official readings." Two other hybrids tested released three to four times higher CO2

That is about the size of it, I never said it was going to be rational lol.
Once costs come down there will be a shift to cheaper electric cars and bikes for commuting and town use, where they make more sense rather than the halo Tesla / X5 jobbies and £20k electric bikes.
Cheap electric bikes & scooters are already available (from China, they are far ahead of the west in managing traffic pollution in some areas).
I'd happily have one for cross town runs & commutes if I did that sort of thing but, at present, I'd still need another for speed / distance stuff.

oldwingguy wrote:

Thank you gents, here they are trying to place wind powered generating units in our Lake Erie, the blade rotation spread on these are near 400 feet, the units to be placed in one of the major flyways and so far without much input to the damage it will cause. The blades on these monsters have little use after their primary use and need to be buried in landfills, but where.

We've got quite a lot of wind turbines in the UK, they are generally either off shore or out in the sticks. Some folks have a problem with them but I don't, they look better than a coal or gas power station. I don't get too hung up about the disposal of the parts afterwards either, it's very little compared to decommissioning a coal, gas or nuclear power station.
Along with water turbines and solar its now a pretty much established energy source - and it removes some of our dependance on importing gas from foreign powers that we might fall out with.
Have look at this website and you can see where UK power is coming from at any time, I expect there is a US equivalent out there in www land.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Most of the wind turbines seem to be sited in Northern England, when I lived in Cumbria they had them sited along the Solway Coast. There was very large offshore wind farm in the Solway Firth itself, and there were lots on high ground in rural areas, and on the Lakeland Fells.

Go down South and there seems to be very few, the NIMBY mindset down there probably has a lot to do with that. I've noticed large solar energy farms on my occasional train journey down to London, not anywhere London of course. I was down in Surrey a few weeks ago and looking back I can't say I noticed any wind turbines sited in the Surrey Hills.

Nuclear energy, the first generation Magnox power stations have closed and are now being decommissioned, there's currently sufficient nuclear capacity but some of the second generation stations are now on their way out.

Plans for new build nuclear stations have been delayed for years, with investors pulling out in frustration, having their own financial problems, or not wanting investment from China. So plans for long awaited nuclear stations at Wylfa on Anglesey in Wales, and Moorside near the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in West Cumbria are now cancelled.

An alternative option would be building smaller French designed nuclear power stations around the country, but the usual NIMBY opposition would delay them as long as possible.

Coal fired power stations are either closing or converting to bio fuels etc, the familiar vapour clouds from their cooling towers are no longer a common sight.

So apart from providing enough generating capacity to charge all the new electric vehicles, the network charging stations that we already are from a number of different suppliers, and unless go to one you have the right smart card for, you can't use them.

Then there's the millions of city homes where the owners have to park their cars outside on the street, and if they're lucky outside next or near to their house. In future are you going to have to step over dozens of charging cables when you're walking along the pavement/sidewalk.

I read somewhere that they're considering using the existing electricity supply to street lights as a source for electric cars to plug into. Who knows, it's fine for politicans say we're all going Green to 'Save The Planet, and make all sorts of grandiose plans and pledges. Then we have a General Election and another party come in with their own agenda. Let’s not forget it's not that long ago we had a Labour government that encouraged us to ditch petrol/gas and buy and drive 'cleaner greener' more fuel efficient diesel engined cars instead.

It's no surprise now that they've turned that around and it's diesel engined vehicles that are now considered dirty and polluting.

Anyway are people generally that interested when we currently have more pressing issues in the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, a new Tier system being announced as we near Christmas, job losses, and the Economy tanking.

I also picked up on this, but expect South Africa will be one of those burning coal well into the 22nd century. Unless there's some incentive for the politicians to push through legislation......which is how we got the White Elephant toll gates, that only 10% of commuters pay for!
Our biggest problem is the daily commute which is often 100km's or more. Anything electric would need to be charged EVERY night. With the current power shortages we already have, that would be impossible.
Which is probably why Elon Musk took his Tesla company to the US to become a billionaire!!

We all need to have this debate over a beer. The internal combustion engine is reaching the end of it's useful life. We've gone from contraptions to Moto GP refinement. What more can we do with a bunch of metal parts flailing and rotating at ridiculous tolerances inside some kind of containment field?

Much time will have passed before an electric motorcycle meets my expectations but I'm sure they'll appear eventually. Think how far battery technology has come since the days of having to top them up with deionised water and make sure they are charged on a monotonous basis.

Zero emissions is a long way off, so for now, I'm going burn my way through as much SW petrol as I can, while I can

We're now way off the OP topic, but I'm enjoying myself so...
The current battery technology is improving but its hardly environmentally sound, but it will generate a huge amount of money for those with the minerals, just like oil did.
Places like DR Congo have the potential to become ridiculously rich but they will need to get their political act together and form a stable government. I can't see that happening anytime soon so I expect a lot of Western / Eastern involvement in Africa and a whole heap of trouble to follow.
A more environmentally safe option is using a hydrogen fuel cell to drive the electric motors. I don't understand why hydrogen isn't in the race.
So in conclusion I think I'll get the bike out tomorrow and contribute a few litres to the carbon cycle.

Interesting, to me at any rate, is that the first commercial onshore wind farm was built in Cornwall, in the South of England.
Undoubtely, there are fewer onshore windfarms down South, hardly surprising since it's not as windy down there as in the North. However, there are plenty of offshore farms down there and vast solar arrays are proliferating. Obviously, as they are at ground-level, they are far less visible than wind turbines but are a more sensible way of generating electricity in the South where the weather is generally sunnier.

I see Boris has announced the North East will be in High Risk Tier 3 after lockdown ends. It's time to exchange your Gremlin Bells for the type that lepers used to ring.

And red crosses on the doors....

I wonder what the going rate is for the man who trundles the cart round, shouting: 'Bring out your dead!'

It'd suppliment my pension when that doesn't go up as much as more recent retirees' does next April.

I saw a documentary recently about the great plague of London...(actually, there have been several plagues over the centuries).

What we're doing now is not so different from back then. It wasn't the rat's fault either!

I'm waiting for the final part which covers the Great Fire. It looks as though the fire was started by councils starting fires in the streets to try to smoke the plague out of existence. How bizarre!

It's interesting (if that's the right word for something this horrific) when you start reading up on pandemics. The same processes seem to happen from early denial of the problem, a period of madness (bogroll gate recently lol), some kind of lockdown by the authorities to control the spread, economic chaos and then a lot of 20/20 hindsight of what could have been done better.
To be honest we're getting off quite easily in this 'un, the Spanish Flu just after WW1 killed about 50 million folks. That must have been a bugger, surviving 4 years of trench warfare only to die of flu!
Keep safe everyone, this winter stands to be the worst of the current pandemic.

Mosquitos kill 1 million people every year...yikes!

There are around 11,700 prostate cancer deaths in the UK every year, that's 32 every day (2017 figures)

All of which makes biking feel much safer, so as the TT is cancelled next year, shall all take the Scooters over to the IOM and have a race, sorry I meant a gentle ride, over The Mountain?
What could possibly go wrong?