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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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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.
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.
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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.
Actually, from what I understand, electric vehicles were never really expected to succeed and each of the big automakers purposefully limited performance, features, and production numbers. Now before you lump me in with the big-oil-bush-presidency conspiracy theorists, let me tell you why this is actually a good thing.
Initially, EV development was influenced by government pressure and companies did try to market these vehicles to niche markets. However, once the car companies realized that battery technology was already mature and has already had years and years and billions of dollars thrown at development, they pretty well gave up on pure electric vehicles as the future of the automobile. However, they did not immediately give up on their EV programs (EV1, Th!nk, etc.). Apart from political reasons, why is this?
Well, the most promising technologies (hybrids, fuel cells) were still out on the horizon but shared many simularities with battery driven vehicles. EV technology was mature enough to be put on the road immediately so they could learn about the issues they would run into with these cars. However, if they offered a particularly attractive EV with lots of features then Joe Average might buy one and become very frustrated with the beta level technology, swear off ever buying any future hybrid or fuel cell car, and tell all his friends how much they suck. Instead, they limited the market to early adopters who wouldn't be turned off by the problems of bleeding edge technology. This is also why the first hybrids had such long waiting lists and were only offered in very basic, unsexy models. Again, they intentionally restricted supply for trial purposes and made sure that only real geeks would ever buy them.
Effectively, they used enthusiasts to fund the testing of their new technologies in real world conditions without risking widespread customer dissatisfaction and without the expense of designing normal creature comforts. Now, with real production model hybrids, the early programs have served their purpose and the limited functionality models have less catchet with enthusiasts, so the manufacturers are removing them from the road to avoid confusing the average consumer.
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