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Electric Car Drag Racing
rumba writes, "The National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) exists to increase public awareness of electric vehicle (EV) performance and to encourage through competition, advances in electric vehicle technology. This organization's first big event of the year is coming up next weekend. Anybody in the Phoenix Area going to this? There's no slots on these babies. Still, I'd hate to see the utility bill."
Great points, but missing something: traffic.
I live in Minnesota, and drive 20 miles to work. (Lets assume that works provides a recharging station so I have a full charge when I leave) Take a cold winter morning, -25, with a coule traffic accidents. It now takes not 30 minutes to get to work, but 75. Since the tempature is so cold I expect the heater to be running the entire time. The electric car does not have the range I need already, just running the heater on full.
Subsidized? You mean by the gas tax, and personal property tax on cars, and title and tag fees on cars, and (in some places) road tolls, and ticket revnues?
Or do you mean the Federal Highway "assistance" that the federal goverment likes to use to get "assistance" on unrelated issues from the states? (lots of funds are conditonal on parcipation in various drug programs, or other non-road related issues)
Thats one thery. Another is people don't like standing in the cold and rain to catch a bus. Another is that the busses and trains don't run all the time (i.e. people are afarid if they rely on the bus that if they have to stay late at work they won't be able to get home). As a former rider of busses and trains, I can say those were big downsides for me.
Intresting choice of analigy, since I bet the ratio of public transit systems to private cars and of mainframes to personal computers are allready pretty similar, yet you are arguing for more public transit (and fewer cars).
What's my answer? I don't really have one. I wouldn't be opposed to more directl linking the costs of cars to their operation, through say even higher fuel taxes, but only if the existing monies allready used to pay for the roads are given back. I'm not intrested in anything that makes cars more expensave without making something else less expensave.
I would also like to reduce the "zero emissions vechile" requirments a bit. Zero emissions really only has an eletric solution, and only because electric power lets you cheat by having the poultion gennerated elsewhere (nasty coal plants). Having a very low emissions standard would get you things that actually polute as little as an EV, and may have better range, or a better ride, or actually not be so dammed expensave.
But most of all, I would like to reduce goverment involvment, because they seem to fuck up everything the touch. Look at our public eductaion system and tell me otherwise. Or the highly regulated helthcare industry. Or compair the still regulated phone componies with the internet componies (or the current not-as-regulated phone componies with the highly regulated Bell System of the 1970s).
Survey says... BZZT! Nuclear plants continue to be engineered and built, just not in the US. Both Westinghouse and General Electric have been developing new reactors (search for CANDU). They're just not being built in your backyard.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
The "solar cells" used are optimized for light in the relatively far infrared - heat radiation. One of the nicest things about this method is that it can recover energy from waste heat which would otherwise be unusable. If only the cells weren't so expensive and made from such toxic materials...
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Wrong. Research in to learn-burn technology, petrol-electric hybrids, and petrol-powered fuel cells continues.
2. Research on electricity based transport is advancing rapidly . . .
I haven't heard of any major advances in battery technology in years. Yes, new electronics is helping, but power density and cost are as unfavourable now as they were ten years ago.
If America (and my home country Australia for that matter) are serious about reducing greenhouse emissions the only real choice is a carbon tax (and a substantial one). That might even things up and give alternative fuels (not to mention public transport) a chance.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Actually, if you have a charger that can use 110v, you can charge just about anywhere. A lot of people use the outlets intended for block warmers in the colder parts of the country. For commuting, it's usually not too dificult to get an employer to let you charge there, if necessary.
But for travelling across country, it's not so much the charging facilities as it is the time needed to charge. You go 50-100 miles, then you have to stop and charge for a few hours. Not too practical, but it forces you to really see the country.
Of course, your best bet for long drives is a rental car.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Actually, as I understand it, acceleration is one of the strengths of EV's. You have instant torgue -- no revving up. But, keep in mind that I'm not much into the racing side of EV's; I want an electric Land Rover.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Therein lies the real advantage of public transit. I could drive to my main client (about 45 minutes) or ride the train (about an 1.5 hours.) But in a car, I have to drive. On the train, (electric, of course!) I can work, read e-mail, or even sleep. That hour and a half is worth a lot more to me than saving a couple of dollars a day (which I would end up paying for gas anyway.)
It comes down to do you want to have a small amount of unusable time, or more usable time?
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
An electric vehicle requires charging, and guess where most of that electricity comes from? Coal fired plants produce the bulk of electricity in north america... due to "green" resistance to nuclear power plants, most of the electricity is not generated in a clean fashion...which is worse, burning coal or gasoline? Probably coal, as it generally burns dirtier.
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Here in Los Angeles, our base Metro Rail system cost $ 3.46 billion for 4.4 miles of track and rolling stock, so I don't see $1 billion for a major freeway as terrible. If I recall correctly, that particular segment of road was one of the more expensive ones in the entire system because of the complex engineering involved.
The real bottom line is that people hate to wait for rail or bus transit, people hate it when they can't get seats, and people like the freedom cars give to travel when and where they want. Unfortunately, economic viability of public transit requires that you pack 'em in like sardines. Do I want to become a human sardine, or do I want to ride in my comfortable European luxury import?
I don't think cars are subsidized at all when the taxes paid by drivers are taken into consideration. In California, we pay a gas tax of about $ 0.30 a gallon - until the recent gas price spike, that was almost 1/3 of the total cost at the pump. I think we should expect gold-plated roads for that kind of money, but our government generally spends it elsewhere. Cars are a net contributer to government, not a net loss like public transport.
D
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I wonder if they have tried using thermal batteries. These will put out huge amounts of power over a short period of time. The military likes to use them to power the electrical systems in missiles. They have an integral pyrotechnic heat source that brings them up to a high internal temperature (over 350C) to melt the electrolyte.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...that are on the road now.
The Honda Insight is a 70 mpg gas/electric hybrid that has won the Sierra Club's Excellence in Environmental Engineering Award. Base model MSRP is $18,880. You can read Carpoint's review of the Insight here.
The Toyota Prius is a 66 mpg gas/electric hybrid that has received the United Nations Environmental Protection Award. It has been available in Japan for about two years now, and is scheduled to be released in the US sometime this year. Toyota's site doesn't currently list the MSRP, but it sold in Japan for about $16,500 USD. There is a review of the Prius at TopGear.
The motor industry is extremely interested in all forms of fuel economy
The motor industry is less interested in economy than they are in performance, or building the biggest SUV they can. Why? There is a lot more profit in building vehicles like that than there is in building the low-end cars that get good fuel economy.
high MPG sells cars
You must be from Europe. Almost nobody thinks that way in the US. The only people in the US who buy the high MPG cars like the Geo Metro are people who are just too poor to buy a decent car. All of those cars are tiny, uncomfortable, dangerously underpowered rolling deathtraps.
5.0? Big? Big doesn't start until over 7 liters. And all but the last generation RX7's weren't really that impressive performers for drag racing (no torque at low RPMs). And those didn't compare that favorably in price/performance (they were priced in the range of Vettes). Also the rotary has always had durability problems and its fuel consumption per liter displacement is pretty attrocious.
There is a reason the rotary engine never took off, even after the Wankel patents expired. Even Mazda has given up on it.
Most of the cheap low end cars that are sold over here which get the high MPG don't offer any of the ABS or other refinements of the last 20 years. Why? Because they are cheap, low end cars that the auto makers don't want to put the good stuff into, precisely because they aren't that profitable.
The micro cars aren't just in competition for safety against old big cars of 20 years ago anyway, they also have to compete against the mid size and larger cars of today and against the road monster SUVs. No amount of ABS brakes or airbags are going to negate the fact that if a car like a Metro gets hit by a 6000 pound SUV (let alone a semi trailer rig) doing 65 miles an hour, the Metro is going to look like it was a tin can crushed by a 200lb man's shoe.
Your argument still does nothing against the fact that the high MPG cars are dangerously underpowered either. My wife used to have a Ford Festiva with a dinky littly 1.2L four cylinder engine and a 5-speed manual transmission. On a short freeway onramp, no matter how hard you pounded the thing through the gears there was no way you could get it up much above 45 MPH to merge into traffic. Dangerous, and scary as hell when you have 18-wheelers bearing down in your rear view mirror. It is my opinion that any car that can't get up to 65 by the end of one of those ramps without being a major ordeal is dangerously underpowered and should be banned.
You also completely ignore the fact that most people don't want something like a Metro because they are just too small and uncomfortable for most people here in the US. Automakers don't really have to engage in that much of a FUD campaign to sell people on larger cars. That is what people want, and has been since before there really were any small cars. The American love affair with the big car dates back to the 1930s when there was no such thing as an econobox (the Model T was dead by then) or SUVs either.
Do you have a reference to the article you mention? I'd be curious as to which model and year Ferrari and Vette they are using in their comparisons and what the actual performance specs on the electric car you mention are. Most of the Ferrari's I've seen have been published with numbers in the 13-14 second range, which is not bad for a production car, especially one that is intended more for road racing than drag racing, but not really that impressive when you consider it is the same ballpark that a $20k Firebird Formula V8 is. 99% of the cars on the road are absolutely horrible 1/4 mile performers (look at the number of minivans, SUVs and econoboxes on the roads), that doesn't make a Ferrari or Vette outstanding 1/4 mile performers.
If they wanted to pick a car for example that was a reasonable comparison based on price, they might have picked the Dodge Viper, for example. It will toast either the current C6 Vette (which is a much less expensive car) or a Ferrari (which is a lot more expensive) in either the 1/8 or 1/4 mile. I'm not really a huge Viper fan personally (for that kind of money, I'd build a Cobra kit car with a 502 Chevy box motor and have money left over), but it is hard to argue with the numbers in this case.
You apparently are picking purposely bad internal combustion cars at the 1/4 mile. Neither a Vette, nor a Ferarri (and you don't specify year or model either) are particularly stellar performers in 1/4 mile and even less so in 1/8 mile drag racing. Both of these cars are more orriented for handling and road racing, especially the Ferarri. Line the specially built electric vehicle up against a internal combustion vehicle that is built for drag racing, and the story will likely be significantly different. Let alone that the electric car probably costs several times as much to build.
O.K., "Even Mazda U.S. has given up on it.". The article you reference mentions that those cars will be built only for sale in Japan.
Batteries are usually designed with the possibility of recycling. That's why used car batteries (the regular kind) don't present an environmental hazard in disposal; auto garages already know what to do with them.
As for cars blowing up, remember, real life isn't like you see in the movies. It doesn't happen that often! Nowhere near enough to present an environmental issue.
The real environmental hit of electric cars are the power plants, which have to work harder to feed them when they're plugged in. So if your city is powered by a coal-fired plant, and everyone gets an electric car, the air ain't getting any cleaner.
But the advantage, then, is that-- in programmer's parlance-- the power source has been abstracted away from the car engine. So you can change the power source's implementation (say, from coal energy to wind energy) without breaking the rest of the system. Unlike the internal combustion engine, where the power source (gasoline) and application logic (engine) are so closely intertwined that it's impossible to port to any other architecture.
Methinks, however, even better than electric power for transportation is hydrogen power. You don't need super-high-tech batteries to power it, just armored fuel tanks, and an efficient way of producing the stuff. The exhaust products are (theoretically) just CO2+H20. (IIRC, however, since some nitrous oxides inevitably get into the air intake, you do get some icky exhaust hydrocarbons too, but nothing overwhelming)
iSKUNK!
Cool stuff this, but everyone seems to be caught up on the power density problems of batteries. Electric motors have efficiencies way beyond what ICE's (Internal Combustion Engines) can produce. The problem comes in feeding enough energy to the motor over a prolonged stretch of time.
This problem is pretty much moot if you consider fuel cells. Fuel cells come in a variety of types, but the most popular for vehicle applications run on Natural Gas or Methanol. Check out the efficiencies when compared to ICE's here.
These babies are the future. And if we go the methanol route, we can grow our own fuel stocks!
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Electric motors aren't that fantastic in cars, actually. Sure, they've got high torque at low revs: too much, actually. Most larger electric testbeds have to be managed VERY carefully to minimise this, or you spin your wheels rather embarrassingly every time you pull away, damaging your tyres in the process.
Battery energy density's pretty poor, too, while the energy tends to come from coal fuelled power stations which actually increases pollution. So your nice clean electric car's only serving to move the pollution away from the cities - NIMBY all over again.
Electric motors have a lot less moving parts than a conventional petrol engine, I'll agree, but have you come across orbital engines? Six or seven parts, only a couple of which move. Still more than an electric motor, I'll agree, but a more realistic proposition for cars, too.
If you want a practical alternative to petrol powered cars, it's likely to be either hydrogen fuelled combustion engines or fuel cells. Both are substantially better than electric cars for the environment and are relatively easy to slot into the existing infrastructure. Wait 10-15 years and they'll probably cost little more than current petrol vehicles of similar ability.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
My apologies, I must've got the names wrong.
Orbital engines may be a bad idea, but this was being promtoed a few months ago. It was an unconventional two-stroke where everything 'orbitted', hence my assumption it was an orbital.
This system could have combustion chambers of any type acheivable with conventional engines. With that few moving parts. Looks a VERY nice idea.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Say, something like the 24 hours of LeMans or Daytona. Max speed 100MPH (to make the results more practical to the average driver). He who drives farthest wins. This not only stresses battery endurance but charge/change time. Maybe allow each team only 2 sets of batteries (one in car, one charging).
Actually, electric cars would be considerably worse for the environment than our current IC engines. Remember, they're not zero-emitting, they're just remote-emitting, and that's after losing most tof the power generated to the hideous inefficiencies of the electric's systems.
I know some of you folks love to bash gasoline engines, and no, I don't think we'll use them forever myself - although I'm betting it's >50 years before we see a dent in thier dominance.
But you have to recognize that technology has improved the performance, efficiency, and cleanliness of gasoline engines by several orders of magnitude, while electrics remain steadfastly immune to technological progress. Remember that gasoline engines weren't given a ghost of a chance at the turn of the century (that would be the 1901 one) - *everyone* knew that steam and/or electric would trounce the stinking, noisy IC motors. But what happened is instructive to all students of technology: the gasoline engine, for all its faults, became the best option - to the point that its competition quit trying. This happened not because of a conspiracy by Detroit and the Oils, but because unlike other powerplants, the ungainly IC engine continues to respond well to technological attention, and seems to show no sign of slowing down its progress anytime soon. At tthe same time, we have only proven that electric cars are as unviable as ever, and that even spending ridiculously high sums on them results in vehicles that are still seriously sub-par compared to their gasoline eqiuvalents. Electric cars are scarcely more viable today than they were in 1920.
Today's gasoline engines are remarkably efficient and clean, with emissions that are effectively zero after the catalyst is warmed up. Today's running emissions would be off the bottom of the scale for cars of just twenty-five years ago. Further, efficency is now remarkable - Honda's new (normally aspirated!) S2000 roadster has a specific output better than many *race cars* of the 1960's!
And don't forget that we don't have excess electricity generating capacity out there burning a hole in our pocket, either. Most utilities are seriously encouraging conservation as a method of delaying the construction of new power plants, which is becoming horrendously expensive due to new environmental rules. Even if the electric car side of the equation were solved, it would likely be a very long time before electrics became economically viable as an alternative, since sharply increased demand would soon cause skyrocketing electric rates. We've gotten very, very good at producing, distributing, and using fossil fuels, and you don't replace that infrastructure overnight.
Oh, and don't forget that there is very little energy lost in transporting fossil fuels, but considerable loss even in the best high-voltage transmission lines we can make...
Electric isn't likely to be the answer anytime soon. (Pure electric, that is - hybrids may be sort of viable sometime soon, although they'll always cost more.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
You have to wonder how long these motors last. That smoke you see coming out the back? No... it's not just the tires. :)
:)
Obviously not designed to be an environmentally friendly demonstration, but it does raise awareness about electric motors.
Also... I'm wondering if they use special batteries in order to get that super-quick drain rate. And what gauge their wires are.
Well sir, you are an evil, evil man. Have you read your bible lately? It has many grievances with your way of thinking. You'd better read it, or the forces of heaven and hell will banish you to the land of ghosts and spirits. Why, it says so right in Revelations 13:13 - "Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast(RMS) rising up out of the sea, with 7 GNU Utilities and 10 Man Pages, and in his 10 Man Pages, 10 factual bits of information, and on his head a blasphemous name(RMS). And then he killed everyone...STOOPID"
Mud99
It doesn't matter if the green resistance to Nuclear power fades anymore, the damage is done. No new nuclear power plants have been initiated in the past few years, and with the length of time it takes to build one in the US, even if a major utility decided to build one tomorrow, it would likely take 20 years to get it operating. In another few years, there might not be any more engineers qualified to design these plants, as the current group retires. (My father is a nuclear engineer who designed power plants, a large number of his peers have already transferred into other areas of engineering, or retired.)
In this case, the Luddites won.
And that's only looking at direct costs. If you factor in indirect costs, such as traffic cops (I'm not even going to get into environmental costs), then yes, driving is heavily subsidized.
How many cars does your household have? If you're married I'd be willing to bet there are two.
:P
Most EV's today have a range of 120 miles on a full charge. If you can't get to work with that amount of juice you drive worse than my mother
You didn't quite balance the equation okay either, it's 2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O. 8-)
Also, you are still using a combustion, which has efficiencies limited by a thermodynamic Carnot cycle. If you took the hydrogen and pumped it into a FUEL CELL, the reaction is far more effective (theoratical limit is actually a 100%)
Fuel cells are already in use for power
generation, notable example is the space shuttle.
And, yes, abstracting the power source can mean more cleaner power generation methods (such as wind, tidal, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc).
-=- SiKnight
That's not surprising-- pour enough juice into a big motor and you have a very efficient, monster torque producer. All we need are super-efficient batteries now.
The problem with electric cars is making them accelerate without killing the battery life.
In a drag racer, you don't care how long the batteries last, you just want to draw as much current as you can without melting them. I doubt we'll see an electric vehicle running in Le Mans anytime soon.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
There's one big advantage to electric powered cars when looking at it from a Drag racing standpoint: full torque is available from 1 RPM. compared to the popular internal combustion engines for drag racing (V8 or turbo'd imports) this is an amazing advantage. A typical V8 will start producing useable torque by 1500-2000 RPM, and peak around 3000. Turbo'd cars (mainly seen in the import drags) are even worse. The torque curve there is dependant on the turbo being at full spool, so it's a slow build to a peak around 5000 RPM (generalizations, but good to make a point). This translates to wide ranges of the power band that are for all intents and purposes un-useable for the race. When you have a power supply that is at full torque from the moment you step on the accelerator, and holds that through the entire band, your biggest hurdle is in keeping the tires stuck to the ground. The hard part of translating this advantage to street vehicles is in the range these cars have. They have been designed to go a short distance at full power. It equates to the funny cars and rail-dragsters that only have a 5 gallon fuel cell, and it has to be re-filled after each 1/4 mile race. Having any engine run at maximum power generally makes for a very short range.
I've had the fortunate opportunity to experience some really effective subways in London, Japan (Tokyo area), Paris & Washington, DC.
The things I really liked about them, and which I consider necessary for any system which will be used & cost-effective:
1. They go everywhere. I could get to anywhere in those cities by walking a couple of blocks, with one or two transfers in between.
2. They were cheap (a buck or two at the most), and got cheaper the more I used them (volume discount/passes).
3. They were convenient. I could walk into any subway entrance & get tickets in any amount to any destination with either cash, ATM or credit card, within a minute or two.
4. They were frequent - in Tokyo, I never had to wait more than 2 minutes for any train. They arrived on time, to the second.
5. They all ran on raised platforms so that they were completely independent of the local traffic patterns, which really sucked in most of the high-density urban environments. I contrast this experience to the light rail stations running here in Portland, Oregon, which have to go through the stop lights just like all the other cars.
6. They had many overlapping local/express routes - so you could take the express routes to get quickly into the area you wanted to go, then switch to a local route to get dumped practically on the doorstop of your final destination.
The BIG problem that I saw, is that without the incredibly high population densities in these particular urban environments, NO ONE is going to be able to build self-sustaining mass transit.
These systems work because of a critical mass of people who are using them on a regular basis, paying good money & who need them available to survive.
As long as the people in the Mid & Western United States prefer a low-population density lifestyle, they will never be able to build an effective mass transit system which can compete with all of the above benefits of a mass transit system w/o massive subsidization (which will inevitably appear to most taxpayers as an incredible waste of taxpayer money).
While electric cars that can do wheelstands may be cool, they probably aren't too pratical. Check out the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University. They have some really cool alternative fuel vehicles, everything from solar to electric to hybrids. The best engine they have developed so far is what they call the Midnight Sun. Check out the webpage for more details, but the gist of it is this: The engine is composed of very efficient burners which burn methane (I think). The trick is that the car doesn't get it's power from the heat, rather from the light energy. Highly efficient "solar cells" are located very close to the flame, and those charge banks of batteries. A very cool setup indeed. Not to mention the fact that this thing can ALSO peel out for a full block :0)
"I always wanted to be a procrastinator,
I'm inspired enough to someday build an electric vehicle for myself for city use.
If batteries were unable to give massive amounts of current, this competition would spur advances in battery technology. But your average lead-acid car battery can already pump 600 amps, and NiCad cells have an even lower internal resistance (a single D-cell sized NiCad rechargable can put out 50 amps).
No, the problem with electric vehicles is the combination of power and range. Battery technology today simply cannot store a tenth of the energy that is stored chemically in a modest tank of gasoline. I don't see these competitions as improving this.
We've made some progress since then.
This is just another example of the white man trying to hold down the National Electric and Gas Racing Organization (NEGRO). Seems nobody cares about gas/electric hybrids anymore.
...you'll love seeing $1.80 a gallon for the stinky toxic gasoline that you fill your car with every time you go to the pump.
electric motors are in every way superior to gasoline engines. as few as a single moving part, lifetimes in the range of 250K miles, and the torque curve of an electric motor is better than any gas engine ever built. when you kink in an electric motor, it's solid torque from 0 rpm to [in some cases] over 15k rpm -- no gas engine can do that. transmissions are not even used on many electrics -- except for reverse. no need to constantly adjust the drive ratio to match the pathetic powerband of the gas junker.
it the energy density/storage that's killing evs. just no way to store all those electrons in anything close to an efficient way. the energy density of chemical fuel is many times that of even the best theoretical batteries.
it's a shame, cuz gas engines are a horrid relic of the past. having a heat pump under the hood is a big waste. better to do the conversion at the remote power station, where you can make the engines ultra efficient at one rpm and let 'em spin. you can also put good stacks/scrubbers on a power station that limit emissions, no room on gas junk.
hopefully, someone will have a storage solution ready before too much longer. maybe right about the time fusion goes online! that would so rock.
gasoline==fur==meat==(death&&poison) although i still eat meat. too tasty. sorry.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Not only is power generation more efficient en masse, but electric cars can also employ regenerative braking, a system in which the vehicle is slowed by the magnetic drag of the vehicle's motors, thus converting its kinetic energy, no longer wanted, into potential energy in its batteries, instead. Of course the system isn't 100% efficient (duh), but it's unspeakably better than simply throwing all that energy away by converting it into heat with break pads.
It also serves worth noting that hybrid electric vehicles can be made extremely efficient as well, even when the "hybrid" involves a traditional internal combustion engine: An engine running at a constant speed and load (or a very tight range thereof) can be fine-tuned to maximum efficiency in that target mode of operation. One of the things that makes current automotive internal combustion engines so inefficient is the wide range of conditions which they must serve.
In addition, finely-tuned engines serving an electric "drivetrain" can be made significantly smaller, simpler, and lighter-weight than their traditional counterparts, for the aforementioned reason. All in all, this makes for some dramatic increases in efficiency (I'd give figures, but I don't have my automotive engineering notes handy at the moment) without sacrificing range of travel and without completely alienating the petroleum industry.
Factor in recent advances in energy storage technology and regenerative braking, and you could have a ridiculously fuel-efficient vehicle that still ran (secondarily, primarily, or completely) on petroleum.
There was an interesting article in the March 1999 issue of Wired regarding high-performance (ie racing) electric vehicles. All of these are technologies which exist now. The only real barrier is retrofitting existing manufacturing facilities to work with a (completely) new system and getting over that intital cost hump. Until the major automakers decide that they really want to mass produce such vehicles, their costs will most likely remain prohibitive. But the automakers don't want to produce them because they cost too much now. And then there's the petroleum lobby.
There are certainly plenty of barriers, but it's feasible stuff, and worth developing, IMHO.
Someone once said (I can't recall who, unfortunately) "The best way to extend the range of an Electric Vehicle is a rental car." (or something like that.)
How often do you drive from Akron to Detroit? How far do you really drive on a daily basis? One of the problems is that the general public is conditioned to thinking of refueling as a pain in the butt, hopefully done no more than once a week (Often in the rain or snow, or late at night when you'd rather be in bed, or when you're late for a meeting.)
Not so with EV's. You come home at the end of the day, pull into your nice warm garage, and plug the car in. The next morning, you've got a full charge. Around here, (San Francisco Bay Area) there are all kinds of places for an "opportunity charge." Offices have EV charging stations in the parking lot, as does BART (the local, inter-county train system,) and even Fry's Electronics. Even in Akron or Detroit, I'm told that many parking lots have public outlets for block heaters -- which work fine for most EV chargers.
For driving across country, generally speaking, EV's are not the answer. But for day-to-day commuting of, say, 50 miles or less each way, (and if you commute more than that you need to re-evaluate the value of your time!) they work great. For running errands around town, they're great.
You don't want to use your EV to drive to visit your mother-in-law, but how often do you do that? You don't want to use an EV to drive the kids to Disneyland, but that's not an enjoyable task in any vehicle -- you're better off flying anyway. You're a travelling salesman and you drive 150 miles a day? You need gas. But for the rest of us, EV's would work for most of our driving.
On a side note, I was in Yosemite a few years back (9/22/95, to be exact) to do a little backpacking and attend the unveiling of some electric busses that were to be used in the valley. There were quite a few EV luminaries in attendance with samples of their work, including one gent who had just driven his electric Honda CRX from Washington DC. (He used, of course, a high-efficiency gas generator built into a trailer to get something like 60mpg.)
If you're looking at distance per pound, yes. But that is not the only criteria. There are others such as cost per mile (EV's win), convenience of refueling (EV's win for day-to-day, Gas wins for the unusual), noise (EV's win), power (EV's win), and so on.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Obviously a joke, or at least close, but the same argument (Electric cars are not better for the environment) has been pulled out of many hats, not just for cars but buses and trains and all sorts of things. The simple fact is that the argument doesn't hold water.
:)
1. The current state of the art in low-pollution petrol powered cars has almost nowhere to go. Further research is giving fewer and fewer returns in methods of making mobile petrol-based propulsion systems cleaner. On the other hand, factory scale plants using both petrol and other forms of raw material such as coal have been making large advances, with many by-products of the electricity production going into creating other useful products.
2. Research on electricity based transport is advancing rapidly, greater efficiencies in all areas are constantly being achieved, with new software able to micro-manage power consumption, newer battery methods and flywheel technology offering better storage per gram, and longer life for all components.
These alone are excellent reasons why electric cars, although they may _possibly_ be less environmentally friendly right now taking into account the entire supply chain, are the future.
Their primary attractiveness as far as the environment goes is the shifting of by-products to large generation plants where the benefits of scale and space can be used to filter and reuse pollutants. They are also demonstrably quieter, and in many cases can take advantage of their electrical nature to make driving as we know it today more fuel efficient (brakes tied into flywheels mean that stop-go traffic would cost far less in energy terms, and wear out your brake-pads less).
I'm looking forward to it
You can't win a fight.
Although for that matter, I'm pretty impressed with a power supply that can deliver that kind of current, too. (Quick calculation on xcalc...) Conservatively, that comes out to around 100 KW from a battery!
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Public transportation may not be the best solution for some cases, people will still want their cars to drive wherever they want. But trains and subways do have their own advantages. Have you tried to read or sleep as you drive your car every day to and from work? I compare the transportation problem to computers. Public transportation is like a big mainframe. People want to have a personal computer on their desks, but mainframes are still the best solution to many tasks. We need a well planned, well integrated, public transport network, which we will use on a day to day basis. We also need roads and cars, for special trips, like what we do on weekends, for instance.
The reason why public transportation systems have been so neglected is mainly a question of bad pricing regulation. You don't need to explicitly pay anything to drive on public roads and streets. You do need to pay to ride on trains. This makes roads and streets seem to have a much lower cost than they really do. A well planned transportation policy should get rid of this subsidized personal transportation policy and make people pay the real cost for the use of cars and trucks over public roadways.