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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
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.
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.
I'm really torn, I like electric cars in principle, but as you say, lacking 'oompm' (power) is my reason not to get one. Along with statistics that show more powerful cars are less likly to get into accidents. but then, the only reason I have to think that they are weak is from what other people say in side comments like yours. Maybe their acceleration is better than gas powered cars. Maybe you own a gas station, and are telling lies to stay in business, maybe... YOU killed the electric car!
They need better ads, depicting them zooming along, speed of a dead dinosaur vs. speed of a lightning bolt... meanwhile, last I heard, people were selling Hybrids for more than they paid, and some delivery/shuttle fleets are getting them. Like with Natural Gas vehicles, they may be more economical if your business is willing to provide the infrastructure themselves.
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.
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.
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/
Here are two articles from Nature and Science journal...
No, they are just links, but not to articles
Apparently this is a non-news outside of a scientific community, for some reason...
It is non-news because most people outside the scientific community aren't going to pay to read these articles. And no one who has read it has thought it newsworthy enough to discuss on a mainstream, nonscientific or free website.
And what's with all the ellipseses, I didn't insert those. Why must all your sentences end with 3 periods?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
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.
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. . . 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.
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?
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
Except that
a. most of the vehicles were kept in a specialized lease program that generally didn't allow the leaser to purchase them at expiration even if they wanted to. You're claiming to know how people who weren't allow to vote would have voted there. Very few of these vehilces are in the hands of actual owners today. There are people wanting to purchase one even today who simply can't get one. GM isn't selling, even at prices above the initial new value.
b. The State of California decided in the middle of the 3 year lease program, that inductive charging was out, and only conductive charging would qualify a vehicle for the state's 0-emissions tax breaks. (That's from GMs own letter to EV1 leasers)
c. At that time, there were about 210 stations with inductive paddle charging in the state of California, and about 80 stations in Ga. and Fla. If you lived in any of the other 47 states, you couldn't get charging. Over 1/2 the Ca. stations were in the process of converting to a smaller paddle size when the Ca. board announced its decision, and GM had to eat all those costs at once, plus in some cases drivers had to deal with their local stations being down for days or weeks as part of the policy turn-around.
d. GM mentioned in their same letter that some people had asked to get out of the lease program early. Yes, that might support your statement, but there has never been an automobile leased in numbers where some people didn't want out early. GM hasn't disclosed what the percentages were, and saying that less than absolute perfect consumer satisfaction was a factor in their decisions isn't really telling the rest of us anything. You can infer suckage from that if you want, but there are several alternate inferences. Ca's decision alone was certainly enough to make the program unprofitable, so this and other subsidiary factors cited in the letters seem to be just additional justifications for a decision already made.
e. The 1997 model 1 had very poor range, with some leasers reporting as little as 40 miles on a charge. Suckage indeed. However the 1999 Model 2 used a Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery array, and was officially rated for 100 Miles. A substantial number of users reported it did far better than the rated milage, typically reporting 140 to 180 miles/charge for mixed highway/city. This is the origin of some of the claims that the project was deliberately screwed up - why would GM underate its own product? Leasers also praised the car's pickup and sportscar like handling. Apparently there were weight savings from NiMH that made the second generation quite a bit better in multiple respects.
e. The design had near instantanious heating and cooling for the passenger cabin, and, at least for the Model 2, near noiseless driving (I don't know that the first designe wasn't quiet as well, just that I haven't seen leters specifically praising it as I have the 2nd. generation). Offsetting this was charging time and limited range, but just offhand I'd suspect that the charging station problem, making that range more for round trips than one way, was a more important factor, and that came almost entirely from the state government's actions.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
Why, sure they have! The only issue is that, because of the range problems, they're only working on vehicles competing in the "rich-guy's occasionally-driven toy" market (i.e., the market populated by exotics like the Lotus Elise and Enzo Ferrari -- not stuff suitable for daily driving, like the Corvette). Here are some examples:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
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.
Who killed US inter- and intra-city passenger rail transportation?
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.
With the new capacitor-based batteries being developed (rather than chemical) we might actually see more realistic electric cars (since they could fill up in a few minutes rather than several hours). Weeeee, technology!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
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
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.
When was the last time you did your research, early-1990s?
Every modern hybrid today (Prius 1997, Insight 1999) have used regenerative braking, or have tried to.
o Highway? Toyota's HSD (Hybrid Synergy Drive) puts the engine into maximal efficient RPMs while you drive and then pumps the excess energy into the battery.
o Slowing down? Engine drag is simulated through regenerative braking until battery is overcharged, then it goes into compression drag.
o Engine braking especially going downhill? Aggressive regenerative braking until the battery is full.
o Coming off the freeway? Again, very light regenerative braking before you even hit the brakes.
It's not just plain red-tail light regenerative braking you're thinking of.
Supercaps? That would be nice, but I think Toyota threw out that idea already. There's a few modders on the Prius using Can-view to watch the voltages going in and out of the plain NiMH system as well as total state of charge.
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
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.
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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
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
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.
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 . . .
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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.
Up in the air! A bird ... a plane ... No, it's the $$$ Oil Indu$try $$$!
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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.