New Toyota Hiace van to be released mid year

Select to expand quote

WindmanV said..
H-m-m-m-m,

In the case of the new HiAce, the best advertised fuel consumption for the small diesel is 7.5L/100 km, whilst that for the petrol engine is 12.0L/100 km.

Even if the difference is that much the petrol v6 is $4000 cheaper. An extra 5 litres per 100km = $7.50 = $750 per 10K. Be 50,000km before you recoup fuel costs going diesel. And with 50.000km on the clock your diesel will be emitting all sorts of carcinogenic crap, Go petrol.
www.toyota.com.au/hiace/prices



We got the current spate of diesels due to a ,miscalculation in the 1997 Kyoto protocol.


www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/22/the-rise-diesel-in-europe-impact-on-health-pollution


"Following the signing of the Kyoto protocol climate change agreement in 1997, most rich countries were legally obliged to reduce CO2 emissions by an average of 8% over 15 years."


"Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars," said Martin Williams, professor of air quality research at King's College London since 2010, and former head of the government's air quality science unit.

"The [emission] tests were simply not stringent enough. They were devised by a UN committee based in Geneva called the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, which was dominated by people from the car industry."

Select to expand quote

Mr Milk said..

kato said..

Mr Milk said..
What range could you get if you converted LWB to electric and covered the whole cargo floor with batteries?

That's my idea

Is this what you've been building?
www.sea-electric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Seadrive-70.pdf

I just rang them up to check the price...$84 000.

A bit big and the range is a bit short. Very early days for my project . Budget of about 30 k

LPG! Now you have got me started!

Our Government, in it's wisdom. allows companies to export billions of Litres of LNG overseas for as little as a cent or two a litre. That is the most shocking criminal exploitation I have ever heard of. Then they say we don't have enough gas for domestic use, so we must Frack our land and ruin our most precious water resources to get more for domestic use, and so another multinational company can charge us exorbitant amounts for destorying our agricultural land and potential.

We should have reserved a big chunk of that NG for domestic use and changed to running most of our road fleet on LPG 30 years ago to rid us of reliance on imported petrol. Natural Gas is readily converted to LPG, but many vehicles can be converted to run on NG directly from the domestic supply.

Of course, there are many vested interestes that don't like that idea, including any governments addicted to Fuel excise.
Unfortunately, the window for converting to LPG has well and truly passed us by due to Government incompetence. And this just when liquid LPG fuel injection technology for cars has started to mature (catch up with efficiency gains made by injected petrol cars).

A change to electric powered cars is going to rely on a serious commitment from governments for enabling legislation and incentives for the consumer and industry. But is is hard to see any govenment that is addicted to fuel tax wanting to rush into it.

I am pretty sure electric will happen anyhow, but it will be very slow and be driven by outside forces, overseas legislation and industry, and Australia will be severely disadvantaged in the long term, as usual, with no domestic industry. We will again be hostage to overseas interests and developments.

I see a company is trying to gear up to build electric cars in Australia. Unfortunately, they won't succeed without a lot of government driven incentives and investment. The rules of mass production (huge volume = low costs) still applies too, like it did with Holden/Ford/Toyota. To simplify, if it costs $100,000,000 to build a factory to produce cars, and you build 1000 cars, the capital cost for each car is $100,000, before labout and materials costs. But if you can build 1,000,000 cars, the capital cost is $100 dollars per car. That is purly and simply, why the Australian car industry died and has almost nothing to do with Australian Labour costs. We could not make and sell enough cars for them to be cheap enough to compete, simple!.

We need visionary government with long term commitment to Australia's best interests, not short term personal and political gain.
Unfortunately, such a government is a Unicorn.

Meanwhile, I will continue to travel the land in my 18 year old 'Bitsaremissin' petrol van with 485,000Km on the clock that costs me nothing in depreciation, but only normal running costs, and sucks up 13-14L of petrol every 100Km. And there is still no economic incentive for me to change it to run on LPG or buy into electric.

Select to expand quote

Mark _australia said..
The problem with electric is our big wide land.
Saw a blokes calculations for the requirement for charging, based on how many cars travel a major route from perth to Albany - about 400km. At the petrol station along the way it will need 85 charging bays. Anyone in the group of rocket scientists at the Govt thought about that when they said WA must be 30% electric in a few years?

And again, I am yet to see any of the greenies pushing electric actually do the real sums = to generate the power needed how much emissions? It can't all be solar wind and wave. Then, the cost of mining the flash minerals needed for ulta hi cap batteries and ultra efficient electric motors.
Its all very emporer's new clothes at the moment

Arrr Mark you just don't get it . almost all the major car makers have a plan to get out of ICE . Some very soon others by 2040. Australia doesn't make any ICE cars anymore but is making a few electric ones.
Yes it's not perfect but neither was the car in the 1900 and fuel was rare and hard to find. Btw I have done the sums and it works out cheaper to go electric.
Embrace the future

Select to expand quote

Ian K said..
When I was a boy our annual 2 week Xmas expedition was an hour and a half drive. When I got a car the Ballarine peninsular was a weekend trip away. Later on, as a Canberra based windsurfer, a day trip was 2,5 hrs each way!
It's become ridiculous. Maybe I'll have lived through the age where excessive mobility came and went.

Future historians will say "That was bizarre...but it didn't last long "

Yeah. It seemed a bit strange to me. When I was growing up, having 1 car was a pretty big thing, at least for my family. Going away was an expensive thing and we rarely did it.

Fast forward 20 years and it seemed like everyone had a good car, not just some junker, and driving a long way was not that big a deal.

My theory for some of this at least is the difference in cars. I grew up with ford escorts, cortinas, geminis, toranas, and all those era cars. I drove an escort for a while, and while it was fast and okay on fuel, it wasn't exactly comfortable.

I bought an early VN commodore that had huge Kms on it at the time, and it was like chalk and cheese. The commodore was refined (in comparison), good on fuel, powerful, quiet, and sat confortably on the road. Trips that seemed like a marathon in the past with the escort became a stroll in the park with the commodore.

Now, every car is at least as good, so traveling is not such a big deal.

Select to expand quote

Mark _australia said..
The problem with electric is our big wide land.
Saw a blokes calculations for the requirement for charging, based on how many cars travel a major route from perth to Albany - about 400km. At the petrol station along the way it will need 85 charging bays. Anyone in the group of rocket scientists at the Govt thought about that when they said WA must be 30% electric in a few years?

So why not simply tow a battery trailer on long trips? Swap it for a fully charged one after a few hundred Ks. Be just as fast as filling up with petrol.
There was a company started up in Israel a few years back that folded pretty rapidly whose model was to swap the whole battery pack in and out of cars when they needed a recharge. Seems a complicated way to do things, but using a trailer for long trips means that the car can get away with a shorter range for around town, so slightly lighter and cheaper.

So the batteries power the van or the vehicle towing it as well?

So, having little to do today, I thought I'd just see what other vans were available and found some very good new vehicle offers. The one that jumped out was the Mercedes 111 CDI SWB. Comparing vans with near-equal load volumes:

2019 HiAce, diesel, 130 kW/450 Nm, 7.5L/100 km, 6 speed manual, 6.0 cub. m. load volume, on-road price $46040. Petrol engine,
207 kW/351 Nm, on-road price is $42443. Service intervals on the HiAce are 6 mths/10,000 km.

Mercedes 111 CDI SWB, diesel, 84 kW/270 Nm, 7.2L/100km, 6 speed manual, 5.8 cub. m. load volume, ESTIMATED on-road price $41422. Service intervals on the MB are 12 mths/25,000 km.

Could not get a true on-road price over the phone from an MB dealer for the 111 CDI, so I took the on-road cost from a current offer new MB311 CDI and worked backwards to its RRP, then applied the difference ($2982) to the MB 111. The actual delivery price may be even cheaper.

My van's engine is rated at 114 kW/305 Nm and it's over kill for the 5 boards and sails etc. that I carry, so the MB, even with the lower-power engine, will do the job.

Renault too, has special pricing on models at the moment that may be worth checking out.