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Smithsonian Removes EV1 Exhibit
johnMG writes to mention a Seattle PI article on the Smithsonian's move to remove the EV1 electric sedan from display. From the article: "The upcoming film 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th. GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display."
Apparently not, Slashdot.
The funny part is, they're removing an Electric Car display to make room for an SUV display.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It was those darn consumers who didn't like utterly nutless cars that had much less oomph and range than regular gas powered vehicles. They died out because they sucked, plain and simple.
...it's boring and noone wants to see it? not everyone the museum owns is displayed...generally it is in response to demand.
Lots of things that people like are canned all the time because no-one buys them - and personally I'm not sure I would have wanted a world of all eletric cars when the time came to recycle the batteries...
The time will come when all electric cars will be more practical, but in the meantime do we have to be so sensationalistic when something we like vanishes?
Perhaps if there had been a cool movie about electric cars BEFORE they were cancelled we might still have them. If you really like something then now is the time to drum up support for it! Be an evangelist, not a mere consumer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also, the insistence on making electric vehicles look as unsexy and unstylish as possible was not a deliberate ploy intended to kill public interest in them. We all know that most people would just love the chance to be seen driving around in something which looks like a French milkvendors cart.
[...] questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later.
8 b.html8 0/1580
I would venture they did it for the same reason that US satellite systems lost polar icecap sensors and other climate sensors... Here are two articles from Nature and Science journal... Apparently this is a non-news outside of a scientific community, for some reason...
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060612/full/44179
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/57
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
GM is pushing "flex-fuel" over hybrids. Ethanol over electric cars. For GM to have this first commercial electric car and then lose the hybrid market is embarassing. But at least they have the good sense to put SUV's in their place: in a museum.
We are all just people.
Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly. I have never heard of a perfectly efficient method of transmitting electricty from where it was produced to where it was needed (e.g. charge up the car). Ergo, there would be a net increase in "environmental badness" to use the e-car vs what we have now.
All the fossil fuels that are economically reachable will be burned. Do you want them burned in nice epa-mandated catalytic converter equiped cars or some 3rd world 2-stroke putt-putt cars?
Either way we will eventually get to "the next thing" - I'd say let us use it up the way we are going now.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's the Stonecutters. As a matter of fact, they also control the British Crown, keep the metric system down, keep Atlantis off the maps, keep the Martians under wraps, hold back the electric car, make Steve Guttenberg a star, rob cavefish of their sight and rig every Oscar night.
Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do!
WE DOOOOOO!
Gas prices were high, so one of the Smithsonian workers drove it to the corner store. Unfortunately, they wrote the vehicle off on the way there.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Lots of things that people like are canned all the time because no-one buys them
But GM didn't just "cancel" the EV1 like these other things. GM went to auctions and bought back the cars, and then crushed and recycled them. People offered to buy back the cars from GM as "junk cars" (waiving liability), but GM refused. Basically, GM has spent and passed up a bunch of money to make sure these cars were destroyed.
You can read more weird things about the program in the Wikipedia article. There's far more to this than "company stops selling product."
I'm not sure I would have wanted a world of all eletric cars when the time came to recycle the batteries...
.
Contrary to an above post electric cars do not suck. Batteries suck.
Perhaps if there had been a cool movie about electric cars BEFORE they were cancelled . .
More disappointed owners would be aware of how badly batteries suck.
Those few of us who actually love electric cars have to hang our hopes on the fuel cell or the Mr. Fusion, whichever comes first, although hybrids are getting closer to what they should be.
KFG
Alternative fuels have always been repressed by the US government and big auto makers because of the global dependence on oil. Do you think it has taken us 50 years to get a car to go supposedly 40mpg?
.
Back in the late 70's there was a little know company called AMECTRAN, that a the first production ready electronic vehicle that could go 80mph, had a range of 100+ miles, and costs less than $10,000. Electric cars suck? Yea right! Take a look at the inventor's website: http://www.amectran.com/
You just need one of these:
s s2_wrightspeed/
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/04/technology/busine
This particular electric car does zero to sixty in three seconds, out-accelerating every car in existence other than the Bugatti Veyron. Naturally, it was someone in California who designed that particular electric car and not someone like GM or Ford.
Let's face it, there's a very simple, logical explanation for the failure of the EV-1 and GM's unwillingness to support it: the cars couldn't be sold for the amount of money it took to build them. EV-1s were heavily subsidized by GM as part of an R&D and PR program. I remember reading at the time they were introduced that the actual cost of the vehicle was almost twice what GM was selling it for, and GM could hardly move any, even at half cost. Add to that their extremely limited range and the short life-cycle of their last-generation batteries, and it's no wonder they died a quiet death.
I have heard that the Smithsonian has about four times more material to display than they have room for displaying. Removing this particular item, whose main interest was as a counterexample of how not to build an electric car, isn't some evil plot of our hybrid car-selling overlords.
You can take off your tinfoil hats now.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
. . . was very, very simple. GM couldn't make any money from them. They knew that going into the project, they knew it when they were making prototypes under the "Impact" name, etc., etc. Thirty thousand dollar loss per vehicle.
So why did they make them at all?
Well, California was going to impose a zero-emissions vehicle standard, that required a fixed percentage of the vehicles sold in California from every manufacturer be zero emissions. GM figured it could own the Californian market if it could put together a from-the-ground-up electric car, while companies like Chrysler were doing things jurry-rigging electric Voyager minivans. After all, if GM were able to dominate the electric car market, then the percentage-of-sales rule would allow it to dominate the normal auto market in California. Who cares if you're losing thirty thousand dollars per vehicle on a couple of percent of the Californian auto market, if you simultaneously wind up with much higher, law-guarnateed market share on profitable cars?
So, after GM puts in all this investment, California repeals the law just as it's going to go into effect, leaving GM with no way to actually make a profit from the vehicles. They go ahead with the program anyway (it's too late to save much money, since the tooling was already ordered on year-plus lead times), they recoup some cash leasing the cars), and then when the liability calculations make it cheaper to recycle and scrap than continue to lease or sell them, they got rid of them.
Five gets you ten that the movie comes up with some wild-ass conspiracy theory involving oil company influence at GM, though. After all, when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace, it has to be the fault of Big Evil Corporations.
The question is, why did they buy the SUV rather than the EV-1? At least in part, they liked the size, and felt that relatively cheap gas (remember the "gas glut"?) was worth the mileage.
But at least according to the film, more was at work than the market in that decision. They blame the oil companies for anti-market tactics like astroturf groups to oppose charging stations, as well as buying congressmen to give tax credits to SUV owners. (SUVs over 3 tons, most famously the Hummer, were treated as commercial vehicles, and given huge tax breaks. And non-enormous SUVs got to count their potential carrying capacity towards that 3 tons under a 2002 "economic stimulus package").
Oil companies also campaigned vigorously against emissions restrictions and higher CAFE standards. In market terms, those are attempts to monetize externalized expenses.
So the cards were stacked in favor of SUVs and against the electric car. Not by the market, but precisely counter to the market, when powerful companies get a larger say in regulations than consumers do.
Electric cars can be quite fast. Electric motors have all their torque starting at one rpm and it just goes on from there. There isn't a fuel engine made that can compare horsepower to horsepower down where the rubber meets the road with an electric motor. People who managed to *lease* an EV1 loved them (EV1's were leased, not sold for the most part), they tried their darndest to get GM to sell them at end of lease and GM just took them away and crushed them while they were still in perfect working order. Read up on it, or actually go see that movie in the article, that is what this is all about.
Electric cars are a threat to auto makers because there is much less stuff to break and they are simpler to make (think about that one for a long time, it is a critical part of the equation), and they are a threat to governments because there is no way to apply the road fuel tax to them (short of the GPS tracking deal they just started in oregon). You can theoretically own an electric vehicle, own some solar panels, and eventually be driving for pretty darn cheap per mile. Many people are happily doing that today, proving it is possible and can fill a lot of niche driving. As to range,50-100 miles on a charge is doable *now*, which would handle just millions of commuter profiles, that is *easily* extended and handled by having an additional tow behind trailer with a fuel burning generator in it for trips, which would then morph your ride "on demand" into a hybrid vehicle..
Pure electric cars are a clear cut example of what is called "disruptive technology" that threatens big auto, big oil and big government. A lot of big money and big juice there that doesn't want that sort of threat, yes? That is why electric cars "failed",not that they don't work or can't be built in mass productyion style, of course they can,but they were never offered in the first place.
When is the last time you saw a pure electric car at a normal mainstream dealer *for sale*? I'm an old gear head,and I have *never* seen one for sale, never. I have seen anything and everything else under the sun with an engine that moves for sale, the only electric "car" I ever saw for sale was a golf cart, not a real car. I have seen a few low production prototypes that people hand built, and you were able to buy them used that way as one or two-offs,but that's it, nothing mass produced.
They say "there is no market", well it is a self fullfilling prophecy if you never even try to sell them.
Nobody ever BOUGHT an EV1. All EV1's were leased and the contracts specifically prohibited users from buying the cars at the end of the term. It was a limited production run meant to be a proof of concept. GM didn't want to offer support for these cars after the lease terms were up.
EVERYONE who leased an EV1 knew they had to return it to GM.
Self awareness - try it!
Since they are putting up an SUV on display in the museum does that mean that we may see an end to this class of vehicle soon? How would we explain these vehicles and their widespread popularity to our children who will one day visit this exhibit? Now, as time passes and people see new interpretations of acronyms that get across the lesson we learned from that project or event, I wonder what SUV will mean down the road to our children. So, just out of curiosity I decided to find out what the other possible interpretations of SUV were, and I found "Screwed Up Values" to fit just nicely. Take it how you will, but how many people (percentage wise) that have one of these SUVs actually need them on a daily basis?
GM was obviously gaming the system somehow, though I've never understood exactly how.
This sentiment has been shown by well known and respected individuals such as Greenspan. Therefore it does not surprise me that that electric car is being forgotten about.
A link to a free article regarding the lost icecap sensors is at http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23640/ This article has several other FREE links in it.
The technology that replaces the Gasoline Engine has to be of devistating power. It has to deliver far more power than Conventional Internal Combustion Engines can. Such engines have to be able to push ~300 MPH and be like dangerous for Americans to buy them.
That is what is missing. They have to have devistatingly destructive power, while being Eco friendly.
Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly. I have never heard of a perfectly efficient method of transmitting electricty from where it was produced to where it was needed (e.g. charge up the car). Ergo, there would be a net increase in "environmental badness" to use the e-car vs what we have now.
In the real world, it doesn't always work this way. For one thing, burning fossil fuels in a powerplant is much more efficient than in a small engine. For another, about 20% of the electric power in the US comes from nuclear, hydroelectric, and other non-CO2-emitting sources. Even with transmission loss, storage battery loss, and conversion loss, electric vehicles can put a lot less carbon in the atmosphere than a gas vehicle. Do a comparison between a 2001 Toyota RAV4 EV and the comparable gas model, and there's a substantial decrease in fuel economy. A lot of this is dependent on the powerplant(s) and power gird in question, though.
Basic thermodynamics can lead you down some sensible, but totally wrong, thought paths. Thermodynamically speaking, hybrid vehicles should be ridiculously inefficient. We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Where's that information coming from?
From the site:
"The interesting thing about the EXAR-1 was, that the pictures never did the car justice. When seen in person, the car was as beautiful as any foreigh exotic costing 7 or 8 times more; as well as the fact, that the EXAR-1 sported advances that even the most expensive automobiles in the world would not have for many years in the future."
"Mr. Ramirez, actually built an electric automobile, making sure that details, such as matching ring and pinion gears to tire and wheel size for optimum operation, were implemented, regardless of cost."
"Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company provided special tires developed expermintal future characteristics to be implemented into the design of the EXAR-1.
"Bell Helicoptor and Ling Tempco Vaught Aerospace engineers provided structural design and metalurgical analysis. 4130 chromally steel would be used as the roll cage to protect passengers and provide a body on frame,for inexpensive repair and maintance."
Doesn't sound cheap to me...
As for development/production costs:
"Pietro Frua provided the body design while the Department of Transportation cooperated in technical recommendations and asistance in overall safety design and new materials analysis...suffice to say that Ramirez built an electric automobile for approximately $18 million dollars, that General Motors (with government funding assistance, etc.) could not do for $360 million dollars..."
It seems pretty unlikely that they could produce such a car in large numbers for 10,000 USD each.
But ok, even granting the claim that they could, you have to account for inflation. Using a little calculator found here (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/), $10,000 US in 1970 is approximately equal to $50379.13 US in 2005. That's not exactly conveniently priced, by a long shot.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
...cannot ... resist ...
"Oil gurus killed the electic car"
FLR
Who killed it, Physics. There is only so much energy you can put into a battery. Hulling around 50% of the cars mass in batteries (as is the case of the EV) is not very efficient. Nor is the whole concept when you factor in the energy creation from (coal, oil whatever) to end disposal of the car.
EVs have nice performance and are can be fun cars. But there is a practical side that needs to be factored in. They typical person may have a EV capable commute, but odds are they also make a few trips a year that are outside the range of the car. That alone makes them a no go for most people. Also they tend to be small 2 seat vehicles. Which again are not practical for most people. People want 1 vehicle that does it all.
Furthermore, hybrids are far more practical in the end and much more environmentally friendly from an entire life cycle standpoint. That's why all the car companies killed their EV programs (EV1, S10, Ranger, Epic.. All now dead).
The EV1 was also not that spectacular. I've worked on one. It's a 1980s tech car developed by Aerovironment and sold to GM to put into production. It was a very crude and dated car when it went into production. GM dumped 2 billion into the program, and never even leased 1000 units in the couple years the program ran. They lost money hand over fist on it. It also had technical problems of the charge port catching the car on fire which was the final nail in the coffin.
EVs do have a place. Fleet service they can work out well for. There you have a fixed usage, daily schedules you can use it around. So the limits of an EV are not a problem. And the durability is a plus. But for consumer usage, they just aren't there.
Now if you manage to make a battery pack that fits in a 13 gallon space, and has the same amount of energy as 13 gallons of gasoline, and weights the same. Now you are on to something. But that isn't going to happen tomorrow.
Were you really in the market for an EV1/electric car, or is the 'I only buy vehicles, never lease' just an excuse?
A SUV is functionally a far different vehicle than an EV1. I'd tend to think that a Honda Civic/Accord or similar would have been a better choice if an EV1 would have truly met your needs.
I don't read AC A human right
The reason this is so fishy is because GM denied renewal of leases (despite begging and protest) and took back cars back to have them destroyed. They seemed intent on obliterating the EV1 to remove it from public memory, much the same way the Egyptians did with Akhenaton when he tried to change the whole of Egypt to a monotheistic religion. And now, on the eve of the release of a motion picture that brings light to a set of events not many people are aware of, the Smithsonian removes (AFAIK) one of the last places people can see a real-life EV1 (like so much stone from a bas-relief sculpture), making a documentary seem, for all intents and purposes, more like fiction in the public eye. Oh, and GM had nothing to do with it. They were not under pressure to engage in some uber sparagmos-like act of worship to the oil gods at the detriment of all EV1s ever made.
Makes me wish I had GTA'd one and hidden it somewhere for future generations.
Well, that was a fun conspiracy theory. I'm going to drink some more vodka.
http://www.acpropulsion.com/tzero_pages/tzero_html _home.htm
There's a tradeoff between acceleration and range, so you will meet people who've seen anemic electric cars.
The Chrysler Turbine car of the mid 1960s was given out for trials by dealers and loyal Chrysler customers, collected, and cut up for scrap. The excuse not to save even one for a museum was that they avoided paying hefty import duties on the imported, stylish bodies, hand made in Italy.
Apart from the discussion of GM having legal liability, liability to provide parts, etc, I kind of think a reason was that whoever bought one of those cars would have been effectively handed a 6-figure check -- what that thing would be worth to a collector -- for its exotic nature and its unique place in technological and social history.
the cars couldn't be sold for the amount of money it took to build them
Change that to "the cars could not be bought for any amount of money". That's right: GM never sold a single EV1, they were all leased with no option to renew the lease or buy the damn car! On top of that, GM made the customers jump through hoops to even get an EV1.
Still some people were persistent and patient enough to get their hands on EV1s. But after the leases had expired, they had no choice but to return the cars to GM. What did GM do with them? They crushed them! Every single one! Crushed them and dumped them in a junk yard! Seems like the prudent business decision would be to *ahem* sell your product rather than trashing it, no?
Here is more information on the whole fiasco: link. My take on it is that GM set EV1 up for failure so that they could point at it and say "see? no one wants electric cars!". But when, despite GM's best efforts, customers actually showed interest in it, GM decided to pull the plug.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Batteries are reasonably recyclable and replaceable. They can't store as much energy as a gas tank, but so what? For the 98% of the time when I don't travel more than 40 miles in a day, it's sufficient. For the rest of the time, I can rent a car/minivan. I'd go for an EV1 for my commute, why not?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Is Alan Greenspan a scientist? No which means I don't care what he thinks when it comes to technological progress. Aside from that fact, ethanol is a sorry bandaid to subsidize the farming corporations. How much energy is used to create the ethanol and where does that come from? Same question for Hydrogen. The ONLY acceptable solution is solar so we should be working on increasing the efficiencies of it rather than pretending we are going to be saved by the magic ethanol or hydrogen bullet. Please no pro-nuclear flames, I'll save that for another rant. However, in the interim, Brazil is an excellent example of progress on our way to energy independence so my thanks for pointing it out.
With the dependency on gasoline removed, and the input energy freely convertible from anything that generates electricity, an all-electric car makes switching our fuel source a thousand billion times easier. This is very likely why it scares the bejeesus out of energy monopolists.
All the fossil fuels that are economically reachable will be burned
I eagerly await your explanation of who will be burning them in cities that are three to six feet underwater.
My book, podcast
The ethanol situation is not nearly as simple as "use corn".
As it stands, the US Gov't pays farmers not to plant fields, subsidizes the farmland that is planted, and buys up excess product to keep prices up. This practice isn't limited to corn, most independant/corporate farmers recieve gov't handouts.
Ontop of that, the Feds have tariffs to keep the domestic price of ethanol up, because ethanol production (like farming) is heavily subsidized and not exactly profitable.
The entire market that is/would be involved in large-scale ethanol production is heavily skewed because of subsidies. The cheapest route would be to import ethanol from places where it is cheap.
On a side note: Why do SUVs belong in museums?
Like trucks and the TUV (Truck-UV), they fill an important niche.
The SUV is just a vehicle, maybe your problem is with the people who drive them.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I waited three months for one of the first Priuses and a whole year for the hybrid Highlander. But GM wouldn't do even that much. BTW, the Prius was heavily subsidized by Toyota before the economy of scale tipped over into profit.
If you don't have about 50 million or so to do it, you're not going to get the manufacturing capacity to make the motors (They just typically don't make electrics quite that powerful yet...yet...) or the batteries, etc.
It's NOT as simple as all you say or there'd be the same story with autos- the engines we have today aren't anywhere near
efficient as they could be. There's a market opportunity there too- but you don't see it either. It's not for want
of ability to do it...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'd go for an EV1 for my commute, why not?
Probably because you would balk at the cost of the batteries, especially if the cost of recycling is factored in; and you still have to pay for the fuel.
On the whole a Boxster is a much better deal. A used Plymouth Sundance even better.
KFG
Who killed US inter- and intra-city passenger rail transportation?
Mod parent down.
Most full-hybrids today have regenerative braking: Honda(Insight, Civic & Accord Hybrid), Toyota(Prius, Camry Hybrid, Highlander Hybrid), Lexus(RX400h, GS450h), etc at a decent enough efficiency level.
It is just as likely that homo-sapiens are currenly holding off an Ice Age as they are helping bring in "global warming". The objective science is pretty thin either way. Maybe we'll be smacked by an asteroid or rogue gamma ray and end the agument once and for all (or until something else crawls out of the muck to take the issue up again...)
Anyhow, the answer to your question who will be burning [Fossil Fuels] is this: who ever can get at them for an energy source cheaper than any alternative. (India, China, evolved racoons 2 million years from now...)
Right now, it is whoever can pay the market rate (i.e. the Industrialized Nations).
Let's say there is some "day after tomorrow" or "an inconvenient truth" scenario in our future... and humans are whacked back to Ice-Age times, or "worse"... Do you think the raco-sapiens will give a whit about burning cheap hydrocarbons vs "the environment"?
In the long long long run, the planet will be a cinder either way.
If you really care about saving the planet - it is a lost cause. If you want to save human kind, then you should push for high-tech and space programs and spread people all over, off this doomed rock.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Hello, I am an Electric Car
I don't go very fast or very far.
And if you drive me, people will think you're gay.
(one of us! one of us!)
The Toyota Prius batteries are expected to last 100,000 miles, and have done so. Battery replacement for a RAV4 EV is only expensive because it's a "boutique" item. If there were tens of thousands of EVs on the road, the cost would come down.
As for the fuel, according to Wikipedia it was 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the gas equivalent, and that was before prices skyrocketed to $3+ per gallon here. And your hands don't stink after you refuel it.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
...it was apparently *too good*. Demand real high, good sales, but they stopped selling them. gee, wonder why??
You can't keep selling cars if they don't break down as much. Dealers make a ton of loot from repairs as well as from sales. Electric cars bork both of those business models severely. You can't keep milking drivers at the pump if there is no need for it and joe driver can make his own power for his vehicle that lasts a long time and works well..
This is also why they are pushing hydrogen over something else, the hydrogen infrastructure (creation/delivery/retail sales) will invariably fall to the already entrenched multi-billionaires in the oil business, who control government and policy in those areas. They will *never* advocate anything that would put them out of business, or reduce their business. The doofus CEO of exxon in congressional testimony said it from their POV, "we are not in the alternative energy business-we sell oil". If they can't control it and profit from it *in perpetuity*, they will spend any sum to FUD it away or make it not happen. IMO, hydrogen is 99% conjob right now.
GM made the electric because california mandated it(so many cars in the fleet had to be zero emission, etc), it was designed on purpose the way it was so they could say "see, too expensive, and no one wants them", etc. The electric ford rangers as well, although the last few ford relented and let the leassees keep them, but just a few, they crushed most of them. I believe this was covered on slashdot and I know I put some stuff up on technocrat about it.
I am looking forward to the movie, it's something I have been aware of for a long time now, and thanks for reminding me of that toyota, forgot about that model and AFAIK I never saw one. I have seen a couple EV1s driving around and a LONG time ago a few Lectric Leopards, which were handbuilt one at a time, conversions made from renaults modified to be electric.
So far though no smaller vendor will just do the practical thing and do a normal looking car. You either see those extremely expensive high end sportscar models, or the pith helmet on wheels joke toy car models. first guys out with a normal looking car or truck that isn't totally stupid will sell a lot of them. I think they should go whole hog and offer a complete package, the car or pickup, etc, the "instant hybrid" tow behind cargo/generator trailer for longer trips, and the home solar recharger station. And I bet you could come in with that whole bundle for the price of a high end SUV. I am thinking 20 grand for the basic ride, 20 grand for a *nice* home recharge solar station, and 5 grand for a nice genny trailer, something along those lines anyway, and right now, most of that stuff has some decent federal tax credits and some states have similar deals.
I'm so sick and tired of that argument, every time it pops up in electric car or hydrogen economy related articles.
as i see it, we should still be changing to electric cars or hydrogen based ones, even if it produces more nasty stuff at the beginning, if you take the power plants into consideration (which is not even proven at this point, because of efficancy differences)
the really important thing is to change the energy-transmitting infrastructure - by changing it from fossil fuels to hydrogen or electricity, we create another level of abstraction (to use programmer's speak), and we can tackle the other parts later (someday, in spite of the old joke that fusion is always only a couple of years away, it will arrive). there are zillions of ways to produce electricity, but only one way to "produce" normal gasoline (i love the idea of bio-petrol, but i think it's more of a temporary crutch than a real solution). with electric or hydrogen based cars, we'd open the energy producing market to a broader competition, so to speak.
it's kind of like developing cross-platform applications. it allows you to switch the underlying layers depending on your needs.
but right now, we have this massive monolithic problem that the whole infrastructure, from the moment the oil is pumped out, upto the moment the gas explodes in your cylinders, is extremly unflexibly based on fossil fuels. so the only reasonable way out of this is the good old 'divide & conquer', IMHO.
It is well documented that the car and oil companies bought out a lot of rail transport systems early in the 20th century. The also used thier pollitical clout to achive the same thing and managed to remove a lot of electric trolly and bus sysems in cities all over north america to make way for the new freeways and cars, trucks etc. Now, we are entering an age of less oil (we have peaked out on oil production where its going to cost more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel'w worth of oil out of the ground. Perhaps what we should have been doing, instead of a lot of screaming monkey buisness in the 20th century (lots of wars, the cold war etc..) was to invest in developing cheap solar cell technology, now we are in the 21st century and we are now using computer systems and engineering tools (like those in the electronics feild), we had better speed up the development of nano and biotech where we could grow cheap plastic solar cells and we would cover arizona with solar cells, that would be more than enough to power north america.
If we don't then we miss out on nanoreplicator tech and indefinite youthfull lifespan tech, and we can go back to some smelly 9th century existance where most people live 25 years if they are lucky and light their houses/caves by candles (ooh, real high-tech, and the added bonus that islamics like bin laden would like that!!).
Just for the few that bother to read AC posts at the end of articles...
I work for a PR company that was retained by one of the large car manufacturer who did make an "impact" with Electric Vehicles. Sometimes it's a hard choice between doing ones job and doing the right thing, let's just say the Who Killed the Electric Car film has a lot of things right. Oh yeah, also it was our firm that skewed several Wikipedia entries relating to electric vehicles in our client's favour. Sorry, just doing our job.
I agree with the other posters. What killed the car was economic unviability. So that's why it was discontinued.
But why were the cars all taken back and destroyed? The same reason Beechcraft took back the Starship. If anyone owns one out there, the company has an obligation to provide certain services. For example, in the US you must make repair parts for a car for some amount of time after you discontinue it. And there's plenty more costs too.
But by taking them back, they could forgo this stuff and probably write off the program for a nice loss too.
So, the car became unviable for all but a tiny number of people. And then some beancounter did the math and found it was far cheaper to recall them all than let people buy them and keep running them.
No conspiracy. It's just the way corporations work. Money talks.
Anyone who says GM was just setting up electric cars for a fall is drawing an inexplicable link between GM and oil. GM wants to sell cars. If people want electric cars, they want to sell you electric cars. They had a huge advantage in the electric market, there's no reason to think they would kill that market rather than cash in on it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The Toyota Prius. . .
.
Not really an electric as is the EV1. It makes a big difference in battery life. A battery might be rated at 10,000 cycles, but only 350 cycles for deep discharge.
Battery replacement for a RAV4 EV is only expensive because it's a "boutique" item. If there were tens of thousands of EVs on the road, the cost would come down.
How much does a battery pack for your laptop cost? They're just shrink wrapped AAs. Batteries are expensive. When I buy batteries for an electric car I buy off the shelf stuff from a bulk jobber. They are still expensive. About $4K for a set of conventional gel batteries (which I would expect to last about a year or two in a commuter vehicle) as made in the Godzillions for various applications.
As for the fuel, according to Wikipedia it was 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the gas equivalent. .
And the cost of the batteries is part of your fuel cost. Pretending it's not is cheating. It takes fuel to make them. It takes fuel to recycle them and eventually dispose of them.
For a RAV4 that's $.26 per mile if you get maximum life out of your batteries, but $.50/mi was more typical. Plus your electric costs. A conservatively driven Boxster will cost you about $.10/mi in gas at $3.00/gal (although you can do a lot worse if you want).
In a small car they take up most of the space so you are reduced to a two seater (I happen to like two seaters, but I do like enough room left over for a couple of guitars), or you take Toyota's approach and put them in an SUV, with the weight of an SUV to haul around and the air drag of an SUV to push against. You're also hauling 1000 lbs. of dead weight around all the time, even when the "tank" is nearly empty. Ten gallons of gas is 60 lbs. One gallon of gas is 6 lbs.
Please, please, please bear in mind that I am not an electric car detractor. I am an electric car lover. I simply don't let my love blind me to the fact that they simply aren't going to save the world. They have certain considerable advantages, but they have certain considerable disadvantages.
Chief among these is batteries.
KFG
I'm a volunteer firefighter, and I want an SUV so that I can have a big fire extinguisher in the trunk, cary all my turnout gear with me everywhere I go, have a bunch of radio and emergency lighting in my vehicle so that I can get to a scene faster, and so that I can take a bunch of people with me whenever we all go somewhere. I don't know why all the soccer moms want them though when a mini-van is so much more efficient when you aren't carrying a lot of weight and equipment.
Sig: I stole this sig.
That was certainly a huge factor and I totally forgot about it.
The California regulations required that some percent (5%? 10%?) of the cars sold in California be zero emissions by a certain date. So companies start to make electric cars.
And what does California do? Back away from the regulations. First, they declared that some gas-powered could be qualified as partial zero emissions vehicles (PZEV) and thus qualify for the regulations. I don't have a problem with SULEVs (the less Orwellian name for PZEVs), but anyone who thinks they deserve credit for being zero emissions should have to sleep in a bedroom ventilated by the exhaust of PZEVs for a couple nights and report back how the "zero" emissions are treating them.
So after GM spends a lot on real ZEVs, California allows other companies to spend less than 10% as much and make the grade. then they flat out ditch the program making GM (and Honda's) efforts an almost total waste of money.
No wonder the car companies fight new regulations that seem likely to force them to make vehicles there probably isn't a market for. Once bitten, twice shy.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I think you mean suppressed :) although I still disagree and I think you've picked a bad example.
7 .html1 :625789979 /01/04/daily12.html
- Although $10K was a lot of money in 1970 dollars, based on what I've read $10K was a wild under-guesstimate
- Only one prototype was ever built, so most claims seem to be based on regurgitated marketing specs rather than hands-on experience
- In the late 90's Mr. Ramirez was eventually convicted of 12 counts of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison after he swindled his electric car investors out of millions
http://www.crest.org/discussion/ev/199811/msg0151
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?docid=1G
http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/199
He doesn't exactly sounds like the kind of chap who deserves to be lauded by electric car fanboys.
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
just curious, how do these electric cars generally work? do they use the same kind of motor as those little electric motors we used to make in physics classes? the ones with copper coils and solenoids and stuff? is it just like a bigger, improved version of that?
Let's hope they leave room for the Slashdot Cruiser !
My chemistry teacher actually owns one of these. He purchased it when they were first introduced, and then was offered almost twice of what he paid for it to sell it back to them. He turned them down and still drives the thing to this day, much to GM's dismay, I'm sure.
60%+ of the US's electricity comes from Coal, which is -highly- polluting. Your average car may be less efficient, but your average car also doesn't spew radioactive waste into the air. Coal plants do (yes, coal is radioactive.)
Please help metamoderate.
Do you think it has taken us 50 years to get a car to go supposedly 40mpg?
The *SAME* car? No - the problem is that the American consumer will pay more for a car that is heavier (safer) and has more features/trunk space/acceleration/handling/etc than they will a car that has the weight, trunk space, acceleration and handling of a car from the 1950's that gets 80 MPG.
We have gotten REMARKABLY more efficient with engines in the past 50 years. We just spend that efficiency on things OTHER than MPG because that's what the consumer wants.
paintball
That... that doesn't apply to efficiency. It's more efficient to release energy in a bunch of little steps rather than in a big one, so I'd think that a smaller engine is going to be more efficient than a big plant.
Now, as to which one releases more _pollutants_ as opposed to _heat_...
Obliterating 1,000 EV1's after lease is probably cheaper than leaving 1,000 EV1's (or any other car) in the marketplace. Even if they charged $10,000 each for a post-lease car, it would cost GM more than $10 million to support them for their life cycle.
paintball
1. GM sponsors an entry in the first Solar Race Across Australian
2. GM's Sunraycer runs away from the competition
3. a. The board says, "rah rah, good PR opportunity. Now back to our business of making gasoline-powered cars."
b. The engineer CEO says, "Build me a prototype, I want GM to be a leader instead of playing perpetual catch-up!" The board says, Are you sure? Might give those crazy CARB regulators ideas...
4. Impact prototype shows in the January 1990 L.A. autoshow. By November, CARB had a spiffy new Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate on the books.
5. Engineer CEO says, "we can do this!", and starts going all-out to meet the ZEV mandate.
6. 1992: Recession! GM misses profit forecasts. The engineer CEO is kicked out, and replaced with a beancounter.
7. Beancounter CEO says, "look, this EV1 project is a decade away from being profitable, and we're cashing in on every Suburban we sell. Our only hope is to spend $1.50 lobbying against the crazy mandate for every $1.00 we spend on EV1 development."
8. GM splits into two parts - a section that believed in the project, and a section that believed in making Suburbans.
9. GM shows a diesel-electric 4 passenger 80mpg hybrid at a 1997 autoshow. Never shown again. GM proceeds to let Toyota clean their clock in the hybrid game...
10. GM loses several billion dollars last year on declining sales of Suburbans, while Toyota and Honda (which build cars too) enjoy substantial profits.
-------
blah blah, sure I'm missing something. Above points partially inspired by this electric car group post, and Alan Cocini's memoir (Electrical Engineer extraordinaire, who saw the writing on the wall and left soon after the engineer CEO was kicked out).
GM could've been a leader, as electric cars with an onboard generator are now all the rage. Instead they spent a couple years cashing in on SUV sales, and now they're irrelevant. With a visionless management, they'll certainly be in bankruptcy court soon.
The post linked to above is quite lucid, so I'm going to copy it in part here:
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Why do all electric or hybrid cars have to have their rear wheels half-covered?
WTFIUWT? It's fugly. Make it stop.
No sig.
Back in '99 I drove an EV 1 a bit. I found it to be very "futuristic feeling". It also had great acceleration and handeling. My only holdbacks were passenger/baggage space and distance. I couldn't even really drive the thing to work and back without a charge. If I needed to carry a few things there was no space for it. There were many factors that lead to the collapse of the EV1 and all are debateble. Al I can say is, that I as a consumer would only buy an electric car under a few circumstances. 1. Improved range. 2. Quick charging 3. Improved cargo/passenger space. 4. Wide infastructure of charging units in place. I don't fore see any of those factors happening soon. I can sooner imagine fuel cell and hybrid technology further advancing. Heck the US would probabily start refining oil shale before it built an infrastructure of charging stations.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
Good link, I hope the naysayers see it and read it. Once you have lived with solar-or like these guys with the electric vehicles, it strips away just a TON of industry mass brainwashing.
While it's true that a battery-only car is still fossil fuel powered in the end
While your statement applies to much of the US, here in BC, Canada we use mostly Hydroelectric power... which isn't really consumed in use. And of course, many places use other power sources such as nuclear, tidepool generators, etc.
Why not create a set of plans based on the Open Source model that could be used to bypass GM like FOSS bypasses Micro$oft.
Eventually, a RedHat will come along and produce the hardware for the masses.
It may not look sexy like a Jaguar, but it will get you there.
> and personally I'm not sure I would have wanted a world of all
> eletric cars when the time came to recycle the batteries...
The industry is very well prepared for recycling lead-acid batteries. The chemistry is very well known and the batteries themselves are pretty much all the same size. Should be about the same hassle as getting your tires rotated.
> About $4K for a set of conventional gel batteries [snip]
When you buy big batteries (as opposed to AA's), there's gotta be some recycling reimbursement going on. I mean, you give up your old batteries when can be refurbished and recycled... It sounds incorrect that you'd be paying full price for each new set...
The recycling savings may already be reflected in the price of new batteries. I watched a documentary on metal production that said that 98% of lead is recycled. That's a huge amount of lead that doesn't have to be mined and smelted.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And I've never been so hassled in my life. The checkouts worked great and I had no problem using them, but I practically had to fight off five employees being unhelpfully "helpful". Stuff was snatched out of my hands and scanned the "right" way, the exact way I was doing it. Hollered instructions came over my shoulder as I went to use the touchscreen, even though I'd used it many times before. Then began the "out-of-order" signs, which I would march past and use the machines anyway AND they still worked! Nothing wrong with them at all! Next, every time I went there, the machines were blocked behind everything they could pile around it, or barricaded behind wet floor signs in the mysterious need to contantly wax the 12 square feet of space in front of the machine, to the neglect of the rest of the store...
After awhile, the automated checkouts vanished (from that store). The checkers jobs were safe, once again. A little lesson about the human factor affecting technological advances.
That would have been more convincing if another poster hadn't already pointed out that they were never sold:
Not exactly failing in the marketplace if they never actually entered the marketplace.
This reminds me of feeble arguments a few years ago that we had temporarily (and quite by accident) balanced the pollutants in our atmosphere so that one effect held off the other.
And actually, no, it's not just as likely.
If we were holding off an ice age, we would be seeing increasing CO2 having little or no effect, quite contrary to our expectations. But what we're really seeing now is very much in line with the expectations that were set twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Anyhow, the answer to your question who will be burning [Fossil Fuels] is this: who ever can get at them for an energy source cheaper than any alternative.
Again, missing the point. We burn fossil fuels as a means of improving our quality of life. At the same time, we're destroying the quality of life of the future. Don't give me some free-market bullshit as a justification for crashing our society.
Let's say there is some "day after tomorrow" or "an inconvenient truth" scenario in our future... and humans are whacked back to Ice-Age times, or "worse"... Do you think the raco-sapiens will give a whit about burning cheap hydrocarbons vs "the environment"?
There most definitely is such a scenario in our future. All we need do is nothing and allow the short-sighted sociopaths who run our businesses to exploit conditions to their maximum extreme and it will happen.
And I give a shit. Short-sighted nihilism disturbs me and as a rule I have this advice for nihilists: destroy yourselves, but leave the rest of us alone.
you really care about saving the planet - it is a lost cause. If you want to save human kind, then you should push for high-tech and space programs and spread people all over, off this doomed rock.
Oddly enough, investing in more efficient energy sources is about the only way that can be done. But there are few current realistic alternatives to the Earth as a place to live. Trust me, I've thought about the topic some. Follow the link in my .sig . . .
My book, podcast
You clearly have a view from the inside. I get pretty tired of all the "big evil corporations are holding back THE MAN" posts around this place.
By and large, corporations are full of good people who understand that making money ultimately comes from pleasing your customers. If GM dropped the electric car idea, it is not for some nefarious reason, but because the things just couldn't provide a competitive balance of brice and performance at the time. It is also ludicrious to claim that "Big Oil" and the car companies are not pouring tons of R&D into alternative fuels and transporation. On the contrary, they are putting in as much as anyone. I think this myth comes from the mistaken belief that companies only think about the short-term. Not only does a basic understanding of markets dispel this (a stock price is the value of ALL future profits), but so would the experience of actually working in any high-tech company. In my company, I work in an sub-group where product life cycles are extremely short. Yet we are routinely projecting potential revenues a decade or more into the future, and betting on products that will produce no revenue for several years.
My Prius is a looker! So far, an average of 45.3 MPG on a 140 mile per day round trip commute. I suspect my mileage would be higher, but I live in the Pocono mountains, and my commute goes through some other steep hills in New Jersey. I have been impressed with the car's mileage for another reason, since most people average around 80 miles per hour on the aptly named Route 80, I am forced to drive likewise or be run over by a typical humungous GM/Ford/Chrysler "World Destroyer" SUV.
The Prius and other hybrids are also unoficially the geeks dream vehicle, with LCD displays, GPS mapping which can be updated with a DVD - the list goes on and on and I haven't even RTFM, which explains even more features I have yet to try out.
Evangelist mode off."Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
But in most ADT messages, EV1 is a required segment! I don't understand. Is this part of HL7 v3?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
http://www.things.org/~jym/greenpeace/myth-of-batt ery-recycling.html
KFG
You try getting even half of it sometime- it's not been fun for me and I've got things as important
or moreso to produce.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have a very bad feeling about what is going to happen to this vehichle. I know that committing Grand Theif Auto, especially an automobile owned by the United States Government, is wrong. However, it appears that the conspirators who are named in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? fear that the movie will have a greater convincing argument than Al Gore's crappy movie. For a guy who is so concerned about the environment, and under the Clinton Adminstration got the funding to start the EV1 program, I don't see him at the Smithsonian signing a check for ownership of this vehicle.
Obviously, whoever wanted the EV1 removed wants it to be destroyed.
Destroying the EV1 states that the Smithonian is in the business of manipulating or destroying history rather than preserving it.
In order to save this history from those who want us to continue to be slaves to the oil pump --the status quo-- a crime must be committed in order to save the existance of this vehicle before it is crushed by those people who can not admit that their power is waining.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Hey stupid moderators, learn your Simpsons quotes!
And your hands don't stink after you refuel it.
I live in Oregon, so my hands don't stink either. The hands of the gas station attendant stink, but mine stay perfectly clean.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I am not really sure how many of you have seen this but heres a guy in NJ who worked out a "water fuel" its pretty intresting and get this...the video is on ebuams world... http://ebaumsworld.com/2006/06/waterfuel.html
Ford Escape Hybrid / Mazda Tribute Hybrid / Mercury Mariner Hybrid: Wheels not covered.
Toyota Prius: Wheels not covered.
Honda Accord Hybrid: Wheels not covered.
Toyota Highlander Hybrid: Wheels not covered.
Toyota Camry Hybrid: Wheels not covered.
Honda Civic Hybrid: Wheels not covered.
Lexus "Hybrids": Wheels not covered.
Honda Insight: Better MPG than any other hybrid? Wheels covered.
My mom says I'm cool.
Lets see. Museum officials didn't remove the car. GM didn'tr have the car removed. Umm. The car had a computer brain bent on escape. Pretty smart. That car was With W running the show the car appears to be smarter than the average dem or neocon job.
Lets see. Museum official didn't have the car removed. Gm Had nothing to do the removal of the car. Umm. The car had computer brain bent on escape. With W running the country the car was smarter than the Average Dem or neocon job.
The whole EV1 thing is very interesting to say the least. One thing it did was to introduce really crappy technology and sell it as the best available. Things usch as the battery charging arraingement, the batteries themselves and even the styling. This in part is why I honestly believe that GM stacked the deck against the machine. As long as they can convince people that electric cars can't be useful the demand won't be there.
That hasn't stopped people form continuing to develop newer technolgoy but they have been held back by geuss who - GM. The biggest shortcoming with respect to an electric car is the battery. Geuss who has a hammer lock on suitable battery technology? That is right GM whom can't seem to find a way to market a standard battery that people can go out and buy off the shelf. It is an absolute requirement that parts be available to to allow companies to enter into the EBV market. If some of the best EV battery techonology out there is held closely by GM, apparenlty to prevent EV auto procduction without heavy licensing fees you won't see a huge up take in EV vehicles nor independant manufacture.
Lets face it if you want to produce an electric vehicle now adays it is easy and simple to do. Everythng needed is of the shelf and for the most part reasonably priced. Except the newer battery technology. That doesn't stop people from going the lead acid route with home built units, but lets face it that is relying on technology that is many years old. Still functional vehicles can be built that way.
If people really want to see what is possible with EV cars go to web sights that discuss the technology. The only thing missing is a good power source. AC Propulsion is one vendor of state of the art solutions. Cheaper DC solutions have been around for years.
Considering that I work in corporate America, I'm not one to tag along with those that describe big corporations as evil. In GM's case though I think it is very obvious that they are either Evil or run by complete idiots. I'm leaning towards the complete idiots point of view more and more as it becomes obvious that they can't even make a nickel these days.
As to the specfics of electric motors there is little they can do to convince me that the manufacture of these things in a mass produciton environmnet is expensive. The corporate work I do involves the maintenance of industrial systems. Electric motors are very cheap and extremely reliable when engineered properly. Even the costs of the controls is now very competitive. The thought that performance and quality aren't possible in an electric vehical, because of the underlying motivator, is just garbage.
So yeah GM is screwing us. There is no doubt in my mind that their legal teams trashed EV's in California. It is matter of a company that didn't want to get its head around the technology becasue of vested interest else where. It literally did not make an effort and had teams in the back fields making sure the effort wasn't requied.
The worst thing about the whole electric vehicle attempt in California is the very lack of will to go though with zero emmisions vehicles. They could have clobbered GM over the head buy funding a few start ups if they really wanted to. Most to the required technoogy could easily be found in California anyways.
Nope can't have anything different. Instead we have GM implementing plans to keep us locked into the same busness model we have been in for decades. That is keeping the consumer locked into one fuel source that is difficult for them to manage on their own. After all the maufacture of Hydrogen in an economic manner won't be easy for the consumer. Atleast no where as easy as the generation of electricity. So we will all be tied to the pump for another few decades, just that the pump will be pushing hydrogen instead of gas. All in all it looks like an engineered lock in.
Well that would have happened if it wasn't for GM's cu
This of course works for all cars, but when your
engine system already has sufficiently high efficiency
you have to start looking at the other bottlenecks.
Think about profiling software.
I think jacked up 22" truck tires are far more fugly,
both aesthetically and socially.
Up in the air! A bird ... a plane ... No, it's the $$$ Oil Indu$try $$$!
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I don't comment all that much, but there are some points being missed.
1. The big automakers got hefty grants/tax breaks to research said cars. This served three functions. First, it denied it to other companies by sucking up money that could go to future competitors. Next, it's free money and good publicity. Finally, if they did hit something magic, they'd get it...as opposed to the other companies.
2. Let's talk about cars of the future for a moment. Think about how many small companies are out there, with good ideas and noble goals, going to trade shows and conventions for VC? Where they talk about the challenges and successes they've had? The entrenched automakers applies pressure with their money to put a PR edge on the shows...company A wants to promote their ideas? We bump them from the speaking schedule, kick them out to being a small booth that now only 1% of the attendees now see, and no investors hear a pitch.
GE had a car, deliberately sabotaged it, and then claims it is a failure. Where does this put venture capital for new electric car companies? Nobody's going to buy into it now.
GM spent about $1 billion in R&D to develop this. Seems a bit expensive to prove a point.
Sure you'll be better off if you collide with a small car (and much more likely to kill whoever you hit). The lack of breaking ability and increased rollover risk makes up for it though.
Reason.
The Diesel-electric hybrid shown was developed with US government money actually. But after the car was finished, the government changed the laws so that no Diesel car can qualify as a PZEV (SULEV), the classification hybrids are in.
So the car had no future, so GM didn't put their own money in to continue developing it. You also remove the mention that California cancelled the ZEV laws before the EV1 debuted, putting the EV1 into a difficult position in the marketplace.
And I think rightly so, since Diesels then (and only slightly less so now) pollute so much that driving one to help the environment is kidding yourself.
Note that in no way does Toyota excel at low-volume custom manufacturing. Toyota is fantastic at manufacturing, but it's of the high volume kind.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not only tankered from, say, Saudi Arabia to the US but also put in a truck and driven out to a petrol station when it's there. The "transmission losses" on petrol are probably higher than electricity - though both are pretty low. If people gave a fuck they'd driver lighter cars.
GM donated many of the cars to universities. Apparently, that which is unsafe for a trained mechanic to work on can still be given to a bunch of engineering grad students to dissect and play with.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Fuck her, I loved that cd.
They typical person may have a EV capable commute, but odds are they also make a few trips a year that are outside the range of the car. That alone makes them a no go for most people.
Unknowingly, you point out one of the greatest problems in the USA (and probably the rest of the world).
People buy cars that cover 100% of their "needs", rather than an economical (and energy efficient car) that covers 99% of their needs.
For those of you that aren't convinced, look around during the morning/afternoon commutes. It is rare to see any passengers (other than the driver). A single person driving a "Ford Excursion", etc, etc.. Despite efforts, most people do not carpool.
And this is their daily pattern for 5/7 the days in the week. Yes, a few times a year they might want to move furniture or haul a BBQ. They could rent a truck from Enterprise/Uhaul for ~$20-$40 for that occasion.
Instead we have extended cab 4x4 luxury pickup trucks on the roads...
Do you seriously think that in a commercial environment like the USA Auto companies are currently going through, that if they thought they could sell an EV profitably, they wouldn't?
I must admit, I am surprised that there is no sensible EV currently on sale. The technology is pretty straightforward, and if you just take Toyota's approach with the RAV then, even though it is not especially efficient, it is safe and useful.
EDrive has their Prius Plus, expected to cost $12,000 and make a Prius use almost all electric power. The batteries are expected to last at least five years, so assuming that "at least' gives us at most $.25/mile for a "boutique" item. That battery pack weighs 150, the standard Prius pack ~80; that doesn't seem like it would take that much space, although it would outweigh many gas tanks. Granted, the Prius+ isn't all electric, but they expect it to get 200 miles to the gallon plus the electrical costs. At $3/tank, we're talking $.015/mile plus electricity.
Technically, the battery isn't fuel costs, but it is a consumable. We don't count periodically needing to replace the gas tank or (as I had to not long ago) the fuel pump as a fuel cost. That said, the cost/mile is what we really care about, and at present batteries do factor highly in that.
But again, Edrive is a small company. Assume bulk manufacture could cut the cost in half, and give us 10 years like a Prius, and the batteries are $0.06/mile. A Boxster is rated at 20/28, so the EPA would expect more like $.12-.13/mile.
I'm not claiming build-your-own EVs are practical. But lead-acid automotive batteries, used for high-drain cold-start conditions last years and cost $100. Is a cost-effective battery really that far beyond modern manufacturing?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
That battery pack weighs 150, the standard Prius pack ~80; that doesn't seem like it would take that much space
.ohhhhhhhh, eight batteries if you really wanted to get somewhere. . .and back again, without a recharge.
.the fuel pump. . .
The Prius is not an electric car. It is a hybrid. With a hybrid you may only need a small number of batteries, because the battery is actually a sort of cache/voltage regulator. The electricity flows through the battery, but you do not depend on it for the electricity. That comes largely from the gas engine (plus your initial cache). EDrive says 100 mpg for the first 50 miles, which would be as close to "almost all electric power" as it ever gets.
With an electric you have your batteries and that's it.
I could build you a hybrid cyclecar with just one standard deep cycle battery and a weedwhacker motor. The equivelent in an electric would take . .
. .
Now we touch on issues of why I love electric cars. They are engineering elegance. Too many damned parts that wear out on a gas engine and too many support systems to fail. And they're all expensive.
But lead-acid automotive batteries, used for high-drain cold-start conditions last years and cost $100.
Workable for hybrids, but unsuitable for electric cars. Reliance on these is one of the reasons the average electric of the 70s sucked so badly. I pay $170-$200 for a deep cycle. 40-50 lbs apiece. You'll want a dozen or so for a low performance commuter, I believe the RAV4 used two dozen, which is about right for "car like" performance. The RAV4 batteries were so expensive because they were NiMH.
Is a cost-effective battery really that far beyond modern manufacturing?
Yes, it really is; and I'm afraid it may be beyond physics. A good battery is simply very energy intensive to make and the energy must be paid for. Every breakthrough in batteries over the past 30 years has given us better, but more expensive batteries. The stuff they are made of is more expensive and the manufacturing techniques used are inherently more expensive as well. The EDrive battery isn't expensive because it's a "boutique" item, it's expensive because it's a big ass Lithium ion battery. It's just the nature of the beastie.
By the way, Lithium ion batteries have a shelf life. The EDrive battery will end up dead in five years even if you don't use it.
But at least they're much lighter than lead acid.
KFG
They are good people. It is sad to see their company falling apart, but on the other hand, any company that pays its lawn-mowers more than its PhDs is going to come un-glued.
Delphi and GM are really betting on fuel cells as the future. It is a tough problem, though, as fuel cells work much better in producing slow, steady power as compared to the high-output bursts that are required by automobiles. I have done some research on fuel cell membranes in the past (which is the primary show-stopper right now). It is a tough problem. FCs are not being held back by any form of corporate greed. They are being held back because they simply cannot be produced with the reliability, performance and price required.
because of my career and how close we are to detroit i spent quite a bit of time at GM's tech center for training.they had a large number of the electric cars running around within the center. it's actually a large facility and the electric cars did a great job in their closed environment. i'm all for helping mother nature but there are a huge number of issues that need to be dealt with before the electric cars could be released to the general public. the insurance companies including workers comp and the EPA were fighting about who was going to deal with the batteries. the battery weighed over 1000lbs,carried high voltage,is full of acidic/caustic chemicals and can leak in a collision. that was just for starters, the liability issues came next......it's a dark and stormy night...you come upon a bad wreck.. you see a mangled EV1 sitting in the low area beside the road in two inches of water.. the driver is still inside...not moving do you (a) run over and try to open the door to help OR (b) wait until someone comes along with a DVOM (volt meter) and checks for a short in the battery system before you touch the car?????????????? laugh if you want but this is real world! i know for a fact that the legal system had as much to do with killing the EV program as anything. the fuel cell is a better option and i think that there is less "meat" to feed the lawyers with
I always thought those "major brand" gas stations were shady. I live on riverside. You say they sell biodiesel, but do they sell ethanol? E10 or anything close?
Taxation is easily handled by a number of methods.
Method #1: Every year at license renewal time, require a certificate of the odometer reading from a licensed inspector, just like the emissions test certificate you need for a gas-powered car. Based on last year's mileage, you pay your highway taxes. The obvious drawback is the sticker shock when you see the annual bill, instead of paying piecemeal.
Method #2: The state estimates how many miles your car possibly could be driven, given its range and assuming daily recharges. Tax accordingly.
Method #3: Tax the electricty used by stand-alone charge centers and home rechargers. That requires a smarter meter for the home, or a separate meter just for the recharger.
Method #4: Drop the gas tax and make every road a toll road. It would be political suicide, and requires ubiquitous automatic toll technology (or using increased numbers toll both attendants to curb unemployment).
Method #5: Choose to not charge highway taxes for electric cars as a way to encourage and subsidize their use. That is what most states and the federal gov't are doing.
it's called life cycle analysis. "a gas burning electric plant is FAR more efficient than a 3 liter V6" may be, but then when you take transmission losses, and all the other losses (conversion, etc etc) you end up with less efficiancy overall. pure electric cars simply move the pollution from the urban areas out to wherever the power is generated.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
...they are adopting a GPS based mileage tracker, precisely for this purpose. You not only get to pay a tax, they will know where your ride is all the time if they feel like it.
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/12/4359
That beats being a PhD. A typical corporate entry-level PhD will make about $80k per year in salary and have benefits that amount to half of that. $120,000 divided by 50 hour weeks and 47 weeks per year comes out to $50/actual_hour_worked, ignoring business travel and evening conference calls.
There are guys in our plant making over $100k in pay alone a year with their overtime.
[Lead acid batteries]Workable for hybrids, but unsuitable for electric cars.
Some RAV4 EV prototypes used lead-acid batteries, and so did the EV1.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Lots of electric cars have used lead acid batteries. I, literally, designed mine around them (they were incased in a central spine chassis, like a Tatra or a 'Vette, in a slide out tray so they could be changed like an R/C car stick pack). Nearly all prototypes start out that way.
That doesn't mean that they don't suck, it just means they're comparitively inexpensive and readily available just about anywhere.
KFG
> So, it's not actually clear without hard numbers wether or not driving an electric car
> 500 miles requires more fossil fuels than driving a gasoline car 500 miles.
Fortunately, folks have done those calculations, such as here and here and here (pdf) for IC efficiency confirmation from a not-anti-oil source. Here (pdf) is another overview (from the standpoint of CO2 emissions, so electric vehicles come out even better, due to nuclear power and the like).
The short version is that all-electric vehicles are about twice as efficient as gas-powered vehicles -- 28% vs. 14% -- when considered "well-to-wheel" (i.e., start with crude oil/coal and go from there). So if you had enough gas to take a car 500 miles, you could burn the crude oil for electricity instead and drive an electric version of that car 1,000 miles.
All-electric cars have some problems, but overall energy efficiency is not one of them.
But will it run Linux?
More important:
Take 20 minutes to go Googling - you'll probably find 200 plans for electric cars - both free & pay for the plans type.
Gads, a long-running debate on slashdot. Who woulda thunk. Makes me nostalgic for usenet...
Here's my analysis. Electric power itself is cheaper than the equivalent gasoline power, at least "at the wheels." Battery tech exists (for example, the NiMH used in the RAV4 EV) that lasts 50,000-100,000 miles, which means maybe two changeouts in a car's lifetime. The technology exists, the only issue is battery price. So we have to ask, is the high price of the batteries due to something fundamental about the batteries, or is it their custom nature? Nickel costs ~$5/pound. Is there anything else in an NiMH battery that is particularly pricey? If not, it's just manufacturing cost. And for an item that could potentially be produced in the millions, that really gets amortized out. I don't see any reason mass-produced batteries that provide tolerable performance should be particulary expensive.
Moreover, even if we go with Lithium-based batteries (Lithium goes for ~$50/pound, I think), the Lithium is not consumed, so the battery being replaced should be fairly valuable in its own right for the metal, and recyclable. It should have a decent trade-in value assuming enough batteries being replaced and reused.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.