Slashdot Mirror
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.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.