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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.
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.
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I don't know about Kei cars, but I've read some pretty interesting articles on the GM Autonomy. It's currently vaporware, but there's about $1 billion in funding behind this hydrogen car already. See more here:c ars.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/fuelcell
Hopefully it will come out within the next 10 years - would be interesting to see.
You've obviously never driven a BMW Z3 (or any other car with good power/weight ratio) on something other than busy city streets.
Why else do they want big engines with lots of power? Freedom. Choice. Not unlike the open software movement.
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.
One example of how car transportation will eventually not work is the city of Beijing. You either have an "A" license plate, or a "B" license plate, and you can drive every other day. If you drive on the wrong day, you get a ticket. This is because there is simply not enough room for all of the cars. And sometimes I think 695 is bad here in Baltimore...
On the other hand, we have Japan, which is pretty heavily packed with people in most areas, and the cities aren't spread out suburbs. This makes it easy to build an efficient train system, and in fact, most people take the train to get most places (that are too far to walk). Trains stop more frequently (sort of like busses in the US), so it's easier to take them pretty close to where you want to go, and according to my Japanese teacher, you can get really good pricing if you plan on riding them a lot (which you will). Germany is another example of a place with an excellent public transportation system.
As I implied above, it would be difficult to do this in most US cities due to the way they're laid out. The public transportation system in Baltimore can't compare with Germany or Japan, although with the combination of busses and the light rail (I believe you can buy monthly plans for a combination of the two), you can get most places around the city and close suburbs, though not in a hurry.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I'm curious why you say the Prius is "too bare-bones" to be an enjoyable car. We have one in the family and it is a great full featured car. It has a high output heater/AC, stock entertainment system is very nice, power everything...what is it missing for your needs?
How does 0-60 in 4 seconds sound? You can get an electric car (built for "commuting" heh heh) now that does just that.
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