The demise of the tow car?

Frankly the idea of actually banning fossil fueled vehicles is not on with current technology and you do wonder if the points made about countries doing this is in fact possible. It may only take a change of government to stop this. Possibly the main impact of that would be that people kept their current cars indefinitely.

I agree that diesel looks to be a problem though and think we may have to change to petrol in the short term although what the long term future is no one actually knows.

I'm not going to worry about a maybe. 

But petrol has a real down side when it comes to towing.  My 2 litre diesel car can take me up a very steep hill at 60 mph with a den caravan behind.  In order to do that with petrol I would need a very much more powerful car and that would, I assume, be more polluting.

Simple, leg power!

Like I said, it's never going to happen. It's going to take us 10 year to leave the EU apparently, so something  as drastic as banning Diesels is never going to have any impact in our life time

I worked in the engineering side of the London Bus industry. and was there when the first all electrics (a total disaster) and later the hybrids, both Parallel and series technologies came in to service. They both still need a good old Oil Burner to make them work.  As said before if we did go full electric where are you going to plug them in overnight, not mention the extra CO created generating the electricity to charge them all. Then you have the problem of getting rid of all the spent batteries when they reach the end of there working life and the excessive cost of replacing them. Then what about those that live in terraced houses, flat's etc, they don't have a nice driveway to run a cable out to the car. We had all this in my industry with LPG and Hydrogen powered vehicles. yes it works but the cost of investment in the infrastructure is so high that to make it happen requires Billions £'s and will take years.  We can't sort out the rail system yet alone the road transport system.

My company tried to show their Green commitment by dumping some of our Diesel Transits that we used to attend breakdowns and replacing them with Smiths full Electric Ford Transit vans and one flat bed truck for the stores run, around 13 garages in South London  and Kent. The supply runs had to be reduced to one run a day from two because the truck needing to be charged in Kent at the end of the run to enable it to get back to Camberwell to be reloaded for the next day. Progress ?

Ian. 

Happy Christmas to everyone BTW, have a good one

I can't quite see the logic of your reply. Horsepower is horsepower, no matter how it is created, whether by petrol or diesel, and it's the horsepower that gets you over the hill.

Don't know about the pollution side Lutz, but as to getting over the hill in an efficient manner, surely it's down to how the horse power is applied. When we first started caravanning we had a 2L petrol Mondeo rated at 150 hp. After a a few years we changed to a 2L diesel X trail rated at 150 hp. They might have had the same horses but the torques available  in various gears at various revs was totally different. So the X Trail would sail up a hill that the Mondeo was down to second gear on by the top.

I can't quite see the obsession with not having to change gear. The car has got a gearbox and it's there to be used. If you don't like changing gear, get an automatic.

Not sure where you got that I had an obsession with changing gears from my post. It is just, in my opinion, the high torque, at relatively low revs, makes a diesel much more efficient for tackling gradients than most petrol cars of the same engine size / horse power. This is particularly the case if you ever need to come to a halt  on a gradient.

Diesel for me please and why are cars with manual gearboxes still made I wonder.  Rolls Royce and Bentley phased them out around 1952 or 53 I seem to remember.