Slashdot Mirror
100-Year-Old Electric Car Design Makes a Comeback
CNet's Green Tech Blog is reporting that Detroit Electric plans to release a small number of cars based around a car designed nearly 100 years ago. Detroit Electric is a joint venture between Santa Rosa, CA-based electric transportation specialist, Zap and China's Youngman motors. "Back in 1917, a Detroit Electric cost anywhere from $1,775 to $2,375--in other words, fit for the proletarian or plutocrat. The cars could go 65 miles to 100 miles on a battery charge, but only go at speeds ranging from 6 miles per hour to 25 mph."
Personally I'm very skeptical about this... Zap is know for vaporware. Anyone else remember when they were supposedly going to be bringing the "Smart" cars stateside and Daimler Chrysler (smart's owners) was all like WTF no they aren't?
Probably another pump and dump so their exec's can make another quick buck.
They go anywhere from 5-35mph depending on the weather and the engine equipped, they run on any type of food and they can cost less than $20. They bicycle has been around for a long time and needs to be taken seriously as a method of locomotion.
Plugins, hybrids, fuel cells, and so on... Each of these technologies has use cases for which it can excel, each has a place in our economy in the coming years. What I don't understand is why we need to even talk about an electric car design from 100 years ago. Since that little car was made there have been phenomenal advances in materials, magnetic motors, batteries and controls - anything designed today will be vastly superior to the car of 100 years ago. The ONLY bit of design I can see that is of even marginal interest is a quaint, retro look. Mike.
The consumer price index says that $1,775 is about $30k today, a reasonable cost for a low-mid end car new -- try it here: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/
But you are right that $700/year was the average annual income back in the 20s. On the other hand, the average annual income today is $26k, so things do work out roughly (i.e., the car is still a larger-than-unity fraction of a year's income.) I think the distinction here needed is not average income, but average income per household (today that is more like $48k.) Of course, there's the mean/median/mode distinction as well, but this isn't a statistics class so I'll spare us all.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
1) The Prius isn't an electric car. It's a hybrid. It's just an efficient user of gasoline.
2) Priuses aren't largely driven by "the affluent". They're mostly a middle class car. And they've been a stunning success; Toyota has said not to expect any more increases in sales next year because they can't produce them any faster.
3) "In the end" is hardly applicable; the adoption of hybrids keeps expanding, and automakers are offering more and more options. GM, for example, plans to release a new hybrid modelevery three months for the next four years.
4) As for electric cars, there are a lot of myths. Here they are, all broken down for you.
5) Yes, you are correct that there was no conspiracy to kill the EV1. The EV1 was never designed to be profitable; like all of its competitors, it was solely a byproduct of the CARB mandate. It was produced in tiny numbers, with tech far worse than what is available nowadays, based on a design that shared no common infrastructure with other GM vehicles (a "one-off"), and so forth. The leases were heavily subsidized. GM wanted nothing to do with actually making EVs, and as soon as the CARB mandate was overturned, they were quite glad to be rid of them. So were the other manufacturers who also had similarly unprofitable EVs. It was a horrible PR move, and GM realizes that now, but it made sense on the books, especially since GM was bleeding money at the time. And as for the "liability" argument, GM was 100% correct; lawsuits add hundreds of dollars to the cost of every car made in the US, and an owner can't disclaim liability for *someone else's* lawsuits. And as for the battery argument, please -- if GM cared about the EV1, they wouldn't have *sold the batteries* in the first place. They had already shut down many other part lines before CARB was overturned anyways; even if they had the batteries, they still couldn't have made more. The conspiracy arguments get crazier and crazier from there (like GM destroying the EVs because they wanted to "hide" them, yet in a fit of insanity they donated them to museums, but then they put pressure on the museums to hide them...)
That was either the start of something bad or the end of something stupid.
Wow, Its cool how you know exactly what streets will be like in 50 years (They will be made out of dirt) AND that electricity will be readily available, yet no fuels to alternatively power vehicles. Particularly shocking to me is that they will not be able to use concrete to pave roads. They will HAVE to resort to dirt roads in the future.
I will predict you are 100% wrong. That in 50 years we will have roads paved with something and cars will be run on something other than pure electricity. Heck, even the ROMANS didn't use dirt roads when they could avoid it. And that was 19 centuries before asphalt.
How does walking ankle-deep in liquefied horseshit grab you? That's a pretty good description of life in a major city at the turn of the twentieth century.
San Francisco installed cable cars in the 1870s, when they knew that electric trolleys were only a decade away -- because they simply couldn't wait. Their streets were getting hit with some 55,000 gallons of horse whiz, and the concomitant number of road apples, per day. Foot, wheel and hoof traffic stirred it up into a goo so slippery that the horses couldn't make it up the hills; they kept slipping on the cobblestones and breaking legs. At one point the city was shooting an average of one horse per day.
Then automobiles came along and the cities got all polluted.
rj
Depending on how oil consumption goes, I can see bicycles becoming MUCH more popular in the near future. Right now it's not feasible for me to ride one to work (I live 25 miles away), but I'm looking at moving to a location that's only 3 miles away from work and might certainly look into riding my bike each morning (though the savings wouldn't be huge - doesn't take much gas to go back and forth 3 miles to work each day).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Horses (or any biological transport) are inefficient for most users since they don't turn off. For comparison, consider if you had to park your car in the garage on rollers and leave the cruise set to 25mph. That's exactly what happens when you "park" the horse by putting in a field: it continues burning fuel even though you're not driving.
The other issue is that that's going to need to be some pretty impressive genetic engineering; at the moment a horse can develop life-threatening injuries from potholes so small that you wouldn't feel them in a car, and need replacement parts (shoes) with startling regularity.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I don't care how fast electric cars can go, or how quiet they are, or even how much torque the have. The show-stopper has and continues to be charge time and range. Range isn't long enough for charge time to not matter, and charge time is too short that the limite range is an issue.
I don't care how many smelly hippies claim all they need is 20 miles a day. That's not nearly good enough for public consumption.
Until the battery problems are solved then electric cars are a pipe dream. It seems like there is progress being made here. I wish that work would be highlighted more. But I fear it's often glossed over because the makers of these cars realize it's the deal-breaker and they still haven't fixed it.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
that should have been in the summary - but it does encourage one to read the article. ;)
The only way for me to be encouraged to read TFA is if someone links a printer-friendly version. I'm not wading through fifty two paragraph screens. Or has C|NET renounced the madness and rehabilitated itself to the point that I would actually RT C|NET's FA?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Even using the CPI metric, how on earth could anyone call a $40k car "proletarian" today?
A $2995 used Taurus is a "proletarian" car in 2008. A $2375 car in 1917 would be the equivalent of a new BMW 135 with leather seats and all the options today.
I'm afraid I must conclude that this article's author has no idea what he's talking about economically.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
And yet Birth is the #1 cause of death.
Solution: End all births.
Ice Cream has no bones.