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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.
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!
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.
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.
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Incidentally there is a good articles in a recent Time magazine and Wired.
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...)
Normally I let crap like this go by, but this time I'm calling you out. Prove it. JUST PROVE IT. And no, cynicism is not proof (aka "I just know and you would too if you weren't so naive").
Of course, it CAN'T be that the electric car TOTALLY F'ING SUCKS. It can't be that battery technology is not even close to being ready (6.5 hour charging time, 100 mile range?).
It can't be that every car manufacture has invested 100s of millions, if not billions (GM) in electric cars, and have TOTALLY FAILED.
Of course, we JUST KNOW that oil companies will "buy off" car companies. Never mind that car companies MAKE CARS and the first one that really makes a practical electric car will make a ton of money. Never mind that car companies DON'T PRODUCE OIL and do give a shit about how cars are powered, as long as they sell cars.
And by the way...
There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
Sorry, but yes, there IS AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF PETROLEUM. Yes, I said infinite. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF PETROLEUM. Never. Ever. You know why?
Very simple. Because as the reserves get lower, it simply gets more expensive to pull out of the ground. Eventually, the price is higher than alternatives, and we start using alternatives. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL. EVER.
And even if we could, please explain to me exactly why it would be a bad thing if we ran out of oil in the ground. Big deal. We use something else.
//end rant.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Inevitability of "Resource" Wars? I have to say that wars for resources are the only sort of war. Ok so its not as easy as Persian Gulf == Oil War but war comes from two societies' sharing a border. To keep the growth of their "lifestyle" both jockey for position with each other. Trade, culture, politics. At its most extreme extension is war. It is foolish to think that a society will every be so self-sufficient that it will no longer feel the need to expand. As its population grows so does its hunger for territory.
Of course what is a society and what is a border are up to debate. Usually the rule of thumb is that if it can be broken down to an Us and Them scenario.
It is an implicit delcaration of war every time you gas up your car or go for a drive. Your right to drive at 10 MPG is worth fighting for.
What is music when you despise all sound?
As far as I can tell the auto industry made a good faith attempt at this. California for example mandated that something like 3% of all cars sold by manufacturers in the state had to be electric and the auto companies ended up having to heavily subsidize to be able to move them at all. They spent a lot on technology to figure out how to do it.
But they are facing the same problem that laptops do:
1 - They couldn't get enough charge to work
2 - They couldn't maintain charge as long as they needed.
Until there is a major break through in battary technology battary devices will always be crippled compared to those drawing energy for either AC or petro fuels. Wanting this to change won't make it change; and given how much is being spent on improving battary life there is no evidence that more spending (except for perhaps insane levels of spending like the moon project tyep spending) will necc. do very much to shorten the time to we solve this technical problem.
Finally, right now electricity is generated by petro fuels. There isn't much gain by generating the electricity to store in a battery vs. just burning the fuel on an as needed basis (i.e. the current system).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is true that oil is dirty. However, it's also true that we're not going to run out.
The alternatives the previous poster mentioned are already being worked on.
Basically, what's going to happen is that as oil reserves are depleted, the price will increase. Eventually, it will rise above the price of alternative sources of oil.
What are these alternative sources? Well, for starters, it's possible to refine oil from coal. This process is more expensive than just pumping it out of the ground, so we don't do it right now. When the price of oil rises enough, it will make more sense to use coal.
There's a lot of coal in the world.
When the coal runs down, after a few thousand years, the price will again start to rise a bit, at which point a second alternative will be attractive, if it isn't already: oil shale.
When the oil shale runs out, after many more millennia, we'll either find a new energy-rich source, or we'll go full synthetic. Of course, full synthetic production will run at an energy loss, so it will need a real power source such as solar or nuclear power to drive it.
Synthetic oil production will be viable for more or less the lifetime of the universe.
One example of a form of "synthetic" oil production here is refined vegetable oil, by the way. Solar powered crops can be replanted every year, and thus won't run out.
Of course, actual oil from the ground won't run out either. It's just that new reserves won't form at nearly the rate we like to use it, so it'll always be insufficient to fill demand after the current fields are depleted.
So, no, we'll never "run out" of oil.
We will, on the other hand, want to stop using it because it's dirty long before we reach synthetic production. When we actually do stop using it, who can say?
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.
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.
Hehehee...yeah. Herd mentality...right. I would hardly classify those supporting alternative energies as "the herd." But maybe herd has been re-defined.
Nope, same definition as always. One who doesn't do any of his own thinking, but just follows the herd. Your herd just happens to be smaller than a lot of other herds. Of course, people like you think that the farther out of the fringe you go, you must be getting closer to the truth.
What you want is magic technology. And if the magic doesn't exist, then it must be a conspiracy of someone to keep the magic away from the masses.
WHY? Because Stalinism is obviously the only alternative to Multi-National Corporate Run capitalist government.
OK, if the failure of electric cars is just a big capitalist conspiracy, then why aren't your non-capitalistic paradises producing them? Only stupid people live there and have no engineers? Come on, if it's just a big conspiracy, then I'm sure one of your oh-so-moral countries will start producing them tomorrow and gloriously fill the world with non-polluting, electric vehicles that recharge in 5 minutes and run for 1000 miles. And of course, all produced by a non-profit entity.
So please, tell us all. What country is it, and when will the utopia begin? We're all anxious to hear about it./p
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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
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.
Oh, please, read a little bit about large scale solar energy before opining.
no 'friendly' energy. Just energy sources that are less destructive than others.
Nonsense. Energy sources do not have to be "destructive"--they can be sustainable and have a small, one-time impact on the environment.
"plant based fuels" means chemicals in the ground a la the mass argriculture we currently practice in growing food
Absolutely not. Unlike showy supermarket fruits, most plants grow without fertilizers or pesticides, and many plants are suitable for making fuel.
How exactly do you plan to recycle inert chemicals into useful batteries for the next generation of equipment?
Oh, come on, that's elementary chemistry. For example, for lead-acid batteries, you recover the remaining solid lead and melt it down. You recover the various lead compounds from the acid and reduce them back to metallic lead. And the acid itself, free of heavy metals, can be neutralized and the resulting salt disposed of harmlessly. The process doesn't even require much energy. Other batteries can be recycled similarly.