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Small Electric Car May Usher In Big Changes
An anonymous reader sends us to a profile in CNNMoney.com on a Norwegian car company that is building a compact, plug-in electric car, the Think City, that will go on sale in Europe early next year. It could hit US markets in 2009. The CEO is working with Silicon Valley VCs and with Google, Tesla Motors, PG&E, and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. Plans are to sell the car only on the Web. No dealers, cheap manufacturing plants, and a battery pack that you lease, not buy — there's potential here for shaking up the auto industry the way Dell did PCs.
Recently Top Gear magazine paid for one of these to be subject to the most basic testing - the results were pretty horrific.
You're forgetting two things.
First, this car is produced in Norway, where the overwhelming majority of power is generated by hydro-electric plants.
Secondly, the manufacturer was bought out by a company that specialices in solar energy.
So yes, it makes perfect sence for them to talk about a 'carbon free' car. Off course, the marketing blurb, reality in Norway and reality in [country of your choice] isn't always the same thing...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The price is actually from Germany. That's where I saw a Gas station this morning, now I'm in the Netherlands and here it's more around $1.90 or $2.00 for a liter.
For an international price list take a look at this (prices in EURO).
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
How much of the driving in LA is at slow speed in heavy traffic? Under those conditions a petrol engine will be less efficient, and an electric drive line will be more efficient.
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these vehicles are not the same as the vehicle that the article is about. It is not about to go on sale this year or the next. There is nothing that you can order yet, so there is nothing you can crash test. The test was with a totally different vehicle. If one SUV did bad in a crash test (like killing some bystanding dummies that were not even in the test), does that make all SUVs bad? (well OK, SUV are still bad, but for other reasons). ,made in different factory. Or are all electric vehicles the same?
Some other poster pointed out your strawman is called g-wiz(made in India), which is a different vehicle
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Here's the text:
The potential for a electric car to revolutionize the transit world is tremendous, but the oil companies, as do traditional the car manufacturers have a vested interest in not seeing it happen.
If you want to know more about the history of the eletric car, and the state of californa, and even the future of the eletric car, i'd STRONGLY advise you to watch
Chris Paine's 2006 documentary: Who Killed The Electric Car?
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
A small, efficient electric car even powered by conventional electricity sources will be pretty efficient.
Unlike the diesel, it doesn't have to idle when stopped. Unlike the diesel, it can use regenerative braking and not waste energy to slow down. Unlike the diesel, one huge powerplant is much more efficient than lots of very small powerplants (our local power station, a combined cycle gas turbine which uses any remaining waste heat to heat the nearby swimming pool has a pretty amazing thermal efficiency - I think with the combined heat and power it's starting to push 80%)
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Really? Most Americans I know have at least two (if not more!) vehicles - for example, a normal car, a giant SUV and a pickup. The normal car is used for nothing but the man's commuting. The wife uses the giant SUV and the pickup gets taken on camping trips. So at least one of the vehicles is a "unitasker" already.
When I lived in Houston, I was quite unusual amongst my friends having only one vehicle.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
And for Europe the price isn't bad, particularly as many countries have lower taxes for electric cars. Most people commute short distances where speed is limited anyway (I'd challenge anyone to try to get anywhere near top speed with this car in London during rush hour - average speed is between 10 and 15 mph), and so the limitations of this car means very little to most people. Since gas is more expensive here too, it can be economical at quite a higher price point than in the US.
Things are different in Europe. Here in Sweden there is a pretty heavy environmental tax on gas, so the price is roughly $1.60/litre. I only commute by car twice a week, and still I have gas costs of upwards to $200/month. With a new car for $15,000, and a battery lease for $150/month - I'd be lowering my costs significantly, while being able to commute every day (saving rougly 1,5 hours/day). I'd also avoid the congestion charges as a bonus.
All in all, this seems to be aimed at the European market.
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
VW's Toureg can already get up to 25 MPG, real world. Semi trucks can see 7-8 MPG, as good as a Hummer and they're actually pulling a load.
Diesel is going to make a bigger impact that hybrids in the coming years.
And at an estimate of $7.3 per gallon, you can expect to get about 27 gallons of gas for the same cost of the estimated $200/month "battery fee" (not counting the cost of electricity). With a very conservative estimate on a gas-car, you can expect 30 mpg -- or over 800 miles for about the same cost. That gas-car in the US would most likely run less than this thing, too.
You'll need to travel more than 800 miles a month to make this thing cost effective at $7.3 per gallon for gas. Far more, if you calculate an economy car which gets closer to 40 mpg... In the US, with gas at ~$3 gallon -- I just don't see me using this to travel over 1300 miles a month to save "gas money"...
Tiny cars don't sell well. ... most americans
That's why a European company is doing this. In Europe. Where small cars sell.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Only about 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas and need to drive twenty miles to the shops (which, incidentally, is well within the round-trip range of these vehicles).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Greater demand for and larger scale production of these batteries must come before the prices can drop significantly.
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The problem is that there is.
American residential lots are bigger and mixed commercial/residential areas don't really exist in suburbia.
The practical differences of all that space are much larger than you're giving them credit for.
We can't walk anywhere. We don't have mass transit worth a damn. So we drive. Everywhere. And even we don't like all this driving, so we combine trips. Alot. Can a mini get an adult, two kids and groceries back and forth? Sure. But not when you throw in football/hockey equipment and/or an instrument or two, and/or a couple bags of softener salt, and/or a dog or two, and/or a couple bags from clothes shopping, and/or school supply shopping and/or a couple week's worth of non-perishables and maybe some dry cleaning. Even in a full-size sedan mixing two or three of those trips will be a squeeze at least a couple times a month.
Sure, we could split those trips up and still use a sedan comfortably. But who the hell wants to? The shops are all on one end of town, and your house on the other. You'd wind up burning even more gas and time going back and forth. And it's not like suburban shopping is itself an enjoyable diversion, as it might be in a city with sane zoning laws.
The landscape is cut up, the destinations separated by space, concrete barriers and often pedestrian-hostile traffic-flow. So we Drive. Park. Shop. Load up. Drive to the next store. Repeat. It's another one of those reasons we get head-scratchers like indoor malls, strip malls and giant one-stop behemoths -- all built around our annoyance with our own suburban zoning and our propensity to combine trips.
We also have an outdoor/roadtrip culture that sees the family + luggage + recreational gear jumping in the car and driving a couple hundred miles a few times a year. (Skiing/snowmobiling/fishing/camping/etc). Not even full-size sedans are really suited to that task -- which is why the station wagons sprung up shortly after American suburbia exploded. As style changed, mini-vans replaced station wagons and now most SUVs are just 'more stylish' wagons or minivans.
But its not like they're buying an Escalade instead of a Camry. 90% are buying the SUV because they're in mini-van-denial.
As previously noted: most American families have more than one vehicle, and in the vast majority of cases they have a reasonable sedan too. We just move around enough junk, often enough, that the alternatives make less sense than having an SUV.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It's funny, every time details about some "cutting edge" idea or business model surface, this forum (which used to be populated with physicists, engineers, and geeks of all stripes) piles on with their own particular angle on why it won't work.
Far be it from me to stick a pin in your nostalgia, but slashdot has never been any different, really. And in this case, we're right, this product has "going nowhere" written all over it.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
So, while you are correct in that aluminium can be recycled, a widespread conversion would involve making an awful lot of it.
There is a subsidiary issue, unfortunately. It is very easy to convert steel from one alloy to another, e.g. recycled mild steel can be used as the basis for inox, but a small quantity of inox in a steel melt will not harm the resulting alloy. However, there are many aluminium alloys which vary in content for specific purposes (copper in aircraft alloys, magnesium in many car parts.) Recycling of aluminium requires a lot of metallurgical intervention to get the desired resulting alloy. Other than the pure Al used in cans, there is currently no recycling scheme to distinguish alloys. With steel, this is not really an issue. Aluminium alloys can contain copper, magnesium, zinc etc., and contamination of an alloy with the wrong metal will affect the ability to heat treat it, corrosion resistance etc. So while it is possible to, say, recycle cans into auto wheels or aircraft, it is not possible to recycle auto wheels into cans. Recycling aluminium is NOT trivial.
Believe me, I have sat in on very heated exchanges between aluminium and steel metallurgists - two of them once came close to blows in a meeting with Government representatives present - on this precise issue.
Pining for the fjords