Slashdot Mirror
Ford Pulls The Plug on Electric Cars
Cytos writes "Apparently Ford has called it quits on their EV program Th!nk Mobility, stating "... we don't believe that this is the future of environmental transport for the mass market." Ford had purchased Think in 1990 and did a short run of advertisments in California for it's lease trial, even involving Hertz in helping out. I was really hoping to see this pan out, I guess our only hope for an EV now is the Toyota Rav4 EV." From the sound of it, most companies are looking at hybrid cars.
now I get to read 100 tree hugging posts on why this is bad
Is the issue with Kei cars a safety one? Why don't they appear in the U.S.?
I have been pwned because my
Yes better gas mileage is a plus. And helping to save the planet yadda yadda yadda...
:-)
I still want a car with a lot of horsepower and low end torque. When I can get one like that, I might be interested.
Negative karma? hehe.
"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats."
That is one ugly sub-SUV. The newer Rav4s look so much better.
I have been pwned because my
I know that I would never buy an electric car for a multitude of reasons...
1: How am i going to charge it in my parking lot at work? at my dorm?
2: It just wont get me very far here in Kansas
3: Lack of speed. When I need to merge, I need to get up and GO damn it.
4: Small. I like big cars, or better yet Trucks. You cant have an electric Truck - it just makes no sense unless you haul barbie furniture
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Eventually, we're going to be at a point where we deal with electric or bio-fuel whether we like it or not. There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
The hell of it is, if we were to start *now* working on getting all the kinks and problems worked out of things like bio-fuel or solar-panels with the same energy and resources that the auto industry spends on developing new models every year, when the time comes that petroleum is so rare as to inspire strife, war, and conflict, we will be far enough ahead of the curve not to be affected.
While hybrid cars may be a step in the right direction, they're only postponing the inevitable.
Luckily, I rather like bicycling.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Hybrid cars are much friendlier to the environment.
Many advocates of electric cars see the energy cycle as something like this:
1. (energy comes from somewhere)
2. Environmentally clean driving!
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants, we currently get almost all our power from coal and gas burning plants. These guys are not very efficient at making electricity, a least not compared to the super efficient engines in the hybrids. They produce much more pollution per watt. The end result, an electric car just moves the pollution it creates from the car to the power plant, and the power plant is very very dirty.
Until coal & gas are not used anymore, pure EV is bad for the environment.
Electric cars are not the wave of the future. Has anyone ever seen an electric car that could compare to a gasoline car in terms of range and acceleration? Imagine being in cold weather with the radio and the heat on. Anyway, all electric cars do is move the pollution from a mobile vehicle to a stationary powerplant.
I went to this website looking for specifications on the EV cars that they make and they are nearly the same specifications that I saw about 5 years ago. The top speed is still only around 55 mph. And the range is only 56 miles?!?! Come on. If it's going to take 4-6 hours to charge the battery only to 80% then I'd want to get more than 56 miles. I don't care who they are marketing it for. It's almost no better than buying a supped up golf cart.
maybe if there were a market for this stuff, itwould actually sell. there are no demand for these kind of cars however, because of a few important market factors.
:-)
1. gas is cheap, at least in the U.S. (not to mention, how is the electricity for these cars being made? that's right, burning fossil fuels in some power plant.)
2. the world is not melting (i.e., global warming whether you believe it or not, is not having a profound effect on purchase decisions).
3. there are no mandates to use these cars. the only hope for these cars are illogical laws to force their use, but this flies in the face of the market. this won't stop california from trying however.
in short, when there is sufficient need for these cars, the market will accept them. if tomorrow the U.S. were cut off from its foreign oil, you'd sell a million of these cars that day alone. of course, the electricity would have to come from either natural power (hydroelectric etc.) or nuclear, but it could be done given enough lead time. but i digress
not getting stuck in Death Valley at 130 degrees looking for an outlet. You just cannot pack enough energy into these things at a reasonable cost.
AND who says they are clean? Someone somewhere is choking on the fumes of the power plant suppling the charge for EVs. Usually those of us outside of California...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Incidentally there is a good articles in a recent Time magazine and Wired.
They look like freakin' golf carts.
Why do they look like golf carts?
Because whoever designed them knows nothing about why cars sell.
Oh, wait, one looks like a pickup truck. And we all know that the whole point of buying a pickup truck is to get that economizing cachet.
Either Ford made a huge mistake buying Think, or they did it to appease nascent environmentalism, or they did it to put Think out of business before Think got the idea to put a Porsche Carerra body on one.
--Blair
Ford is still the principle sponsor of Cornell's Hybrid Electric Vehicle team and I'm sure they are at other universities as well. They haven't given up on energy-efficient, clean cars; they just believe that this particular approach isn't viable enough in the near future to continue with. Perhaps Americans just aren't ready to give up their 2mpg SUVs yet....
Check Ford Environmental Research
"... we don't believe that this is the future of environmental transport for the mass market. Anyone want to bet that this will go down in history as one of the dumbest things ever said? Might take a while but I think it's coming. It's gonna be like that 640k-of-memory quote we love so much.
Wind-powered cars.
I'll be rich!
Er...wait.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
They are quite right. Car is not the future of environmental transport. There are dozens over dozens of cities in the world where the transport situation is totally unsustainable due to constant grows of the cities themselves and consequently the number of vehicles on the streets.
What city or country has the best public transportation system?
One of the problems that kills electric cars as a reasonable alternative is climate control - especially in winter. A normal gasoline engine throws off as much energy in waste heat as a it generates in mechanical power. This waste heat is easily used to heat a car interior. Since cars have really bad heat loss (lot of glass), it takes as much energy to heat a car as it does a small house. With electric cars you have a real problem because of the lack of the internal combustion engine heat.
As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.
By the time you total grid inefficency, battery inefficency and so on, the total CO2 emissions advantage is negligable. You'd do better to add more insulation to your house and drive a little Honda.
The Hybrids, though, are another kettle of fish entirely - they generate their electricity from gasoline, in situ, and that actually (surprisingly) turns out to be a smart thing to do for a long list of reasons.
So, over-all, no great loss and wait for Hypercars - cars that think they are power stations..... (no, I'm not making this up).
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I agree with you that most people think that electricity comes from nowhere, so it's automatically "cleaner". However, I have to question your claim that a single-user, commercial grade device is more efficient at generating electricity than a huge mass producing power plant. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that that would surprise me, and I'd be interested to see some hard numbers. Why don't the power companies junk their power plants and just order a boat-load of hybrid cars? Clearly I'm missing something. Thanks!
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
General Motors is expecting to release their first generation fuel-cell vehicles around 2010. We've reported it before.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
I wonder if hybrids (which seem to be the practical transitional cars) are only the stop gap till the real 'next' car, fuel cell powered vehicles.
i think ford saw ev as that stop gap, but they got the beta instead of the vhs in this case.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
1. ya think maybe these guys want to recoupe their R&D costs? Think that might affect the price?
2. Hmm, 2 hours in 5 minutes charge, do you mind wearing a lead suit while filling up? And it'll probably cook your passenger if they don't stand back at a safe distance.
3. Must ont look like a plastic toy. Hmm. Based on battery technology, the REST of the car has to be THAT MUCH MORE efficient to make up for it. You just won't get a car you want, that goes as far as you want with a normal coefficient of Drag.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
Fuel Cell/Hydrogen is a very promising way to go. It's not really any more volatile than that tank of Unleaded you filled up with, and the reaction generates power and water. so why isn't it pervasive? Infrastructure. You can't drive a hydrogen car without a place to fill up (your 2 hours for 5 minutes would be doable with hydrogen), and you can't build a place to fill up without Hydrogen using cars!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Remember these clowns attended Hope College--they're not exactly the brightest pixels in the display.
The last time Slashdot was enamoured with electic cars I looked at the Think Mobility site. They had a bunch of products, all marked as "NO LONGER AVAILABLE". Of course, if you lived in a 2-sq ft section of california they designated you could be allowed to lease a piece of shit electric van. No wonder nobody bought the stuff.
At least I believe it was 2010, might be sooner. They need to have at least a hybred or some type of car that does not run on fossil fuels. At least car companies based in the USA, which is Ford, Toyota, Chrystler, etc.
In fact, I believe that they are suppose to at least have 20-30% of their cars sold as some type of alternative otherwise they will be fined large amounts. I might be wrong, but that is what I remember.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
I think that was the whole point. Pure EV cars are a dead-end technology. That's why everyone is looking into hybrids.
I won't consider electric cars or any other AFV ready for prime time until it can deliver the kind of performance you can get from, say, a Corvette. I hope the government doesn't decide to impose them on us either. But then again, the oil companies will do everything they can to keep that from happening.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
No one, including him, has claimed that it's trivial. All he's stating are the minimum requirements before he would consider an electric car. And I agree wholehardedly.
Sorry, but you are not going to guilt me into buying a car that sucks. If it's not practical to build electric cars, then they aren't practical.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
ok if you are after torque and speed then Electric car is the way to go in terms of cheap and easy
Lotus had a contract with a mod company that pulled out the petrol engine and stuck in 2 electric ones (I forget the name) but they rocked they where kind of crazy 0-60 Mph in about 3-4 seconds which is bike speed
the problem of course is how far they can go which is batterys
fuel cell cars use Electric motors the differance is the way you generate and store it
regards
John Jones
p.s. the U.S. Guv should be funding alot seeing how you guys are the biggest poluter and also one of the cheapest for fuel wait 10 years and then see how cheap your it is (-;
I would remind gentle /. readers that the electricity a Ford Think (or any electric car) would use has to be generated somehow. This was an attractive solution for California, as most of the electricity-generating plants that serve (my) state are in Arizona and Nevada.
Further, when the California power grid goes down again, not only will you have no TV, you will have no car.
Hydrogen, my friends. Dubya might be wrong about lots of things, but he knows the future of energy. Check out the new developments in extracting hydrogen from shale and rock, much like natural gas. Its only pollution is water vapor, which can be electrolyzed back into hydrogen fuel and ozygen if required.
Hydrogen can also be produced by the electrolysis of seawater using solar cells for power or by heating coal dust in the presence of a catalyst using solar collectors.
California simply tried to legislate a market that will never exist, and, if by some freak it did, would shift the pollution to other states.
... for several reasons. Let's go through some of them:
1) Batteries suck. Even the best ones are expensive, don't hold enough charge per unit weight or volume to come within an order of magnitude of gas, and take a long time to charge.
2) Electric engines suck at high RPM. Gas engines suck at low RPM. Electric engines are horrible on the highway unless your car is really light.
3) People don't want light cars, even if this is best for the environment, because all the mother-trucking heavy 3-ton pickups and SUVs out on the road will crush them like a VW Bug in an accident.
4) Electric engines are expensive and not as efficient as gas ones. The industry has a hundred years of experience in making gas auto engines and not nearly as much in electric.
5) It pollutes just as much anyway. Most people get their power from a coal or oil-fired plant, or maybe natural gas. Since charging and then discharging the battery is fairly inefficient, especially at high speeds, it can even pollute more than a gas engine.
6) Those EVs on the site are ugly, as are the Prius and the Insight. People don't want to buy ugly cars.
7) The cars are more expensive than gas cars. The decreased fuel cost does not offset this completely, and it doesn't help the environment much unless you have a nuke plant in your neighborhood, which you probably don't, because evironmentalists hate nuke plants (even though they are probably better for the environment). They have crappy performance on the highway and they are ugly. So what is your motivation for buying?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Is it?
All you want is the moon from the sky? The only way you're going to charge batteries in 5 minutes for 2 hours of driving is by using liquid acid batteries and actually replacing the acid in the cells. And the liquid batteries ain't that great otherwise.
Anyways, here in Finland they actually have a punitive tax for any alternative cars. If you try to dodge gas tax by driving an electric van, they slap you with a fat annual tax to cover up the "loss". Delightful.
"Grid-provided" electric just isn't the way to go. Most folks that are looking to eliminate fossil fuel engines from cars are now working on hydrogen-based fuel cells. The reasons for this are fairly simple:
"Electric cars" that charge off the power grid are just moving their fossil fuel consumption over to a power plant (unless the power is provided by nuclear generation, which has its own huge set of problems).
With a non-material "fuel", there is a wait time associated with recharing. It takes a lot less time to fill up a hydrogen tank (or even swap an empty one for a full one) then it does to recharge a big bank of batteries.
A reasonably-sized efficient fuel cell would be revolutionary far beyond personal conveyances. Rather than persue research that would result in, at best, a full-scale version of toys kids have played with for years, why not work on a method of power generation that could vastly change the way we physically structure our societies and make giant leaps towards restoring Earth's natural capital?
Groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute have been pushing fuel cell cars for a decade (search their site for "hypercar"). It's nice of the auto industry to catch up. :-)
GM has built s concept car that requires little space and runs on hydrogen. Further, auto manufacturers should be developing methane burning cars not petrol thorstein
1. Build Electric Car
2. Save Planet
3. ???????
4. Profit
Anyways, here in Finland they actually have a punitive tax for any alternative cars. If you try to dodge gas tax by driving an electric van, they slap you with a fat annual tax to cover up the "loss". Delightful.
Doesn't surprise me. You guys were one step away from being a full-fledged member of the Axis in WWII. The Nazis you've got in power now just learned from the generation before.
Another reason this is good is that we (here in the US) have all been paying for the development of these machines through our tax dollars. There is an interesting rant about this on CarTalk's website.
In addition, the batteries are insanely expensive. Each car produced is subsidized by the taxpayers to offset the costs of the batteries. From About.com: "Depending on the size of battery bank in the vehicle, it may cost between $20,000 and $60,000 for the batteries."
Why don't the power companies junk their power plants and just order a boat-load of hybrid cars?
Probably because they want electricity, not motion.
Think about it. They run a turbine to spin a generator and pipe the electricity to you to turn the wheels of your car, OR you skip the electricity generating phase unless your only option is to waste the energy by turning it into heat (braking). Every time you convert eneryg from one form to another you loose some. In a hybrid vehicle there is one less conversion.
Since both silicon and boron are toxins, by definition any production process that uses them is going to generate toxic wastes.
This sentence qualifies for the most idiotic statement of the year award. Either you are a retarded monkey, a troll, or still in 9th grade and haven't yet taken a chemistry class.
Boron is a metal. It's no more harmful than, say, iron. It's definitely not toxic. And if you think silicon is toxic, you better not drink out of glass or ceramic containers and not go near a beach. Silicon is the main component of glass, ceramics, and sand. It is one of the most widespread substances on earth.
So, STFU and read a fucking book.
I assume that fuel-turbine electric hybrids are the best option. They use existing fuels, thus use existing stations and timeframes for refueling. They should have tightly-controlled combustion through a small turbine, thus increasing efficiency as well as decreasing pollution. But I don't expect them to have the acceleration of the usual car engine.
The dual hybrids (I am just making up terms here) -- that use electric for in-town or slow driving and also internal-combustion for high-speed or highway driving -- show some promise. However, the dual-drive systems strike me as particularly complicated engineering and thus the result can only be expensive and/or problematic. On the plus side, if you can get this to work well and within budget, then it has good appeal to consumer needs -- power and efficiency (not at the same time).
Pure electric cars are trash. Ranges are too short (R2D2 is also short, but I digress) and recharges are too long. Perhaps if we started using space-program style nuclear batteries, then I'd see the applicability of purely electric cars. But there's no chance of a nuclear battery in individual cars; the public won't stand for it (for some good reasons -- accidents, proliferation and expense).
It was somewhat encouraging to have seen California take the legislative route to enforce transportation change. At least it reflected some public will over corporate misbehavior (i.e. the lack of suitable options when you go to buy a car, because the auto companies simply haven't invested in making them). But this has failed and corporate America has won again. And the more SUVs that show up on the road only mean the more and more women will get frightened by the overshadowing while they drive, thus increasing SUV sales as some sort of defensive move. Gas-mileage averages will continue to drop. Except for niche markets, electrics will continue to be a joke product.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
I think it's important to note that Think wasn't really about electric "cars" it was about electric vehicles. The venture was very much an "outside the box" and it's product line makes that obvious. (Mostly they are small vehicles designed for short trips around town) Not surprisingly, people like cars and don't want
;-) )
That said... Here's a rejected slashdot story submission about what *I* think was a fairly interesting news. I post it because I think it's on topic and intersting and I put some time in typing it up--obviously, sometimes slashdot doesn't have the space... so no hard feelings. (Maybe I just spelled everything right
The jist is that GM is betting on fuel cells. Not electric and not "conventional" hyrbids.
Popular Mechanics is carrying an article (with pic's) of GM's latest fuel-cell concept car. The pictures are our first look (mine at least) at GM's new strategy to redefine the basic systems every car they make. It's called AUTOnomy and was written about a little while back in Popular Science. Essentially, because fuel-cells allow a radically different organization of cars' structures, GM is betting it can make cars cheaper. This despite the fact they'd be running on the famously expensive fuel cell. Wired wrote about this"billion dollar bet" in its August issue and quotes a GM exec: "If we're not there by 2010], we'll have dug too deep a hole to recover the time value of that money." In other words: call us stupid if you can't drive one of these by 2010. This is some good reading for those wanting to know more about what GM's plans to do with its fuel cell "platform" that it hopes to use for virtually every vehicle it makes in the future. Of course, as Wired notes, a fairly heavy dose of skepticism is NOT optional. Itís required.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
informative
No more lunix hippies driving around in shitty electric cars!
you can't fight the StoneCutters.
Who keeps the metric system down? WE DO.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Captain Planet, he's the man
Leading the charge, Earth's number 1 fan!
Check him out, you're gonna see
He's the Mega-mac Daddy of ecology!
Cap's the hero with the gumption
Takes on the "overs," population and consumption
Yeah, he could use a better groomer
Some people say he's got a bad sense of humor
"I'm baaaaaack!"
But when Eco-Villains run amok
Plundering and pillaging, Yuck!
Cap's here to level the playing field
With a Ph. D in sustainable yield
But he's not the only hero for Earth
Gaia's wisdom gave the Planeteers birth
Wheeler's the Fire
Ma-ti's go Heart
Gi's got the power to make Waters part
Kwame's rockin' with element Earth
Linka uses Wind for all she's worth
But still Greedlys and Blights trash our planet
It's up to us to say, "We won't stand it!"
Raise your voice and challenge your peers
Say it's way cool to be Planeteers!
"The Power is Yours!"
I have been pwned because my
I'm a driver of the GM EV1, a great electric car. I've created a website about GM's treatment of the car: cleanup-gm.org. GM is pulling working EV1s off the road, even though drivers are willing to pay to keep driving them. (They returned the checks that we sent them.) Meanwhile, they falsely report that nobody wants electric cars.
Try a diesel. Yep, diesel. Cleaner burning, better mileage. With the new ultra low sulfur fuels becoming more available in the US (not required until 2006, I think, but new emissions regulations enter in 2004... go figure).
Run some biodiesel (http://www.biodiesel.org) and you have a no sulfur fuel. You have a clean car running on renewable fuel, no dependency on Middle East oil. Burning biodiesel smells like popcorn out the tail pipe.
Currently the only diesel engine we Americans can buy in a passenger car is a 90 hp/155 ftlb Volkswagen TDi (Jetta, Golf, Beetle).
Do some chiptuning (http://www.upsolute.com) and you have one heck of a fun car.
FYI, I get 43 mpg city and 52 mpg freeway.
Most of the people on this discussion seem to think that hybrid cars only the transition to fuel cell vehicles. Although, I probably tend to agree, I question when exactly fuel cell vehicles will actually be available.
I actually bought a Honda Civic Hybrid last week. I've gotten just under 1000 miles on the car now and the car is only on its second tank of gas. The readout shows 43.1mpg at the moment.
The car has surprisingly good power both off of the line and at top speed (when you need that extra ooomph to cut off the guy in the fast lane to get around the slow guy in front of you).
ArsTechnica has a good article about it. Especially, check out the CVT transmission. You don't even feel the car shift.
I don't work for Honda or anything like that (as I realize this sounds like and ad), but I love it so far, it gets awesome mileage, and there's even a $2000 tax break for owning one.
Even if it is a "stop gap" until fuel cells show up in mass quantities and reasonable prices, I'm very happy with my hybrid for the time being.
The petrochemical industry hates EVs, for obvious reasons.
No car company in America has taken EVs seriously. Who wants to make a car that lasts 300K miles without any service?
Who wants to buy a car like the EV1, where odd batteries were scattered throughout the vehicle, making battery replacement a horrendous, expensive task? Most every commercial electric vehicle manufacturer in Japan or Europe uses a easy to replace battery pack that can be swapped out in minutes.
No, damn it, we want catalysts and fuel systems onboard every frickin car sold.
Forget batteries...it's surely impossible to increase the energy density of batteries; after all, they're basically the same technology that's been used for 150 years. Can't be done...technology just doesn't improve that way (riiiiigghht).
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
From the site:
Maybe people would buy these cars if they didnt looks so damn FUGLY!
Make one that actually LOOKS like a normal car, maybe people will buy them.
'Look at the freak car kids!'
Hmmm.
.25 = 234 MJ.
Best solar cells you're going to see in "field use" are around 20% efficiency. Let's call it 25%. Let's set insolation to a very favorable figure of 1300 W/m2; this is what it is at 1 AU from the sun, but doesn't take into account axial tilt, clouds, nighttime, that sort of thing, so it's pretty much a maximum value.
How many solar panels can you fold out of the trunk? 100 square meters seems like a reasonable size for how big the array could be and still be manageable. Let's also assume total efficency in the other aspects of the system; all energy the solar cells manage to turn into electricy eventually ends up moving the car.
With all these favorable numbers, we end up with 1300 J/s/m * 100 m2 * 7200 s *
Merely to accelerate a 1,000kg car to 100km/h would take 784 kJ of this energy. I don't think you're getting 2 hours of driving time out of this array's charging the batteries for 2 hours unless the car in question is Matchbox.
Getting heat from an electric car should be easy. If your car has a 30 horsepower motor, it may consume over 20,000 watts (30*746). A small motor like that needs a lot of cooling. Its cooling system would be your heating system. That is a lot of BTU's. Add a refrigerant compressor on the drive for the hot days.
It just takes a small extra investment to add these creature comfort features to any electric car.
Efforts to develop alternative fuel vehicles were spurred on by having an environmentally conscious President and Vice President (Clinton and Gore). When Bush and Cheney took office, they let it be known in no uncertain terms that the country's "energy policy" was being written by big oil companies and automakers. They have fought against CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, pushed to turn over public lands to oil companies for drilling, and dismissed the notions of improved energy efficiency and practical mass transportation. Their lip service to fuel cell vehicles is a ruse because auto industry experts know that those vehicles have little chance of being commercially viable in the near future.
If they had been successful at giving their buddies in the oil industry free access drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the oil would have been sold on the world market to the highest bidder. That's how oil prices are set. Exxon doesn't give special discounts when oil is sold in the same country where the drilling took place.
So expect to see lots of efforts at alternative fuel vehicles go by the wayside. Biodiesel, electric vehicles, CNG (compressed natural gas), and hybrids will solely be developed based on consumer demand -- not environmental needs. Low sulfur diesel, which would radically reduce pollution and give U.S. consumers access to high-tech European diesel engine technology, won't be mandated here any time soon. Oil companies can mysteriously refine it in Europe while claiming that it is somehow impossible to produce in the U.S. Go figure.
P.S. I figure that this will be modded down in anger by right-wingers. Silencing people on Slashdot is easier than intelligently debating them.
. . . so it must be good for the "environment" for us to use it. Nothing bad can come from mother earth afterall.
its "wholeheartedly"
67 horses to drag an SUV weighing over 4,000 pounds. My old Civic had 96HP and weighed half that, and it felt slow. Is it any wonder people want hybrids? Pure electric isn't going to be worth shit until they figure out how to get better energy density out of batteries.
Hydrogen is the future. They have horse power and water is the only thing that comes out of their tail pipes.
EVs are kind of lame.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
try not to be so jewish next time
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Sorry, this is almost impossible. You underestimate the tremendous energy density of gasoline. To move an equivalent amount of electical energy in such a short time would probably require conductors too heavy to lift, and refueling stations would require special high capacity hookups to the electrical grid.
Gasoline has an energy density of about 44 MJ/kg, and a density of 740kg/m^3. Let's assume you put 15 gallons into your tank in five minutes (which would be a pretty slow gas pump if you ask me.) That's 1.85 GJ of energy! Now, certainly not all of that energy is put to use moving the vehicle. Most of it goes to the atmosphere as heat. Let's say 20% of it does useful work. (Or, alternatively, that electric vehicles are 1/.2 or 5 times more efficient.) That means that our electric vehicle needs 370 MJ of energy for the equivalent fillup. If you want that in 5 minutes, you're looking at a rate of 1.23 MW (that's megawatts!) At 120 Volts, that would be over 10,000 amperes. Even at at 10,000 Volts, that's still 123 amperes.
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better. This completely ignores the fact that the "system voltage" of the vehicle is probably around 75 - 150V, so this refilling voltage would have to get stepped down again, and you're back to the problem of how to handle 10,000 amps. And of course there's the fact that the electrical grid probably could not handle short bursts of several megawatts for every person refilling a car. How many simultaneous people are refilling their cars at any given time? And how much extra headroom does your power company have?
This is one of the classic problems of the all-electric vehicle. I don't think you'll ever see charging times reduced to less than 4 - 6 hours. And that's for specialized refilling stations. Most households just aren't wired for anywhere close to that much power. Older houses I think had 150 amp service, newer houses are built to 200 or 250 amp service, if I recall.
Those numbers look pretty good to me. Maybe I missed something? According to your numbers, you could accelerate 0-100km/h 300 times from a two hour charge.
The RAV4 EV is more of a real product; you can buy the thing at ordinary Toyota dealers in California, and there's a reasonable network of charging stations in the SF Bay Area. But the range is still only 80 miles.
How does 0-60 in 4 seconds sound? You can get an electric car (built for "commuting" heh heh) now that does just that.
Hydrogen is not an energy source though, only a means of (pretty) inefficient storage. If you get it from solar, sure it's a little better, but it still makes more sense to use that solar energy to grow an oil producing crop like hemp, and then burn that oil in a biodiesel vehicle.
Too bad even non-psychoactive hemp is illegal, it would be a very environmentally friendly way to collect solar energy. We could also use the fiber to almost completely replace cotton and a lot of wood paper logging. The current cotton and paper logging industries are major reasons for it being illegal.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Not even close. No mass-produced gas burning motor can even approach the efficiency levels of a coal/gas or nuke fired plant. The power loss through transmission is small compared to the difference in efficiency. If you want an efficient gas engine, why bother with a hybrid? Just get a diesel car which has just as good fuel economy with far less complexity.
Check out the Corbin Sparrow. They are selling them as fast as they can make them.
I've seen many posts in this thread claim this. Could you please provide some actual proof of this? It sounds to me more like the kind of thing espoused by the gas industry, bought up by righties everywhere and assumed to be "common sense" when it isn't.
Ok, so you and a handful of other people are willing to lease (maybe not even BUY) an EV-1. This does not mean that there is a viable market for them. You have no plausible reason to believe otherwise. For one, it is almost certainly economically unviable to run the manufacturing facilities in such small quantities. For another, honoring the warranties, training people, overhead, on going engineering, etc to support these cars also may very well be costing GM a lot more than they could ever sell.
As long as you are counting in the hundreds, you are not going to appeal to GM or any other worthwhile car maker. Now I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that this is going to happen, because Americans aren't willing to put up with EVs in any sizable number. The fact of the matter is that we have standard cars that get 3x times the gas milage of the most popular cars today, without half the drawbacks of EVs and most of the supposed benefits (I'd argue they're probably even better), and they aren't exactly moving swiftly. What's more, we also see evidence of unwillingess to make really measurable sacrifices for the environment in numerous other ways, from CHOICE of driving distance, to not carpooling or taking mass transit, to living in an inefficient house, to simply owning an obselete highly polluting car (like so many so-called environmentals), and so on.
Who, other then you and a handful of people that spend a lot of time fretting over such things, really want to put up with all the potential bugs (engineering 101, you make a lot of changes to time tested designs, you're going to have a lot more bugs), limited driving range, poor acceleration, costlier maintenance, numerous drawbacks of owning a lighter, smaller, and often weaker car, and so on just to save the environment a couple liters of pollution? A lot of people may clamour for it (mostly those on forums like this), but the money isn't following it. If there were a market there, or even one that could be easily developed, the major car manufacturers would have pounced on it (esp. those that are desperate for growth). What we have instead is a handful of companies that have made pretty damn impressive efforts...but they are all ultimate failures because there are not enough buyers.
It looks like this is many people's first discussion on the concept of alternate fuel vehicles.
First of all, forget everything you've seen about electric powered vehicles that look like golf carts with bad style. You have fallen hook, line, and sinker for what the oil companies wanted you to do. They wanted you to say "yuck" and underpowered and go back to the big hairy SUVs and sports sedans. Point 1 for petro companies, 0 for the geeks.
If you look at the electric powered vehicle outside of a climate like California (why do they introduce them in a place where battery power will always be at a peak?), you know without even starting pilot tests that this technology is doomed to failure in climates that get a touch of winter. Even if you get only 4 cold days a year, if that means you can do limited range and no hills, it is a failure. Batteries as energy storage make no sense in a territory where people have problems starting their gas powered cars with lead acid batteries.
The real solutions will be in hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles. The electricity will be generated on demand from fuel cells, and there will be the same range of power available in the future as there is now. One benefit in going this way is 4 wheel drive available by putting a motor on each wheel.
Ballard Power and Stewart Energy Systems are two companies prepared to offer fuel cells and electrolysis systems to the market. Many of the big automakers have been involved with one or both of these companies. There are others.
GM is developing its own fuel cell solution.
Today there are limits on range, power and performance for hydrogen. These are getting better every year as competing companies break down the old technological walls.
The concept machines have little to do with the over all picture. The auto makers are targetting 2010 for the year you will be able to pick up a hydrogen powered car and then go around the block to Shell or whatever for a fill up.
And may we remind you, AGAIN, that power plants are FAR more efficient than car-sized gasoline engines. "Moving pollution" is a red herring and you know it. Fumes from gas engines and power plants affects everyone everywhere, not just the people who live in the place where the power conversion is done. If you believe that the only pollution from using hydrogen is water vapor, then you are just as ignorant and short sighted as those people who think electric cars eliminate all pollution. The idea here is to reduce, not eliminate (because that is impossible) the adverse affects of personal transportation. Electric cars are here now, are reasonably priced for use as a commuting vehicle for the vast majority of people on the road. Hybrids and fuel cells are also fine to have, but they are not good enough solutions to discard the concept of a small electric commuter vehicle.
As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.
It would be simpler to upgrade the technology at the power station rather than ask people to switch each time something new comes up.
Also, in the transition from Norway to the US, they should have (and could have) increased the range a little bit to match the longer distances in the US.
If this failure weren't adequately explained by the usual corporate incompetence, one might thing that Ford was deliberately trying to set Think up for failure.
the average car doesn't have the performance of a Corvette. so why expect an electric car to have the same?
You're forgetting about things like friction. Accelerating to 100kmh doesn't mean you *stay* at 100kmh, unless you're driving to the Moon.
Dangit, I really want one of those electric cars. Right now I have about a 2 mile commute to work, and my truck engine doesn't even get warmed up. An EV would be so ideal for me, heck I could probably go all week on one charge if I had to.
I never thought much of Ford's anyways. "For Old Retired Drivers." I guess their quality isn't too bad, but working on them seems a lot tougher than GM vehicles. Never liked how Fords handled either.
Well, I guess they dropped the ball. I hate it when a company buys a promising startup and then kills it.
Clickety Click
Electricity can be produced by environmentally friendly means--we need neither oil, gas, or nuclear power. Furthermore, even oil and gas-powered plants can reduce emissions much more effectively than automobiles--they can use much better catalysts and filters, and they could even eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. They also avoid most of the pollution resulting from refining and transporting gasoline.
Another reason why electric cars are environmentally friendly is because they simply don't come in the kind of behemoths that gasoline powered cars come in. And they don't have to: if you want a lot of power in an SUV, you need a big engine and that's going to depress gas mileage. Electric motors give you a lot more flexibility.
Furthermore, even if there were currently an environmental disadvantage of pure EVs (which I don't believe there actually is if you work it all out), you wouldn't have to eliminate all coal and gas powered electric plants, you'd only have to replace a fraction of them with environmentally more friendly technologies, or upgrade a fraction of them to run more cleanly.
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants,
If only it were true. Nuclear energy is environmentally the most harmful energy source imaginable because it leaves behind waste that is both highly toxic and completely indestructible by chemical or biological means. We should eliminate it completely as soon as possible--we just don't need it.
Acceleration:
0 to 60 mph 4.07 sec
1/4 mile 13.24 sec at 90 mph
Range: 100 miles at 60 mph
videos etc from http://www.acpropulsion.com/tzero_pages/tzero_hom
Oh, wait, you could use photosynthetic bacteria, some of which make hydrogen and oxygen. But if that became economically practical, we could use it for power generation too...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.
:)
Batteries are currently expensive. You'll have to wait quite a while.
Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Why not go a different route? How about putting automatic charging stations in every parking lot in the nation? The charging stations themselves aren't all that complicated, but it would need something special to do it automatically (induction?, some robotics under the car that finds the charging socket on the parking stall?.)
This way the average use for a car is taken care of. You won't be able to go traipsing across the country, but a lot of us don't do that anyway.
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
Seriously, think outside the box. With polymer batteries that can conform to many shapes, there is no reason why a car manufacturer needs to have that really big front end where the motor used to be. You don't need an axle, so you can stick the driver in the middle instead of off to the left (or right for your backwards countries.
As it stands, cars aren't exactly the most aerodynamic peices of equipment out there after all.
In fact, GM is doing exactly this with their fuel cell platform. It will be neat if they actually go ahead and fully back the project.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
IIRC, the current laws applying to car manufacturers require that their entire line of automobiles get a certain level of average fuel efficiency. An all electric car doesn't help the manufacturer in this respect. But adding a hybrid line can allow a manufacturer to also sell those mamoth SUVs that measure fuel efficiency in gpm (instead of mpg).
That's why I have a sneaking suspicion why they always make hybrid cars look butt-ugly. They don't actually want to sell many of these, they just want to be able to sell their cash cow SUVs.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Actually, the Ford Ranger pickup is one of the most popular vehicles for people making "conversion" vehicles. (Turning a gas car into an electric.)
Granted, these are hobbyists working at home on their own wheels, but I've heard that the Ranger pickup is a popular one because of all of the room to place the batteries.
I was working in Norway this summer, and I worked for a power company. 99% of the power in Norway is hydro or wind. It then becomes very environmentally friendly.
The speed limits are also lower, the top speed allowed in the country is 90 km an hour, which is also the top speed of the car.
The acceleration is OK, but you roll back a bit if you accelerate up a hill.
I liked it. There was also almost no noise when the car was running. That may be dangerous for pedestrians, but it's kind of cool too.
0.25 USD for a full tank of gas.
TWO Drawbacks:
The stereo system had no bass, that would probably shorten the range, which is also small ~100 km.
If you can tolerate the range (20-25 miles),
speed (25-30 mph), and the great outdoors, you can get an
electric bike from Voloci, or a less-expensive Ego 2
Better to propel 100 lbs off the grid rather than 2000 lbs!
I am just curious how many more animals are going to get shmucked by cars once everyone decides to move to the clean-car movement.. I mean, aren't these cars supposed to be ultra silent?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Who cares?
The interesting discussion about electric vehicles and the future of personal transportation is one thing; Ford's behavior is quite another. Presumably, their strategic thinkers are as well informed as Slashdot readers, at least on this subject. If they didn't think this was where the market was going, they didn't have to purchase Think. If they had made a strong effort to develop and sell EV technology, and then failed, their present course of action would be understandable - but we have seen no evidence of that.
The big auto companies have a long history of buying out threatening or alternative technologies and then burying them. Two brief examples:
The SF Bay area used to have an extensive network of electric trains that ran on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to many outlying communities. Ironically, even today BART does not service as many communities, and in most cases is not as fast, as what was available half a century ago. The KEY trains were purchased by a consortium formed by GM (cars and buses), Goodyear (tires), and one of the big oil companies (I forget which just now), which proceeded to dismantle the system.
In the early seventies I had some contact with a small technology company working on hydrogen-powered vehicles and developing metal hydride cells to safely store and transport the hydrogen gas. The company was bought out by one of the Big Three, and quietly folded a few years later.
So, it's your call - did they really give it a go, and then reluctantly concede defeat, or did they just control it to hobble it? Am I cynical about this? You bet!
Really?
Stop thinking of progress, can't you see the economic climate? The future is in nursing homes. You should all train to be nursing home aides. Gasoline will be here forever, and we need to stop thinking about technology and progress. All that has brought is misery and lost jobs. Get your head out of Star Trek and into reality.
OP
There are several things wrong with this view - The previous post is self contradictory First it criticizes electric cars for requiring that the electricity be generated somehow, and then it advocate hydrogens, which has exactly the same problem
Both systems are energy inefficient (although I suppose electric cars are worse).
Electric cars are energy inefficient because you must generate electricity, then lossily transport it, then lossily convert it into chemical energy in a battery, then convert it back into electrical energy, then convert it into mechanical energy.
Electric cars are not unpopular because of some vast conspiracy, but because they are a lousy technology. The main problem is a result of the energy storage technology; it is extremely poor compared to storing the energy in gsaoline. Electric car batteries are very expensive, only last a few years, and have such a low energy density that they greatly constrain the size and power of automobiles. And in climates like here in Arizona, the power load of the required air conditioning (5 kW) reduces the range even more.
As a result, electric cars are a fine choice for a few people who are willing to pay too much (or extort the money from us via government subsidies), who have driving requirements/habits that can deal with the short mileage, and who don't mind small cars (read: more collision danger to the occupants) with limited air condition and storage capabilities.
OTOH, hydrogen cars require the liberation of hydrogen from a bound state in some existing compound. Electrolysis is inefficient, and still leaves you with power plants to deal with. Storage of significant amounts of hydrogen is also a problem. The biggest problem IMHO with hydrogen powered cars is the investment required to distribute the hydrogen. Retooling the civilized world to dispense hydrogen along with gas (I am not a fan of slash-cuts!) will cost many trillions of dollars, and hydrogen doesn't offer those advantages.
Fuel cells may be a better approach, depending on the fuel and cost. The car makers and the govmint are counting on them. Of course, there is the issue of what to do with the waste from fuel cells also. If you use a hydrogen fuel cell, you pick up all the problems of hydrogen mentioned above! If you use a fuel cell with something that reforms a hydrocarbon, you have to deal with whatever is left of the hydrocarbon. Hopefully you can put it into a tank and bring it back... but who knows.
BTW... anyone who wants to use electricity as either a primary (electric cars) or secondary (hydrogen cars) had better be an advocate of nuclear power. You can put all the nuke plants you want here in Arizona, and its fine with me. But don't put any more hydrocarbon plants here and screw up our visibility.
Oh, and solar.... fuggetabout it. It takes too much land area, produces unreliable power which must be stored somehow (probably inefficiently, even more reducing the energy efficiency of the system), and most solar cells take more energy just to produce and install than they will deliver in their lifetime!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I am sorry site like honda and mazda really irk me. Both sites say you need to upgrade your browser when you go to their site using mozilla
p ://www.mazdausa.com/errorpages/netscape6.asp
http://www.hondacars.com/error/upgrade.asp
htt
I have no idea why they say use netscape 4.x or 4.7 or better and yet mozilla does not work... isn't mozilla better?
Sure this might be off topic but I think they need to get real developers working on their sites before I buy a car from them.
--MD--
Please change your name from Reality Master to Reality Distortion Field. You could give lessons to Steve Jobs.
The only thing in infinite supply on this planet is stupidity and thanks to you we're all stocked up here.
boo fucking hoo!
shut the fuck up slashdotters...
The sources used for this post: A government study of power plant efficiencies, The EV1 specs page and a government report on the efficiency of the 2002 mazda 626 (the most efficient non-HEV sedan this year).
.92 kg / KWh
.24 kg CO2/gallon, a car gets .35 kg CO2/gallon...
-A coal powered power plant produces 920 kg of CO2/MWh -> 920/1000 =
-An EV1 uses 26 KWh/100 miles -> 26*.92 = 24 kg CO2/100 miles
-average car produces 9 kg CO2/gallon of gas
-A 2002 Mazda 626 gets 1 gallon/26 miles -> 9kg/26 miles.
-Compare: an EV1 gets
So the difference exists, and is actually quite significant, but ultimatly the EV1 gets better fuel mileage. (Mind you, this does not count any of the inefficiencies introduced in the transmission of the electricity, nor does it account for highway driving, i used city driving stats only.)
The only way you're going to charge batteries in 5 minutes for 2 hours of driving is by using liquid acid batteries
Why not just manufacture the batteries to a uniform size and power grade. Then instead of charging them, swap them out. This also handles the problem of limited life cycle - add a surcharge to cover replacement after 2 or 3 years. In addition, this allows your car to take advantage of better technology.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better.
While a true recharge in under two hours may be out of the question,
a "fill up" at a station could be as quick as changing a battery pack.
If the batteries were cheap enough, then you could have one at home charging at all times.
(Or only at night, when the rates are lower.)
The real problem is energy storage, not energy transfer.
-- this is not a
The prices were also absurd: the Saturn EV-1 was available only by lease, at a montly lease rate that was TWICE the monthly rate for a regular Saturn ($399 vs $199, at that time), and at the end of the 36-month lease term, the EV-1 had to be returned -- there was no purchase option, since GM didn't want electric cars to be "out there." The net effect was that the "real cost" of an EV-1 was triple the cost of a comparable Saturn gasoline-powered car.
Later, the Honda and Toyota hybrids were marketed in a similar manner: not really available to consumers (most dealers can't get them), and priced at least twice the level of the comparable "regular" car sold by the same company.
So what's really happening? The car manufacturers are playing a combined political/legal game, in order to avoid meeting California's requirements. The task is simple: the auto makers pretend to seriously explore alternative power technologies, and they pretend to offer them for sale, but they deliberately set prices at unreasonable levels, and when demand turns out to be extremely strong anyway, they discontinue the vehicle model, falsely claiming that consumers don't want these vehicles.
If California ever sought to enforce its requirements (which seems quite unlikely), the manufacturers would go straight to court, claiming that the standards are unreasonable, and they will claim that they made all reasonable efforts to try to meet the standards.
It's a shell game, and Ford's decision to buy and then dismantle one of the few viable companies offering alternative-fuel cars, is just another clear sign that the automakers won't tolerate any attempt to "do the right thing."
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
It this world it's money that makes the decisions...
100 miles on the Mazda 626 will cost you about 100/26*1.35 = $5.19 in gasoline.
So if you can get electricity at $0.20 per KWh, the EV1 is cheaper to drive.
Now, take a quick look at your electricity bill. I pay less than that.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
either everyone on this board is ignorant or electric cars have taken a huge step back.
i tested drived an electric car about 4 years ago.
it went 85+ miles an hour.
it accelerated faster then any car you can buy from ford right now.
it had a range of 400 miles (300 with excessive use of radio/ac/heat)
it looked, felt, and drove, like a regular car. none of you could tell the difference from 20 feet away.
there were only 2 drawbacks at that time.
they were expensive.
they took a long time to charge.
its sad that so many of you have been fooled into thinking electric cars have to be small plastic toys or cant go faster then 55 miles an hour. go test drive one.
Lest we forget the other big three company.
I don't think GM has axed their EV1. Haven't heard anything lately from their attempts at electric cars, but from what I can tell it's still on their site.
http://www.gmev.com/
-------
People are great... When they don't come near me.
I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less?
By that same logic, laptops should be half the price of desktops. After all, they weigh less and they have less parts, right?
In reality, though, lighter parts cost *more* because they're made out of things that are more expensive. Take the car's frame or body - iron is cheap, aluminum is not so cheap, and composites are downright expensive.
What's your damage, Heather?
Every, and I mean EVERY, competent engineer knows that these battery life numbers are just bull. The car companies DO have the capacity to get more hours from batteries and the 5.5, 6.5, whatever that is being quoted here is pure hogwash. This is also a question of travel distance. Basically, this is just an excuse to kill pollution-free programs because they will co$t large corporation$ PROFIT. About 5 years ago a friend was working at a large aerospace company (coincidentally owned by GM) that was charged with the task of extending the distance traveled by the EV predecessor called Impact. Let me provide some more details:
1) The Battery Acid Pump: Batteries store energy in ionic solutions. By providing more ionic solution (acid) in the form of a reservoir and a pump more battery energy can be stored. This idea effectively doubled the driving distance and battery life. VETOED because of "safety concerns" (even though all conventional autos use gasoline -- yeah that's safe).
2) The NiH Battery/Hybrids: There are space and satellite communication batteries that hold twice the charge. They operate at about 120 degrees F though. This is a real breakthrough that I was told had the possibility of extending battery life by factors upward of 2x. VETOED because of "safety concerns".
3) Fuel-cell battery technologies: These current satellite-grade technologies could have extended the battery life/distance by about 1.5x plus. The engineering team was certain they could make a commercially viable product that would do the job. There was more research needed, though. VETOED because of cost.
4) Feature-bloat: What about the car itself -- When a CalTech spinoff originally developed the GM EV prototype it traveled farther and longer than the one released. GM actually ADDED WEIGHT to the original design. For instance, they had to add some type of new lock/hinges for the hood area because they said their marketing tests showed people wouldn't buy the thing. (Yeah, right! People buy electric cars because they are cool and efficient.) Except all the features they added were stupid, heavy and only succeeded in reducing by about 40 percent the distance the car traveled.
4) I forgot the other ideas but they sounded great to me at the time and my pal swore they were viable, except each time these floated by GM management they were VETOED by lawyers, executives and accountants for one reason or another.
Ever wonder why the California energy crisis came about in 2001? Well, about this time the major auto manufacturers were pressing cases in court to PREVENT a new California law from taking effect that would have required a certain percent of zero emission vehicle sales by 2003 (I think 3 or 5 percent). Of course, the auto manufacturers won because they said that electricity was no longer a viable alternative due to cost and other factors. It's really important to look at the big picture -- the energy crisis in California didn't happen in a vacuum. In fact there really was no energy crisis as the state has always had at least 30 percent excess capacity over peak demand. This crisis -- and the lawsuits and the ensuing folding of the zero emissions requirements by the state Air Resources Board -- are really all tied together. As well is the auto companies killing of electric vehicle projects. Anyway, this is a topic for a magazine article that I should write. Bottom line is that electric cars are viable from a technical and useability perspective. They are viable, they just have not been implemented. Or, nmore to the point, their implementation has been FOUGHT AND PREVENTED DESPITE TECHNICAL ADVANCES.
There's no friction on the moon?
Spencer Ogden
Electric vehicles have never made sense to me, from a Canadian perspective. Even in many parts of the U.S., the power available in winter from any battery system will be useless in severe cold temperatures.
The automakers are really more interested in hydrogen powered fuel cells.
There are many subtopics off of this news item.
One concept being discussed is that non-petroleum energy sources are not currently available which are environmentally friendly. If I hook up a hydrogen electrolysis machine (available from Stewart Energy Systems to my 220 volt household, it is probably getting juice from nuclear power today. But the future might be different. If I really wanted to, I could have a small windmill or two set up to generate the electricity needed to convert the water to hydrogen.
There are two problems we are solving, and we don't need to do them at the exact same time. One problem is that we need alternate fuel vehicles as gas and oil will eventually be unfound. Another problem is that we want a clean and renewable energy source. Hydrogen power in cars will be part of the solution, and finding sources of electricity that are cleaner will be another solution.
Another topic coming up is that people don't want to give up today's current horsepower and styling. Well, you can probably credit the early efforts of the petroleum industry for making the electric car concept appear in the front pages and then fail. I think this has changed now. They realize the petroleum reserves are down, and if they want to live on in any way they have to adapt to the next wave. You should not assume the production vehicles are going to come with puny horsepower, etc., of the early generation concept cars. There is no reason why we won't see hydrogen powered 18 wheelers, heavy equipment, etc. All you have to do is build the same with more power. Right now this technology is in the R&D phase, with many advancements coming each year. I've heard the big automakers have 2010 as the rollout date for fuel cell vehicles appearing in showrooms.
A major player in this is Ballard Power Systems, who have been working with many of the automakers. GM have decided to develop their own fuel cell technology.
Ford had purchased Think in 1990 and did a short run of advertisments in California for it's lease trial
It's its lease trial. How many times does somebody have to tell you?
Of course you realize that todays technology cannot provide what you want, and that's probably your point :)
There's just no way that we can store enough energy (that can be tapped as electricity)... not to mention recharge time.
The Think can store 11.5kWh, 100 amps. There's no way you can get that kind of energy out of solar panels in any reasonable amount of time. And a measly 11.5kWh is not enough, a few MWh would help. If anyone can find a way to store that amount of energy, a Nobel prize wouldn't be out of the question.
The battery tech we are using today is practically the same as it has been for the last 50 years. Sure, we have some new materials (like LiIon), but for a high capacity, high output (as a car battery would be)... nothing new.
GigaFahrad caps that can are stable and can deliver lots of amps over a long period... or still SF stuff like microfusion, cold fusion, taps into other dimensions...
We'll see how the fuel cells turns out. Would make good hybrid alternatives. Problem today with low emission hybrid cars is that they are more expensive to make (you have two engines and battery arrays). That will be a non issue with higher gasoline prices (I.e $10 a gallon) as fuel gets sparser.
//TheToon
"we won you the war, we won you the war"
You utter wankers! You don't realise that this tired argument makes you a laughing stock - you only got involved because the war came to you - before that you sat on your fat lazy asses and ignored the fact that millions of people overseas were struggling for years against the kind of bullshit fascist oppression that you are responsible for right nowRead some unbiased history, not just the facile shit that your third rate high schools spout and see what really happened in that war, and also see the way that America has behaved since (hint - it involves a lot of bombs, a lot of innocent people dying and a lot of "friendly fire" from redneck school boys in million dollar toys)
Hold on! Serbia? Do you know ANYTHING about what happened there? If you really knew America's part, you wouldn't have said such a totally stupid fucking comment.
Fuckwad.
Don't forget GM. I've actually seen a few of their electric cars driving around Atlanta. As far as I know, they haven't pulled the plug on electric cars yet.
Because you blindly follow a leader who's only policy is to point the gun barrel away from his own criminal bullshit.
And pale and stupid and ignorant and xenophobic and racist and bigoted and environmental disasters.
They're probably looking at something like this
Basically, a process that breaks down biomass from plants and produces hydrogen and CO2 as byproducts. They claim the CO2 produced will be less than what is used by next years crop of plants that are grown for this purpose. We'll see, I suppose.
But anyway, it's a promising technology, and probably what Ford is looking to for the future.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
I've taken a couple of rides in my friend's EV1, arguably the best electric vehicle to date. It is an amazing experience.
It has a 100KW engine - roughly 137 horsepower, and it has *no transmission*. Very, very mechanically simple and reliable. Maintenance, according to the owner, is replacing the tires.
He has never had to change the battery pack. As far as he knows, no owner has.
Charging can be accomplished very quickly with class IV chargers, and 50% capacity can be restored in less than two hours on one of these high-power chargers. Surprise!
For that matter, have any of you ever lived in LA? The smog here is nasty! Albeit, it's getting better, but it's still wretched.
The statement that "less than fifty miles" is a LIE. He has gotten his up to 130 miles between charge, and the mileage IMPROVES in city driving.
I contend that EVs are a very viable solution for those who own a home and commute every day in Los Angeles. I would own one in a heartbeat if I didn't walk to work every day.
For those of you who don't think EVs work, go visit http://www.evworld.com.
Some people bitch and gripe about problems. Some people actively _participate_ in the solution. I have great respect for the man who affects change, even in a small way, in his own circle of friends. He also carries with him a *very* clean conscience.
Because of these factors, a lot of people are willing to pay the extra expense to drive clean cars. That is why GM has sold *every*single*EV1* that it has ever made. The demand for electric vehicles is far higher than any of you might think.
Try sitting in an EV1. It's a very, very unique experience. Quiet, snappy, 0-60 in nine seconds. Faster off the start line than *any* gasoline vehicle. It's just the best vehicle in its class; a remarkable vehicle, an amazing mechanical and scientific achievement. And it was all designed nearly ten years ago.
GM engineers have impressed me. I would consider working for this company if I could be involved in a similar program. I think if more people actually *sat* in an EV, and tried driving it, then the demand would go up. They really are that neat, and they do ease your conscience.
It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
We *must* give up fat cars. The days of fat cars are gone!. Face up to it.
We only need powerful cars to impress girls and compete for road space with OTHER powerful cars. IOW, it is a wasteful escalation.
We have big fat selfish bloatmobiles that hog the road and the environment.
Get with reality, America. Kiss the 57 Chevy goodbye. James Dean is dead history, so stop being a selfish brat and come back to reality.
(And this is after I trashed the Escort for being wimpy in another topic. I would not mind if all the other cars were also wimpy. This is in regard to the "escalation" comment above.)
Tax Road Bloat. If you don't need a fat engine for provable business reasons, then don't allow ownership. This is the only way to stop this silly selfishness.
Table-ized A.I.
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less?
To put it simply... No. Not when the parts that are added back in (the motors) are non trivial to build.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
I suspect that a study of the laws of physics would benifit you here. 2 hours of driving is a lot of energy, and it's very unlikely you'll move that much energy, safely, that fast.
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
Did you ever think there is a *reason* why EV's are small and not full sized? See the comment above energy requirements.
Around 2035 there isn't going to be any oil left anymore at all. Of course there're new drilling technologies, yet they are used and reaching their limits, too.
So enjoy your driving experience now as it isn't going to last forever.
I want a car that runs on politicians hot air. Or how about running off the vapor from vaporware.
Actually, once the EPA mandates strict controls on sulfur compounds in diesel fuel, this will mean diesel vehicles stand a good chance to meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) criteria. This is because with cleaner diesel fuels we can apply common-rail fuel-delivery and direct fuel injection on the intake side and modern particulate traps and catalytic converters on the exhaust side. Because diesel engines uses 35-40% less fuel than their gasoline counterparts, that means also lower CO2 output, too.
Now, combine a modern diesel engine in an electrical hybrid system like what Toyota and Honda achieved and we maybe talking a Toyota Prius getting fuel mileage over 60 miles per US gallon! I would not be surprised that companies like Ford are seriously looking at hybrid automobiles and trucks/SUV's using half-electric/half-diesel power; imagine a Ford Escape SUV with a diesel/electric hybrid powerplant getting fuel mileage around 40 miles per US gallon.
This thread has sure pulled them out of the woodwork. Pretending the oil will never run out, and electric is no good because they have to have their BIG and FAST guzzlers that they drive all the way to the supermarket.
The arguments sound like those people who wont give up windows, its not that they cant its that they dont want to - its their way of life.
You guys sure live up to your stereotypes, even on a geek site.
Yes, I do agree that the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius definitely steps in the right direction when it comes to improving fuel mileage and lowering emissions.
The next step before we go to hydrogen-powered fuel cells is the diesel/electric hybrid car. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds; with the EPA soon mandating strict controls on sulfur compounds in diesel fuel, we can easily apply modern fuel delivery and emission controls on diesel engines without worries about the sulfur compounds in diesel fuel turning into something akin to sulfuric acid and ruining emission control/fuel delivery systems. This means a diesel engine could finally meet the strict ULEV standard for exhaust emissions.
When you combine diesel's 35-40% better fuel mileage with an electric motor like what Toyota and Honda has done, the result could be quite spectacular. Imagine a Toyota Prius getting 60+ miles per US gallon fuel efficiency instead of 44-48 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency--that's how much better a diesel engine could improve the Prius' fuel mileage.
If you don't use your car much during the day, perhaps you could plug your car into a recharge point in the car park.
For the average 8 hour working day, 300 MJ could be transferred at about 10.5 KW.
At 230 V (standard British mains voltage) that is 45 A -- not too handy.
Increase it to 1 KV (would that be reasonable? Assume the plug and socket have good safety features) and you have 10 A, which could be carried by an ordinary mains flex (rated at 13 A IIRC).
In any case, if you did this every day, you wouldn't need to charge anywhere near as much energy as that in one go. And if you do use your car during the day -- well, you could use a second car which recharges at night.
The major problem would be how to pay for the energy... a credit/debit card should suffice, swiped when the car is plugged in, and charged (no pun intended) when the car is unplugged.
If you opt for the exchange method, the guy who recharges the batteries would still need his special power supply to charge all those batteries by the time his customer needs them. So, the problem of energy transfer is still with us. All an exchange would do is transfer the inconvenience of charging into the dealer's hands. Admittedly, the inconvenience would be less for someone who does it a *lot* -- perhaps using a "battery dispenser", which accepts your old battery, and schedules recharging to distribute the power load over time, to avoid overloading the grid.
A thought on the exchange method from the motorist's point of view: A monolithic battery which could store 300 MJ would be too heavy to lift; but you could use a trolley to remove and transport it. It would probably take a long time to change such a battery built in sections, though a low-capacity top-up would be quicker. I presume this is what you meant by the energy storage problem.
Anyway, any sort of electric car wouldn't solve the problem of pollution generated at the power station. That takes clean energy sources: another problem entirely.
Driving to the moon, which would require driving through space, thus a notable lack of friction.
Quoth the zombie, braaaaaaaains
The real draw back is this: They are un-American.
The cars of Europe are built for handling and speed. Cars of the USA are built for maxium power from stop light to stop light. Not really a good idea eh?
Think about it: "American Muscle Car" says it all. There is no support behind a EV because you can't street race it, everyone would likely be driving about the same speeds. I mean, it really comes down to your feelings about your cock.
Of the people I know interested in EV's, they are all women. Why is this? I know for a fact because they want something that is practical, easy on emissions and safe. Men want fast, they want to show off and they need that car to show off their status (or their wishful status?).
I've always driven a small car. My first was a Honda Civic. Now I drive my girlfriends Aspire. Sure, the car sucks: But I don't feel ashamed of it because I'm actually smart enough to know the world isn't measured in horsepower. How I do in the sack or at work has nothing to do with what car you show up in.
The EV is unpopular because it's too much like a vehicle and not like a "Carrrrr". Really, this is plain stupid. One of the first posters noted that when he wants to change lanes he wants the thing to go. Well, if most people are driving EV's then you don't have to worry (duh?).
It's really about your cock people, admit it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The percentage of Prius' and Honda electrics with a rainbow bumper sticker is a little too high for my tastes.
Piss on them. If they were so great they wouldn't worry about the US so much. Penis envy is quite a pathetic sight on a national scale.
I have a 2002 Prius that I simply love!
Today I drove from Elgin, IL to New Salem Village (near Springfield) and back in it. 220 miles down and 220 miles back. Comfortable. Smooth. CD player making tunes. It was wonderful. And we did this 440 mile trip on less than one tank of gas, with an indicated MPG of 48.2 for the whole trip.
Nothing bare-bones about this car. It works like a dream. Mind you, it isn't designed for drag-racing, but it can accelerate well enough to merge without stress, can zoom along at 70 with traffic, and stops really, really well.
For those who might care; I got mine with cruise control, side airbags, and the single disc CD changer. I passed on the electronic map system. The color is Aqua Ice, and it is a pretty car!
Go test drive one.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Uhh, I call foul to your claims.
I call foul on your figures first. Emission levels are here. The carbon emissions for a modern coal-fired plant are 263gC/kWh. You are claiming 920gC/kWh. To compare, an oil-fired plant is 213gC/kWh and a gas-fired plant is 113gC/kWh! This is one THIRD of the Mazda 626's 350gC/kWh. I expect there's a mistake in your calculations.
But the problems in your argument aren't over. You're comparing coal-fired power plants against an oil-fueled 626! Coal is a poor alternative to oil. Energy densities here. Coal is at best 31MJ/kg. Oil is at worst 41MJ/kg. Gasoline in your 626 is 45MJ/kg. These energy densities influence CO2 emissions. To use a tired cliche, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Also I call foul with your conclusion. You only compared CO2 emissions per kWh and then concluded that the EV1 has better mileage!? If you want to compare mileage then you need to use the same fuels in the two cars and the plant and concentrate on the miles travelled!
But let's do some napkin calculations to get a feeling for "mileage". The electrical transport cost of overhead powerlines is less than 10%. Motors are 95% efficient. The best gas-fired plants are now exceeding 50% efficiency. So the fuel->wheel efficiency is 43%. Even the most efficient diesel generators as used on hybrids are less than 40% efficient. Cars range between 25% and 35% with petrol. So the plants use fuel more efficiently and therefore have the better "mileage".
We can also do some napkin calculations for cost. Cost calculator here. A car will typically cost 3x more per kWh than the plant. This is because plants get huge economies of scale and use much cheaper fuels. Cost alone proves nothing but combined with my previous arguments it proves that purely electric vehicles - not hybrids - are the best choice.
We have to effect change sometimes in baby steps. Companies aren't going to make a change that drastic over night, and not see it effect sales. Once they have the technology to make a powerful electric car we might start seeing them be a main stay. Until then we will start seeing more and more efficient hybrids.
> The electrical transport cost of overhead powerlines is less than 10%. Motors are 95% efficient. The best gas-fired plants are now exceeding 50% efficiency. So the fuel->wheel efficiency is 43%.
I belive you ommitted the absolutely horrific conversion loses in a battery -- both charging and depleting.
This project got dumped because its small vs SUV and till the war starts, SUV's will keep wining the market share. Of course once the shooting starts, no one will be able to afford to drive a motorcycle let alone a SUV but thats not a problem for today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know all the eco-freaks are always saing "the republicans are trying to destroy the earth, we need to go hop in our big gas-guzzling protest bus and destroy one of the oil pipelines. If the spill kill enough animals, then maybe people will understand that oil is bad", but the truth is that there is nothing that you can do that does not hurt the earth.
So you want an electric car because it doesn't pollute, right? No CO2 emissions or anything like that. Guess what. You are polluting as you read this. You, the other 6 billion people on this planet, and the countless billions of animals on this planet pollute every time you exhale.
So you take your electric car and you plug it into your wall every night to charge it up. Where do you think that electricity comes from? An oil power plant? Coal power plant? Every time you use electricity, you're also contributing to pollution.
Maybe your town runs on a hydroelectric plant. Where do you think they get the concrete and steel and wood and plastic that they use to make the plant? They strip mine the ground for metal. They cut down trees for the wood. They make the plastics in a factory. More pollution.
For the Americans, how many of you are really willing to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas, if the oil drilling in the states stopped. You probably think it would only really affect those people with SUVs and trucks, until you go to the grocery store and realise that every item in the store has been marked up in price. Guess what? Your food is brought in on trucks.
If oil is not to be drilled as much, then prepare to take some money out of your retirement fund in order to pay for simple daily things.
No matter what you do, you will be polluting.
The point that many people seem to be missing in danheskett's post is that this is pretty close to what MOST American consumers want out of an EV. Since it's basically impossible to do this with current technology, he's saying that pursuit of EV's at this time is a wasted effort.
The fact remains that EV's, at this point in time, are vastly infriorn on a functional level to internal combustion vehicles and will remain so for some time. Our best bet in the short-term seems to be hybrid gasolice/electric vehicles and fuel cell technology on the horizon looks like it may be the long-term solution.
BTW, Somebody suggested swapping out the batteries. Unfortunately, current EV designs (such as the EV-1) require over 1000lbs of batteries for a decent range, which prevents them from being swapped quicly without heavy equipment. This is not saying that this approach is impossibe, but it has logistical problems.
And don't assume that a magic battery will appear that will solve the weight and range problems. Improved battery technology has a great many applications and such technology would be worth many billions of dollars. Hence, there are a great many people working on it, and have been for decades. Slashdot had an article a while back featuring the head of R&D over a Eveready saying that there was nothing being on the horizon.
Whenever I am done drinking my beer, I take the bottles back to the store for refund.
Whenever the bottle of propane for my BBQ is empty, I take it back and exchange it for a full one (of course, I pay for the propane).
Now, how about designing EV's with removable fuel cells (or batteries or whatever device the energy is stored in), so that we could simply take the empty battery back to a specialized retailer (analog to gas stations), so that we could in a few seconds get a fully charged vehicle?
There are probably many ways that have nothing to the with the EV technology itself that could make it a viable and realistic solution.
If the technology is deliberately held back by the lobbying of oil companies and others who would lose because of the shift towards EV's, then make them part of the solution, and have them maintain their level of profit. Let's grant them a monopoly on EV energy production and sale.
BUT PLEASE, PLEASE let's stop ruining the environment so that we can give our children and grandchildren the same comfort and environment that we've had so far.
I'm no engineer or scientist, but common sense has always served me well.
That's the heat power you'd get if you completely burned the gasoline as it came out of the nozzle. That's a lot!
But for a more reasonable comparison we should multiply 20MW by the average efficiency of a car engine, say 15%. That gives us 3 MW, still a lot. (EV efficiencies are much higher; 70-85% is typical, and that's dominated by the battery since motors and inverters are so efficient).
So it's clear that EVs will never have charge times that approach the refueling times for gasoline cars, unless the batteries are physically swapped.
But is this really a problem? My EV1 spends most of its time parked in one of two places: my driveway, and the parking garage at work. I can charge in either place, and I have plenty of time to do it. So as long as I can get through a typical day's driving on two charges (one overnight at home and another during the day at work), I really don't have a problem.
Actually, I hardly ever charge at home anymore. And the electricity at work is free.
As an EV1 driver for the past four years, I will say that charging speed is the biggest drawback of the current generation of EVs. (In fact, it's the only drawback even worth mentioning.) I would very much like to see charging powers increased from the present 4-6kW range to perhaps 15-20kW, which can still be managed in most homes. But given the considerable convenience of being able to charge at home or at work without ever having to go to visit a gas station, there's just no compelling need for charging speeds comparable to those of gasoline cars, at least for cars used for routine commuting and shopping.
For long road trips, use a gasoline car. But for everyday driving, EVs are already entirely practical.
Bring on the nukes. Somebody tell the enviro-wackos out there that Homer Simpson does not really work at the nuke plant. If they want energy to drive (or post to /.), get used to nuclear power.
But the real win is in emissions. EVs charged by California power plants are about 97% cleaner than the average gasoline car.
I actually agree with this. I love the reaction I get from my fellow EV enthusiasts when I, a EV1 driver and a solar power user, advocate nuclear power as well. Wrong. I have a 2.4kW system on my roof here in San Diego, and it produces most of what we need. The economic payback, at current electric rates, is approximately a wash. While I do have a battery bank, I only use it during outages; during normal operation, I pump my excess PV power back into the power line, spin the meter backwards, and collect a credit from the power company towards electricity I use at night.The truth is that in the southwest US, a typical solar panel will take only about 2 years to pay back the energy used to manufacture it. For the rest of its typical 25-year lifetime, you're ahead.
They have a minivan, truck, van, etc. charges over night or gas stations can have a special compressor that can fill it up with compressed air in 3 or 4 minutes. The cars put out NO pollution.
: //www.zeropollution.com
These people have it all figured out. I know I well purchase one the minute it comes out. I never travel more than 75 miles in a day. This isnt a solution for people that need to travel alot or go on vacation with, but for local travel it just makes sense.
I have a feeling that the gas companies are paying the media off not to advertise this, because I have seen zero coverage on it.
http://www.bellwetherinteractive.com/mdi/
http
#1: Cost. While you may end up paying the same for a car that doesn't have a transmission for one that does. You're gonna save in the long run (much more then you would if you bought the car for 10k) not only on gas, but on repairs. You'll never have to repair your transmission (or the 1000's of other things that can go wrong with the primative combustible engine)
#2: Fast Recharge. While this may never be possible, you should consider this alternative. A car that take 8 hours to charge but has a range of a hojillion miles (or, more miles then anyone could possible drive in a 12 hour period). This would remove the need for fast recharge, since you could never run out of power between long-time chargings.
#3. "Plastic Toy". This has already been addressed. You need to test drive an EV.
Actually, electric cars already have the edge. Despite there being more energy conversion steps in the EV, the overall energy efficiency is still greater than the gasoline car.
I know this is a naughty, but I am really curious. Do you have any references on this? Do you mean that electric cars are more energy efficient (total energy cycle) than equivalent gasoline powered cars?
Re; A/C - You live in San Diego - a mild climate. I live in Phoenix. In the summer you need about 5 kW to cool a car here.
As far as solar, again it depends on a lot of things. And, the cost per kw (if you ignore unreasonable subsidies, such as California and Arizona laws that force the power companies to buy your unreliable power back at your whim by running your meter backards) is much, much higher.
Finally, you seem to not use much energy. My home, in the summer, runs about 15kW for about 18 hours a day! That's a heck of a lot of solar cells, and part of that time it is dark out.
I would also be interested in the 2 year energy cost payback on cells in the southwest. Not that I disbelieve you, but I would love a source.
Finally, as one who frequently attacks environmental policies here, it might surprise folks to know that I would *love* to have an electric car if they could solve the battery problem. Electric cars are very low maintenance, quietnon-polluting (at the car... the non-nuclear power plant is a different issue), have excellent performance, and in general are just cool. But the caveat.... the battery problem.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Reverse the charging problem. Use the efficient electric generator in a hybird car to charge batteries in your house.
A household has much lower electricity demands than a car (ignoring hot water heating - use natural gas for this), and the demand for energy during the day is probably much less than in the evenings.
Disconnect your house from the grid and the savings in line charges will help pay for the DC equipment in the house (Here in New Zealand, about 1/3 of the electricity bill is fixed connection charges).
Better still; use the natural gas supply in your house to refuel the hybrid car.
Hows that sound?
O.k. here it is:
As some people mentioned "Where can I charge up?"
Well in_some_cities they have a few charge up places like Mesa Arizona. But not enough.
And yet people argue that we will never run out of oil. And they are right we might not in out life time, but we might run out of good clean air and water.
So you want to but electric chargers all over the country? Great but where do they get their power from? That's right BIG OIL and COAL companies. So either way if we go to electrics cars, we'll just pay more electricity and heating, but hey at least we are saving the environment while filling the same pockets with more money.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
That's the beauty of petrol--I can move twice that amount of driving in under five minutes. Electricity just isn't as convenient.
It might work alright in Europe. I understand that they drive much less and more regularly than we do here.
I don't want a car I cannot take a spin down to Florissant, Colo. in...
If you could chill out a moment and not rush to nonsensical defense of your country you would see that there is a certain amount of sense to the argument, even from your point of view.
If we had the balls to keep our military *out* of other people's disputes, they would settle the problem one way or another. The problem is in part, ours, our agendas, overt and otherwise, will not let us keep our noses out of it.
If they think they need the US to help them out, they can ask for our help. Until that, they can handle it however they see fit. From your point of view it means making their own bed and lying in it, from their point of view it means the US lets sleeping dogs lie and/or stops playing big brother.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
Hybrid cars give insanely good gas mileage and are the next step in evolution of auto transport. Their weight makes them unsafe in collisions, but thats another article.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
So if you want to drive somewhere more than a few miles away, you need enough planning to find a recharging station along the way, have another vehicle, or rent a car? I can't imagine non tree huggers accepting the inconvenience and social limitations of owning 1 vehicle and having it be an ev.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
So, it appears many of the recharging stations, which you seemingly dont have to pay to use, are at municipal offices(tax dollar funded), or Costco stores (higher price funded). So, once again the greens are getting non willing participants to pay for their desired results.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Here are some figures.
The NiMH model of the EV1 is rated to consume about 370 watt-hours AC per mile. The PbA version was more efficient, about 270 WhAC/mi. I've driven both models, and I've confirmed these figures. (The NiMH model is worse mainly because of GM's kludgey use of the air conditioner to cool the battery pack during charging. A good liquid-cooled design would be much more efficient.)
Gasoline is about 125,000 BTU/gallon, or about 36.6 kW-hr. So a car that gets 25 mpg consumes about 1464 watt-hours/mile, or about 4 times that of the EV1.
So if the efficiency of the power grid, from primary fuel to customer, is greater than about 25%, then the EV1 wins on overall energy efficiency. Large combined-cycle gas-fired turbines now yield efficiencies in excess of 50%, large alternators are practically 100%, and the grid efficiency in California is about 96%. So the EV1 wins.
It's even better than that, because I've ignored the energy used in the production of gasoline from crude oil. And the EV also has the qualitative advantage of being able to use electricity from any primary source, while the gasoline car can only run on petroleum (although it could be converted to run on compressed natural gas.)
Even without subsidies, solar is within a factor of two. That may qualify as "much, much higher", but the long-term trend on solar prices is steadily down while the trend on fossil fuels is steadily up. Eventually, they'll cross. So it seems reasonable to get started now, and to use subsidies to help the economies of scale kick in.
My PV power is quite reliable -- whenever the sun shines, I get power. It has kept my house going several times when the utility failed (though I had to "spill" the excess generation.) Net metering is hardly "unreasonable" when you consider that the effect of my generation is to slightly lower the net consumption of my neighborhood. When net-metered photovoltaic becomes a significant fraction of grid capacity, then we can reconsider net metering. I'd be happy to have that problem.
I note that electricity demand is usually greatest exactly when the sun is shining, because of heavy air conditioner use. I take advantage of this fact by having a time-of-use meter; I generate most of my PV electricity during peak periods when it is most valuable, and I buy it back at night at lower rates.
Did you really mean to say that you average about 15 kilowatts? The typical US home consumes about 1kW (or less) on average, so you're way above that.I typed "photovoltaic payback" into Google and immediately got several pages of links with that information. It seems to be a popular topic of study. A particularly detailed analysis is here
I know public transport is not great- and I really would admit to that. But I use it every day. Yes it could be improved-and will be, and I do hope toll-road systems will be used to subsidise it in the uk. Sorry - any body who cares so little about anything else but there fat SUV can get the hell away.
The EV is great for small inner city transport where a bus or train network is not available. And even for small amounts of luggage/shopping. In fact what would be ideal would be vehicles that can be leased and return to base in some manner- even EV taxis. The problem with Taxis is they spend so much time ripping people off that they stink and dont know the routes (I really look forward to AI jonny cabs). I am prepared to look at any system which could:
a) Decongest London
b) Make the air a little more breathable
c) take half the dangerous idiots in the uk off the road - like stricter, more regular driving tests(not you can try the test 6 times in a row failing it and then pass and get by on your lucky average pass with crappy driving skills for the rest of your life-though anything short of some driver genocide may not actually work).
d) Subsidise public transport so it is cleaner(that is cleaned more often and doesnt smell), safer(no more Selby style sh1t), faster(read as realistic timetables- if they cant send a train to X at Y time - then at least admit it- dont lie), and cheaper.
If theres one thing that really makes me angry- its that london is full of idiots driving to work in the biggest, noisiest, smelly car they could afford, with 4 to six passenger seats and no passengers. Personally- a good start would be an outright ban or heavy fines levied for such behaviour. I understand someone commuting from god knows where in the sticks needing a car- but even they could leave it in the suburbs and take public transport into the center. Beleive me- parking would be cheaper and easier and you will probably reach the destination quicker. Im not a vegetarian, or some fscking hippy- but I really think that macho/penis symbolic car ownership is the biggest load of w4nk this side of Iraq.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Good spotting. Lead-acid batteries lose 20% of what was put in. So the losses are 50% to the plant, 5% for transmission, 20% for storage and 5% for the motor. This brings a total efficiency from fuel to wheel of 32.3%. Still better than a conventional car.
I also missed the comparitive energy costs of transporting and storing gasoline for an ICE. I also missed transmission (aka gearbox) losses which might not even apply to an EV. I'm certain there are many factors that I've missed. I wish I was an expert but I'm not.
But at least we can dispute the figures instead of disputing each other!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are many solutions to this- which dont involve conventional "Fill-up" scenarios. The most basic is to change the battery-or failing that pump out old electrolyte, swap the electrodes and recharge the old ones at the station.
The second is to have recharge points at any given parking space-where it is incorporated in parking charges should you use it. It would probably work out cheaper for companies to supply these than deal with petrol expense forms/claims anyway and much fewer tax oddities.
The third is having a built-in unit that acts like the secondary coil of a transformer, with the roads having an EM grid underneath them. The car on the road would be constantly charged from a field. Using superconductive materials- this could be HIGHLY efficient. I recharging by coil induction. This would mean that 90% of the time- the car may be running directly of grid, and only using batteries where there was no grid yet.
The 4th is the h2 fuel cell which is fairly well known-so I wont discuss this further.
The 5th is the attempt at using a flywheel for powering these- although I dont beleive it was entirely succesful- but suspending it with magnetic bearings, then engaging it when power was required. Charging would involving spinning up the flywheel.
I think the real problem here is that attitudes,politics and economies need to change before we would see people using EV's or alternative fuels. Until then-we can only speculate where it could lead us. I still feel the research done on this has been in no way conclusive-and although money has been spent on it- you can guarantee a great deal more was spent on the bodywork and ad campaign for the new mundano.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
I agree with what you say. And yes the car does not need to conform to the old shape and size regimes... But I think the guy is making another point- that is- he doesnt want to be the pink-shirt-bearer(re the simpsons). He wants to have the choice of making his choice without stigma of being some animal-loving-tree-hugging-hare-crishna-hippy-ston er or something(note I do not thing this of environmentalists- I am merely making a point). Its like the geek who doesnt want to look like a geek- so he shaves, cuts his hair, ditches the glasses and wears deisgner clothes or something like that. People cant look at him and say "There goes the guy in an electric car" becuase his electric car looks like any other ICE car on the road. Its only the inside thats different....
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
You're very presumptuous. I merely stated that according to the numbers, one could accelerate to 100km/h 300 times. Nothing in there about friction, the levelness of the road, the material of the road, the spin of the earth, windspeed and direction, the position of the moon, or any number of other factors which might have influence.
What we are talking about here is a deregulated regulatory environment the stifles innovation at the expense of human progress. So it's not about some bullshit claim that you are making up to make reality-based arguments sound false. It's about the power to stifle innovation because it continues the status quo. Personally I don't give a shit if you drive around Texas with steer horns on your Escalade. I would like an electric car to be continued -- not killed -- and innovated instead of attacked. Companies should not be able to influence government regulations at the expense of the democratic majority. And no company should be powerful enough to buy a competitive foreign concern like Think and shut it down because it does not fit their (and your) world view or financial concerns. That my friend is the definition of a government endorsed monopoly much to the same effect as prior Communist regimes in East Europe.
Your postings go against my understanding of the facts, but frankly you have more detail than my sources, and obiously have researched this in depth, so I have to tentatively grant you the facts :-( :-) ... It's always nice when one can learn something new, and I think I did. You should get modded up!
:-) Actually, we do supply a lot of your power now - the largest nuclear plant in the US is 50 mi SW of Phoenix (Palo Verde), and it sends a lot of power to California.
MOD UP THE GUY I AM REPLYING TO, PLEASE
A couple of comments... you should probably compare your car to best-of-breed gas powered small cars, which would have a mileage closer to 50mpg than 25mpg. But that still leaves you with a 2 x 1 energy advantage.
My comment on the reverse metering is that it is an unreasonable subsidy for your power. One could argue, as you do, that it is reasonable to jumpstart a better energy source, and you may be right. But the power you feed back to the utility definitely isn't worth as much as you get paid for it, because they cannot control it or count on it. Thus they have to build peak load and transmission capacity as if the photovoltaics weren't there at all (in fact, this in general is a problem with photovoltaics - outside of energy efficiency which I'll tentatively grant you).
So a major consideration of solar power (not to mention wind power) has to include the peaking/storage issue - i.e. the cost of energy storage. At that point, on a personal basis, you are down to batteries, which unfortunately suck. They contain lots of lead and production of them produces lead pollution. They have lifetime problems (although we have a mountain top radio repeater site running on 30 year old telephone company batteries - but we are *very* nice to them). They are heavy to ship, and contain and produce dangerous chemicals. The batteries are capable of extremly high currents, which means that they are more dangerous in some ways than primary power - and to get best energy efficiency you want them in series producing at least 40V or more. Oh, and they are really expensive. Submariners know well the dangers of batteries, as all submarines have huge banks of them - and most diesel submarines provided all underwater power via batteries (I believe there are now underwater combustion systems that can be used).
Large scale solar power could use more efficient systems. Of course, one of the best - gravity storage - runs afoul of the environmentalists (gravity storage, for other readers of this post who may not know, means pumping water upstream into reservoirs. You can then get the energy back - mostly - by draining it into generators when you need it). I don't know of any other good systems. People have talked about all sorts of things, but nobody seems to build them - stuff like superconducting magnetic storage (big BOOM if it overheats - nuclear bomb class energy release) - or big flywheels (same issue). Of course, you can produce hydrogen and store it, but again, that is not very efficient, and hydrogen, contrary to what some people here have posted, offers its own dangers: except at night, its very hot flame is invisible, so a leak can TOAST you with no warming. It is extremely good at embrittling metal (it adsorbs into it, permanently changing its structure). Hydrogen corrosion of steel has been studied for at least 140 years! In fact, the whole cold fusion approach was based on hydrogen adsorbtion into palladium, as are some hydrogen storage approaches. Not all of these are impossible things to overcome, btw... just issues.
Power systems have to be built for reliable peak power, and cheap base load. I happen to favor nuclear in this regard because done right, it can give you lots of power at a good price with no pollution. In fact, I believe in it so much that I wouldn't mind if all of California was powered by nuke plants here in Arizona - even upwind of where I live
Oh...re the power consumption in my home...
It is a big home (>5000 ft^2), built before the environmentalists killed the "too cheap to meter" nuclear power... i.e. energy inefficient. It has three good sized air conditioners, and in the summer, during the day *and* evening, their duty cycle is almost 100%. And, it is in the desert - the temperature here right now at 1725 local is 109 degrees F.
I have looked at making it more energy efficient, and other than replacing the air conditioners with modern high efficiency units (which I had to do anyway due to death of the old units), nothing makes economic sense. I have had two energy consultants out (one from the power company, and an acquaintance who is an architectural engineer specializing in alternative energy) and they agreed with me. Of course, as an engineer/nerd, I naturally had done all the fun stuff - calculating heat fluxes and heat storage in the brick and tile, measuring temperatures, measuring air conditioner power usage, etc, etc, etc.
I have considered retiring to nicer climes (I once lived on Malibu Beach - wonderful place!) but they are just too crowded and too expensive (So Cal), too far away (Hawaii where a relative lives), or too foreign (Mexico) - and besides, I still need to make a living just to get medical insurance (but that's a different subject).
The only good weather is bad weather.
Is it more expensive to build an electric motor or a combustion engine with transmission? I find it hard to believe that it is more expensive to build the former.
Research manufacturing processes. See which one is simple castings and machining, and which is not. Add into your analysis the fact that EV's require four electric motors to replace the one IC engine.
I wrote:I suspect that a study of the laws of physics would benifit you here. 2 hours of driving is a lot of energy, and it's very unlikely you'll move that much energy, safely, that fast.He replied:
Would you bet your life on it? I have few doubts about the ingenuity and brilliance of properly motivate researchers and inventors. Figure it out and the world will beat a path to your door.
I'll certainly bet my life on it. No amount of motivation in the world can repeal the laws of physics, none, nada, zip, can't be done.
Its not so much the size as the styling. There is no reason it has to be made to look the way they do.
No reason other than the simple *fact* that you cannot make a small car look like a large car, especially when you have to shave every pound possible in order to make the car perform at all.
Hobbyists have been converting stock cars to alternative fuels for decades. What is the problem with a major car maker doing the same?
Nothing other than the fact that the general public simply won't accept a car that does not match the performance level they are used to, or one that is far less convienient to operate.
Well most mass producing Electricity devices make some thing rotate to produce electric current, use steam whateva. So naturally there is loss of energy in this process. Then you transport this energy to house again a Loss occurrs. Then ya use this to create a rotational force to drive your car. So hydro carbon -> kinetic -> electric-> kinetic is better than hydro carbon -> kinetic ? I think not.
(Team of electrical and mechanical engineers with careers of experience building motor controllers, batteries, and automobiles put down their sliderules and listen with rapt attention to you.)
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.Issues:
Battery technology is the limiting factor on price. Ideally, the battery would be no bigger than the gas tank, contain no caustic or dangerous chemicals, recharge in a few seconds, last thousands of charges, and contain enough energy to drive the vehicle for at least 500km. But batteries are a mature technology; unlike memory chips and hard drives, they don't double in capacity every 18 months. Exotic batteries used in current electric cars are expensive, partially due to weird chemicals, partially due to limited production.
Electric cars would remain expensive because they're not being mass produced, because they suck. They don't do the things that people have come to expect of modern automobiles. Therefore, consumers will never buy them.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.That would be, like, so kewl! Maybe you can call up our buddy Sol, at the center of our solar system, and ask him to increase the energy density of the light hitting our fair planet, so that even with a 100% efficient solar panel, this would be possible! (Unless you're gonna design a way of unfolding enough solar cells from somewhere in the car to cover a couple of football fields of ground?)
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.Ahem. All modern cars look like plastic toys. For example, you described a Toyota Echo perfectly (molded plastic with 4 tiny wheels).
Lightweight, flimsy tinfoil designs are essential to reduce the mass of the vehicle. Since accelerating a greater mass to a given speed requires more energy, lighter mass cars are more energy efficient.
While the car companies have to make these trade-offs, I don't. I continue to drive a full-frame all-steel American made vehicle, because momentum=mass*velocity, and I don't really feel like dying at the hands of some incompetent Honda Civic driver on his cellphone running a red light.
Give me those three things, and I will never look back.Give you those three things, and superluminal travel will seem easy.
Instead, what we get are 1000 pound plastic attempt-to-look-like-the-future pieces of junk. Not interested, thanks.Okay. Let's make electric cars look like my 1976 Dodge Ram. Why?
Does that make you happy?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I'll grant you this point provided that you grant me mine that under the present circumstances (net-metered PV and wind production is a tiny fraction of grid capacity) net metering is not an unreasonable subsidy -- and not just because the amounts are small. Consider that a sudden decrease of 1kW in my PV production (due to a cloud, etc) is indistinguishable from a sudden 1kW increase in my -- or my neighbors' -- demand. Yet the power company is quite capable of adapting to such small changes in demand, charging only for the electricity we actually use, and not charging us for the electricity we don't use. They don't apply "demand" charges to us residential customers as they do to large commercial customers.
Only when net-metered generation starts to represent a significant fraction of generating capacity should the current net metering policy be revisited. And the right answer then will not be to eliminate net metering, but to add real-time pricing. I can still generate electricity (or not) whenever I want, but the price I'll be paid for it will depend on the current supply/demand situation. Generators able to provide electricity whenever it is needed will, on average, command higher prices than "unreliable" sources that can't.
But I still expect PV generation to command above-average prices simply because it generally occurs when demand is highest, i.e., on hot sunny summer afternoons.
A long time later, when nearly all of our daytime needs are being met with PV generation, the daytime price will fall to where additional PV capacity won't make economic sense. The market will then encourage the building of generator (or storage) capacity that can meet nighttime loads. Here I agree that nuclear represents the best technology currently known, although I wouldn't completely discount battery storage. Large sodium-sulfur batteries are already being used in utility load leveling applications.
When discussing energy and related topics (e.g., electric cars) people often fall into the trap of arguing that just because some new technology can't meet all our needs, it has no value and shouldn't be pursued at all. This simply isn't true. It's quite easy to see that photovoltaic can never meet all our needs unless we develop inexpensive, reliable, safe and large batteries that can store enough PV energy to run us over night and during cloudy weather. (Either that, or an electric grid able to ship electricity halfway around the planet, from the day side to the night side.) But does this mean PVs shouldn't do what they can? Of course not! Electricity can be generated in many different ways, and it is neither necessary or even desirable to look for a single magic way to generate all of it.
I think that a subsidy is a subsidy, and in general I oppose such things. A subsidy means that politicians think they know a better way to do something than the market does, and history shows that this is rarely the case (look at Japan's big initiatives in the 80's for example, or Carter's various misguided programs).
BTW, I *do* pay demand metering on my power... the power company considers demand to be so important that with demand metering, I pay about 1/3 the normal KWH charge, plus a demand charge. Demand metering is very common, and I wouldn't be surprised if your utility also offers it on residential property. Demand metering works by reducing the amount of peak power that utilities need to generate, and peak power is always the most expensive. It time shifts their power production to base load power, often nuclear or big-time natural gas, which is very cheap.
Certainly your small 1KW is not a problem. But when lots of people are doing it, as you say, it does become an issue. Then I agree that time metering (and even the ability to refuse the power) should be the way to go. Also, in an area with air conditioning, the power peaks may more or less coincide (although there is a lag between peak insolation and peak usage, due to heat storage). My house reaches its top temperature around 9 to 10PM, well after dark, due to the thermal mass of the tile roof and stone and brick walls.
Currently all sorts of energy technologies are under extensive research. I really do want to see a lot of progress there... especially in mobile energy storage, because I *want* an electric car, but I don't want to sacrifice characteristics for it.
I have never been one to demand that a system meet all needs in order to be valuable. For example, there have long been cases where PV's were the way to generate power. We operated a ham radio site for years on a power-less mountaintop, using PV and huge batteries. Unfortunately, ice falls from the tower destroyed the PV's at some point, but by then power was available. Also, because at the time we had inadequate monitoring, our charger failed one time and we didn't detect it until many weeks later when these huge batteries finally discharged. I then had to spend a summer driving to the mountaintop almost every weekend to care for the batteries. This was over 15 years ago, and they are still there (as backup). But I also created telemetry for the system (which later became a business for me) so we would know when they system was operating on batteries!
I do believe that the market usually achieves better results than government policies - especially when balancing a complex of issues. Thus I think that PV, if it makes sense, will make economic sense without subsidies.
I had an acquaintance who was employed by the government to push PV. She proudly showed me her all-solar house (with reverse metering like you have). I asked a few questions, and it became clear (at that time) that her real cost of power, minus subsidies, was enormous. But she didn't know that, not being an engineer, and was paid to troop around the country telling people all sorts of nonsense about it.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Electricity is a perfect example. There are serious land-use issues associated with transmission lines, and serious environmental issues associated with power plants. Even libertarians generally agree that it's appropriate for governments to regulate pollution, e.g., by encouraging the construction of cleaner power plants than would otherwise come about by just the action of the market.
Rooftop PV is about the most benign way to generate electricity there is. The "fuel" is free and effectively infinite, and PV panels mounted on existing rooftops require no additional land. Rooftop PV power is generated right at (or close to) where it is needed, thus reducing the need to build additional transmission facilities. It is clearly something worth encouraging.
Now we can certainly discuss the various ways to do that, ranging from direct subsidies (e.g., California's "buy-down" program), to production incentives (e.g., preferential rates for PV production), to levying additional taxes or restrictions on the less benign methods of generating electricity to account for their environmental impact.
But it's just not realistic to assert that PV "doesn't make economic sense" when you haven't accounted for the serious indirect costs of most of the traditional ways to generate electricity.
I don't know about Arizona, but in all the places I've lived (Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California), demand metering is a strictly commercial phenomenon. It's just not part of most residential tariffs.
Are you sure you're talking about demand metering, not time-of-use metering? TOU is optionally available in many residential tariffs, though the extra cost of the meter makes it uneconomical for most people. I have a TOU meter because of my EV1, which I can choose to charge at off-peak times.
That said, I still think the best answer is continuous, real-time pricing for all customers, residential and commercial. The lack of such mechanisms is one of the reasons that electricity deregulation failed in California. It also contributed to several rolling blackouts, as there was little incentive besides altruism for individuals to conserve during Stage 2 alerts.
Real-time pricing would not only encourage the construction of PV (since, as I've pointed out, most PV power is generated during peak-rate periods) but it would also encourage those with battery banks to sell from those banks when things get really critical. I've done this on an experimental basis, but without a price premium high enough to cover battery depreciation as well as various losses, there's no economic incentive for me to help out the grid in its time of need.
Phil,
You are raising the issues of externalities. But surely, if the externalities are real, the way to deal with them is to force their cost onto those who create them, rather than to pick, by fiat, an alternative. There is no question that failing to account for externalities itself biases the economic system. However, even the cure I suggest above (put the cost on those who benefit from them) brings in the heavy hand of government, and unfortunately government usually does a really terrible job of that sort of thing.
I have nothing against PV. I also think that if the technology is worthwhile, the small difference caused by the reverse metering won't make much difference either way. It just isn't enough money, compared to system costs and other issues, to really push it over the top.
However, there have been all sorts of government environmental and energy regulations that have been much more significant, much more costly, and foolish. For example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rule - to raise gas mileage in cars - kills several thousand people a year, and has driven many folks like myself into buying RV's. No matter where you live in the US, it is illegal for you to be sold a shower head that will put out more than 2.5GPM. This is absurdly overbroad.
So I am extremely skeptical of getting the government into this sort of thing.
I think a better way in general is through government programs that need technology and select it based on need rather than ideology or market forecast. The best of breed there has been defense and space. It's very expensive, but the fallout has more than paid for it. I am sure one reason it has been valuable is becaue no bureaucrat was charged with *making* it valuable! Now that NASA tries to cost justify itself, it has turned into a pretty pathetic organization.
I refer you to Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy (http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Lawsburo.htm) for my thoughts on the subject.
A final comment... the market is far from perfect, and as one who likes the free market, I am still ready to acknowledge its weaknesses. The market has a broad problem domain over which it is useful, but there exist other domains (for example, war and peace belong to the political world, not the market). However, the government is so terribly bad at "industrial policy," which is essentially what you are arguing for, that it should be used only when absolutely, totally necessary. I don't think we are yet to that position in the country where the government needs to steal my money at the implied threat of violence in order to subsidize one particular alternative technology!
PV's are good things. *Maybe* they will turn out to be broadly helpful in energy usage. However, the numbers I have looked at put PV still well in the marginal category for many years into the future.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Perhaps I don't know what demand metering is. I know that I get charged for my peak hour demand for the month - so many bucks per KWH for the peak load during the time of day. So it is time of day related, but the charge is based on measured peak demand.
I don't think real-time pricing is realistic at the residential level. At some point, the cost of having everyone process that information into their decision loops isn't worth it - it is too much burden on society. I think this is one reason consumers like fixed rates on many things - so they don't have to incur decision cost (or anxiety, or whatever you want to call it).
I used to work in the hotel reservations industry. We adopted the same tricks that the airlines did ("revenue management"). We looked at the implications of doing the same thing in grocery stores, etc. These techniques basically vary the price continuously, based on very sophisticated demand forecast models and constant updates of actual demand. I am sure there is a limit to how much of this sort of stuff the average consumer is willing to put up with! You can't spend all your time optimizing your costs, or you don't have time to live you life! So real-time variable electrical pricing is IMHO a nice theoretical idea, but not a practical one. Time of day/demand is a compromise that consumers can live with, and it achieves a lot of the goals of the full time market driven price fluctuations.
It is true that one of the major reasons for the electrical crisis in California was the lack of rational pricing. The utilities, due to political concerns, could not charge the cost they had to pay. The state put them into a position (which they agreed to, but then they act sort of stupid, since they are sorta like governments themselves) where they sold power at long term prices but were prohibited from buying it except at the spot price. Dumb is a kind description of this sort of government regulation!
As far as the rolling blackouts... there was never a shortage of generating or transmission capability. There was only a shortage of power to buy. It was not a matter of too much demand, it was a matter of market failure (and possibly some collusion on the part of suppliers)! The shortages miraculously stopped as soon as the purchasing rules were changed... no significant additional generating or transmission capacity was created to solve the problem.
Actually, the California power crises presents a great example of why I distrust governments messing around in markets, including the energy market. A true deregulation would have delivered power, but perhaps at a higher price. Since utilities are still monopolies (like Microsoft, ahem), regulation is required. But regulation is frequently stupid, and sometimes, as in CA, catastrophic.
Hence my objections to subsidies for PV (or burning camel dung, etc).
Personally, I am in favor of removing the enormous unnecessary obstacles placed in the path of nuclear power generation. Any rational analysis of the power situation would go for nuclear power as the primary electrical power source for the country. The fears that people have about nuclear plants are misguided (even Chernobyl, which could not happen with our kind of reactor, has killed at most 3 people outside of the fire crews). Waste is an easy problem if you don't get stupid about it. The biggest danger is terrorism, and that can be handled with proper design and protection.
So here we have one already proven low pollution, low cost energy solution that has basically been crunched by uneducated environmental wackos. But for some reason they love solar cells (but don't let anyone build the silicon processing plants near their houses!).
The only good weather is bad weather.
Sigh... no sonner did I send in the previous post than I came across an article in tomorrow's (west coast time) New York Times on revenue management moving into retailing (fortunately not yet real time).
O M.html
The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/02/technology/02EC
and of course requires simple registration.
The only good weather is bad weather.
I love being right, heh heh. This is mega-corp (Ford/Union Oil) buying up viable competition(the Think Elec car co./the Los Angeles red-trains) and dumping it. Ask Los Angelenos if the lack of public transportation in LA is a *good thing*. Ask N.Y./SF/Boston/DC/London/Tokyo/etc.. if their public transportation is a *bad thing*. We'll look back in wonder that this happened so quitely. --User0x45
3. The Think was definitely under-designed,[...]
If I were to reply fully to this I would be fired. If I were to refute this comment I would be lying. Therefore I will only say officially "No Comment."
From the starting gate, Ford knew this vehicle (Think City) would not pass FMVSS. It was electrified as a demonstration fleet and never intended for mass market. It is a marvelous product given the amount of personnel, parts, and money that Ford decided to throw at it.
If anything, it is only a testament to the fact that the engineers involved worked their a$$e$ off trying to build a car given an impossible schedule, baling wire, duct tape, and something that initially resembled playground equipment.
Signed Anonymous Coward in Detroit.
test