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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."
Exactly. It's like getting a hydrogen powered car. Totally crazy.
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.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
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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.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
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?
... 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.
Exist for some cars. I've been thinking about this investment for a while now.
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.
This is my sig.
Read more carefully, the $12,000 included the truck itself.
It does get arround the immediate problem of rising gasoline prices. Fact is coal is much cheaper per unit energy than oil and afaict the US mines most of it's own coal supply whereas they are having to import ever increasing ammounts of oil. It also moves polloution out of cities and iirc big power plants have much tighter emmisions controls than motor vehircles and those controls are much easier to enforce.
It won't help with global warming though :(
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's the concept of "waste" heat you see.
Deleted
But not all power generated in the US is from coal and fossil fuels. My power is generated via Hydroelectric. There are Windmills popping up left and right. Except for trying to say no to all fossil fuels the trick is to reduce the need for it. fossil fuels are easy to transport and offer a lot of energy. Nuclear has to many left wing hippies who think of it as a bomb waiting to happen stopping it from popping up next door (Aka a field 10 miles away from you) Solar isn't ready neither are others. But even a dirty coal power plant is probably more efficient then a gas power car.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Perfect... Let the government worry about courts, police, and military. The rest we'll do ourselves, thanks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Also, there is the question of whether the $700 represents a real savings, or simply a transfer of costs from gas to electric. Unless he's stealing power from his neighbors, of course...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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.
And just as importantly, that single point doesn't have to move, and thus doesn't pay an efficiency cost due to having to move the extra mass of any emissions controls.
The enemies of Democracy are
Read the article.
A lot of people want to eliminate petroleum imports, and consider environmental protection a lesser priority or no priority at all.
I know plenty of conservatives that scoff at the idea of environmental protection and global warming but who still have a strong interest in electric cars, alternative fuel vehicles, and hybrids as a means of cutting the trade deficit and reducing the leverage that OPEC has over our foreign policy.
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.
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.
Please, you Californians, if you see any of that horseshit on the ballot, please oh please vote it down!
Other components such as a fuel injector were replaced with their electric counterparts
What's the electric counterpart to a fuel injector? A... wire?
--sabre86
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also consider that most electric cars will recharge overnight, and during other "non-peak" hours. This also helps improve the efficiency of the power generation station.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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
you assume that gas prices stay the same for the next 7 years.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Actually, cars are hydrogen powered already - liquid hydrocarbons.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
1. $12k includes the price of the truck.
2. According to this, his truck would get 16 mpg, not 25.
Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands."
How dare they??? I want government oversight of this dangerous endeavor immediately! I want it taxed, and regulated and I want government subsidies.
How dare people do things without asking for government permission!
They need to make sure that these vehicles can pass all the safety regulations. You know, to protect the children. Do it for the Children! Won't anyone think of the children????
OMG This is crazy. These people are Terrorists! They are out to destroy America! How dare they!
And don't forget Illegal Aliens. I know they are involved somewhere.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know 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.
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.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
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.
I would love an electric car. But a few times a year, I drive from the Bay Area to San Diego. This is the perfect solution to the problem.
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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A tank of hydrogen can store more energy than an equivalent sized battery, so in that right, the H2 concept is more viable. However, in addition to the H2 generation being much less efficient, its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas... so in that right, the electric is more viable.
In the long run, electric will be the better choice. We can get electricity from a number of sources, which abstracts that away from the engineering of the vehicle. An h2 powered car will have significantly fewer of sources (aka naturally occurring, electrolysis, byproducts from fission events)
Just my $0.02
Mal: "So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The DOE did a study stating that 76% of vehicles in the US could be converted to electric with no additional generation capacity required, due to the base load power available at night that goes unused.
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."
Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%.
In contrast, is says this about fossil fuel powerplants:
Subcritical fossil fuel power plants can achieve 36â"40% efficiency. Supercritical designs have efficiencies in the low to mid 40% range, with new "ultra critical" designs using pressures of 4,400 psi (30 MPa) and dual stage reheat reaching about 48% efficiency
Your coal plant is getting around double the efficiency of the ICE. Not sure about the other losses, but I'd be really surprised if you're losing 80% of the energy in the grid as you claim - figures I remember from school were closer to 95% efficiency. If your electric motor is 50% efficient, it's about even with an ICE.
And this is assuming that all of your power is generated from fossil fuels. If some is from solar, wind, hydroelectric, or nuclear, then you've got a net decrease in fossil fuel consumption and you've moved the pollution away from population centres.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Stealing precious tax dollars from fuel tax so they can drive their tax free electric vehicles all over town on road they haven't paid for!!!
Someone contact the MPAA (Motorcar Pavement American Association) and the RIAA (Roadway Improvement Advancement Association).
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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.
It may or may not be cost effective. That's not why they do it. They do it because they are tinkerers, and if they weren't building electric cars, they would be building jet powered go carts. They money saved is just offsets the cost of their hobby.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The bicycle industry seems to be one of the last bastions of Yankee ingenuity, where small entrepreneurs make a successful business out of a few thousand square feet of floor space, some machine tools, and a few dozen employees. Once you get beyond the Huffies in Wal*Mart, a large percentage of the $500-and-up bicycles seem to be made by large numbers of small companies. But I don't think this is going to happen with cars.
The bicycle craze and the horseless carriage fad hit the U. S. at roughly the same time, maybe 1895 or thereabouts. An 1896 Boston Globe article quotes a livery stable operator as being worried by bicycles but dismissing the horseless carriage as "a pack of French nonsense." At the time, bicycles represented a high level of mechanical and engineering sophistication. It's not surprising that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; bicycles, early automobiles, and early airplanes were not at terribly different levels of complexity.
Not any more. (Pace, members of the Experimental Aircraft Association; I know that there are people still building airplanes in their garage).
But I don't see cottage-industry carmaking as going much of anywhere. For one thing, it's not about the car, it's about the battery. I don't think great breakthroughs in batteries are going to be the province of cottage-industry entrepreneurs.
In the 1900s, electric cars had a range of about thirty miles. In the intervening time, advances in batteries have been counterbalanced by increased expectations of what a car should do, and I find it very discouraging that the Chevy Volt should have a promised electric range of only forty miles.
The brilliance of the Prius (which uses a fundamental design worked out by the U. S. company TRW in the last sixties, who couldn't get U. S. carmakers interested in it) is that it achieves something significant without requiring revolutionary new batteries made of unobtainium. The battery is just a short-term buffer that makes up the difference between the torque required for normal driving and the torque obtainable from a small, fuel-efficient engine. But it does so by being mechanically and electronically very sophisticated. I don't think anyone could cobble up a Prius-style hybrid engine in a small machine shop.
I'd love to see a disruptive-technology electric car emerge from small companies, but I don't think it will happen.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
if you shoot heroin, you really do support the taliban and al qaeda. especially if you shoot heroin in europe
its funny, but the only positive effects the taliban had in afghanistan while they were in power was they utterly destroyed the opium trade there (the ONLY positive effect. blowing up ancient buddhas, beheading prostitutes and adulterers and prodiving a safe haven for bin laden and his jolly crew was their real achievements.)
before 9/11/01, american drug officials would fly over opium growing regions in afghanistan and be mind boggled at how there just was no opium anywhere. the taliban completely razed the poppy fields and issued death pronouncements on anyone who would grow poppies
so apparently, murderous religous fundamentalism is the way to win the war on drugs. "stop growing opium or we'll kill you" seems to weigh heavier in the minds of poor farmers than easy money i guess
but please note how shallow the taliban's religious convictions are: they got to power in afghanistan in the first place by relying on opium growing funds, and now that they are out of power again, they are relying on the poppy fields again
there's no religious fundamentalist like a hypocritical religious fundamentalist (well actually, that's doubly true, as all religious fundamentalists are hypocrites)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The main problem here is in expecting a Chevy to last 7 years. Chevies never last that long without everything falling apart on them. And it's not the engine itself that's the problem, it's the rest of the car; many of the engines are actually ok.
So basically he has a vehicle that will pay for itself in fuel and maintenance in about 7 years. Another flaw of the GP is assuming that gas prices stay the same over a 7 year period. If the last 7 years are any indication ($1.358 in 2001 Aug 12, $3.71 Aug 11, 2008 Citation DOE Midwest Prices)they won't in fact it's likely to increase another 2 dollars by then so in 2016 he will be saving about $1150 a month depending on how inflation keeps pace it could make a significant difference.
That said, right or wrong, a core tenet of American culture is independence.
I disagree. That used to be a core tenet of American culture 100+ years ago, but not any more. There's still a tiny minority of people that believe strongly in independence; they're the ones who voted for Ron Paul recently. All these EV DIYers are probably from that group. The vast majority of Americans, however, couldn't care less about independence, and only care about consumerism. They have no problem giving away all their personal info to marketing companies, putting themselves in as much debt as possible, enslaving themselves to huge corporations and working insane hours, etc.
Savings in gas: $700
Satisfaction at not forking over money to the Saudi royal family and their BFF Bin Laden: priceless
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
they already do this in some places - i live in NC and here you can get a time of use meter - which does exactly what you are asking for.. we get reallllllllly cheap off peak power and we pay higher than normal for peak times.
mix that with our dish washer and washer/drier that has a wailt x hours ability.. and we just load it up and have them run at 2am
doing this (along with setting comps to go standby while we are at work and wake up before we get home) dropped our power bill from about 250 to ~120$ a month..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
Collector's Edition
Saturn AMP is just one. There is room for many businesses to start up doing conversions. In addition, this would be a good time for small manufacturing company to put together kit electric cars. Buy the frame, electric drive, then pick your chassis and batteries. You can assemble it yourself. Detroit is trying hard to keep their gas engines. But if a small business man was smart, they would make the kits such that others could sell the assembled kits, perhaps with add-ons. Heck, I could buy a kit car that did 80 MPH, had decent acceleration and got 50 Miles/ charge for $15K. Ideally, it would be a truck or a small SUV (crossover or whatever the new name is). But 50 miles/charge is fine here. To work and back, and then some. Out with the old and in with the new.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is still both cheaper and more environmentally friendly to buy a use car with good millage.
EVs make the best sports cars, period. Nothing competes with electric for performance. We should have been making electric sports cars 15 years ago. But soon Tesla & co. will finally push the internal combustion engine out of the high performance market.
After EVs are dominating the sports car world they weill trickle down rapidly.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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
Well, there two goals when you talk about electric cars. One is to reduce pollution by not producing gases like CO2 and NOx. The other is for reduced costs by eliminating the need for fossil fuels. The first one is the real goal of electric vehicles. It just happens that second is just a bonus given the technology and gas prices today. Maybe in the future, cost efficiency would be more of a goal if fuel prices increase at the rate they have been increasing and/or manufacturing costs of electric vehicles drop as they start to be mass produced.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas
And this is different from driving around with a tank full of highly explosive gasoline because...?
In the long run, electric will be the better choice. We can get electricity from a number of sources, which abstracts that away from the engineering of the vehicle. An h2 powered car will have significantly fewer of sources
Since one of those sources in the hydrogen case is electricity, I don't see the number of sources to be fewer than in the case of battery-powered cars.
Please criticize valid points of hydrogen as an energy storage medium instead of making up silly points that can be refuted in an instant.
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.
Note that's almost exactly half the price of a new Prius. I'd say he came out way ahead on the purchase of a new(ish) energy efficient vehicle.
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.
My dad bought an electric Renault a couple of years ago and after i took it for a spin i was totally lost. First of all an electric car has a very flat torque curve, it accelerates pretty evenly from standstill to 90 Km/h. Its easy to drive it very smoothly and elegantly. The next thing is sound, the car is dead silent until you hit 60+ km/h and road noise starts. Electric cars arent all about the enviroment.
Myself i really want one but sadly you cant buy one no matter how much you are willing to spend. The demand is here but for some strange reason no western or japanese manufacturer wants the money. The Chinese on the other hand are getting up to speed very quickly and at current pace of development it wont be long before their EV's start pouring into the west.
HTTP/1.1 400
Aside from the cost savings, efficiencies and other benefits already mentioned, the electric car I rode in back around 1990 was wonderful for more reasons.
- silent, no noise pollution, just wind noise
- no shifting, the better torque allowed it to be driven in one gear
- no idling, it only is "on" using power when accelerating, otherwise completely off
- regenerative braking, actually GAIN power instead of wasting energy slowing
- less maintenance/cost, no oil changes, no cooling system, fuel injection, ignition system, clutch, timing belts
- never stop at a refilling station again or ever "run low" between fill ups, basically have a "full tank" at the start of every day
I am looking forward to hearing more about eestor.
52 KW-h at 400 lbs and $3200
They claim units will be shiped early next year...
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.
Actually their main concern is having enough US bought weapons and oil revenue to prevent an uprising
Debian FTW
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.
Every 80s Camaro I've ever seen outside of a junkyard looks like its owner lives in it, along with a family of rats.
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.
My electricity is nuclear and my BBQ is natural gas..
Oh yeah? In my neighborhood, it's the other way around!
(try my Cs-137 Chili some time - yum!)
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.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
Also note that volts alone don't kill, it's combination of volts+amps.
Grrr - Not really.
If you had to grip two ends of a power supply would you rather grip the 12V PS with a current capability of 10000 amps or the 1000 V power supply with maximum current of 20 mA ?
hint V=IR where R is your resistance which is usually in the meg ohm region. It takes only a few mA to fry you.
or more accurately: If R1 is your resistance and R2 is the internal resistance of the power supply (approx: R2 = Vps/Ips Vps = open circuit voltage of PS, Ips = current capability of PS) then Vps = I ( R2 + R1) : again current "I" here has to be less than the fry value.
Of course if you had a power supply of many thousands of volts but current level capability is well under the value to interfere with your biological systems (Ven Der Graff (sp?)) generator - well it would be a hair raising experience but thats about it... Such a power source would have not applicability to EV. If there is a possibility of someone coming in contact with the PS, voltages need to be keep below the threshold that would pump more than a couple mA thorough a person. Of course this could be gotten around by having various protections if higher voltages are used.
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.
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.
Hydrogen electrolysis of water will almost certainly always be less energy efficient than using capacitors for storage. The only reason anybody cares about Hydrogen is that you can get a little bit better energy density right now, but supercapacitors are quickly catching up. Hydrogen is not the answer. It is the question. "No" is the answer. The primary goal of Hydrogen-based power is to keep people dependent on filling stations, not fixing our energy problems or saving consumers money.
Apart from people taking long trips, it offers no advantages over a pure electric system and lots of significant disadvantages, both in terms of producing emissions (H2O is a greenhouse gas, sorry to say) and in terms of inefficiency. Add to that the extra risk of driving around on top of what amounts to a giant bomb (gaseous hydrogen + spark = barbecued passengers), and it just screams "completely wrong answer". Oh, and it is much more complex. The car companies love this idea because that hydrogen power plant is one more part that will wear out, leak, or otherwise require maintenance ($$$) and is likely to cost almost as much as a new car does when it comes time to get it replaced. More money in their pockets, less money in the pockets of consumers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
This space available.
Fast-charging battery tech is certainly a possibility, but the faster the charging, the shorter the life of the battery tends to be. By contrast, supercapacitors can also charge up in seconds but have no such limitations about lifespan. And unlike those batteries you're talking about, they can scale up to vehicle sizes today. For all practical purposes, charge speed with supercaps is more likely to be limited by the amount of power the grid can provide. :-)
Either way, though, the argument about recharge times made sense ten years ago when lead-acid batteries were the norm, but doesn't make sense in light of modern technological advances.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Burning a gallon of has in a similarly sized care would get you around 25mpg city, the Volt will get ~60mpg when burning ...
I think that, similar to electric recharge stations, we won't see this sort of technology take off until a large number of gas stations in the US are also offering hasoline.
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?
Greenies are so afraid of nuke plants that they blocked any being built for quite some time.
Blocked in part because the glowies were blind to the problems of the reactors at the time and the problems of scalding hot water discharge that destroyed the surrounding water ecosystems, as well as the fishkill from the intakes. And there was always the issue of cost -- states would rather build coal plants because it had cheaper rates! Much on those fronts has been solved today, but a lot of that resistance was well-founded. Now that nuclear is becoming more responsible and more mature, you'll see (and are seeing) less resistance.
What I need is an electric motor that weighs less than 125 lbs, and will put out 100 hp at 2500 RPM. Then I could build a decent light sport electric airplane!
Also, EVs won't require a radiator.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically.
This is one of the reasons why the mainstream car manufacturers won't want to support EVs.
1. They make a ton of money selling parts. If EVs become popular, this revenue will dry up considerably. Also take into consideration the fact that vibration and heat contribute considerably to wear and tear on the parts. EVs have much less vibration and heat in the engine compartment which means that the parts will last longer. The car companies are pretending that EVs are complex machines by spouting all kinds of statistics about the "complex" power storage techniques, battery technology etc. So they price the cars very high stating that the batteries are very expensive.
But this is not really a big problem to solve. The batteries can be easily switched over when the owner of the car has the money to afford cheaper/lighter/more efficient batteries sometime in the future.
2. The service and support infrastructure (mechanics, service stations) will all lose money if EVs become popular. Even an oil change becomes unnecessary. Car companies have invested a lot of money in setting up their cars so that they can only be serviced by "authorized" service personnel who have the equipment which can interface with the car's proprietary control interface. All this becomes redundant if EVs become popular.
3. Automobile companies pride themselves on their engines which are difficult to replicate exactly and reuse between different models and even brands unless the person(s) making this modification have considerable experience and skill.
However in the case of EVs, the electric motors are fairly easy to reuse between different models and even brands. So if my 2008 EV has a motor which has a certain power rating, I can easily change to a motor with a different power rating or some other characteristic sometime in the future when this motor becomes available. It won't take very long to make this modification and it will also be reasonably simple to do.
Car companies won't want this to happen - they would prefer that you went in for a completely new car instead of purchasing just an updated part.
So in a sense, EVs reduce the car industry to makers of chassis, frame and panels and the basic drive train, steering, lights etc. This is not what a car company would want.
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.
$3.24 worth where I live, which is actually a little less than the price of a gasoline where I live. And the gap is currently closing from both ends.
Can't say any more until we know the full process efficiency of the electric.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
By 70,000 miles, my Ford Windstar had already had to have the intake torn down and cleaned due to a flawed valve cover design sucking oil through the EGR hose (emissions control crap) clogging the vacuum lines, causing the computer to adjust the fuel mixture incorrectly and show a Check Engine light. The overdrive off light started blinking periodically due to a solenoid problem in the automatic transmission. It also had a faulty switch on the air conditioner that caused the rear air to randomly turn on and off. Several replaced bulbs. Recall for something wrong with the fan controller for the rear heat or something, recall for overheating wiper motor, recall for two or three other things. Problem with the suspension system causes a rubber boot to rub against something under there and make noise. Oh, and then there was the fuel line that blew off the back of the fuel filter while I was driving down the road. I'm sure if I thought about it long enough, I could list plenty of other problems.
Okay, so maybe that qualifies it as not a "decently made car", but nearly 100% of the problems I've had with my vehicle stem from actual problems with the drive train, and the bulk of those stem from emissions control hardware.
Don't tell me these modern engines are a dream. They can be great, but so could engines 20 years ago. The difference is that now there are a lot more things that can go wrong because of all the complexity of the emissions control system, and that when things go wrong, they often go cataclysmically wrong.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Excuse me? Are you actually suggesting that the same battery chemistry that can't be relied on to power an iPod with greater than 80% capacity after a year and a half is suddenly going to magically become reliable and long-lasting in an automotive setting?
In my experience with batteries, the more complex and newer-fanged the chemistry, the faster it dies.
Lead-acid cells, while they may have a low energy density, last about twice as long (five years) and don't degrade anywhere near as much during that time as my experience with Lithium chemistry (both LiIon and LiPol). LiPol lasts about two years, then it's dead as a doorknob. The last six to nine months it's running at about 80% of it's old capacity. Not something you'd want in a vehicle.
I'd love nothing more than an electric vehicle, but the poster of the great-grandparent is right... supercapacitors are the only feasible option. Batteries die, and replacing them several times in the life of a vehicle that has such an otherwise elegant and simple design is a giant glaring flaw.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
::EVs are presently about as efficient, overall as IC-powered vehicles.
Actually they are a fair bit better in well-to-wheels efficiency, even with electricity from coal power.
Tesla published a whitepaper on their site, unfortunately theirs is taken down for an update, a working link is still here
http://me222.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/twentyfirstcenturycar.pdf
Now coming from an EV manufacturer, that may not be the most trustworthy source, so i encourage you to go to Michelin Challenge Bibendum site to dig out their reports.
Link here
http://www.challengebibendum.com/challengeBib/AfficheServlet?Rubrique=20080611093557&Langue=EN
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