In Monash University in Melbourne’s Engineering Garden stands a sobering monument: twisted fragments from the wreckage of the Westgate Bridge collapse in 1970, one of the world’s worst bridge collapses. The tortured chunks of metal are meant to remind engineering students of the devastating consequences if they screw up.
A great many politicians and activists could benefit from the same reminder. The same people who witter about “the precautionary principle” when they’re trying to stop a mining development, throw caution to the winds when it comes to their green-left monomanias.
It’s all very easy to gaily skip off down the primrose path of forcing everyone to adopt electric cars. Much harder to do the hard thinking about what all the consequences will be.
Has any green-left politician or activist given the slightest thought to anything so mundane as how carparks will cope with widespread EV use?
Multi-storey and underground car parks could collapse under the weight of electric vehicles, engineers have warned.
Your average climate activist, having never built anything more complicated than an IKEA lamp in their lives (if that), is no doubt gawping in puzzled astonishment at the very thought.
Sure, carparks are built to accommodate the weight of cars — normal cars. But the simple issue is that EVs are heavy. Very heavy.
Electric cars, which are roughly twice as heavy as standard models, could cause ‘catastrophic’ damage, according to the British Parking Association (BPA), which wants local authorities to conduct urgent structural surveys.
Most of the nation’s 6,000 multi-storey and underground facilities were built according to guidance based on the weight of popular cars of 1976, including the Mk 3 Ford Cortina.
But even a run-of-the-mill Tesla Model 3 is half as heavy again as a Cortina. That may not sound much, but pile enough of them into a carpark and you’ve suddenly got a structure groaning under 50% more weight than it was designed for. Suffice to say that 50% tolerance is not a factor in most structures.
Structural engineer Chris Whapples, a member of the BPA which represents car-park owners, said: ‘If a vehicle is heavier than the car park was originally designed for, the effects could be catastrophic. We’ve not had an incident yet, but I suspect it is only a matter of time.
‘We have recommended that a loading check is performed on all older car parks. And the industry is responding.’
At the heart of the issue is the component that is at the heart of so much that is wrong with EVs: the battery.
Electric vehicles are heavier predominantly because of the batteries used to power them, and the reinforced framework and suspension needed to accommodate them.
‘All the internal components make these batteries very, very heavy,’ said Mr Whapples.
‘Nowadays, the battery forms the underfloor of most EVs. It’s contained over virtually the entire footprint of the vehicle, from axle to axle’ […]
But Mr Whapples said that the accumulating risks to infrastructure like car parks and bridges remain unacknowledged.
‘When you start to see the weights of the vehicles that are coming out of the factories, you start to question whether existing standards are adequate,’ he added.
The Institute of Structural Engineers is set to update its design recommendations for multi-storey and underground car parks in January, to recommend larger parking bays and an ability to withstand increased loads.
Daily Mail
At the end of the day, those upgraded design recommendations translate to one thing: money. Put simply, it’s going to cost a lot more to build EV-proof carparks. Strengthening old carparks to cope will likely cost even more.
Has any politician, activist or green trougher run the numbers on this? Do they even want to?
Of course not. Because, just like the sky-high costs of rebuilding grids to cope with unreliable renewables, and the costs, both financial and environmental, of mining and manufacturing batteries at all scales, the Climate Cult prefer not to tell the truth.
Because the truth is that renewables are delivering very little bang for a whole lot of bucks.
Another problem the Climate Cultists don’t want to talk about is that, as electric SUVs enter the market, their weight may well exceed the weight limits of a conventional licence.
