The Electric Vehicle Revolution - BBC Click

[Music] this week we're back on the road in our electric motors i'm digging up the truth about battery tech lara's got the lowdown on charging them up and chris is using all that power to take some fabulous photos [Music] welcome to click i know i'm not on the sofa don't panic though i brought it with me no i've not made a dash for it i'm in an electric car on a 300 mile trip across the uk this is a lockdown mission to find out if an electric vehicle revolution is about to happen across the world governments are putting up ambitious targets for environmentally friendly transport the eu aims to reduce its greenhouse gases by 80 percent in the next 30 years and electric vehicles are a big part of that plan the uk this week announced its ambition to stop selling cars that are wholly powered by petrol and diesel by the year 2030. so many more of us it seems will be buying electric cars in the next few years and lara has some tips for you on that later in the show but first i'm off to a place which may hold the key to the future of european electric cars [Music] cornwall is known for its fish its stunning views and its tourism but it's not always been that way for most of its modern historical life cornwall has been a center for mining [Music] silver tin and copper were all pulled out of the ground to support the expanding british empire at one point in the early 19th century this was the greatest copper producing region in the world but as globalization took hold cornish mining became too expensive to compete internationally and so the mines were closed but all that is changing traces of an elements discovered in cornwall in the 19th century have suddenly become rather important this is lithium mica granite and the important word there is lithium as in the lithium-ion batteries in your phone in your computer in your electric car and some think that cornwall may be the best place in europe to supply it there is lithium in the czech republic but the boss of one company realized that the rock here in cornwall was made of the same stuff and we followed it up with a field trip and the first rock that andrew picked up had all-grade lithium in it british lithium is prospecting here in cornwall and once they find a rich seam of lithium mica granite they plan to build an open clay mine a lot like this one what's the ecological impact of a mine like this well the footprint of a mine is actually very small so the mine we're proposing will produce about a third of the total lithium requirement of the uk should the whole industry transform to electric one from internal combustion and the quarry would be quite modest much smaller than this actually most of the development is a refinery now there are obvious advantages of a country making its own products rather than importing them but there's actually another very important reason why batteries specifically need to be home grown lithium batteries are very bulky they're heavy and they're a dangerous good to transport a model s tesla has got a half ton of battery in it so it's a major component of the car so battery makers co-locate with electric vehicle makers you picture a tesla factory they've got chemicals and metals going in one end and cars driving out the other now if we want to have an electric car industry in the uk we have to have a battery industry here so what things can we do to attract a lithium battery industry in the uk one thing is to have the only domestic source of the major component in europe there's none producing the whole of europe and so it could be that cornwall along with the czech republic become vital as europe's hunger for lithium grows so the amount of lithium we need in uk and also globally is going to increase dramatically over the next few years by so we calculate by 2035 we'll need five times as much lithium as we are mining now so that's quite an increase but at this stage companies like british lithium are still trying to work out where the lithium is so i'm off to their lab to find out what happens to all the samples that they're digging out and in the meantime lara has been off on their own adventure [Music] my armchair is looking a bit different this week as well as i'm also out and about this hybrid bmw uses geofencing to automatically switch from petrol to electric in a particular location in this instance it's when i enter the london congestion charge zone i'd imagine that most people who buy a plug-in hybrid want to be on electric as much as they can be so would actually just pre-set it to be on electric unless they were on a long journey so this idea is possibly a bit of a gimmick but i guess it could help keep cities less polluted of course the benefit of having a hybrid vehicle like this is that you don't need to worry about charging on a long journey but this week i'm going to be looking at a surprise bonus of having an all-electric vehicle and the importance of planning there's been a rapid increase in the number of electric cars sold in the uk and i'm talking pure electric almost double were sold this year compared to last but for many of us buying an electric vehicle is still a new experience and there are a few things that you need to think about electric is great in the city and over recent years there's been an increasing number of charging points emerging on our high streets but for longer journeys things can get a little bit trickier the range an electric car can drive before needing a boost has increased greatly there are now many on the market advertised to be able to do around 280 miles on a single charge whilst all electric cars show a calculation of how long you should be able to drive for they're rarely accurate if you're a smoother driver you'll definitely benefit with an electric car in terms of the weather that's another impact that can affect electric car range generally when it's colder range falls you might expect to see something like a 20 maybe 25 drop off in in range at the most extreme points in winter uh weight also is an impact so if you have a heavy low that will give you a lower range as well potentially again in the sort of 25 region but if you do run out of juice on a longer journey then most motorway service stations do have charges and in the majority of cases they will have rapid charges but rapid means different things to different cars it's not only about how fast the charging point is but also the speed your car can charge the combination determining how long a stop you'd need to make at the services most motorways have 50 kilowatt charges an average electric car would be able to boost its battery by 90 miles in half an hour at one here on this forecourt though the chargers can triple that power one other thing to know your battery can only do the fast charging up to a certain point when it reaches about eighty percent the charging slows right down if i'm taking the car on a long journey i need to first check to see where the charges are and if they're working and then i need to plan for the charger beyond that in case they're busy and often when i get to the charger they're not working properly um or they're taken by somebody else and i have to use my contingency plan so planning is definitely required to drive long distances but if you are near a motorway and you have some time to spare you should be okay in rural areas though the electric car revolution may be harder to kick start there are certainly comparisons with electric vehicle charging infrastructure and broadband there's lots of private investment going into ev charge points but it's focused very much on urban areas where those companies are going to make a return in rural areas where it's more sparsely populated there aren't the same returns so they're not being prioritized by those those companies to boost driver confidence it's now essential that the infrastructure reaches across the country if it's not done right once again rural areas risk being left behind price has been a major sticking point for electric car ownership but in recent years have they actually become cheaper to own we've tried to simplify the figures based on a mid-range car over the course of four years buying this electric car over the same model with petrol would set you back around an extra forty percent yet the electric should depreciate less have lower running costs and no road tax you're likely to spend around a quarter on electricity than what you'd spend on fuel evs are expensive um but if you think about it uh you know if you look at a mobile phone that's a that's a five or six hundred pound device so actually what you're finding is that paying for it as you go so the phone the insurance and the text and data is a way you're happy to pay for that it's then a mobile device as a service so with evs bundling a monthly price with the car the insurance the service the maintenance and the energy could be the way actually we consume cars in the future [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week that chinese smartphone manufacturer oppo showed off a concept rolling phone screen which can transform into a tablet amazon started selling prescription drugs online to us customers at significant discounts and twitter and facebook ceos were cross-examined for the second time in three weeks by u.s senators this time facing questions about their company's role in the u.s election facebook also separately announced it would extend its ban on political ads for at least another month it was a very eventful week for tesla ceo elon musk who saw his personal fortune got by 15 billion dollars overtaking mark zuckerberg as the third richest person in the world also this week mr musk tested positive for the coronavirus and his rocket company spacex sent four astronauts into space robot vacuum cleaners could be accessed remotely to eavesdrop in the home even without a microphone on board lidar sensors were hacked on the xiaomi robo rock vacuum by researchers at the university of maryland picking up acoustic signals from the room and finally this week we saw how a magnetic spray could turn everyday objects like pills into mini robots a team from city university of hong kong showed the uses of the m spray such as guiding a catheter inside the body or distributing medicine the object's locomotion is controlled by manipulating the magnetic field around it the spray can be absorbed or excreted by the body making targeted drug delivery possible this week i've been putting four of the latest smartphone cameras to the test to see how they stack up the iphone 12 pro max the google pixel 5 the huawei mate 40 pro and the iphone 12. i've been using the mini version but it has the exact same camera as the regular size iphone 12. let's talk about lenses and the trendy thing at the moment is to add a super wide lens so you can zoom out and fit a bit more into your picture i actually prefer a telephoto lens because i feel that you can't always get closer to something you want to zoom in on but you can quite often take a few steps back to get further away all four of these phones have a super wide lens but only two of them have a telephoto lens and huawei's has the biggest optical zoom here's how that looks in practice because i saw some ducks in the park and i took these photos from about two meters away here's as close as i could get without digitally cropping on the iphone 12 and the pixel 5. now here's the 2.5 times zoom on the iphone 12 pro max we're getting a bit closer but look how close i got with the huawei camera this duck was working my camera gorgeous and this really does make a difference later in the park i saw a squirrel and my instinct was quickly grab the huawei and this is how it turned out this was taken on a camera phone so the zoom here blew the other phones out of the water to test the phones in low light i went into central london after dark which as you can imagine is pretty much deserted at the moment apart from every now and then you'd see a social media influencer and their camera operator striking a pose and having a little photo shoot i went down to the take britain which at the moment is lit up for diwali all these were taken on the super wide cameras and all of them look great although i think the huawei just edges ahead because take a look how much detail it preserved in these beautiful tiles those were the super wide shots with the regular wide camera apple and huawei both say they've made improvements this year to let in more light here are some photos from the wide cameras both iphones took a decent shot the pixel did too although again it was darker and grainier than the others and then the mate 40 pro captured this and i was blown away look again how much detail is preserved i also took some portrait mode shots here which came out very nicely you'll notice the one from the iphone 12 pro max is more zoomed in because it defaults to the telephoto lens for portraits i have to say both iphones and the pixel captured quite a lot of lens flare from these neon lights i didn't mind in this particular context it looks quite artistic but the huawei didn't have any lens flare in fact the mate 40 pro was so consistently impressive that whenever we were taking any extra shots or i wanted a quick one done of me in a nice location i'd say let's do it on the huawei it's going to get the better shot now all four of these phones also offer night mode and to test that out we went to st james's park at night and it was very dark this is all the iphone 12 could see without engaging night mode and the iphone 12 pro max does have an extra trick because it has that lidar scanner to detect depth it can also take blurry background portrait mode shots with night mode switched on it was very impressive but what's more impressive is that the mate 40 pro can do this without engaging night mode this was just a regular portrait mode snap taken instantly without a long exposure in near darkness let's take a quick look at video stabilization the iphone 12 pro max is trying something new for apple it has sensor shift stabilization so it's moving the camera sensor around to counteract your hand movements and it worked very well in these shots jogging in the park alongside my friend the pro max definitely produced the most stable video of course there's more to a phone than just the cameras the elephant in the room is that huawei still doesn't have access to google play services due to that u.s trade black list and that means many of the most popular apps are missing from the platform including from its own huawei app gallery but there's no denying that when it comes to the camera at least from my testing the huawei 1 is a generation ahead of the competition that was chris with a truly illuminating report back at british lithium's cornwall lab i met with their ceo the man who discovered that first rock to find out how cornwall might be the answer to our battery problems now it used to be that all lithium came from brines created by water being pumped up from underground and then left to dry in massive lakes the lithium could then be extracted from the salt left behind but all that is changing as the lithium industry is growing those brine lakes can't keep up they take 10 20 years of evaporating to get going so the world has switched over to hard rock with western australia leading the charge and now we're coming in with unconventional hard rocks like we see with tesla and nevada pakinora and mexico czech republic and here in cornwall with this lithium micro granite so the first stage of expiration is we need to drill some diamond holes to see what's in the ground not just the surface but deep underground so these holes are about 200 to 300 meters each a diamond rig produces draw core which looks like this and it does two things we can crush it down and get an analytical assay on the lithium content but also it's useful for logging it what's the difference between the lithium that you get here in cornwall and the lithium there is in australia the lithium in australia is about twice the grade to what we see here but in australia the seams about three to six meters thick well here we get 120 meters of continuous mineralization wow so each of these cores was joined on top of each other to the depths of a hundred bucks three meters so we're going down the hall this way and as you can see this is continuous mineralization all the way down the hull so to work out if this rock contains enough lithium worth mining they need to send the rocks off for analysis and before that their geologist needs to get the mica out so this is a lithium mica pegmatite actually with very coarse lithium mica flakes in it actually with sieving it we should get some of these microflakes to separate this is a small operation at the moment because they're still trying to find the best place to put the mine by seeing which drill holes contain the most lithium this is prospecting at the very edge the modern day equivalent of prospectors at the american frontier hacking at rocks with pickaxes and panning for gold in rivers you can see the quite coarse microcrystals in there still and if you've got mica is there definitely lithium in there or is it possible that you can get mica without lithium mica is a very common mineral so um it's very important to be able to recognize which ones have lithium and which ones don't so the crushed minerals from each core are bagged separately and sent off to the lab the results will show which location yielded the most lithium at which point they know that they've struck gold well lithium so the data that we've got at the moment is a good indication that we're on the right track what point will you say would we'll put the mind here do you think it'll be in the next year or the next five years or i think it will be in the next one or two years yeah so the lithium from cornwall may one day end up in the batteries inside electric cars and those lithium batteries might not just power your car they might also power your home lara's been looking at a scheme currently being trialled on some nissan electric vehicles which allows your car battery to be used as a mini power station [Music] meet david he lives near luton with his family and his electric car but unlike most electric car users his car battery acts as an energy store that can also power up his phone on the vehicle to grid trial it's completely changed the way i use my electricity i don't have to run things during the night now it all happens through the charger on his wall which converts the type of current used to either power a car or provide electricity at home each night david sets the amount of electricity he wants to buy from the grid to run his car the next morning you can set a schedule so for example i tell it that at six o'clock in the morning i need enough energy in my car to be able to get to work and back whatever's left over in the battery the next day when he gets home from work can be used in the house via the charger essentially i'm buying my energy quite cheaply it's about about 15 people kilowatt hour but when i'm exporting it from the vehicle i'm getting paid 31 people kilowatt hour dave is buying the energy to store in his car during off-peak times and sells it back during peak hours when the prices are higher this pilot scheme is run by the energy company ovo but only works on certain nissan evs at peak times when the kids come home from school and turn on their computers and plug their phones in and turn all the lights on it's not such a big deal and anything remaining after a day's use gets sold back to the grid overall david's made a profit of around 700 to 900 pounds in the last year although most customers on the scheme make closer to 300 on average and david's joined here by the other 319 on the ovo trial but how viable is this project in reality customers on the trial are getting the charges for free yet to buy one would set you back four grand so it all depends on the uk regulator and treasury as to how much you can actually sell this electricity for if you look at something like hintley point power station which might cost about 20 billion pounds if the sum of all the houses the 20 million houses in the country at the peak time can use this technology and come off the grid we might offset building another nuclear power station so then it becomes the simple sounds of is it worth giving people enough incentive to offset building a nuclear power station but it's only going to work for those who have off street parking and even for those who do well your electrical system needs to be up to dealing with it but for customers like david who are on the trial there's an appeal of being both green and economical i think it's terrible that ninety percent of the time ninety percent of vehicles are sitting doing nothing so the benefit with having electric vehicles is you've got a huge energy storage device sitting on your drive you've invested all that money in a car why not use it more of the time rather than having it sitting doing nothing [Music] that was lara and that's it for our ev special on the road wow it's been an adventure back to the sofa next week still if you'd like to get in touch with us in the meantime you can we live on youtube facebook instagram and twitter at bbc click thanks for watching and we'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 67,294

Rating: 4.8016529 out of 5

Keywords: click;, bbc, bbc click, bbc world, bbc news, tech, technology, science, energy, musk, tesla, climate, sustainable, co2, car, ev, electric, battery, lithium, bmw, truck, photo, camera, huawei, google, facebook

Id: TOdMczkkjTU

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020