Weird question time..

My Vogue has an off brand LPG system fitted, offbrand meaning i don't know who made it..

Of course when i come to put the RR on the road in a few yrs i will have the system overhauled.

Will LPG be in your opinions the next best fuel for our thirsty V8s when Electric cars take over?

There doesn't seem to be any hate towards LPG at the moment.

It's apparently a very clean fuel.

Also what do you think will happen to service stations when the number of petrol and diesel cars start to drop?

Will there be dedicated LPG stations i wonder?

H

I doubt very much if the electric cars take off like they think they will, you’ve got limited mileage, can it tow a 3 ton trailer ?
If anything lpg should of been promoted more than the few cars that are dual fuel

Should be simple enough to work out what LPG system you have by looking at the markings on the ECU. Even if the label has fallen off if you find something like AEB2568 engraved on it, you are 80% on the way to identifying it. A picture of the switch and injectors will tell you the rest. As far as filling stations are concerned, While BP and Tesco removed their pumps, Shell supply (and actively promote) LPG along with some Texaco, Jet and Esso stations and there is still the Flogas and Calor depots too. It'll be a case of supply and demand, those that have removed pumps have done it because they didn't sell enough. In the case of BP mainly because they were too damned expensive, charging up to 15 a litre more than other stations. According to DVLA there are around 150,000 LPG fuelled vehicles on the road but that is only the figure they have listed as dual fuel on the V5. Of the 5 LPG powered vehicles I've owned, only 1 was shown on the V5 as dual fuel, the others were simply shown as petrol. So in theory that means there's nearer 600,000 of them needing to fill up somewhere.

I'm with Chris in thinking electric cars will never take over. Unless there is a dramatic breakthrough in battery technology they don't have the range to do a decent journey. Sooner or later, if they are taken up as fast as some would hope they will be, the electricity generation and distribution infrastructure will collapse when it can't cope with the demand. As a town car, a shopping trolley, then they probably have their place but not as a replacement for the average family car. Think, taking the kids to the south of France or Italy for a holiday and having to stop every 3 hours to charge the bloody thing up. Admittedly I have to stop every 200 miles to fill up with LPG but that takes what, 10 minutes? 15 if I have a coffee while I'm stopped, not the hours it'll take to recharge the batteries on a Tesla. LPG is cleaner and that is recognised by some but not the shortsighted, ignorant twats we have making the decisions in this country.

France has introduced a Clean Air vignette system in Paris, Lyon and Grenoble. You pay your 4.10 Euros for a sticker that you display on your windscreen. They are numbered from 0 to 5, 0 being electric and hybrid, 1 and 2 being low polluting petrol (Euro 5 and 6), 3 being Euro 3 and 4 petrol and Euro 6 diesel and 4 and 5 being older, Euro 4 and 5 diesel. On days when pollution levels are high, only classes 0-3 are allowed in the towns. As I regularly drive into or through Paris and Lyon, I applied for a vignette for my P38. As a GEMS V8 is Euro 3, I expected to get a class 3 but because I declared that it is running on LPG, I got a class 1, only one step more polluting than an electric or hybrid. Interestingly, as you can only drive in these areas if you have a vignette, it has effectively banned all diesels made to Euro 3, so anything built before 2000 can no longer enter, even when there are no other restrictions.

Instead, here London (which is due to be enlarged next year) has and Manchester are talking about a congestion charge. Irrespective of what fuel you use and how much pollution a vehicle generates, you pay the charge. I have to drive into London 2 or 3 times a week to work and the traffic in London isn't Aunt Doris going to have a look at St Paul's Cathedral, it's people that have no other choice, the tradesmen that need the tools in their van and the trucks delivering to the shops and construction sites. But rather than it being a charge to cut congestion and improve the air quality, it's simply a money making scheme when me in my works provided Euro 6 Renault van pays the same as the shitty E reg Transit pickup I followed today belching out clouds of black smoke. But, it's always been the same, decisions are made as a knee jerk reaction to something which then proves to be not such a good idea after all. Catalytic converters were introduced to reduce harmful emissions by turning them into nice, harmless CO2 but then research showed that CO2 was a greenhouse gas so wasn't such a good idea after all. Then diesel was a good thing because it produced less CO2 but now they are finally coming round to realise that they aren't such a good idea either.

Rant over......

I think eventually there will be a division between electric cars in the cities and hybrids in rural areas. How that will affect the second hand market will be interesting to see...
As for LPG, it won't be going away as a fuel - it just won't necessarily be available from garage forecourts. You might end up with a big orange cylinder in the boot!

Is there scope for having an LPG tank at home? (Like the calor gas ones that some folk have).

LPG isn't something I'm into for my car as I don't do enough miles to justify the cost but if you are, this might be worth looking at (assuming you have the space and the economics stack up). I appreciate that doesn't help if you are away from home but it does reduce overall reliance on petrol.

Technically yes its possible.

Its not financially sensible though - You need a suitable electricity supply for the pump, a Pump, somewhere to put the tank, and even more of a problem is someone willing to fill it at a sensible price (and thats before you get into buying the tank, and getting the paperwork/certification of it to get them to fill it as well).

Trouble with the orange cylinder route is they just don't hold enough, and the gas inside them is more expensive per kg than the pump variety as well. Thats before you get into the road duty side of discussions as well.

StrangeRover wrote:

Also what do you think will happen to service stations when the number of petrol and diesel cars start to drop?

Will there be dedicated LPG stations i wonder?

H

And there are a few dedicated autogas stations - some around Birmingham only do autogas, Some of the convertors still about have a pump as well on site, which is available for customers. Some of those sites are old service stations that used to retail petrol/Diesel but no longer do.

oilmagnet477 wrote:

Is there scope for having an LPG tank at home? (Like the calor gas ones that some folk have).

Not like the Calor tanks but the same as. Homes without mains gas have two main choices for heating, oil or LPG. The LPG supplied is Propane, the exact same thing as supplied as Autogas at filling stations. The only difference is that the tanks supply vapour from a top outlet but to run your car you need a bottom feed to draw off liquid and a pump to fill the tank in the car. As the bulk gas you buy doesn't have road fuel duty applied to the price, you have to keep records of how much you have used for a car and pay the relevant duty to HMRC. It works out slightly cheaper than buying it at the pump but the initial outlay isn't cheap, you'd be looking at no change out of £2k for a tank with top and bottom outlets. I know of one taxi company running all LPG powered cars based out in the sticks and rather than paying filling station prices they have their own tank for filling the cars.

I can't see the number of filling stations dropping in the foreseeable future in all honesty. Some have gone but that just means that those left are selling more. Compared with the profit they make on petrol and diesel (a couple of pence a litre) there's a lot more in LPG. One of my local filling stations were selling LPG at 65.9p a litre, not one of the cheapest but open 24 hours and on a main road so quite popular. They are supplied by Flogas who are only open office hours but at the time were selling at 50.5p a litre. Now I can't see a filling station paying the same price as Joe Public but even if they were, that's still 15.4p per litre profit and when people tend to fill the tank that's £9.24 profit on a 60 litre fill. A lot more than they'll make on petrol or diesel.

I'm not sure range is a real argument anymore. On LPG my range is somewhere between 130 miles and 190 miles, depending on my mix of commute and motorway driving. I'm having to fill up every few days.

Plenty of electric cars can top that. The Tesla Model X claims a range of 250-350 miles (closest match to a Range Rover I could think of).

I'm also finding availability to be bothersome. I have a filling station at the end of my road but it's only open between 9 and 5, when I'm at work, and not open at all on Sundays. I pass a BP station on my TO work that offers LPG at over 70ppl but it's not accessible on my way home. If traffic is bad in the mornings I quite often don't have time to stop and fill up.

I can definitely see the appeal of electric cars. Chargeable at home, starting to get acceptable range, performance seems to be very good. The only downsides I can see are the lack of noise and the fact you can I only charge them if you have a driveway/garage.

I don't think they'll ever take off the standard method of powering cars until they can figure how to charge a car parked in the street.

RutlandRover wrote:

I'm not sure range is a real argument anymore. On LPG my range is somewhere between 130 miles and 190 miles

But you also have a petrol tank and the option to run on that at the flick of a switch, an option an electric car doesn't have. LPG availability varies depending on where in the country you are (Isn't there a Morrison's near where you live these days?). I've got 6 stations in easy reach, 4 within 4 miles and two more the other side of town, but others aren't so lucky I know. So far, by using www.filllpg.co.uk, I've not been on one journey when I've had to resort to running on petrol no matter where in the country I've been. OK, so some places are expensive, or more expensive that others (of my 6, prices vary between 54 and 73p per litre), but still considerably cheaper than petrol.

Unlike an electric car, refuelling takes no longer than filling with petrol too. A 10 minute stop rather than 75 minutes for a full charge from a Tesla Supercharger point, 9.5 hours if you've had a 3 phase supply installed at home so you can use one of their 22kWh chargers but to fully charge from a standard 13A supply takes the best part of 2 days!! (according to Tesla themselves). Personally I'd rather stop for 10 minutes every couple of hundred miles than considerably longer for hardly any further range (Tesla claim 351 miles for the Model X but the American EPA put it at 301 in real life).

6 stations with lpg, if only I was that lucky, lol.
As you know, I’ve got the choice of 1

I do find the price of LPG down here constantly going up... rarely if ever does it come down. I currently have the choice of two places at 70ppl, and one at 67ppl.

I suppose with the way petrol keeps going up, it should always be cheaper... but its still annoying. If it does start to creep up without petrol going up, in a few years I'm not sure I'd be able to warrant daily driving mine.

55p/pl in Anglesey - Nth Wales.
Generally 1/2 price of petrol @ Texaxo in Bangor....................65p (ish)

I was discounting the ability to run on petrol as the initial premise was what would it be like if petrol and diesel went away, leaving electric as the norm and LPG as the second option.

If my only options were LPG or electric (and I could afford an electric car) I think I'd prefer electric, based on the range I get on LPG and current limited availability.

However, if availability increased as petrol died off my issues with range would be mitigated.

If I had the option of refueling at home (like recharging an electric car) I'd have no issues with range at all.

Nearest Morrisons to me is nearly 6 miles away, in the centre of Leicester. Not convenient unless we're actually going to Leicester for some other reason. Traffic in and out of the city centre is almost always heavy.

The next nearest is just over 6 miles away in a direction I don't travel in for work or any other reason.

There's a Morrisons 5-10 minutes off my evening commute (but not my morning one) that I try to get to as often as possible as it sells LPG at 53ppl.

I know these sound like relatively minor inconvenienced but I'm responsible for taking the baby to nursery and picking him up in the evening. This gives me inflexible times that I have to be in certain places and limits my ability to detour. In contrast, I pass by several regular petrol stations that I don't have to detour to but don't offer LPG.

I agree that a two day charge is unacceptable. However, the 9.5 hour charge is an irrelevance. You'd do it over night when you're not driving the car anyway. The number of people that would be driving over 300 miles in a single trip every day in a passenger vehicle would be so tiny that I don't think it would be a wide spread issue.

I accept that it only works if you have a suitable power system installed but once these things become widespread I don't see why you wouldn't have one. The prices will come down as they get more widespread. As I said above though, it only works if you have a driveway or garahe. - which is very limiting.

Haulage and public transport probably wouldn't cope with that range and charge time but then I doubt they'd run the same size batteries as a passenger vehicle. They'd have scaled up batteries in the same way they have far larger fuel tanks. It would push the charge time up but by the time we get to that level of electrification there will probably be huge advancements in charging systems too.

Thinking about it, we used to have buses that ran on LPG in Southampton, but they seemed to disappear not long after introduction.

Not entirely sure why... and now we have the supposedly worst-thing-on-the-road diesels, with older models having DEF and DPF kit retrofitted etc currently. I'd love to know why LPG stopped being a viable option.

More likely it was LNG for buses? That tends to be the preferred option for heavier vehicle, though CNG also possible as its used elsewhere.

Just means its natural gas rather than Propane, but even more limited options for where you can fill up here (Bus operator would have their own facility so not an issue for them).

I reckon there would have to be some major advances in battery tech and upgrades to electrical infrastructure before electric vehicles could become what many people believe they well soon become. Recent advances in batteries haven't been due to new types of tech, they've been due to how the batteries are packaged. EV's previously used batteries made of pencil cells (lots of empty space between them), recently they've changed to batteries without the empty space. They hype the extra capacity as 'due to advances in tech' when really they just improved the packaging... so now with packaging improved to as good as can be any future advances will have to come from real improvements in tech/chemistry, i.e. a new type of battery invention - If we are to see such considerable improvements we may find the military don't need nuclear reactors on subs anymore and Nasa don't need to use hydrogen fuel cells. Seems a long way off to me, and even then there's the question of electricity generation... doesn't seem much point in generating electricity from burning fossil fuel to charge EV batteries. EVs are currently a small niche, while they're still a niche we won't see any of the problems they will bring if/when they become much more common (infrastructure / generation / lifespan of batteries / raw materials to build them).

Sloth wrote:

Thinking about it, we used to have buses that ran on LPG in Southampton, but they seemed to disappear not long after introduction.

Not entirely sure why... and now we have the supposedly worst-thing-on-the-road diesels, with older models having DEF and DPF kit retrofitted etc currently. I'd love to know why LPG stopped being a viable option.

I haven't researched what type of buses ran on LPG in Southampton... Were they 100% LPG or diesel with LPG split fuelling? Some large engines use the same bottom end regardless of whether the engine runs on petrol, LPG or diesel but the cylinder heads are different for petrol and LPG compared to diesel (swap an engine between petrol/diesel fuel by swapping the cylinder heads). Wondering if a new range of bus were to be introduced it could have an engine which no longer allows conversion to petrol/LPG as easily as swapping cylinder heads (with associated engine management changes) / or LPG could be fitted to clean up emissions of a bus with an older type diesel engine (maybe without a DPF) but those in charge thought not necessary on a newer diesel engine'd model.
Edit - Agreed with Bri, I nearly mentioned CNG/LNG might have been the case as opposed to LPG.

I have a feeling they might have actually been CNG. But still - they just sort of disappeared.

EV are the future because you can't retrofit electric drive to existing cars. There's no profit (and no tax) in extending the life of existing vehicles. The reduction of pollution always involves the sale of new vehicles. Euro 1-6 is a study in planned obsolescence. Forgive my cynicism but I can't imagine anything less likely to make it as a government policy than "No, keep the car you have. We'll reduce the emmissions by 20% by giving Simon £1500"
Quite apart from the fact that there are very few LPG fitters I'd trust with my vehicle.

What would I give to know the real reason that manufacturers gave up on factory fitted LPG. I'm pretty sure they saw that legitimising LPG only ate into their potential for sales of NEW! CLEAN! cars. The fact that most of them were diesel and were more filthy then the petrol cars they replaced just proves that it's a cynical exercise in flogging shit to the sheeple.

Morat wrote:

EV are the future because you can't retrofit electric drive to existing cars. There's no profit (and no tax) in extending the life of existing vehicles. The reduction of pollution always involves the sale of new vehicles. Euro 1-6 is a study in planned obsolescence. Forgive my cynicism but I can't imagine anything less likely to make it as a government policy than "No, keep the car you have. We'll reduce the emmissions by 20% by giving Simon £1500"
Quite apart from the fact that there are very few LPG fitters I'd trust with my vehicle.

What would I give to know the real reason that manufacturers gave up on factory fitted LPG. I'm pretty sure they saw that legitimising LPG only ate into their potential for sales of NEW! CLEAN! cars. The fact that most of them were diesel and were more filthy then the petrol cars they replaced just proves that it's a cynical exercise in flogging shit to the sheeple.

"Factory fitted systems" are merely systems fitted by an approved third party working with the manufacturer (or were at the time anyway). Any number of reasons, but I'd suspect the main one is having to deal with broken systems at a later point (an awful lot of BS appeared to go around this - one of my neighbours used to work in a Rover dealership doing MOTs, and he said they were told not to touch any of their converted car's lpg system unless they were Corgi registered - which would be irrelevant anyway, but seems fairly typical of the misinformation spread about by them). I'd suspect also having to deal with the customers with the cars in question (Ford being a good example here - you can buy the replacement injectors but only with the inlet manifold, at approx £1400) and problems either caused by ham fisted technicians or problems they didn't properly understand didn't help.

Also the road tax system here doesn't really make sense on petrol cars post 2001 - The 2001 Galaxy I've got costs £315 for a year (2.3 petrol). The same vehicle produced after 2006 would be £540. That alone is obviously enough for some people to be put off of a petrol version (and the discount is only £10 for having it on LPG, not in proportion to the amount of reduced emissions it actually produces having been converted).