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Americans Refusing To Wait For Mainstream EVs
hazehead writes "The growing trend of folks refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles is starting to get some press. From DIY tinkerers in Atlanta trying to keep money from going overseas (or simply from leaving their wallets) to a guy in Oregon building an open source Civic conversion kit, Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands."
shifting the source of power from an inefficient source to a more efficient one is an improvement. most cars average around 20% efficiency while even coal plants get around 35%. That and the fact that not all of our power comes from coal, that is nuclear, hydro, natural gas etc.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Exist for some cars. I've been thinking about this investment for a while now.
Read more carefully, the $12,000 included the truck itself.
There are quite a few folks in the Seattle area tooling around in home-brew electrics, including a co-worker of mine who's done a nice job with a Miata. There are two local factors that encourage this. One is that, being in Boeing's backyard, it's fairly easy to obtain a surplus jet-engine starter motor. The other is that most of our electricity comes from falling water, and therefore is relatively cheap.
Umm...RTFA!
The $12,000 INCLUDED the truck. The truck probably ran around $7,000. So $5000 saved $700 in 6 months. At $1400 a year we are looking at 3.6 years. in addition EV's typcially cost 50% to run outside of the cost of fuel. Since he would probably spend around $1000 a year for repairs on the truck, the actual savings are $1900 a year for about 2.5 years.
Electic Vehicles are about break-even for city driving/daily commutes. In the next 2 years the power storage will increase and become cheaper pushing EV's into the financial smart move category.
Batteries can be recycled. Today, you pay more for your new lead acid car battery unless you turn in your old one. You get a pretty considerable discount when turning in an old one, which gets recycled into more car batteries. I think there's something like a 90% recycling rate for car batteries as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_battery#Environmental_concerns
Or, it'll just be like that guy who designed the intermittent windshield wiper, and the car company will steal their ideas out from under them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
There are a myriad of other problems that arise, 10 years down the line you'll need a new set of batteries and what do you do with the old ones?
Recycle them. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the most successful recycling programs in the US - 97% according to the Wiki article. Further, I have seen statements (no reference, sorry) that recycled lead is cheaper/cleaner than mined lead.
I can't comment on other battery technologies, but I don't see why similar results couldn't be achieved.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy (in 2003)... Oil Demand by Sector: Transportation 68% Industrial 23% Residential 4% Electricity Generation 3% Commercial 2% The US does not depend on oil for electricity. The US creates 49% of its electricity from coal, 19.4% nuclear, 20% natural gas, and 7% hydroelectric. The left over is made in other ways, but only 1.6% of the power generated in the US is actually produced from OIL. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/figes1.html Priority 1 here should be energy independence with transportation, based on the numbers. Our ability to create electricity has almost nothing to do with oil.
On Ni-MH batteries in 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solectria_Sunrise
That's close to twice the range of my petrol car.
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The job of the injector is to provide a metered supply of fuel, so the nearest answer is probably the plug, not the wire. High current connectors are not trivial to implement - the Vectrix scooter had a recall because of a problem in this area. But, generally speaking, it is the metering system - the controller - that is the major technical challenge of an EV. Because the batteries are available, if expensive, the brushless motors are available (and really solid proven technology), but connecting the two together is hard. The Vectrix has an advanced controller that allows regenerative braking, as do some hybrid cars, and effective regen is a major factor in mileage. The controller needs to be extremely efficient to avoid wasting lots of energy as heat, it needs to be very reliable and durable, and it needs to function correctly under many load conditions. In fact, I would submit that the sheer technical cleverness of modern motor controllers is what makes EVs possible on modern roads. If you had to start one like a tram, moving a huge brass switrch bar across a resistor bank to prevent the motor shorting before it ran up to speed, they would be impossible to commercialise.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Eventually all biofuels (including old frying oil) will be subject to fuel taxes and they want to be sure that it all flows through "legitimate businesses" that they can compell to collect the taxes for them.
What do you mean "eventually?"
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
they already do this in some places - i live in NC and here you can get a time of use meter - which does exactly what you are asking for.. we get reallllllllly cheap off peak power and we pay higher than normal for peak times.
mix that with our dish washer and washer/drier that has a wailt x hours ability.. and we just load it up and have them run at 2am
doing this (along with setting comps to go standby while we are at work and wake up before we get home) dropped our power bill from about 250 to ~120$ a month..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Holy cognitive dissonance.
Yes, efficiency, as measured by MPG would go up without a cat. However, it's quite a leap of (il)logic to conclude that they'd have better emissions without. Are you really saying that a cat INCREASES emissions? If it were physically possible to get reasonable power and stop the increased NOx formation that happens in lean situations, we'd be doing it. Cats are expensive, and cat's aren't actually required per se, its just that there are no known superior processes for reducing NOx emissions.
Also the bit about the cat not getting hot enough is nonsense. My car has three cats - which is a bit crazy - but the first cat is really only works during start-up until it gets too hot.
Actually they are working on and perfecting solar powered refueling stations. http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/home-hydrogen-fueling-stations.htm
Once that is in play the hydrogen cars are the perfect solution.
love the taste, hate the texture
Good point, but even H2 cells used for electricity generation can explode, albeit not under normal operations. Its still H2 afterall.
Hydrogen cannot explode by itself, it needs oxygen and an ignition source. Thus, it is no less safe than using gasoline, and people do not seem to object to using that. And even batteries can explode, as some laptop owners had the bad luck to experience.
You are failing to take into account the efficiency of an electric motor vs a gasoline engine. An example is something like the Chevy Volt, which has a gas powered electric generator to drive the electric motor after the batteries are dead. Burning a gallon of has in a similarly sized care would get you around 25mpg city, the Volt will get ~60mpg when burning gas to generate electricity for the electric motor. Move the electricity generation to a large coal fire plant and even then it is much more efficient than burning gas in your car. Mile for mile you are putting less CO2 into the atmosphere w/ electric cars.
[EVs] can still be extremely useful for the other 90% of us in the meantime.
So how do you enjoy your EV? (I thought so)
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. I drive our EV several times per week, and we love it. In the past 18 months there were exactly two times that its 100-mile range wasn't adequate. The first time, we just used our gas car, which we've since sold. The second time we traded cars with a neighbor. The EV is powerful, efficient, and fun to drive, so we have about a dozen friends who are happy to trade cars for a week if we need to take a long trip.
Hope that answers your question.
You're citing businesses trying to block alternative approaches.
If you really want to see a mess, take a look at Compressed Natural Gas. Used to be you could convert your truck/car/bus whatever to run on natural gas/gasoline. When you burn natural gas, it burns cleaner than gasoline and is cheaper than gasoline. Right now, CNG is going for under a buck/gallon in Oklahoma, $2.60 in California.
The EPA and the California Air Resources Board, for reasons unexplained, decided to regulate conversion companies out of existence. EPA started out by mandating that companies that manufacture the retro-fit kits get their kits tested for each and every car model it was being installed on. Smog test wasn't good enough, it had to be a special $40,000 EPA test. California, not wanting to be left out, upped the test fee to $300,000. *EVERY* US kit manufacturer threw in the towel on the domestic market. The costs of the testing put the costs of the kits up so high that no one would buy them. The only way the remaining manufacturers stay in business is exporting kits to other regions of the world like Europe and South America. European countries only require that the engine has a regular smog test after the install to verify the kit is properly installed and functioning correctly. If you happen to find a kit, you don't dare install it in California because the cops will confiscate your car.
We have enough domestic natural gas to run every car in the United States for 100 years. We're the Saudi Arabia of natural gas and we can't use it except to cook and make electricity.
It's damn stupid.
Clearly you don't. The simplest definition would be that your rights end at my nose. Or to put it another way a Libertarian is very likely to support the logic of emmision controls that work because you DONT have the right to produce nox that I (a libertarian) might be forced to breath to my detriment. As a libertarian this also means that I don't care to impose my will unduly on your wallet, and I am wholly uninterested in what you do in your bedroom. Libertarianism is practically the definition of logic. It is the antidote to the Red / Blue stupidity which has consumed this country.