Zero minus 1500

[BigVeeGrin]

Is this the future? Long been mooted but surely electric bikes will start to be less like unicorns at some point. Maybe

Anyway, if of interest to anyone you can get grants from the government for electric vehicle purhases. So if a Zero takes your fancy there's £1,500 knocked off one

[VTRDark]

Does it come with subwoofer and big amplifier to make the sound of an exhaust Yes unfortunately this is the future. As petroleum resources get less and less and environmental crap gets used as an excuse to charge more for those vehicles entering congested zones electric will become the norm. Don't worry about all the lithium or powerplants that make the battery's and recharge them.

[Pete.L]

Hmmph!
The only electric car I like so far are the Tesla's. £1500 off the basic model at £82,000 or the Drive itself version at £120,000 probably won't even cover the furry dice

Pete.l

[VTRDark]

I think electric vehicles will eventually become the norm but the infrastructure is not there right now for recharging them. We're only just starting to get used to vehicles that switch the engine off while sitting at lights. I had to travel on London transport not so long ago and noticed the the new buses are hybrid. As they pull away or move along in slow moving traffic they are electric and when they get to a certain revs and or speed there is a terrible jolt as the engine kicks in. I'm surprised standing folk and other road users / pedestrians haven't been injured by this especially the way some of the drivers drive.

You could say us motorcyclists are already environmentally freindly as we can hit the kill switch at lights and we are also always on the move rather than sitting in traffic. What I have noticed, especially around town, is that a lot of traffic lights have been slowly increasing the times they remain on Red...some of them you can sit there for 5 mins. It's like they are trying to push and encourage modern so called environmentally friendly vehicles. I expect the government get plenty of tax from new vehicles made and purchased so they want to encourage business and us to spend our money unnecessarily. It's push push push in the same way computers upgrade every 5 mins. The only people that truly benefit are the companies in a corporate world that take our hard earned cash. I'm not saying we haven't got environmental issues because it's obvious we have but the way governments and corporations are dealing with it is going about it in a way to make profit, not fix the enviroment

It's the same with recycling bins. Over-complicate it and give us diffrent colours which extends to diffrent colours in diffrent areas etc and when we make a mistake fine us for it. This only encourages fly-tipping. The dumping of old fully working computers etc because we're trying to dispose of old equipment to add to landfills or the shores of India because we are forced into upgrading. Only a small percentage gets recycled because recycling is so expensive. Who watched that Guy Martin in China where IIRC there was a Scottish product, salmon or something that gets exported to China first before being brought back to Scotland because it's cheaper. How insane is that.

[StormingHonda]

I agree, Electric is coming whether people like it or not, I don't think I will see completely electric run vehicles in my life time being the norm on the road, but hybrids are going to come sooner rather than later.

[Wicky]

Problem with leccy motorcycles is still the battery. With the bike costing £10-15,000 offering about 250cc performance - the majority of the outlay is in the cost of the battery (like buying 6000 litres of fuel upfront when buying a suck-squash-bang-blow new bike!) - 3/4 of the price with only a finite life as its performance will gradually degrade from charging cycles. And who's to say that a suitable fitting replacement battery will be available in 5 or however may years hence. Though in the leccy pushbike world there are some places that offer recelling (mainly for Chinese generic batteries) , with the advantage of denser more efficient cells can be used. Though some like Bosch batteries have special antitamper electonics (similar to printer cartridges) that rule that option out, and tie the user to buy expensive Bosch branded ones.

Still there are some new batteries coming through that are cranking up the energy densities, and if in tandem faster charging can be achieved, and with drop in prices for the tech then that should allow more widespread use.

Just think of the ever increasing pace of progress in illumination from wood fire to candle, to lightbiulb, to lcd > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38650976

Imagine gathering and chopping wood 10 hours a day for six days.

Those 60 hours of work would produce 1,000 lumen hours of light.
burning a single spermaceti candle for five hours a night all year would cost him £8, or well over $1,000 (£820) in today's money.

By 1900, one of Thomas Edison's carbon filament bulbs would provide you with 10 days of bright, continuous illumination, 100 times as bright as a candle, for the money you could earn with our 60-hour week of hard labour.

By 1920, that same week of labour would pay for more than five months' continuous light from tungsten filament bulbs.

By 1990, it was 10 years.

A couple of years after that, thanks to compact fluorescent bulbs, it was more than five times longer.

The future is bright - unless you're North Korean and they'll get about in the future in horse & carts along glass self-illuminating tracks !

[VTRDark]

Tinfoil hat alert

The lightbulb is part of the planned obsolescence just like the printer cartridges
http://www.page-net.com/frame/pages/Eps ... etting.htm

[youtube][/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU

They will do the same with batteries as there is money to made....for now. They could go down the dynamo route, the use of magnets. Personally I think things would be better if we still used horse and carts, chopped wood, hunted for food and tended our own vegi gardens and drank ale down the local alehouse. Imagine that being your job...actually it's not like having a job, it's survival or a lifestyle that brings back community spirit. The problem is there are too many people on the planet to sustain it hence wars break out and greed takes over. Imagine not having to have bills to pay or be forced into the modern day slave trade working on minimum wage for corporations that then want us to give our hard earned money back to them by buying their products. The industrial revolution was one of the biggest killers of this planet.

[youtube][/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE

The next industrial revolution will be the robots taking over and replacing the human workforce as they don't require wages to make money for the companies. I'm not even sure how money will be made then and the world will possibly have to come up with some other kind of fake currency like a token based system. But before this happens the rich or corporations in this case will get richer and the poor will get poorer and wars and crime will break out as a matter of survival. Welcome to a Mad Max world, then the Terminator will arrive and then possibly Elysium. Eventually and if we are extremely lucky and have not gone extinct by then we may end up like Star Trek. It sounds crazy but we need to look beyond what we are brainwashed with by society. Don't forget going to the Moon (if not faked) was sci-fi years ago. Most of us will be dead unless we are reincarnated but our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have tough times ahead. We only just starting to enter this stage of evolution as we build up towards another world war as the powers to be fight over territory and resources.

Here's an interesting article
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi ... invisible/

The future is not bright and we are entering a new dark age unless there are some serious changes to the way we live our lives and how society is run. Peace and love is what is needed not greed and profit.