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GM Pulls Plug on Electric Car
davebo writes "General Motors' EV1, the all-electric dynamo of a car, has been pulled from the market. You can read the letter GM sent out to current EV1 drivers here. When the EV1 came out, the chairman of GM said it would
"define the GM of the future". Guess he'd like to take that back now . . ." With Ford also cancelling their electric vehicle program, looks like hybrids are it for the next few years.
A sizeable portion from renewable energy?
If you're in the US, that's about 6%.
The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.
If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.
Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.
Before everyone gets on my case about it, I spent 2 years on a team that built hybrid cars. Electric powerplants, by themselves, are ecological nightmares. The majority of our wall-socket power is via coal or other equally ecoterrorizing sources. Their battery packs are highly poisonous, and gigantic on normal electric vehicles. GM's even spending a good portion of its money on hydrogen powered cars, which don't create any CO2.
Even though there are some concerns about the source of hydrogen, you can 'cook' oil and extract it from there, without combustion.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
And asssuming an electrical system which is twice as good as the theoretical best case.
My university engineering department were doing some work on a hybrid car.
It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.
The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.
After looking at the article a bit, it's very interesting to note that the main reason the car was being discontinued was not sales nor popularity issues, but rather CHARGING issues! Apparently CARB (California's nazi regime of pollution control) mandated a new charger system that basically requires a redesign of the EV1 in order to be compatible. Hopefully with these new standards now set, we'll see electric cars back on the market soo.
Some points:
#1. The EV-1 program has been dead for several years. To my knowledge, no new units have been leased (they lease, never sell) to consumers, and they've been steadily retiring their entire EV-1 fleet as they come off lease (scrapping them, as it were.) At the present time, the only major auto manufacturer to EVER sell EVs to the general public is Toyota (the RAV4EV, at over $40k, only in California.)
#2. The inductive MagnaCharger design was very expensive, proprietary, inefficient, and was forced upon the EV industry by GM at the time (about 5-6 years ago) as a defacto method of charging. Unfortunately, GM was really the only one who used it - there were several variants, including a mini-magnacharger used by Honda (or was it Ford?), but all this did was require that the free public charging spaces had to accomodate two different charging standards, so two spaces that could have two cars with two chargers could only support one of each type.
Even worse, inductive charging as a standard was viewed as an attempt at using regulations to destroy the hobbyist EV market, which used standard 3-pronged conductive chargers (plug into your wall type). By cornering and enforcing their standard, GM attempted to make their EV model the only legal one. Yes, it was possible for hobbyists to purchase magnacharger equipment (in fact, there were converters you could buy that would convert a magnacharger paddle into a 3-prong conductive for your conventional charger), all it did was add cost.
Although GM had practical saftey reasons for advocating inductive charging, the fact that they had patents on everything relating to the magnacharger design probably factored into the decision.
So, in conclusion, GM will probably NOT bring back the EV-1, except as a demonstration unit. They're scrapping every EV-1 they can get their hands on, probably to claim the depreciation for their taxes. Note, that there's nothing to prevent an EV-1 driver from carrying around an adapter unit to convert from a CARB-conductive to a Magnacharger (as leasees of the EV-1 had in their garages, in a bigger form), but I doubt that GM will ever produce one now...
We've got 30 year of oil to go maximum. I made the calculation 2 week ago. I think this figure is broadly overestimated (yes, over).
It's basically all world proven reserves of oil (1000 Bilion barels) divided by the world daily consumption (75 milion barrel per day).
That brings us to 36,5 years (2040).
BUT the reserves can't be fully extracted (usually only 60%) and the consumption is likely to go up, so 20-25 years seems more likely, or even less. (ouch, isn't it?)
The figures were comming from the Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government
General Motors is investing $1 billion a year in R&D for hydrogen cars. Quite frankly, they're beating everybody else that I'm aware of so freaking badly in the post-gasoline initiatives sector right now the last thing I'm going to do is sit there and criticize them. If canceling the EV1 helps get that hydrogen-powered skateboard out there to the public that much sooner, then I wish they'd pulled it earlier. Of course, I don't own one so this is easy for me to say.
Actually estimations out there show that there is plenty of oil out there. The problem is that presently the demand curve is fast overtaking the production curve. Even with new drilling techniques and improved refinement, in 30-40 years the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet the demand, despite there being plenty left trapped in the ground.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
compared to electricity, oil's very expensive indeed.
I guess you've never heard of Oil-powered power plants.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
However, I must point out that the economic adjustment of which you speak may not be so painless as you imply. Ask the former residents of Easter Island what happens when you run out of an important resource (in their case, lumber) :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Hey everyone who is debating about "demand for cars" and cost of this or that, did you read GMs explanation to EV1 drivers? They said that CARB has decided that any car that doesn't use a conductive charging (rather than inductive) won't qualify as zero emissions. Since Toyota and GM both use inductive charging, they'll be dropping the cars. They are basically really upset that California decided to screw them like this so that they'd have to complete redesign the chargers on the cars and refueling stations, (very very expensive) so GM is saying "screw you too."
I don't personally understand it. Does anyone know why inductive charging shouldn't qualify for zero emmissions?
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
Wow, these guys must be pretty dumb then. If an electric motor is good at anything, it is acceleration. An electric motor has its highest torque at zero rpm. Do a Google search for electric dragsters and you'll find some neat stuff, e.g. like this.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Canada gets away with a higher ratio of "clean" to dirty power because their power requirements are so much lower.
Coupled with the silly fact that we have a lot of hydro-friendly rivers.
New York City uses as much power as the entire
country of Canada.
Cough...cough...BULLSHIT. New York city is a big city, but a bunch of residents living in dinky little bachelor apartments aren't really big power consumers. I'll bet the steel mills of Hamilton or the mining operations of Sudbury consume more electricity than the city of New York. I'll bet the line noise transmitting power across Canada is more than the entire City of New York. Of course like you I'm just making this up.
A lot of programs that work in Canada do so because of the small population size and pattern of distrubution.
Whatever that means. I mean spreading 35,000,000 out across 10,000,000 square kilometers hardly makes for such easy programs that you propose.
Homorous segue: I am not anti-American whatsoever, but every now and then you meet someone who is so insular and self-absorbed that they can't see the world outside of them: I remember being behind an American couple on a flight into Toronto from Pittsburg, and during the flight I could hear him giving his wisdom to his new wife and new step-child (pretty easy to figure that out). One of the gems of a litany of "Exposing what I don't know about Canada" as we were flying into Toronto was when his wife looked out the window and exclaimed "Gee...it's pretty big isn't it?", to which he replied "It's big for a Canadian city, but it's not really big". Yeah, not big apart from being the third largest metropolitan area in the USA or Canada (people often say "North America", neglecting to mention Mexico), surpassed only by Las Angelas and New York...
Yep. In fact, as a former contractor for General Motors, I knew about all of this almost 2 years ago. I was quite bewildered by the appearance of this article.
My journal has hot
I agree w/ everything you said except for this:
A perfect example is your own LA
LA's air pollution problem will never go away. Local geography traps the smog layer over a series of warm, dry vallies that get very little in the way of air circulation. Compare to San Diego (the 6th largest city in the US), which is in the same region but has a drastically lower amount of air pollution, even when the population difference is taken into consideration. And San Diego gets a lot more pollution from military bases (heavy polluters, and San Diego has more military personel than any other city in the world)...so the smog isn't from the air pollution restrictions (California's are the strictest in the US, and some of the strictest in the world) but rather geographical and weather issues. Oh, and LA is nowhere near being a dense city...its thousands of square miles of suburbia.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I wonder if they're ramping up the AUTOnomy project ahead of schedule. If they're planning to get their hydrogen vehicle off the blocks and on the road in the next few years, they might not want to confuse the issue by having it compared to the EVI. I can't think of another reason for having the cars destroyed rather than just sold.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
What the poster is getting at is that Canada with it's population of ~32 million needs far less energy than a nation of ~300 million like the US. NYC proper has a population of ~10 million alone. NY State and the state of California are larger in population than the entire country of Canada. So to say that it is easier for Canada to meet it's energy needs through renewable sources is correct. This is not an Anti-Canada statement. The fact is, the US could be getting more energy for renewable sources and you still would have low percentages for the US. You are failing to grasp the scale of the energy needs of the US. Now if you really want to stretch your scale, think of providing power to China.
Hehe, you may get tired of gross inaccuracies being spouted wildly by idiot americans about Canada, but I get just as tired of people using CanAda of an example of how the US should be run when it has a population that is slightly more than 1 tenth the population of the US. Each country is unique. Each country has issues it must work on. You can't assume that what works in one will work in the other.
:P
The latest data I could find on Canda's population is from the 1996 Canadian Census listing which states that there are 28,846,761 people living in the country. I belive current estimates put Canada at 31 million and the US at 270 million. My remark about population size and distribution and implementing "programs" (whether it be power distribution or internet) still holds. Most of the population is clustered around major cities (as with most countries, the US included) and the smaller sized population allows large public works to be slightly more effective at reaching the majority of the population. That's an oversimplification of course as there are political and social factors as well, but the population size and distribution does play a major role.
NYC consumes a lot more power than you might think, but yeah, I was making a gross exaggeration and being abnoxiously sarcastic. My apologies both for not making that clear and for any percieved insult.
In the interest of clearing the air here are the actual stats for the relevant areas. I can't find the numbers for the city itself, but New York State consumes approximately 4.28 trillion BTUs (1.26 billion kWh unless I totally screwed the conversion up) of power a year (according to 1999 DOE data) and Canda consumes 551 billion kWh per year (according to 1998 data). The US as a whole consumes 3.36 trillion kWh. So yeah, slight exaggeration.
Then again so was your estimation of the size of Toronto.
According to the City of Toronto's facts guide, the city has a population of 2.48 million people. What it is has that is big is government. The same site boasts that Tornoto has, "5th largest municipal government in North America."
Here is the top 10 (including Mexico) in North America:
Pouplation (in millions)
1.) New York USA 20.2
2.) Mexico City Mexico 19.8
3.) Los Angeles USA 16.2
4.) Chicago USA 8.9
5.) Washington D.C. USA 7.5
6.) San Francisco USA 6.9
7.) Philidelphia USA 6.1
8.) Boston USA 5.7
9.) Detroit USA 5.4
10.)Dallas USA 5.1
And for the sake of completeness the world:
1.) Tokyo, Japan 28
2.) New York City, United States 20.1
3.) Mexico City, Mexico 19.8
4.) Bombay, India 18
5.) Sao Paulo, Brazil 17.7
6.) Los Angeles, United States 16.2
7.) Shanghai, China 14.2
8.) Lagos, Nigeria 13.5
9.) Calcutta, India 12.9
10.) Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.5
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
I dont know where Australians get the idea that their petrol is expensive. Its actually really really cheap in Australia (at around AUD $1/L). In Europe it's around AUD $2.50/L. The price is about the same as the US (maybe 10-20% more I think, but definetely not 4-5x more). Australia has about the 3rd cheapest petrol in the world (behind USA and the middle east).
(And this is from an Australian living in the UK)
There are no electric energy storage devices with a high enough energy density to make EVs practical. You get something like 100 miles per charge. Not only is that not far enough (in America anyway) but then you can't charge them nearly as fast as dumping in gas. Detroit has known this for a long time, but they kept trying anyway to satisfy regulations.
Then I'll volunteer the number one smoggiest city in the US: Houston, TX. We have no geographical excuses for our smog.
The first one is pollution. This is very serious to us as people.
This used to be a serious problem in the past but with today's computer-controlled fuel-injection gasoline engines and modern exhaust emission controls they are VASTLY cleaner than gasoline engines of even 30 years ago! For example, the 2003 Honda Accord has available in California a gasoline engine so clean it has less than 1% of the harmful pollutant output of a gasoline engine dating from the 1970's.
The second is that oil isn't distributed fairly around the world. Some countries have it, others don't.
You're forgetting that oil extraction technology has advanced to the point that many oilfields that would have been impossible to tap just 20 years ago are now economically viable to exploit. There are massive oil reserves sitting out in the oceans; the only reason why we haven't exploited them is the daunting cost up until now to pumping out from ocean sites. Engineers from British Petroleum has estimated that there is enough oil sitting in the Gulf of Mexico to equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. Also, Canada has massively huge reserves of tar sands that could yield enough oil to also equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. There are potentially huge oilfields in the former Soviet Union that could be tapped--but not done so due to the extreme cold of Siberian winters. The only reason why the Persian Gulf is economically viable for oil production is the fact the oil there is very close to the surface and the weather is conducive to year-round production.
Some specs:
- Complete Car Maximum Speed 93 mph (150km/h)
- Vehicle (curb) Weight 3,713lbs (1684kg)
- Driving Range 220 miles (355km)
- Seating Capacity 4 adults
- Motor Maximum Power Output 80hp (60kW)
- Maximum Drive Torque 201lb-ft (272Nm)
- Motor Type AC synchronous
- Fuel Cell Stack Stack Type PEFC (Polymer Electrolyte Fuel cell - Ballard)
- Power Output 78kW
- Power Storage Honda Ultra Capacitor
- Fuel Fuel Type Compressed hydrogen gas
- Storage Method High-pressure hydrogen storage tanks
- Hydrogen capacity 3.75 kg @ 5000 psi *
Toyota is also leasing a hydrogen fueled car but I don't have a URL for that one.Perhaps.
But to be fair. Shouldn't one consider that an engine with a more or less constant load is more efficient than one that is continually changing, dur to traffic conditions?
Additionally, you quote that 70% figure as if conventional cars made effective use of 100% of their engine's energy. According to this site
With a high loss during transmission. I believe I've read up to 50% of power is lost during transition from the plant to your outlet. That doesn't appear efficient to me.
c onomy.htm. The hook discusses how hydrogen can be used to make a more distrbuted power source, which will be cheaper, more robust and better for all. At least, it has that potential.
I recommend you also take a look at the book _The Hydrogen Economy_. Rewiew at http://www.thekewfiles.net/BookReviews/Hydrogen_E
- Serge Wroclawski
My husband and I leased an EV1 for three years. It was the best car we've ever driven: quiet, amazing acceleration, and zero emissions. (There isn't even a tailpipe.) We (and other drivers) sent money to GM asking them to extend the lease without a warranty, rather than crush the cars, and they said no. GM's claims that electric cars failed in the marketplace are false. EV1 drivers wanted to keep them, and there were many waitlisted would-be drivers who never got a car, despite GM's lack of advertising, etc. For much more information, see http://cleanup-gm.org.
Our primary car now is a Toyota Prius, which we've been happy with (except by comparison to the EV1). Driving around San Francisco and commuting over the Bay Bridge, often in bad traffic, I average 46 MPG, and it has lower emissions than other cars with internal combustion engines. It cost a little more ($22K) than an ordinary car, but I expect to recoup some of that with the tax deduction and lower fuel costs.
We recently assumed the lease on a Ford Th!nk City. As its maximum speed is about 55 MPH and range about 40 miles, neither my husband nor I can drive it to work. Instead, my husband drives it to the Caltrain station. We also drive it around town, where it can fit in tiny parking spots.
My points are:
- The EV1 was a great car. It was not pulled because of any deficiency or lack of demand.
- The only electric car available for lease for a little longer (Th!nk) is vastly inferior to the EV1 but still meets some people's needs.
- I was fortunate enough to get to lease electric cars because I was in the right place at the time. Many other people tried without success.
- While hybrids are better than ordinary cars, purely-electric cars have been designed and produced in ridiculously small quantities, not meeting consumer demand.
- If the government hadn't loosened its regulations, more people would be driving electric cars now or in the near future, and we'd be using less oil and polluting less. (Lest you dismiss all regulation as bad, consider the government's role in seatbelts, catalytic converters, and airbags.)
(And, yes, I know electricity needs to be produced somewhere. Internal-combustion engines are one of the dirtiest and least efficient methods, and spew most where populations are dense.)>>Perhaps you'd care to go into more detail as to how an electric motor produces ANY torque when it's NOT moving.
Your thinking power
P=power
T=torque
r=moment arm
F= Force
w=angular velocity
T=Fr
P=Tw
If I grab hold of a lever and pull on it and it doesn't move I'm appling a force to it, and the lever has a lenght, this would be it's radius from it's pivot point, or mount. I'm not moving it but I am causing a torque about it. Now when I start moving it, and it revolves around it's pivot i'm still applying the torque as before, but now I have an angular velocity. Now there is an amount of power I am applying.
In theroy Electric motors can put out full torque at zero rpm. If I put a arm off the end of the motor and had it hitting a block, if the block required 500N of force to move it, but the motor only could produce 499Nm of torque and the arm was 1 meter long it would not move the block, but it would still be at full torque.
Now in reality do to efficencies and stuff motors don't always have so much torque at zero rpm, but the do still have massive amounts of low end torqu at very low speeds. This is why EV's can accel. so fast. Also one of the reasons electric motors are nice in machine apllications.
Hmmm. Let's have a look at the numbers to see if a PV rig is worth buying in conunction with an electric car. I really don't know so we both might learn something new today.
When all is said and done about 1000 watts of sunlight falls on a square meter of ground under optimal conditions. Since sunlight at most will only fall for 12 hours of the day and in the morning and evening the amount of sunlight hitting a PV panel is reduced a general rule of thumb for PV panels is to figure over the count of 12 hours the average output of a PV panel will be 42% of its maximum output. PV panels are pretty wasteful devices and for your average panel under great conditions you have to assume about 13% efficiency, 130 watts of 1000 per square meter. So if we work this out (.42 x 12 hours x 130W/m^2) we end up with 655W per day per square meter. We need to remember this number, it will be important later I believe.
The EV1's standard battery compliment is a 18.7kWh valve regulated lead acid battery assembly. The EV1 will go about 130 miles at 45mph on a single charge. In order for your PV setup to generate enough power to recharge your EV1 once a day you'll need 28.55 square meters of PV paneling plus inverters and batteries to store the power while your EV1 charges at night. Check out the pricing, a 12kW system even after California's $4/W rebate costs you over thirty six thousand dollars ($36,000+). Adding the cost of a 6kW and 12kW system to recharge your EV1 you're out more than $54,000 up front. Oh yeah, the EV1 costs $34,000 for the base model. That is $88,000 in expenses.
If you distribute that cost over 20 years at 130 miles a day it comes to 949,000 miles. Over 20 years that is $.09 per mile. Over 30 years (the absolute maximum lifetime of your PV panels and probably far beyond the life of your EV1), you get 1,423,500 miles at $.06 per mile.
Say you get a diesel car like a TDI Jetta and get say 50mpg out of it and you buy all your fuel up front (to make it fair). We'll put Diesel prices at $1.54 per gallon (the average price in the US as of Feb 4 2003). That is $.03 per mile.
In the end you see solar-electric is FAR more expensive in both the long term and short term. I intentionally leave out the cost of maintenance and other mid term costs. Neither the EV1 or the TDI Jetta is going to run for a million and a half miles without a metric assload of repairs and tuning. You still end up with a Diesel car costing a third as much over 20 years and half as much over 30 years. The solar-electric option has a lower long term ecological impact as the ecological cost of the PV and car construction is a one time thing where driving a Diesel is a continuous polluting process. Then again with batter replacements for the EV1 you're looking at some serious environmental impact. With the Jetta you can stick some new high tech catalytic converters on it and have emissions that are cleaner than the surrounding air in some cities.
If you need the self satisfaction of owning a PV system and an electric car and have almost ninety grand to plop down then your idea has merit. For the rest of the country and ostensibly world reality is a harsh mistress. Solar electric is still inefficient and expensive, far too much of both to gain truly wide acceptance in the near term.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This should come as no suprise to anybody familiar with alternative fuel vechicles. GM lost huge amounts of money on every EV1 sold. The batteries for electric cars are outrageously expensive. In fact, I have a friend who's an engineer for Honda. When they were trying to design an electric car the joke was that the cheapest way to build it would be to go out and buy an EV1 and take its batteries.
This is silly.
They could create REAL cars and run a sensible beta program with a handpicked collection of customers.
Detroit just has no interest in innovation. Like another company that need not be named, GM will only do the barest minimum that it can squeak by on. It will only do serious R&D at gunpoint.
Someone made California put it's shotgun down.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.