Peugeot Fiat

[The Beard]

We've acquired a Peugeot 308 at work, in fact the organisation has got a shed load of them. But then I work for a government organisation and they are, I believe required by EU law to buy the cheapest option, which is a little odd as the Vauxhall Astra is made 50 miles away whereas the Peugeot is, er, not.

I bought my Panda from Stoneacre which at the time was a combined FIAT and Citroen dealer so when mine goes in for a service I get a Citroen DS3.

I like the DS3 which is really stylish, at least to my eyes, and as it's a small car the style suits it as does the 1.2 three pot under the bonnet. The only thing I don't like is the tablet thingy as I find it too distracting.

As for the 308, I think this is a different matter. Very bland and totally lacking in charm, and the engine, although ostensibly the same as the DS3 sounds rough and unrefined. As a matter of interest, possibly, the trip computer shows 34 mpg which isn't quite what I would expect, nor what the new EU fuel figures would tell us.

FIAT did introduce a 3 pot motor, at least according to their brochures but I'm not sure if this is one of their own making or a PSA item. There are lots of benefits to be had from collaboration, not least in the fields of big investments such as engines and floorpans, but what remains to be seen is if FIAT will be able to maintain its Italian DNA or if it just becomes "a car maker".

 

[varesecrazy]

Pretty sure the 'firefly' 3 pot is all FIAT.

was introduced in south America.. but took an age to appear here .. emissions farce related probably.

I hear its actually 'modular'
300cc per cylinder

Avalable in 900+ = 3 cyl
......... 1200 = 4 cyl

Only in the uk in niche offerings so far

500x etc

 

[DaveMcT]

FCA paid billions to Tesla last year to buy carbon tax credits. Tesla no longer get the government EV rebates but at that rate, they don't need them.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/w...3PgXp2QHvwkRSx1I7BunL_nvgxGb2FC5r2DlSoTYU0KTj

 

[AndyRKett]

FCA paid billions to Tesla last year to buy carbon tax credits. Tesla no longer get the government EV rebates but at that rate, they don't need them.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/w...3PgXp2QHvwkRSx1I7BunL_nvgxGb2FC5r2DlSoTYU0KTj

This isn’t news, it’s the reason that fiat needed to merge with Peugeot, FCA has virtually no alternative fuel vehicles because of this their group emissions are higher than many others especially when you consider they own Jeep which is selling buckets and does not make economic engines for large 4x4s that spend most of their life on tarmac.

Spending billions of dollars shoring up a competitor is never a great idea in the world of competition.

FCA desperately need electric drive trains and hybrid tech for their cars world wide, then they can get down to investing those billions they would pay to tesla in some car development

 

[DaveMcT]

This isn’t news, it’s the reason that fiat needed to merge with Peugeot, FCA has virtually no alternative fuel vehicles because of this their group emissions are higher than many others especially when you consider they own Jeep which is selling buckets and does not make economic engines for large 4x4s that spend most of their life on tarmac.

Spending billions of dollars shoring up a competitor is never a great idea in the world of competition.

FCA desperately need electric drive trains and hybrid tech for their cars world wide, then they can get down to investing those billions they would pay to tesla in some car development

Absolutely and while I greatly respect Tesla for what they have achieved it's sad to see the venerable names simply not biting the bullet to get things done. It's like an echo of the British bikes and cars of the 1960s. They knew trouble was coming but ploughed on regardless until they went broke.

 

[Schumi2001]

The alternative view, of course, is that BEV only works for a small proportion of the current fleet.

BEVs will eventually self-limit due to infrastructure lagging a couple of decades and several billion pounds of investment behind the curve.

BEV at the moment barely washes its face - for many manufacturers BEVs only make sense as they reduce fleet emissions.

Retailers are still investing huge sums of money in fossil filling stations - Eurogarages and Motor Fuels, the 2 biggest operators in the UK have some pretty aggressive expansion plans which involve building a number of £4-£5m new build sites with capacity for 200k litres of fuel underground. Many of these aren't getting EV charging as the local grid can't cope with the demand.

 

[Garrett500]

All this pushing of electric vehicles is wrong, the technology just isn't good enough yet and the infrastructure to support it is a joke. Battery technology advancement compared to internal combustion development is still in the stone age, the battery hasn't really improved in the last 50 years.
All the infrastructure needed to support EV will put even more strain on our outdated grid, this country produces less MW of power than 25 years ago thanks to the beurocratic idiots demonising fossil fuels and closing power stations before having alternative sources in place.

Back on topic, I think this is the end for the Fiat we know and love. The worst move possible to merge with PSA, a company who lost their way in the 90's, a company who since then have cheapened their cars and now produce nothing memorable, iconic or exciting. I don't believe PSA have any interest in reviving the brand at all and it will become lost. A much better move, in my opinion, would have been to ally with Renault.

 

[Schumi2001]

I don't see why Renault would be any better - they already own a large chunk of Nissan and have Dacia selling to what would be traditional Fiat customers - ie. relatively simple, robust and great value small cars. Renault also have an alliance with Mercedes, so they mostly have all bases covered.

 

[AndyRKett]

All this pushing of electric vehicles is wrong, the technology just isn't good enough yet and the infrastructure to support it is a joke.

Interesting {gets popcorn}

Battery technology advancement compared to internal combustion development is still in the stone age, the battery hasn't really improved in the last 50 years.

Except in the last 50years they have literally invented the lithium ion battery essentially changing the whole world....
50 years ago they still made electric vehicles, they used terrible motors and lead acid batteries, if lucky they could manage 30mph, now electric cars do 300 miles on a charge, have 700hp and 0-60 in under 3 seconds... but yeah nothing has changed.

Im old enough to remember the first mobile phone and the enormous batteries they had, fortunately many of the old ones came with a second battery as it would die half way through the day.

All the infrastructure needed to support EV will put even more strain on our outdated grid, this country produces less MW of power than 25 years ago thanks to the beurocratic idiots demonising fossil fuels and closing power stations before having alternative sources in place.

Currently there is massive free capacity in the system, we produce massively less electricity than our current infrastructure allows. Also when you talk about out dated grids, how do you define outdated, bearing in mind that huge portions of the grid are regularly updated as new houses get built, factories get built and massive wind farms and solar farms are built, the oldest parts of the system are the outdated fossil fuel bits...

Back on topic, I think this is the end for the Fiat we know and love. The worst move possible to merge with PSA, a company who lost their way in the 90's, a company who since then have cheapened their cars and now produce nothing memorable, iconic or exciting. I don't believe PSA have any interest in reviving the brand at all and it will become lost. A much better move, in my opinion, would have been to ally with Renault.

This is a merger not a take over, while FCA May chose to not produce as many fiat model cars, FCA as a company won’t get ignored or be under funded as it’s a joint venture, Peugeot and fiat are in essence equal in the merger, Fiat is not subservient to the French.

 

[Schumi2001]

I work in an industry desperately trying to improve EV charging infrastructure.

Local grid capacity is a massive, massive issue.

I've said it before, but for 2x150kW chargers on some filling stations, we've been presented with estimates of £2m to upgrade the feed. A 150kW charging unit will run you quarter of a million incl. installation if you have reasonable access to the grid. But that filling station half a mile down the road will be bang out of luck if they want one too.

One of my rural sites was quoted £60k for a 3-phase upgrade to support a single 50kW charger. That's on top of the £60-£80k for the charger itself. The costings just don't work without the government throwing money at it.

There are a handful of 'charging plazas' out there - about 3 across the whole world, which have been strategically been built in places where there's the infrastructure to support (eg. Norway with it's almost free and abundant hydro power), or the government has thrown the kitchen sink at it (China) to make a statement.

But the reality is... Friday afternoon at Exeter services, you'll never have enough capacity to swap out even 10-20% of the current private car fleet for BEV unless you get into small modular nuclear reactors.

BEV infrastructure is creaking at peak use times already and the fleet is growing faster than the infrastructure.

 

[Garrett500]

I work in an industry desperately trying to improve EV charging infrastructure.

Local grid capacity is a massive, massive issue.

I've said it before, but for 2x150kW chargers on some filling stations, we've been presented with estimates of £2m to upgrade the feed. A 150kW charging unit will run you quarter of a million incl. installation if you have reasonable access to the grid. But that filling station half a mile down the road will be bang out of luck if they want one too.

One of my rural sites was quoted £60k for a 3-phase upgrade to support a single 50kW charger. That's on top of the £60-£80k for the charger itself. The costings just don't work without the government throwing money at it.

There are a handful of 'charging plazas' out there - about 3 across the whole world, which have been strategically been built in places where there's the infrastructure to support (eg. Norway with it's almost free and abundant hydro power), or the government has thrown the kitchen sink at it (China) to make a statement.

But the reality is... Friday afternoon at Exeter services, you'll never have enough capacity to swap out even 10-20% of the current private car fleet for BEV unless you get into small modular nuclear reactors.

BEV infrastructure is creaking at peak use times already and the fleet is growing faster than the infrastructure.

Which just reinforces my point about our infrastructure being a joke. This should have been initiated before the push to sell EV and the grid upgraded accordingly.

 

[Garrett500]

Currently there is massive free capacity in the system, we produce massively less electricity than our current infrastructure allows. Also when you talk about out dated grids, how do you define outdated, bearing in mind that huge portions of the grid are regularly updated as new houses get built, factories get built and massive wind farms and solar farms are built, the oldest parts of the system are the outdated fossil fuel bits...

I work for a company that supplies emergency power to the National Grid. There are £billions that need to be spent across the whole country to bring the grid up to spec, not just older installations but new ones too that have been under specified. And guess what? The emergency power is provided by fossil fuel.

 

[Schumi2001]

This isn't really the thread for it - but I've just been trying to get my head around the grid demand for a 350kW charger.

Looks like just 1 hour of use per day is the same electrical energy as an average house consumes in a whole year.

I can only conclude that many smaller villages probably couldn't even support a single 305kW charger as that's more capacity than being used to power the whole village.

I wish I'd concentrated harder in physics lessons at school! - so I'm happy to be proven wrong by someone who can get their head around this better than me!

 

[AndyRKett]

This isn't really the thread for it - but I've just been trying to get my head around the grid demand for a 350kW charger.

Looks like just 1 hour of use per day is the same electrical energy as an average house consumes in a whole year.

I can only conclude that many smaller villages probably couldn't even support a single 305kW charger as that's more capacity than being used to power the whole village.

I wish I'd concentrated harder in physics lessons at school! - so I'm happy to be proven wrong by someone who can get their head around this better than me!

a house is 240V most things are 13amps

Industry for the most part is 415V 3 phase.

350KW charger would be easily achieved with an 11,000 volt 3 phase grid connection, at about 25amps there is also the power factor to consider in these installations, I worked this out with a power factor of about 0.8 (1.0 being the perfect power factor) I used an online calculator for this and its rough, its now been 10 years since I last did this so i'm very rusty g8rpi is probably the man to work this out.

Some people get tetchy at 11kv given that the 240 from the mains is plenty enough to kill, but when you understand that the power from power stations is transmitted cross country at up to 400KV its no big deal to get these sorts of very high powered connections, Motorways and power lines where all roughly built along similar lines, therefore its not actually a big deal to build massive power connections to the grid on main trunk routes.

yes smaller towns would struggle if you tried to connect them right now to that sort of grid connection depending on the location they might be quite some distance from that sort of power supply.

Most people don't understand that you transmit power at extremely high voltages but low amps, this means you don't need very thick wires, get it where it needs to go and you turn it from high voltage into low voltage high amps
Connect several thousand volts to a charging station and switch it down to a lower voltage with high amps and you can easily achieve the hundreds of KW that future charges will use. The substation that supplies a village or town will be on an 11 or 22 thousand Volt connection, the power cable down the street to all the houses will be the 415V connection, Build your Charging stations where ever there is a substation......

what gets scary is when you work out that your 350KW charger would take two very large wind turbines to power it.

 

[Schumi2001]

Actually, the £2m quote I saw was for a motorway site! The grid feed was on the wrong side of the road...

Remember, Tesla have had to install battery backups at many locations to smooth out supply when demand exceeds the local grid capacity. Even then, they have to halve the charge rate if all stalls are in use.

 

[g8rpi]

350kW would be 486A per phase on a standard light industrial 3 phase supply (240V phase to neutral or 415Vphase to phase). For reference a standard UK house is 240V 1 phase 100A so 24kW max. Typical home fast chargers are 32A 3 phase (special installation) or 23kW (note that the power remains the same if you take 240V or 415V because the same factor of root 3, 1.73, that increases the voltage, reduces the current). Next size up would be 64A so 46kW. As Andy says, a 350kW charger would probably be fed from 11kV supply (same as feeds local substations) where it would only take about 55A.

Robert G8RPI.

 

[AndyRKett]

£2M to build on the wrong side of the road, given you’d need to to somehow get extremely high voltage cables under a 6-8 lane motorway without affecting the flow of traffic, making it a massive civil engineering project, I’m not surprised at the price tag.

Let’s use an example to put that in context, in 2014 they duelled the last 9 miles of the A11 between Norwich and london at a cost of £134million.

That’s £14M per mile, or £9m per KM

Just over £9200 per meter.... so £2 million would be lovely in my back pocket and go a very long way but as it seems is not unusual for this sort of project. Having done a quick search it can cost £2M to open a McDonalds...

 

[Schumi2001]

£2m is a relatively conservative estimate for building a Maccy Ds.

I'm working with people spending £4m on new build petrol stations. Without chargers...

Difference is, you can pay back £2-£4m on a filling station or McDonald's relatively quickly. Trying to pay that back from the revenue on a charger... never going to happen. So we need subsidies from the government.

Problem there is that £2m buys you a hydrogen install, too...

Anyway, to get back on topic... maybe Fiat have been the sensible ones in not throwing silly money behind what may turn out to be a technological dead end. It may be better to pay the offsets rather than get yourself onto a path to obsolescence. Probably best to ride it out in the medium term and see where it goes.

 

[AndyRKett]

£2m is a relatively conservative estimate for building a Maccy Ds.

I'm working with people spending £4m on new build petrol stations. Without chargers...

Difference is, you can pay back £2-£4m on a filling station or McDonald's relatively quickly. Trying to pay that back from the revenue on a charger... never going to happen. So we need subsidies from the government.

Problem there is that £2m buys you a hydrogen install, too...

Anyway, to get back on topic... maybe Fiat have been the sensible ones in not throwing silly money behind what may turn out to be a technological dead end. It may be better to pay the offsets rather than get yourself onto a path to obsolescence. Probably best to ride it out in the medium term and see where it goes.

You keep bringing up this £2M price tag, then when it’s pointed out £2M isn’t a lot I’m the grand scheme of things, it’s always funny to watch how quickly you try to change the topic.

At the moment you build a petrol station sell petrol but also have a shop, the things sold in the shop help increase the profitability of the site and lets be honest she’ll have to be the worst for over pricing a 500ml bottle of coke, the likes of BP have realised people don’t like paying over the odds so have teamed up with people like M&S creating mini super markets at their new filling stations.

The thing is they model is changing and evolving even with petrol. It would actually make sense to open the new equivalent of a happy eater/little chef at car charging stations as people will need to stick around for an 30 - 60 mins for a charge so want more than a £6 packet of petrol station sandwiches.

 

[Schumi2001]

The point is that every part of the asset has to work for you. Spending quarter of a million on chargers just isn't happening (let alone the places where the DNO is asking for millions!) - people are leasing the parking spaces to charging companies. Many of which aren't turning a profit and some of them have gone under already. The people building the filling stations aren't stupid - if they're not willing to pay for the charger themselves, preferring to sign over a parking space for minimal rent for 10-20 years, then you know there's something in the model that just doesn't work. And EV owners are a bunch of tighwads, which is why they're in an EV... the promise is that they're spending money in the shop. But they don't - they buy a coffee and take it back to the car to read the paper, check emails etc. Just clock the number of really miserable looking Tesla drivers at a service station!

Anyway, we're going to test the theory very soon with a site that only has EV charging and a shop / cafe. It's in a location where, should it not generate a decent return on investment, it'll not return one anywhere.

Reality, right now, and for the foreseeable, is that the only people making money from EV charging are those who own the payment platforms.