Significant fractions

As in 5 thousand bucks is a significant fraction of a million bucks, but fifty cents ain’t…

I was in the queue in a motorway service station today, getting my caffeine fix, the guy in front gives his pump number, pays by fuel card it’s £97, gives his registration, I look out at the forecourt idly expecting to see an old Pontiac, no, a small Vauxhall 2 door…

£97 is near as dammit £100

£100 is 10% of £1,000

£20,000 will buy a brand new mid range car.

At £100 per tankful of fuel, 200 refills buys the brand new car.

This is “batteries not included” territory.

If the cost of fuel doubles, which isn’t as inconceivable as it seems then 100 refills buys the car, and so one refill = 1% of the capital cost of the car.

For my sins I was driving through mid Wales recently, it just struck me, not that there is a lot going on there now, but if fuel goes up from £1.44 a litre of diesel to say £2.50, then all of Wales except a little bit close to the M4 and M40 is going to drop dead like a bug hitting a wind-shield at 70.

I don’t mean it is going to be decimated, or cut by half, it will fucking *die*, cos everything is trucked in… even fuel itself… and as it is fuel is so expensive nobody can afford to grow anything as a crop or manufacture anything as goods…

It’s how shit is expressed.

If a car does 500 miles per refill then 200 refills is 100,000 miles, so point at a brand new mid range car and say, in 100,000 miles you will have spent the purchase price again on fuel, it doesn’t sound *good*, but it doesn’t sound too *bad* either… if you express the exact same numbers a different way, and say in 200 refills you will have spent the purchase price again on fuel, it sounds real bad, all the way down.

So bad that each refill becomes a significant fraction on the original purchase cost… 0.5% is a significant fraction when you are talking about the second most expensive purchase most of us ever make… it is a *very* significant fraction when you start spending it every fucking week, or sometimes twice a week if you do a lot of mileage.

and this is *best* case scenario, if the guy at the next pump is driving a £500 beater, then each refill becomes 20% of the purchase cost.

This, like stall speed in an aircraft, is game changing.

A 100 amp/hour car/truck battery will store around 1.2 kWh of electrical energy.

A gallon (imperial) of diesel will release around 44 kWh or around 9.7 kWh per litre

£100 at £1.44 a litre buys 69 litres, so a full tank is around 665 kWh

In this analogy, the 100 Ah battery is the fuel TANK, not the fuel, and a battery “tank” containing the same energy as the tank of diesel will amount to some 500 batteries, that is a LOT of weight and volume, which itself manifests as vehicle tare and cuts back on range etc

665 kWh of electric at normal domestic rates of around 15p per kWh = £99.75, so we can see it is not the TYPE of fuel that matters here, it is the fucking energy.

Mains electric is a more convenient way to get energy to my home computer, diesel is a more convenient way to power my vehicle, the cost for that energy per kWh is about the same.

We are just at a place where filling the car up once and being able to drive 500 miles uses as much energy as running my home for 3 months on electric.

No alternative fuels are going to make those sums any better.

Its the lack of range is NOT the reason electric cars ain’t selling, although for many the lack of range is a deal breaker, the problem is the electric car uses the same amount of energy as the diesel or petrol car, and doesn’t matter how you buy your energy, the cost per kWh is about the same.

So when you live in bum fuck nowhere and everything needs to be transported in, you got problems.

Big, big, big mother-fucking problems.

Unless you happen to be sat on top of a literal gold mine in bum fuck nowhere.

Otherwise, it’s looking a bit Mad Max.