couldn't agree more with that Ian.

Personally i wouldn't go blow that stupid amount of money on I8, i'd probably give some thought for the Tesla, but the I8 is just ridiculous money for what it is supposed to do when the R8 is just so good for even a bit lees money.

And yeah, call me old school, but i've rather have that rumble in the morning when i start the car and the engine noise on long cruises or when i launch it. Never driven an electric one such as Tesla but i guess that lack of noise and all that tram take off is just blunt and soulless, no doubt it's fast, but the problem is it's only fast without the furious side, sort of speaking :).

I'd buy a Prius or that funny thing Renault Twizy(i think it's called) because those kind of cars do what they're supposed to do and they're great for crowded city driving, but as long as i'll live i won't go buy an electric super-car, period, and that's my commitment to myself :) .

MRC's director has just bought a C6 as his personal car. Same spec as mine, it VBOX'd at 0-60 MPH in 2.9secs and 0-100 in 6.7!! More to come. :ROFL:

Interesting... I did see the MRC facebook posts the other day...... +++

We’ve been using electric motors in ships now for a while and I think the car industry is catching up. Obviously there is a lot more going on in ships electric wise and have always had generators on board but the introduction of electric motors driving the shafts rather than engine / gearbox is more efficient. I think with the modern car now has so much electric wizardry, control modules and the like it makes sense to have a genset running to provide the power and power to the wheels.
The raw performance and the feel for driving a car has slowly been taken away from the driver for years now it’s not new. ABS, Traction Control, Power steering, Electric handbrakes has anyone tried throwing an 8 into a hairpin bend on the handbrake and being ready on the throttle to hang it’s ass out? For real driving experience now you have to buy something out the 80’s or buy a Westfield

Back to the future...
 

Agreed - we're approaching the end of an automotive age, and car production is in transition at the moment, with the traditional/established manufacturers compromising with "stop/start, cylinder shutdown and other annoying interferences" as a defence mechanism against the take-up of "cleaner" or more economical alternatives, and clean sheet designs like Tesla.

Don't knock it till you've tried it ;) …or in the meantime, have a look at the latest R8 e-tron instead:

http://jalopnik.com/2016-audi-r8-thi...-fu-1689172312

Audi have just allocated $30.3bill into tech over the next five years, some of the tech about to come out of Ingolstadt is jaw dropping, they've developed and will manufacture the R8 e-tron battery in house. They can outdo Tesla, I'm confident of it. Get the battery tech right - which they're doing, they're going to be a bit later to the party than Tesla but are refining and making it all bulletproof, a Tesla couldn't compete with Audi in anywhere other than the battery tech.

Blimey! - that's quite an investment: about 60% of their 2013 Turnover of 50Bn Euros* (so, an average of 12% of annual turnover over 5 years, using 2013 figures). Or to put it another way, 3 times their 2013 gross profit (i.e. an average of 60% of gross profit over five years). Assuming nothing changes.

All good news for Audi fans +++, not so sure about their shareholders…;)

*https://www.audi-mediaservices.com/p...k__member.html

Power of the VAG group. They're not far off taking BMW's #1 global lead.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...-challenge-bmw

I think the reality is that with this rapid pace of change, if you're not in it, you wont win it, and I can't imagine any manufacturer wants to get left out in the cold with 'only' fossil fuel power options.

However.

Even if Audi build the worlds very best electric car, which with that sort of money, sounds plausible, the National grid is surely decades away from being able to support any sort of explosive take up of electric motoring.

"Sorry I can't come to work boss, we're on rolling black outs this week"

There is an assumption we can all just plug in and charge our new electric car at home, or work. And that's fine for a few dozen, hundred, thousand even.

Can you imaging the infrastructure upgrades required if virtually every motor vehicle in the country started using electricity instead of fossil fuel? Not just power stations, but overhead lines, substations, underground cables.

That's gazillions of amps being sucked out of an already verging-on-the-edge of collapse grid.

Yes, solar panels help business & industry during the summer days. They don't do anything for Mr Smith wanting to charge his car up overnight.....

Imo fossil fuel propulsion absolutely has to stay for a while yet, even if they perfect the electric car, which is a problem as the electric car seems to be getting good, and cheap, fast..... +++

For me I think the sooner they develop alternatives to burning fossil fuels the better.

How they achieve that I can't really say. I like the idea of electric cars but they are not very practical if your going long distance.

I think if you were to have a generic battery pack for certain sizes of cars then they way forward would be interchangeable battery packs where service stations up and down the country provided a service where one pulled in the pack was dropped out and a fully charged one popped in.

That would need a rolling agreement to lease the batteries but for the end user it would remove the worry of the battery's deteriating over time.

As for the grid not being able to keep up, I think there must be surplus capacity during the night to charge batteries, think how much juice is needed to power all the cookers and kettles at dinner time across the country, that said though expansion would be needed to keep up as more cars went electric.

Where you get that power from bothers me, I don't think nuclear is the answer, far too risky and how do you deal with the waste.

The tidal generation projects make sense to me, it's reliable and reasonably clean.

The other solution is hydrogen but it takes a lot of energy to make so again we have to think about how it's generated.

I know this much though, when the high performance engines become a thing of the past it will be a shame, nothing can excite like the sound of a high performance engine on full chat