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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."
I'd imagine that getting the power from sources that are many times more efficient is still better than waiting on a magic bullet that will solve things completely.
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If we move our transport systems over to electricity, then change the way we generate that electricity, it does a great deal.
Also, its a hell of a lot easier to control emissions from power stations then it is to control millions of cars pouring exhaust fumes into the air in cities.
Its going to take a while to get the somewhat large number of nuclear power stations and solar power farms the US now wants up and running, but it is going to happen, and when it does, things will get a lot better.
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Most manufacturers are going to have a version of an electric car (EV) by 2010, but since car manufacturers have such long development times, by the time we actually need it, its too late. I'm glad these heroes are doing something about it.
Actually it does help a little. Pollution can be better controlled at a single point than at many thousands of points. Economies of scale can also be implemented.
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?
I'm all for using less gas and improving the environment, but the guy spent $12,000 to turn his Chevy into an electric car. He now estimates that he's saved $700 in gas. It doesn't mention exactly when his conversion was done, but mentions January as the time he began the conversion. If the conversion took two months, then he's saved $700 in 5 months, or $140 per month. This works out to $1,680 per year. In other words, he would need to drive the car for over 7 years to make up the price of the conversion. (Yes, there are additional savings since he doesn't need to change the oil or filters, but there might be other maintenance costs that might be higher given that it is a DIY project.) Based on this, I'm not about to tear the gas engine out of my car anytime soon.
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... and getting some press, car companies will step-up the EV production. They don't want any competition eating into their future market.
> Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands.
Don't worry. The regulators will put a stop to it. Can't have people going around doing things without permission.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I would posit that electrical power from coal to drive electric cars would ultimately be cheaper for consumers, better for the environment, and would place on a better path to national energy independence.
It is far more efficient to have a single big plant burning electricity and sending electrons to people rather than having everyone around with their own little tiny power plants. A single giant coal plant has a generator that runs at a fixed rate, maximizing power output for fuel burned, whereas an internal combustion engine car operates over a wide range of RPMs, offering more of a compromise than a fuel solution.
The single giant plant is only one physical distribution point for many cars. Instead of having fleets of tanker trucks with hundreds of people hauling fuel around to dozens of gas stations, you instead have a single train run by one or two people hauling up to a month's supply of coal for a big coal unit and in one single trip.
If we did switch to electric cars, even if they did come from coal plants, you would also eliminate the environment problem of gasoline spills. There's nothing to "spill" in an electric car that is really bad. Yes, you will wind up with either lead acid batteries that are environment nightmare, or, lithium polymer batteries that periodically explode and kill everyone in the car, but ultimately, the birds will sing and trees will wave their branches in joy, if that's the sort of stuff you like.
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EVs are way more frugal with their power compared to gasoline engines. So much so, that even taking into account loss in transmission lines and energy lost in charging batteries, you still come out ahead. I'll take an extra $100 on my electric bill than at the gas station any day... plus I don't have to make a special trip to 'fill up' the car.
Gas engines are at best about 30% efficient... as in only 30% of the energy consumed actually goes to making momentum for moving the car.
This is just more BS perpetuated by those who stand to lose their income streams from oil, including car mfgs who stand to lose the income stream of spare parts, since EVs are waaaaay more reliable than gas or diesel engines.
I can't wait until somebody finally gets around to making a full EV car that seats two with ABS and Airbags, PS, Heat and AC, even if it only goes 100 miles. If they can do it under $25k I'm there with cash in hand.
The development of the powertrain and the source of the fuel is two separate issues. Whether the electricity comes from coal, sun, or wind, at least it fuels a platform of choice-an electric vehicle.
No, it improves the situation greatly. Your view is far too simplistic.
A big power station is a lot more efficient than a small car engine. A typical gasoline engine is perhaps 15% efficient. The combined cycle gas power station they recently built here makes use of about 80% of the thermal energy of the gas. The gas turbines are the first stage, then waste heat from the gas turbines drive a steam turbine, then any heat that is still left is used to heat the NSC sports centre swimming pool and the sports centre itself. Those efficiencies are simply impossible for a small internal combustion engine on a car.
An electric car is a lot more efficient than a gasoline one - for a start, it doesn't idle, and you can have regenerative braking.
If you change the power generation (say, from coal to nuclear) you don't have to also change the fleet of vehicles. Automatically, overnight, they are suddenly nuclear powered.
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Perfect... Let the government worry about courts, police, and military. The rest we'll do ourselves, thanks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like when you shop at WalMart. You get cheaper goods, but you also encourage CEOs to shift more and more jobs to cheaper over-seas nations. Less job opportunities, less wealth in the nation to pay for specialized services, etc.
You gotta look past your wallet to see how your choices can cost you. Giving money to a 'find the missing baby' charity is not cost effective.
Blar.
Common argument, but so very wrong, because producing electricity in large power plants, even from really disastrous ones as coal or oil, is very much more efficient than producing it in millions of small engines.
Subsequently adding cleaning solutions is also very much simpler/cheaper than doing the same to millions of small engines.
And later changing the production from one system (say coal or oil) to another (say nuclear, wind or solar) is very much simpler than to replace millions of cars.
I think this is a great point waiting on the perfect solution means waiting forever. Increase the population of electric cars then increase the amount of renewable resource power generators. If the price of electricity skyrockets due to high demand the cost comparison of renewable vs nonrenewable resources begins to tip heavily in favor of renewable power sources. In addition the idea of a self fueling partially solar powered vehicle becomes much more desirable.
Why stop and recharge as often if you can just put solar panels on the car and increase your miles per watt. Once the general public sees the value in not wasting the constant barrage of energy (from the sun) we receive everyday we might just start the trend we are looking for.
your cash goes to:
1. Chavez in Venezuela to support anti-American jingoism
2. Putin in Russia to support Russian Neoimperialism such as in Georgia
3. Bin Laden via Saudi Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist form of Saudi Islam that gives rise to treating women like cattle, nonSunnis like subhumans, and Islamic terrorism in its myriad forms wherever such groups are supported by conservative Arabic funds
the American government doesn't seem to think getting off foreign oil is as much a priority as the American people think it is. The priorities of the American government conflates dependency on foreign oil with other foreign problems that, if they examined many problems around the world more carefully, they would see that it is the American people and their SUVs that fund those problems in the first place. this complacency is partly our own fault, for not hammering our leaders on this issue hard enough. likewise, you can complain to GM about building SUVs instead of electric cars, but we as Americans buy SUVs instead (until quite recently)
we need electric cars supported by a new wave of modern nuclear power plants. of course there are better sources of electricity than nuclear, but most of these are boutique and cannot scale like nuclear can. this includes wind and solar. but i don't really care to champion nuclear that much as i care about the need to get off foreign oil, any way possible. so please, invest in solar and wind as well, let us find new ways for nonnuclear tech to scale
modern nuclear via pebble bed reactors just does not go chernobyl, and via breeder reactors waste in lifespan and quantity is dramatically reduced (1/10th quantity of waste, a few centuries instead of 10,000 years of radioactivity, and lower radiation levels of safer forms of radiation). breeder reactors also dramatically increasing energy yeild, and allow us to use thorium as well as uranium. security concerns are real with nuclear technology, but if we spent 1/1000th of the amount of money and lives we spend securing our petroleum in iraq on securing breeder reactors instead (they make plutonium, that's the danger with breeder reactors), we would still be many orders of magnitude safer than our current status quo of funding terrorism and russian imperialism and anti-american jingoism like we do now. of course even thorium will run out in a century or two, but if we haven't mastered fusion technology by then, we are doomed anyways, or would have found a way to scale wind and solar by then
zero reliance on foreign petroleum by 2025. whoever enunciates that idea the loudest amongst a range of candidates in any contest before you, elect them to Senator/ President/ Congressman/ Dogcatcher
if petrodollars were to dry up on the international stage, many of the intransigent problems that all peoples of the world face today, not just Americans face, would dry up as well
thems the facts. get with it America
no more foreign petrodollars. stop feeding your damn SUVs
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People have been doing this since the 70s. Popular Mechanics even had some projects back in the 70s and 80s.
Let me know when anybody is doing more than a thousand conversions a year. Until then it just the same as it ever was. A few will spend a lot of money on EVs and then the price of oil will drop. And yes oil does drop. Around 2000 gas was cheaper per gallon after inflation than it was in 60s!
Look up the oil glut of the 80s for another example.
It might not this time but if you asked anybody in 77 if the price of oil was going to drop they would have also said "Never"!
This is not a comment about EVs as much as this is just an over hyped news story that really means next to nothing.
Now the number of people that are signing up to by the Volt is a lot more interesting.
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Not only is this a great example of the American can-do tradition, hopefully it will also go a long way toward dispelling the myth that cars are too complicated for "regular people" to deal with.
Think about it. When my parents were graduating from high school (1969) it was a given that people would know the basics of how to service a car. For guys especially, it was just something that guys "should" know. These days the attitude is more like, "meh, it's too complicated, leave it to the experts".
Let's hear it for can-do, rather than pay-someone-else-to-do.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
If they really want to do something they're better off protesting.
Personally I have much more respect for the man that takes matters into his own hands, than the one who just yells and whines.
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Looks like regulators to me. They will of course, use the excuse that "The industry requested it". The real reason is taxes. 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.
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Whenever I saw those damn "If you smoke pot, you're supporting terrorist" all I could think about was the distasteful regimes we buy our oil from.
Well said.
Blar.
its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas...
Wrong, all viable H2 systems store it in a chemical bond, not 'just' compressed gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
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Actually, I would be more interested in this plus this. When a vehicle is traveling at a constant highway speed, it is using surprisingly little power. Even if the generator can't quite keep up with the constant power drain, if it can supply 80% of stead state power it may well extend maximum vehicle range by 200-300 miles before you have to stop for gas. So for a long trip, toss the generator in the bed and take off. The rest of the time, you have a backup generator for your fridge/supercomputing PS2 cluster. Win-win for me.
Any power plant is more efficient and produces less pollution per watt than a car engine, especially when coupled to a car's inefficient drive train. Then there are the cleaner alternatives some utilities have already been using for decades, like hydro.
Right now for the cost of a nice car you can cover your roof with solar panels and have almost no power bill at all. That would more than offset the extra cost and pollution from charging your electric car.
If you believe otherwise I guess you could power your house with a V8 hooked up to a generator.
I don't know about you but the electric car I build will get it's power from a solar panel on the roof of my garage.
I think more most people it's not about being "green" so much as the low price of running the vehicle... with the cost of electricity compared to gas EVs get the equivalent of 200MPG. Not to mention the other benifits such as smooth and quiet operation, no nasty oils, coolants, or other crap to keep up with, and of course a "full tank" every time you leave your garage.
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Amazing that you did not bother to look up our situation. 48% coal. 20% NG, and the rest is Nuc and AE. The difference is that we would be moving from imported oil with distributed pollution, to using local fuel with central pollution and the ability to control it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Rather than have a car's engine convert at say 30% efficiency, by burning gasoline, you get power from the grid instead. The grid gets power at ~20% efficiency from the distributor, which gets it at 20% efficiency from the power plant, which gets 20-30% efficiency from burning goal and oil.
Something doesn't seem quite right here, your automotive efficiency sounds too high -- I seem to recall a typical gasoline engine has a Carnot limit around 40%, but is something more like 18-25%. Putting the efficiency of a powerplant at or below an automobile engine is ridiculous, considering the powerplant can operate at a higher temperature for its heat resevoir and optimize its design trading off parameters a car engine cannot (like size, weight, and RPMs), 35% efficiency isn't unusual for a real-world coal plant.
The power distribution efficiency seems skewed somehow as well, you have a 80% loss after conversion to electricity when it goes to the "distributor", and another ~80% loss in the grid. Power losses for electricity distribution shouldn't be nearly as disasterous as for a heat engine's conversion.
Which makes more sense?
1) Install a single, as-large-as-you-want, possibly even fuel generating smokestack scrubber on a single smokestack, or:
2) Install millions of mufflers on millions of combustion engines which have difficult engineering restraints on them? Mufflers need to be small, lightweight, and inexpensive as design concerns - concerns that are placed at least on equal footing with efficiency. Possibly more so.
Which seems like the better idea?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Do you realize that the average American spends about 60 cents/mile paying for the car, maintenance, license fees, etc. and only about 13 cents/mile in putting gas in the tank?
I would argue that most people stand to gain a lot more by buying a car that costs less up front and less to maintain than they would ever gain in buying just because it's more fuel-efficient. If it's about cost, that's where you can start.
Don't give me this nonsense that people can't afford gas, the fact is they can't afford expensive cars (and they buy them anyway) and gasoline is a minor player in the 'highway economy' of the United States.
Electric cars are a huge win there, too. The complex emissions control nightmare that U.S. law requires makes the drive train incredibly failure-prone. Automatic transmissions make them doubly so. Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often. It is like using a shiny new computer with monitor and printer where a printer-calculator would do the job. The simpler the device, the less failure-prone it will be.
With electric cars, you have basically four parts: a battery, a bunch of heavy gauge wires, a charge controller, and an electric motor. All of those are generally simple devices except the charge controller. Okay, so there are a few other things like an electrically-powered pump for your power steering and a modified A/C system, but in terms of the drive train itself, you get rid of a lot of crap. You get rid of the internal combustion engine, the computer that controls it, the transmission, potentially the radiator and hundreds of feet of water hoses (that leak), the oil pan (that leaks), the oil hoses (that leak), the fuel pump, most of the vacuum system, the catalytic converter, and the entire exhaust system, all of which are fairly frequent points of failure. Add to that dozens of sensors that no longer apply, including emissions compliance sensors (O2 sensors, catalytic converter temperature sensors, NOx sensors, etc.), axle speed sensors (largely used to verify the transmission is working correctly), vacuum line pressure sensors, etc.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically. Much less. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the reason auto manufacturers are dragging their heels is that, ignoring people who upgrade for appearance reasons or because their old car is too small to meet their needs, people are likely to replace their vehicles much less frequently than they do now. If the average person drives a car for 300,000 miles before they sell it and require no maintenance in the process, a $30,000 car costs only $0.10 per mile average, not counting energy costs. And that's a conservative estimate of EV longevity once we solve the problem of short battery lifespan. There's every possibility you'll have a rust hole where your feet should go before the electric motor or wiring gives out.... :-)
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And what about states where hydro isn't viable but there are vast quantities of cheap coal. Life exists outside of San Fransisco after all. If environmentalists weren't so opposed to nuclear power, there's a pretty good shot many of those plants would be offline.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Except it's odourless, stored at extremely high pressure (dangerous enough with non-explosives), ignites easier, spreads out from leaks quicker and at higher volumes than petrol vapour.
Also, when Lithium batteries explode, it's due to a build up of hyrdogen that then gets ignited. Hence the big whoosh as the hydrogen ignites followed by the 'slower' burn of the lithium.
It still is likely that it's more environmentally friendly even if the electricity comes from coal plants, because generating power centrally in large amounts is going to be more efficient than having millions of little emissions-producing power plants.
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I think you should stick to things you actually know something about. Computers and sensors have actually simplified the engine control system considerably. In fact, well-engineered cars are insanely reliable devices. Usually, the engine and the transmission are the two most reliable components. Most of what REALLY limits the lifespan of a car is the bodywork/paint, interior, and electrical systems. There are many cars that are over 500,000 miles with the original engine/transmission. It's just that most people choose to get rid of their cars before they get that old, simply because they no longer look too good.
I doubt the motor controllers will last much longer than 10 years, on average. They all use large electrolytic capacitors, which don't last that long. In general, complex high-power electronics is not too reliable. If you do make that reliable, you still have the issue of batteries, which will certainly last less than 10 years in any EV. In all likelihood, an EV will be much more expensive to own than a gas-powered car.
Economics of Kensington's (RTFA) home built EV.
That $2000 set of lead acid batteries taking our friend Kensington 20 miles/charge is only good for 500 charge/discharge cycles or 10,000 miles. He's paying 20 cents/mile for batteries. Add the cost of the electricity(without regenerative braking) to this and we're closer to 30 cents/mile or 3.33 miles per dollar. At $10/gallon for gas a 34 mile per gallon vehicle has him beat. At $4/gallon, a 13 mpg vehicle has him beat.
I believe you're over-generalizing what "greenie" is. I used the entire state of CA as an example. You tend to think that SF's borders extend to Oregon, Nevada, and Mexico as far as policy, and you forget that CA also has deeply conservative regions. Where do you think Reagan and Nixon came from?
The power generation options you conveniently left out are natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal. Your state can't provide any of that? You'd rather pollute with coal for short-term gains than explore other options? It sounds like you are gung-ho about nuclear, which is fine except you're blind to all the other options. Nuclear *by itself* will not solve your power issues, because peak demand is what causes problems and a nuclear plant can't easily respond to large fluctuations. Overbuilding a nuclear plant is wasteful and too costly as all the capacity will be unused at non-peak. You can fire up another hydro/gas turbine much quicker than you can fire up another reactor. You need base power as well as peak power.
Your advocacy of nuclear for everything is just as specious as those who completely oppose nuclear power. Would you like it if I lumped you into a group called "glowies" as those who only want nuclear?