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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.
Are those "big changes" similar to Segway's "Big Changes"?
Dell succeeded because they simplified and streamlined the computer buying process, and had good prices for PCs with reasonable features, compared to the rest of the market.
Other than possibly streamlining the car buying process, how does electric car company compare to Dell? It's not like people in the US are jumping to replace their SUVs and trucks with little electric cars.
Please wake me when I can help save the environment without declaring bankruptcy.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
The car in question (G-Wiz) will reach a top speed of around 40mph. They say that "you will rarely hit such speeds around town". Sure, you're doing 30mph, car coming towards you is doing 30mph, closing speed of 60? You're almost guaranteed to die in a G-Wiz accident, but the other vehicle will hardly notice the bump.
Would you prefer to be in a vehicle that, in the event of an accident (head on at least) will keep you trapped, with crushed legs and chest, that can take an eternity to get out of, or a moped? Its a tough choice, but I'd go for the moped. Wouldn't look like so much of an idiot either.
Current technologies exist to generate electricity carbon free.
Nuclear (70%+ of all electricity around here)
Wind is already competitive price-wise with coal. Its main problems are that they require massive initial investment, and that it takes A LOT of time to get over all the Nimbys. Wind also happens to be unpredictable, but that's a non issue as far as battery charging is concerned. All that's required is a broadcast flag to tell the charger to stop sucking current when not enough power is available.
They only have parking meters downtown. And the company I work for just did some massive construction downtown and it was a nightmare getting approval to do anything underground, so getting all the wiring done underground for an entire city is no small feat. And there is a different between plugging a quarter or two into the meter to park and paying to refuel my car. I imagine it will take a sizable amount of electricity and I can't simply pay for it with pocket change.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Tiny cars don't sell well. They're difficult to schlep kids to school and a dozen bags of mulch home from Lowe's. Small cars are seen as unitakers, and most americans need their cars to fill a number of roles.
Plus, without a way to recharge the battery in roughly the time it takes to fill up a gas tank, what the hell are these things good for? Short distance commuting? Corbin already tried it, with a better looking mini-car, and failed. Miserably. Americans generally have no use for automotive unitaskers - most of them have long highway commutes and the occasional road-trip, and they want to do both in the same car.
Ugly cars also don't sell well. I don't mean "Quirky styling" like the Scion xB or Suzuki Aero, or bland styling, like a Chrysler Sebring or Toyota Corolla. I mean, East German levels of "Couldn't Be Bothered With It" styling: truly and deeply misguided design choices no-one paused to give a second thought to, complete with panel gaps you can see with the naked eye from low earth orbit and colors chosen for their complete inability to catch the eye.
Efficient and cheap isn't going to get you anywhere near public acceptance. It's got to offer a lot more... the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius look goood, they're slick productions with a lot more to offer than 50mpg. The Prius in particular has been successful because it offers near-luxury comfort and conveniences with econobox mileage and futuristic styling. (The other hybrid makers are also having a hard time grokking this, so we get Hybrid Civics and Mariners no-one is particularly enthusiastic over.)
The Smart FourTwo is a tiny, inexpensive car with great styling and sybaritic creature comforts, and Daimler =still= won't bring it to the US because there's no real market for it here. The Think, an ugly plug-in doo-dad, is doomed before it even starts. Dell? Try Osbourne.
SoupIsGood Food
OK, so maybe we need small, medium, and large batteries, plus a couple of bigger sizes for trucks, buses, RVs, and those 4x4s needed for all that rugged terrain around the suburban malls :-) but the last thing we need is some dipshit marketing droid inventing new and proprietary batteries that you have to get from the manufacturer. Suppose you bought a Toyota but you had to go to a Toyota garage to get your gas...
The notion of not having a showroom sort of makes sense, but the savings will be limited. After all, they're going to have to set up that car-sharing franchise instead, and that franchise will have to employ someone who can talk to prospective owners, and they'll have to vehicle available, which may mean investing in a demo car.
Also, where will these vehicles be maintained? Independent garages aren't usually the first to invest in new equipment and training to service unusual cars (e.g. handling high-voltage equipment and large batteries that can discharge at 1000 A).
I expect these cars will need less maintenance than internal combustion vehicles, though. I just had my car in for its 15 Mm checkup, and of the E 370 bill, maybe E 40 was for items unrelated to the engine (an interior filter and balancing two tires IIRC). This means routine stuff could be handled by any garage (or tire fitter, for that matter). It's just the high-voltage electric stuff that needs a specialist.
Yes, but the power points could be on a coin-meter which would pay for your parking and your electricity in one go. You just put in enough coins to pay for the juice it's going to use while charging, and plug in your car.
There are a few details to work out, for sure; but first look to the campsite industry, where they probably already use something similar.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Cyclist blindness won't go away.. they'll just run into you/cut you up in electric flimsy cars rather than petrol cars.
Not that cyclists help themselves sometimes.. driving in the dark with dark clothing and no hi-vis (I'd say the same about pedestrians too.. crossing the road in the dark with a dark jacket on and not near any street lights.. aargh!). I'd mention running red lights but car drivers to that just as much as cyclists (probably more, if round here is anything to go by).
Rather than all these crappy mileages, what they should do, is get a distribution with the big petrol stations, make the power cells easily removable, you pull into the traditional petrol station, and instead of sitting there for the next few hours charging the battery, just slip the used one out and slide in a new one stored at the petrol station, of course the petrol station recharges your old one and charges a fee for the fully charged new one, it would be cheap, greatly increase the range and all the recharging worries that are currently around would be gone.
I don't drive up mountains with deer in the back. I do, however, drive about six miles each way for work, and short grocery runs during the week. I bought a scooter that gets 80mpg, but I'm definitely interested in something that can get the same or better mileage but keep me out of the elements.
Just because you don't think something is useful doesn't mean other people don't.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is the main cause why this will most likely fail. Because of the size of the United States. People in Europe, Asia and New York City, Don't really apreate the size of the United States. Geographically The United States is a little smaller then all of Europe. There is a far amount of distance people needs to cover from residentual areas to comerical areas. For me it is about Ten Miles (I am considered to be living close to the cities) For other people they will need to drive Twenty Miles to get to the closest store that sells anything of value. Granted we don't need SUVs to get from here and there but we do need some type of car with a long range and can relialibly maintain a top speed of about 70-80 miles per hour (I know the speed limit is 65 but if everyone else is going 80 you better be too or you will get rear ended) for 200-300 miles minimum. Living in Cities are generally not desirable living conditions when there is plenty of space out there where you can buy a bigger house with more land outside the city for less and also deal with less Crime and Noise from the City.
For these electric cars to succeede they will need to be very cheap (no more then 2k) Roomy enough to cary children and cargo, and safe enough for people to use. Any thing less then these specs would probably make it a huge deal breaker making americans still stuck to gasoline cars for all their driving. If they can meet these requirements then there is a chance that many americans will have a car for short distance driving and a long distance car.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good thing slashdot isn't a frickin' VC company...I can just imagine the comments:
No, instead, we have the run of the mill peanut gallery, with their particularly ignorant insights. Don't get me wrong, a strong dose of skepticism is a healthy thing to have, but do you really think that Sergey and his band of PhD.s are not quite as clever as you when it comes to spotting and growing ideas? I'm no fan of the Segway, but you have to admit, much of the pesky unwanted energy in our machines shows its face in the form of heat, and if you can find a *relatively* cheap way to convert it to some other form, well, that seems like a pretty handy little model...
But slashdot has all the answers...it's too small, too expensive, the batteries should be $free, it's failed x times before, it's a toy, it's not safe, Joe sixpack wants a hummer, ponzi!, l4m3, FUD, w00t...whereas a couple of commenters actually get it: this could work in x conditions, but not in y, for z reasons...at least there are still a couple people left around here that haven't grown up thinking a forum is a place to pile on, the snarkier, the better.
I'm not saying it will succeed just because some heavy duty investors are behind it; plenty of ideas that fit that bill haven't made it. The point is, it could, and maybe one day something will happen that might cause people to think about energy differently, and this model will be ahead of its time, or at least some lessons will have been learned. Like a HOWTO on overclocking your chip with a stirling engine that charges your iPod...
Instead of analysis, we have negative comments modded as insightful. I suppose it's true what The Onion says, it turns out that a majority of Americans are actually NOT entitled to have their own opinions...
The Top Gear test was performed on a G-Wiz, and has nothing to do with the Norwegian cars being discussed. The G-Wiz basically an electric scooter with a metal enclosure, has a top speed of 40MPH, and isn't intended for highway use.
According to the article, the Think cars have a top speed of 62MPH (which their agreement with Tesla hopes to raise to 85-90MPH. It will very much be a highway car, and therefore subject to American and European safety standards. Lumping the Think and the G-Wiz together as "these cars" is like lumping your pet rabbit and your sister-in-law together under "these animals". Did that analogy make sense? No? That's my point: it's nonsensical. If Chewbacca lives on Krykkit, you must acquit.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Please please don't calculate US car prices by converting them from the price in Norway.
I just configured a basic car on the Norwegian volkswagen homepage, a Jetta, with a 140hp engine and basic color and no extras for NOK 308 710 (which according to Google is USD 52 597)....
A Volvo XC90 with some extras quickly reaches USD 125k here...
My drive home -- about 32 miles -- fluctuates wildly between a dead stop and 50-55 mph. If I am lucky enough to hit a relatively open freeway, I may hit 70-75 mph, but that is by far the minority of the trip. Acceleration is crucial. I know electric vehicles have plenty of acceleration when required, but just how much does this reduce the operating radius?
For an electric car -- or fuel cell, or anything else -- to be practical for me, these are the requirements:
* 0 to 60 mph in 11 seconds, max. This would put it on a par with most economy cars in decent condition.
* A range of 100 miles per charge or refueling, minimum, regardless of traffic conditions. Not 100 miles on a good day, but 100 miles, every day, including those days it takes 3 hours to go 3 miles. OR, the ability to recharge in 3 to 5 minutes, and half that range, perhaps by swappable fuel cells or batteries.
* A top speed of 70-75 mph, minimum. 80 would be better, but 70-75 would suffice. The catch is that it has to be able to do this up moderate hills, not just level surfaces. It will not do to drop to 50 mph every time I have to go uphill. This means that the car only has to be designed to handle 75, but the powertrain probably has to be capable of considerably more to account for uphill slogs.
* Air conditioning. This is a considerable power draw, and it has to be designed for, not just bolted on.
That is what it takes to get the average L.A. commuter to and from work every day, with a trip to the store on the way home. A car that does less will find itself roundly ignored.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It depends on the article. If the article makes grand claims, it deserves a nitpick or two. Grand claims require grand evidence.
In this submission it was questioned whether this would "Usher in Big Changes" in the automotive world. The veracity of that is entirely up for discussion and if you've evert tried to get funding for company, you'd want to post the idea here. That way you'll know all the possible failure modes.
Will this make a big change in the automotive world? No. It is not cost effective nor space effective for most people.
For single persons having two cars that carry the same amount of people is wasteful, and takes up more parking spaces in their apartment complexes - spaces they may not have available. Most families of >2 members already have two vehicles, so this would make a third one. Again most families have at most a two-car garage (and many of those are actually wide opening single-car garages). Thus the space issue hits home, no pun intended, for them.
Further, the cost of this car versus their current car makes it cost more to buy and use than to continue driving their existing car, for most people that it is alleged would be the target.
All that boils down to who the real market, targeted or not, is. People who only need this car and are OK with it's limitations (all cars have them). That market is demonstrably small. I
d even suggest that teenage drivers make the most logical target market. These markets are a small, small measure of the overall market. From this standpoint the answer to "big changes" is a flat "no".
On the standpoint of whether the method of selling will usher big changes, again, no. The reasons are different here. The existing model consists of manufacturers selling their product to dealers, who then sell it again. The automaker is already selling direct in this model. Selling directly to the customer would represent a breach of contract with their dealers. It would also put them in competition with their largest block of customers. So no, that won't change either.
It isn't a matter of opinion as to whether or not the questions asked represent a likely future, it is an analysis. Just as with the hype of the Segway. Does the Segway work as a means of transportation? Yes, it is functional. Is it cool? arguably, yes. Did it represent a fundamental shift of how we the people would get around? No. Did it cause a "rethinking" of how we get around? No.
See, that is the problem. Every "new idea" is touted as a funadmental shift, a paradigm change, a "world changing idea", or some such notion. So of course, we the thinkers, analyze that. And due to the nature of the frequency of truly world changing ideas, more often than not the answer is "no it is not a world changing idea". An idea can be a good one without being a world changing one.
Then again, if you believe that the majority of people are not entitled to their opinions, you probably believe they are entitled to your opinion.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.