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Is the Future of the Electric Car Industry in Silicon Valley?
fiannaFailMan writes "The San Jose Mercury News is speculating about Silicon Valley's potential for becoming the Detroit of a future electric car industry. Among the valley's strengths is an ability to adapt to rapidly changing business environments and develop new business models, something that the Big Three can hardly be accused of. On the downside, it's a capital-intensive business and isn't like raising $40 million and having an IPO. Apparently there are five companies in the valley already pursuing electric car technology, most notably Tesla motors."
Does anyone know how much more/less polution is put into the atmosphere by using these coal powered cars as opposed to gas powered ones? In most cases it seems that the electricity for these cars is generated by coal burning power plants. I'm not trying to start a flame war, I'm really just wondering if anyone has stats on this.
Because there are already 3 in detroit perusing it too.
Oh, and can't forget about Audi, BMW, etc. that all have headquarters in Detroit. I see the audi prototypes around auburn hills all the time. Also have seen several time GM's electric car.
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I Like http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/ because the car looks nice and those 10minute charge batteries are cool.
*sigh* I just wish they'd let me buy a Tesla over here in Germany. I, like MANY others, would be more than happy to pay one and a half times the price that they go for in the US, both for the savings on petrol (our prices are MUCH higher than what people in the US pay), and just for the fact that it's a damn cool car.
Honestly, given the chance, I'd hand over the cash TOMORROW for one.
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It will be slow going, but I think that oil-based cars are heading for the scrap pile. Even now, a number of small electrical car companies are springing up all over the world. Yes, our oil companies will try to hold that back, but in the end, it will happen. The cars can be faster, are more efficient, and much cheaper on maintenance. It is only a matter of time before they are cheaper up front.
As to the slice, you are aware that BP, Exon and Shell are busy installing wind generators all over, yes?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That unless they can find a way for Big Oil (c)(tm) to get a huge slice of the revenue pie, there will be no electric cars in our future...
It's more likely that until there is an electric engine capable of hauling an Articulated lorry several hundred miles without a refill that they won't be widely used. The economy won't be able to do without all those trucks taking goods around 24/7.
Ordinary cars for that matter. I don't know the travel habits of your average American, but if a car couldn't be expected to go more than a couple of hundred miles between top ups you'd have problems doing anything but commuting. Unless that is, there are refill stations *everywhere*. That would cost rather a lot.
Yes, it's interesting how Silicon Valley may be where new car tech breakthroughs will happen, but the comparison here is misleading. The reason Detroit was the automobile mecca of the US was because that's where all of the cars were made. That's where hundreds of thousands of people toiled to send car after car off the assembly line. Do you think that the same is going to happen in Silicon Valley? SV will be the same thing it's been for the past several decades . . . a place where ideas and technology are born. And like a lot of the technology invented in SV, it will get manufactured in Taiwan, China, etc.
Near where I work (New Forest, UK) there is a new housing development going up, and I happened to notice that they are having solar thermal fitted into the roofs as standard. I did idly wonder if in a few years time all houses would have solar panel roofs as standard and electric cars would automatically recharge when not being used. I don't know, you park the car up pops a small wind turbine and the entire top surface of the vehicle is covered in photo voltaic paint? Park it in the garage or near the house and up pops a cable to connect it to the house power wind/solar array.
Now, I realize that I am in Sci-Fi could cuckoo land here, but bear with me. There are some things that need to happen.. well I would like to happen..
1. Reverse the trend of people living 80miles from their workplace and seeing a >1hr commute both ways as normal. I realize this would require a society change - but if conventional cars cost too much and there is no reliable public transport infrastructures then this could happen.
2. Cheap, High efficiency solar cells mandated on all new builds. 3. Energy efficiency mandated on all new CE devices and proper OFF switches as standard.
4. Micro generation being normal, and grid "top up" being extra.
5. Smart housing that automatically switched off lights, water heating on demand from stored power, low power devices.
Sorry, I'll get off my soap box before I get carried away....
The way I've seen the folks in Detroit treat the concept of an electric car, and the consumers in America respond to buying one, the future of the electric car is far more likely to be in places like Kyoto, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
(Our next car will most likely be an electric/hybrid RAV-4 or CR-V.)
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That unless they can find a way for Big Oil (c)(tm) to get a huge slice of the revenue pie, there will be no electric cars in our future...
Big oil is not responsible for the devaluation of the US currency. Gasoline in Europe and Canada has remained almost the same price as 6-12 months ago! Oil is most often quoted in USD but the value of a barrel of oil is really much more stable than that.
The US Fed (Congress) has likely "create" too much money and diluted the US currency. Thus giving the appearance of a higher price. When really it is the currency buying it that has lost value.
Electric cars are not really efficient requiring coal or natural gas in many places to generate it. And there are losses in recharging and discharge. Besides, a F150 V8 engine block is more recyclable in the dumps than a composite engine. That is, steel is recyclable where as many plastics and composites are not.
Car companies like composites and plastics because they can make the cars cheaper. And sell it as "green". People don't look at the chemical lists used in it's creation. The result is you're paying a lot for the preception of being green.
The only solution is to put speakers into the outside of cars that play the appropriate noise for a petrol engine. That way we get green cars _and_ safe roads where you can hear the traffic!
The down-side is that there would be a movement to get the most authentic V-8 glass-pack sound from your electric car. Then the war starts between the speakers for music and the speakers for your engine simulation... Next thing you know, electric cars require 5,000W amplifiers just to keep the speakers going, and the ride distance goes to being measured in feet.
1. Detroit has a lot of good engineers, that don't get enough credit.
2. Detroit has a big manufacturing base geared for automotive production and it is definitely a cheaper place to operate. Even if the technology is developed in Silicon Valley, I doubt they would actually produce cars there.
3. Detroit has already gotten its ass kicked by foreign competition. They are going to fight for every piece of market share.
"The San Jose Mercury News is speculating about Silicon Valley's potential for becoming the Detroit of a future electric car industry."
That is unlikely. Silicon Valley is not cheap real estate. I'm sure California's laws are also rather restrictive regarding employment law. The trend in automobile manufacturing is to move to rural areas where the real estate is much cheaper, unions are farther away, or the state's employment laws are less favorable to the employee. Thus, you have more manufacturing jobs showing up in rural Indiana and the Southern States.
Based on that model, I disagree with that conclusion. Sure, SilVal is good for innovation, but manufacturing is not innovation. Development of new electric car solutions may happen there, but the day-to-day construction (i.e., "Detroit") will not be there. Too darn expensive.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Tesla motors is having problems delivering on it's promise, and it is FAR from cheap. Until the startups can prover their clout in lording over batteries, only Fisker has enough potential to really make a dent into the plug in like they are currently squaking over. Ultimately, unless the power generation is by nuclear means, the "carbon footprint" won't be offset, but quite the opposite. So you've got a question veiled in a question. Do you want to "be captain planet?" or "get great mileage?" You can't do both with exponentially jacking the cost up out of joe q. publics reach. But one or the other is possible for nearly all. There are still plenty of ICE options to explore to get considerably more efficiency out of the combustion process. But, all of these are moot when everyone wants to have mug and ass warmers in their car, and 50 speakers, and 40 way adjustable seats in their daily driver. Weight is by far the biggest enemy to the mileage they want, and those options alone add a crapload of weight, and then the gov't regulations compound this effort. Eventually, a '70 Chevelle will seem like a light weight car.
Sure, the boys and girls in the valley could probably build a great electric car, but there is more to it than that. Take safety for example. You like those fancy airbags and "crumple zones" that protect you in a crash? It takes a lot of R&D to get those things right. The Big 3 in motor city have a lot of issues, but they still have a lot of experience with the whole car building thing, especially from a safety standpoint.
We are also overlooking the obvious issue with any alternative fuel: Infrastructure. Electric cars, fuel cell cars, E85 cars just won't catch on unless you can easily drive coast-to-coast, and everywhere in between, with a support network to fill'er up. The last you want is to be on %50 battery life and see a sign that says next electric fill up station 800 miles.
I have nuclear power in the Chicago area (www.comed.com). I've checked, and it's not heavily subsidized.
There's probably little subsidy in day to day operations. The building was subsidized in part, and cleanup (Yucca mountain) is more expensive than building it and entirely at government expense.
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I liked my prius partially for the mileage, but also for the low pollution and even just for the quiet, smooth ride it had when on batteries. So even if gas were $1 a gallon, if the electric were the same (or slightly more) cost/mile to operate, I'd use electric/hybrids to enjoy the other benefits.
I guess I'm just saying, they might not focus exclusively on cost/mile as compared to gas, 'cause I'm not sure that argument holds water....
You're totally right. Tesla are making a car that is small and doesn't use petrol. These are both factors that are far more attractive to europeans!
For the first Teslas, europe would be a far better market. (However, it must be noted that Teslas production runs are already sold out. Can't they ramp up production any more?)
http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/news/01-11-07_1/ Fisker Coachbuild, is making a four-door plug-in hybrid premium sports car. They have operations in and venture funding from the Valley. Unlike other startups, these guys have been in the car business for a long time.
Follow the energy:
Gas engine: Chemical Energy (gas) -> heat -> mechanical energy
Electric engine: Chemical energy (coal) -> heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> (step up transformer) -> (power line) -> (step down transformer) -> (charger) -> chemical energy (in the battery) -> electrical energy -> mechanical energy
Each link in that chain is less than perfectly efficient and wastes energy, so even if the last two or three steps (the actual car engine) are more efficient for electric, there's a lot of catching up to do.
So, while electric cars might make cities more pleasant, unless the upstream source of the energy is either renewable or nuclear* its not going to solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels (i.e. global warming or - if you don't believe in that - the self-evident fact that we're consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate).
They may, however make cities cleaner, and once they're in place at least you have the flexibility to change the energy source at will. However, you also need to factor in the cost of manufacturing enough electric cars to get everybody driving one (not just those kind people who buy a new car every 2 years, but all the sensible people who buy 2-year-old cars and run them until they fall apart).
No one gizmo is going to solve our energy & pollution problems unless its part of a coherent system.
(* nuclear is, of course, safer and cleaner than fossil fuels unless (a) it goes wrong, (b) the current sources of easily extractable fissile material run out , or (c) some asshat uses the byproducts for making bombs. Of course there's absolutely no reason to believe that a massive expansion of nuclear power would make any of those more likely, so that's OK then. However, its probably the only route out of our current hole).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The only solution is to put speakers into the outside of cars that play the appropriate noise for a petrol engine.
Hate to break it to you, but many modern cars are nearly as silent at low speeds as an electric could be. At higher speed wind noise is the significant contributer to noise levels.
I don't read AC A human right
The data is out there, electric makes senses for many people.
1) The environmental impact - depending on who you listen to (ignoring big oil financed studies) - an 1 well tuned contemporary gas car running after warm up creates about the same pollution as 25-50 electric cars charged by electricity produced by traditional coal fired plants. If you have hydro or wind production, it's cleaner. If you have nuclear, the air is fine but you'll eventually have spent nuclear fuel. I don't know how much more over the life of the plant, but you could figure it out. I think that it depends on how many electric cars. Right now, there are so few that they just soak up extra capacity at night rather than creating significant new demand. (Yes, that capacity still uses more powerplant fuel that if they weren't plugged in)
2) You can build or have built a conversion of a gas to electric today. I'm converting a Ford Escort myself at a cost of about $8000 including the car. I've seen them done for less than $3000. You can buy an appropriate care and spend $10,000-$14,000 and have a shop convert it for you in many parts of the country. This assumes you use old fashion lead-acid batteries. You end up with with a car with a range of 30-100 miles per charge depending on trade-offs you control (size car/payload/cost). Think about your ordinary day's drive. Do you really need 300 miles range? or would 50 do? Then you have to decide what you do for the times you do need a greater range. Rent? Own another vehicle that you drive on special occasions? Form a co-op? At $3/gallon and $0.10 kilowatt/hr, you can drive electric for less than 50% of the cost of gasoline, once you factor in the maintenance and replacement costs. So that leaves some head room for a solution.
3) In my case, (family with 3 kids), we're planning to convert both cars to electric for daily use. We plan to own a 3rd gas powered vehicle for occasion weekend trips and other exceptions. We expect the savings accumulated from driving electric to be completely eaten by the cost of the 3rd vehicle unless gas prices go up (hah!). However, that means we'll be driving clean and quiet and not subject to gas prices at our current cost. Seems like a good idea.
This wouldn't necessarily work for a traveling salesman, or a farm-call veterenarian. But if you commute more than 30-50 miles round trip, what are you thinking anyway? (I realize there are people for whom this is a necessity. I hope they get mass transit. For most people, commuting more than 30-50 miles is already a problem.)
Much of that was scare tactics. IE nuclear plants are using it to try to get the .gov off their asses and finish Yucca or some alternate. Or get money from their own funds for casket storage sytems.
.gov for disposal, they've managed to economically store the waste on site just fine.
So far, despite having to pay a fee per kwh produced to the
Given that all the government is considering is storage and internment, I'd say that it's the same thing. Given enough time, it'd be pretty easy to break open those casks and reprocess - much of the short term radioactivity has degraded, meaning that it's nowhere near as nasty to equipment as when it first came out of the reactor. IE you age the waste like some exclusive wines/liquers and reprocess it after 40-50 years of cooldown.
It has to do that the waste produced by a conventional plant in a year is around a single railcar - including shielding. There might have been some transfers from particularly congested plants to ones with more room.
I don't read AC A human right
Very interesting documentary on how big oil and the big three conspire to protect their interests.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10