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Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
gasoline motors can easily be converted to propane based, all thought I'm not sure how safe those kind of motors are.
it's an alternative to gasoline.
Smug alert! Meteorologists predict a huge smug-storm over San Francisco, on an intersection course with the smug from Obama's acceptance speech.
Anybody catch the latest Top Gear where they had an mileage challenge (compared to the normal speed ones). VW already has a small car out that'll get 60+ MP-USG Highway.
Bring on the diesels.
Those were manufactured shortages thanks to the crooks at Enron, Duke Energy, and the sham Governor that was Gray Davis.
The problem with diesels is that the US raised the emission standards for diesel, even higher than what Europe had, as a result manufactures scaled back selling them here because they couldn't meet the requirements.
The problem isn't that SF wants to be electric-friendly, or even environmentally friendly. The problem is that they are doing it simply to cash in on a trendy idea. The union bosses responsible for building this grid will charge SF taxpayers billions to produce a sub-par grid, that will need constant repair, and that is unlikely to be utilized.
Why? Because the same people who promote electric cars, are also the people that recoil from even the word "nuclear"... and thus ensure that while the rest of the world forges ahead in power generation technology, we are stuck with 30+ year old inefficient uranium-guzzlers.
Perhaps people should consider that it's better to do things because they are the right thing, not because they are the "in thing".
"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."
Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.
State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can. Because they are trying to counter a deflationary spiral, they are printing money as fast as they can and giving it to banks.
Compared to what they've been giving away, $1B is nothing. They really should consider throwing some of that over to CA. [It will create JOBS and reduce foreign oil dependency, Mr. Obama!]
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
At least spending a billion for this will produce something useful and will provide some jobs. It sounds like a bargain compared to $700+ billion to keep the bankers from having to move to smaller mansions.
OK it was set in LA instead of SF, but the implication in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel was that the slotcar grid was at least statewide.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I've lived and worked in the Bay Area. Pollution from cars is a problem. Cars are a problem.
Electric cars are not the answer. (I don't even want to imagine sitting in deadlocked traffic, heater or AC on, tunes playing, battery draining...)
Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
Mass transit first - electric cars (if they're still needed, really) second.
Fuck me, America - can we try fixing problems instead of fixing symptoms - just once?!?!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Plenty safe, used them at my work place for years with no safety problems. Only problem is when converting a car or truck not designed for it you end up wasting a lot of space. Since gas tanks made for liquid can't normally be reused for a pressurized gas and the space of the old tank will most likely not work for a propane tank you have to put the tank somewhere else, the trunk/truck bed are the most common places. If you want to hold a good amount of fuel you can kiss your storage space goodbye. Converting a truck to propane is a waste IMHO, you'd need to design it from the ground up or lose at least a third of its bed space. Cars are a good call for conversion but a ground up design would still be a better bet. Same with full sized vans, you can normally fit a new tank in the old ones place but you'll lose some range. Now don't quote me on this but, iirc, you lose a fair bit of power and range when converting to propane most of the time. I know for a fact that our propane F-150 didn't have the same get up and go as the stock one, even though the stock one had twice the miles on it.
Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Capitol is a proper name, originally of a temple and the hill it sat on, but now often of a building that serves as the seat of a legislature. Capital means the city that serves as the seat of government. It also means the chief city of a region, and is the metaphorical sense intended here.
Even if submitter didn't know the difference, a professional editor should have. Good thing we don't have any of those around here, huh?
And the brethren went away edified.
And you're still cranking out CO2. This is about EVs (Electric Vehicles).
My Babylon
Doesn't San Francisco already have trolleybuses on several of its local routes? They've already had a major electric vehicle system from that for quite some time.
I happen to live near Seattle, so I do know the problems associated with being on a paved road while receiving power overhead.
I'm nobody's son, but I do like watching the Simpsons. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Anyone remember that California energy crisis from a few years ago? What exactly has been done (besides firing some politicians and energy execs) to help produce more power?
I'm not sure its a great idea to be building HUGE structural draws like this into (what will eventually become) every major city worth a damn, without a plan for how to power all of it. The "not in my backyard" problem must be solved first.
From some back-of-the-envelope calculations it seems that we already have enough power generation and electrical distribution in the Bay Area and in most places to charge Chevy Volt-like cars overnight on our existing 220V. It might be nice to charge faster than 8 hours, or at work as well as home, but I don't see this as a major technology adoption problem.
The grid and power stations are designed to deliver about 3KW average to each household during peak hours in the summer heat. A single 220 outlet typically can deliver 3KW continuously. A Chevy Volt will need no more than 20KW hours of juice to charge. The math works.
The grid is barley taxed during the night, so this is a match made in heaven. The build-out we really need is an interstate-HVDC grid to deliver renewable power across the country from wherever it's generated. This can't be done at the state level, and will require action by Obama.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
battery exchange stations, i didn't think of that
when mentally strategizing electric powered vehicles you are struck by the onerous amount of time it would take to recharge
but this scheme skips that problem entirely, by having service stations stocked with fresh batteries
of course, you'd then need some sort of airtight battery integrity system, so someone doesn't get stuck with a tampered or faulty one
but battery exchange is a fabulous conceptual leap, for me at least (what, has everyone else in the room already figured this out 5 years ago? ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I took a look at the proposed California infrastructure plan. I suspect that part was drawn up by someone unfamiliar with the state.
It never fails to amaze me how some people can throw up a "proposal" without thinking about the viability of that which they propose.
Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
That's why I installed an electric vehicle grid in my driveway 2 years ago. Get on the ball, Bay Area!
[...] unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Sorry to be the spelling Nazi, but (from the New Oxford American Dictionary):
Capitol
1 the seat of the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC.
â ( capitol) a building housing a legislative assembly : 50,000 people marched on New Jersey's state capitol.
2 the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome.
ORIGIN from Old French capitolie, capitoile, later assimilated to Latin Capitolium (from caput, capit- âheadâ(TM) ).
On the other hand:
capital
noun
1 (also capital city or town) the most important city or town of a country or region, usually its seat of government and administrative center.
â [with adj. ] a place associated more than any other with a specified activity or product : Milan is the fashion capital of the world.
[...]
I'm not a native English speaker and even I knew that.
Either battery replacement, or plug-ins. We don't yet have a standard as to how to recharge these cars.
110v...220v...different plugs...different acceptable recharge times.
Replacement batteries will require some sort of mechanical/robotic system to do it. Your grandmother is not going to wrestle a 100lb battery pack out of the car. And none of the elec cars I've seen have easily (no more than 5 mins) replaceable packs.
Finally, we have the apartment problem. If I live on the 4th floor, how do I ensure my car won't be unplugged overnight by some miscreant on the street.
All of these can be overcome. But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail.
I really, REALLY want this to succeed. But this effort may be premature.
A calculation of the german version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment). I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and ... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way.
Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The people who don't use rail for cross country shipments do so for a reason, the same reason people stopped using it for transport in a serious manner, its too damned unreliable. Not inherently so, but the companies can't get their act together, and shipping something over rail is a good way to get it there somewhere between tomorrow and next month, with no idea which until the package arrives.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Actually, I'm an energy conversions engineer who has designed several types of heat engines incuding, for example, a Stirling cycle engine. People working in my field spend all day every day trying to make everything energy systems more efficient. I know what I'm talking about.
For future reference, that movie was pure propaganda and sensationalism. It was basically a heinous pile of shit. It's sad that people think The Facts are what some ridiculous movie said.
It's great to see people getting out there and trying to get things done about making alternative energy-powered cars available, but it seems like it's happening sporadically.
Arnie is building hydrogen fueling stations around California, the Bay Area's getting electric, who knows what other places will do? And that's just in California!
It seems like a waste to use government money to implement conflicting standards when one of them is going to lose... and the conflict itself can slow down adoption; after all, if people didn't want to buy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray for fear of buying the losing technology, who wants to buy a car susceptible to that problem?
Imagine if, in the 80s, the government had mandated use and sale of Betamax in some major cities and VHS in other major cities -- spent your tax dollars on raising infrastructure for conflicting standards! What a waste.
I hope Obama lays down a clear path for the United States to follow in terms of alternative energy generation and cars. Then perhaps we can sidestep this problem.
http://www.tenjou.net/
The build-out we really need is an interstate-HVDC grid to deliver renewable power across the country from wherever it's generated. This can't be done at the state level, and will require action by Obama.
The utilities are already asking for govt money to do this.
Why can't the utilities use their existing profits for this?
It's really so sad that "hybrids" have hijacked the public's perception of what a fuel efficient vehicle here in the US.
In Europe fuel costs 4 times as much as it does over here right now. The majority of vehicles sold in Europe are diesels. You almost never see a Prius. In fact, you'll see them ridiculed in the automotive press as an example of American idocy more often than you'll see them on the roads over there.
Diesels are drastically better than gas vehicles on CO2. In fact, it's as much their forte as mpg. If you're currently driving a gas car but are concerned about your CO2 production, perhaps the least you could do is switch to driving a diesel until you can afford an EV.
if you are transporting things like coal, or timber, or trash, and many times more effective because rail is so much cheaper than truck
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also note that many charging stations that were put in around the bay area for those EVs are still in place and working.
Why exactly is a Japanese car an example of American idocy?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Because they wouldnt have any profits anymore.
Much better to ask for free money. They'll probably get it too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Bought 'em up, tore 'em up - so we could buy more cars and tires and gas.
I dislike the counter-arguments in the Wikipedia article that the move to buses were more efficient - the light rails were already in place, so a working system was dismantled in favor of a competing one.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Do you have a reference for this? The Diesel cycle's inherent thermodynamic efficiency is no better than that of the Otto cycle used in a normal gasoline engine. In practice, it's actually slightly *less* efficient, except at idle, where it wins hands-down.
There is an easily comprehensible reason that diesels go 15% further per unit volume of fuel. It is because diesel is 15% denser than gasoline.
While it would seem they are "on the ropes" so to speak, Big-3 Auto often has a lot to say when it comes to getting their will. They had a lot to do with the failure of competing technologies including passenger rail. The next argument may be "now we REALLY can't compete because we don't have an electric car! give us more money and time to sell off the rest of our SUVs and we will consider making an electric car provided it has a high enough profit margin and a controlled 3rd party parts market."
Except you were not talking about energy conversion or engineering. You were talking about consumer demand. And you were wrong about those topics. People were willing to buy EVs. The car companies not not willing to sell them. If you want more proof, look at the prius. They sold very very well and the same type of people were lining up in 1999 to buy EVs. There is clearly demand, it is just that no large car company is willing to sell to that demand because they are worried about losing after market profits. But thanks for shilling anyway...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The scheme involves a number of ground-breaking proposals to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, including speeding up the installation of electric vehicle charging outlets on streets and in homes, and offering incentives for companies to install charging stations in the workplace.
On streets?!? Gee, what could possible go wrong with that... nobody would be tempted to, say, unplug that cable from your car and steal the power you are paying for, now would they? How many companies (other than government contractors like Lockheed) have secure parking lots? What's to stop me from plugging in my motor home and living there? Have they really thought about all the different ways this system can be abused? Wouldn't a simple battery-exchange program(just like the propane-tank exchange they already have at Lowe's/Home Depo) work a lot better?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
Deregulation is a nice theory though. Not quite as elegant as communism, but it's a nice idea.
That's how everything works in the US. Things start in the cities and then the rest of the nation eventually catches on. California has been demanding higher efficiency appliances for decades now and because of the vast purchasing power of the state manufacturers are forced to meet our demand. This in turn allows other states to have the option to purchase those more efficient appliances, though it appears most opt for the cheaper up front appliances as opposed to the long run cheaper more efficient appliances. I guess some people just don't get this whole environmental thing.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
this is cool. You know, most of the rest of the ChristianWalmartMicrosft States of America can't stand this stuff. And that's fine. I hope California can just gracefully say adios to the other 49, best wishes, etc. Kind of like how Singapore parted ways with Malaysia when they realized Singapore was doing all the heavy lifting there.
Atlanta, Tokyo, NY, London, etc. work because they are spoke and hub. The bay area is a scattered mix-match of suburban and urban with jobs sites everywhere.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the Tokyo I know is better described by your second sentence than spoke and hub....
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...
I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Yes, small isolated areas, like MOST OF CALIFORNIA.
(On the off chance that you were being sarcastic first: you're doing it wrong.)
The Americans are the idiots, not the car.
They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
What I do and knowing what the market is are inseparable, of course. My living obviously depends on knowing what's viable and what's not. The more the market would embrace more advanced energy conversion systems, obviously, the richer we engineers would be.
Anyway, you don't know what you're talking about at all and are just spouting BS you saw in a movie.
Your little example of the Prius as disproof of the public's insufficient interest in cars like EVs 10 years ago doesn't support your apparent argument that every car company in the world is evil and has purposely kept EV technology from the people or whatever. Neither the Prius nor the Insight sold worth a damn their first generation even despite all their much greater similarities to traditional gas cars than to evs. And that was way after the EV1 your little consipracy movie was about. In fact, the vast majority of hybrids on the market today don't sell worth a damn.
Who are you accusing me of shilling for anyway, just out of curiosity? Companies trying to sell EVs? You don't like EVs?
I'm saying -- let's buy the things this time and reqard the companies that are offering them. What are you saying? That 10 years ago there was a conspiracy to keep EV technology from the people and that now it is gone and we don't need to worry, they're going to sell plenty well?? I don't get it.
this is cool. You know, most of the rest of the ChristianWalmartMicrosft States of America can't stand this stuff. And that's fine. I hope California can just gracefully say adios to the other 49, best wishes, etc. Kind of like how Singapore parted ways with Malaysia when they realized Singapore was doing all the heavy lifting there.
Separation you want, eh? No problem. Hell, it's been the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia for years now when it comes to personal freedoms. We'll take the Military with us if you don't mind. Based on your laws, you seem to be oblivious to crime anyway, so we wouldn't want to burden you with those budgets or protection.
Good luck, and I hope no one comes across your "free and open-minded" borders to mug you with a spork while you stand there with that "I'm sooo baked" look on your face.
Peace out.
Um, so? The old Honda Insight hybrid was a small car that got 61 city/70 highway on gasoline (which has less GHG emissions per unit volume than diesel). Sure, its better than the Prius (though not much, after consideration of the differences between diesel and gasoline), but the Prius is a midsize car, not a small car.
Thank you for being a person who has a clue on this topic rather than spouting the typical BS that seems to have orginated with some hollywood movie or whatever.
It wouldn't be the first time that GM had interfered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Unlike certain people, I don't get all my information from Michael Moore and his wannabes. Just doing my part for Team Reality.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
No. Sorry. Mass transit is part of the solution, but it is not the solution.
The problem lies in the inherent difference between mass transit and public transit and most people don't recognize the difference.
Mass transit focuses on getting mass number of people between various high density locations. These are your medium to heavy rail systems. For the Bay Area that's BART and CalTrain.
In places like Japan, where they have high population densities, it works great. There's a reason places like Tokyo, Moscow, New York, London, etc., can have fantastically efficient mass transit systems: they have the population density to deal with it.
Public transit on the other hand focuses on being a 'vehicle replacement' so people in lower density areas can actually give up their cars. This is taxies up through light rail. Fewer passengers, but more convenient and more versatile.
Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.
The whole electric car infrastructure is an expensive idea, and it talks to the whole "chicken and the egg" problem. Without infrastructure, electric cars are useless. Without electric cars, no one will build the infrastructure. This is actively solving the infrastructure problem ahead of the cars.
Is it a good idea? Ultimately, yes. Is it the right idea? That's a lot harder to say. A massive bay area wide fleet of on-demand bio-diesel fueled hybrid shuttle buses might be better. But who's to say? Cars are a part of US culture partially because of our geography. We live in suburbia, which is inherently tied in with car culture.
Unless your mass transit plan includes re-arranging US cities and how people live in this country, it will never be the solution.
Cheers,
Bagheera
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Europe has higher fuel costs because they tax the fuel heavily to support mass transit and other things that make it so that people don't need to use their cars constantly. This rather changes what kind of car it makes sense for individuals to purchase.
No, they aren't. The best diesels are maybe slightly better than comparable gas-powered hybrids in terms of mileage per unit volume (but maybe not, the best ones I've seen have been subcompacts in the 60s of MPG, whereas the best hybrid subcompact -- the old Honda Insight -- was in the same range; most comparisons are apples to oranges, comparing subcompact diesels to, for instance, the midsize Prius), but diesel has higher GHG emissions per unit volume than gasoline.
(Diesel hybrids exist, mostly in large vehicles, but you don't get as much mileage increase from making a diesel a hybrid because a basic diesel engine doesn't have as much of the kind of inefficiency that a hybrid system will minimize as a gasoline engine.)
Excellent points - although I'll have to struggle with the semantics of public vs. mass transit....
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
RTFA
He said the grid *is* barley taxed. So people are paying for their electricity with barley right now.
I guess the electricity companies use the barley to make beer, and the beer fuels all their slaves running on treadmills to generate more electricity.
Don't you know anything?
I am anarch of all I survey.
I'll make it simple for you. 10 years ago car companies realized that EVs don't need as many after market parts as IC cars do. So ever since then, they have acted to prevent EVs from coming to market. Not evil but against the public good. You are blaming the consumers (who did want to buy the cars) instead of the car companies (who didn't want to sell them). Quit being intentionally dense.
For comparison: a used Prius goes for ~24K USD http://www.internetautoguide.com/usedcars/11-int/toyota/prius/index.html
a new prius goes for ~22K USD http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/
Now why would a used Prius sell for more than the new one? Because you can't find a new one to buy. They are always on back order. Really? No demand? Stick to engineering...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The issues with Enron went back way further than one year...
The other key words for me are
High performance engines always perform badly in urban situations. Is it wise to keep buying them ? Also the PM (particulate matter) issue with diesels is pretty much solved and the NOx issue is getting better (Euro 5).
When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
GM never sold a single one. GM never wanted to sell a single one. GM prevented them from being available in most of the USA. GM refused to service or support them in 90% of the USA. GM could take it back from you if you didn't keep it in the small approved portion of the USA.
Were they subsidizing them? Sure. Were they in low demand? No. The Insight and Prius I were both assumed to be sold for a loss, but they were also mass produced and widely available. They didn't play GM games of hiding them from people, refusing to sell them, having a complicated application process turning away many people that wanted one. They produced lots, and sold every one. And then went on to build many more hybrids based on what they learned. The EV was a limited program designed to be a marketing gimic that GM never really supported. To claim the crippled way that a few people were allowed the priviledge to drive one for a very short period was somehow reasonable is a laugh. The EV1 was not a test bed. It was not preparation for the next generation. There was never supposed to be a next generation. And there wasn't. It was a marketing gimic, and it's over and all of the EV1s are returned and pretty much destroyed. GM never sold a single one, and never intended to.
Learn to love Alaska
What makes the government think it knows which technology is good for reducing carbon emissions? Just put a cap on pollution, punish polluters, fix the market failure by capturing external costs associated with pollution, and let the market fix the problem efficiently and cheaply.
Currently hooked on AMP
And that was way after the EV1 your little consipracy movie was about. In fact, the vast majority of hybrids on the market today don't sell worth a damn.
GM released the EV1 intending to never sell it. They never sold a single one, as per their design. The vast majority of hybrids sell quite well. Perhaps if GM had actually offerend the EV1 for sale, it would have sold better. The Insight was bashed for not selling well (it was only a 2-seater) and it was selling for $5k over sticker and selling out everywhere. The same thing happened with the Prius I. What isn't selling are the Ford Escape hybrids and such. Someone already getting a fuel inefficient vehicle type isn't going to go gaga over a few more MPG. The American companies still don't get it, and when they don't get it, they blame the consumer. All the while Honda and Toyota gain share and silently sell (in large numbers and great demand) that which you say isn't in demand.
Learn to love Alaska
Normally, I'm incensed by euroweenies claiming superiority for some reason or another.
but, you're right about he hybrid nonsense. people apparently ARE that stupid.
not as stupid as the writers for knight rider, though. I've got to stop watching that nonsense. Their big plan this week was to break down top secret documents with "enzymes" so they wouldn't have to incinerate them. It was claimed that this produces methane, and their solution to that was to burn the methane for heat.
Every time they stick that green peacock up there I am reminded that NBC's parent company is GE, so they're not exactly unbiased about the whole "green economy" thing.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
The rate to which utility companies have colluded on prices in the past is well known. In Australia rampant price fixing lead to government "ring fencing" and free market contestability regulations, and more choice for the end user. Power generation companies were no longer allowed to be power distribution companies. This was matched to an independent national electricity market and hub company that so far has done a great job as traffic cop IMHO. Have a look at http://www.nemmco.com/
Disclaimer: I was involved in the independent audit of their market settlements system design, so I have opinions.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It costs less per mile than any available 4-door diesel cars available in my market.
I'm not sure how exactly I fit into the "American Idiot" category, but I'm the last person to bad-mouth stereotyping: it's a great time saver.
THL phish sticks
As an aside, what the heck would you do if you run out of charge? Currently a can of gas is pretty portable... enough batteries to move a depleted car... not so much. I don't think it's very feasible to have a recovery vehicle come out and juice the car up for 2 hours (optimistically). That leaves towing. Not the end of the world, but a step down from the current situation.
Electric cars help on the pollution front, but do jack squat for the congestion problem, and I think that's a problem that's just as bad in the Bay. That coupled with the fact that the hippies won't budge on nuclear, and we're still burning the same hydrocarbons to make the power, we're just doing it in a different place (which might be more efficient, but is it *that* much more efficient?).
Just because your car is powered by electricity doesn't mean the electricity was generated without the use of fossil fuels. Might I remind the greens that most electricity in the U.S. is (unfortunately) still produced by burning coal? The same coal combustion which causes acid rain?
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (but solar and tidal energy are as close as we'll get).
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
And those issues were oddly not solved by putting fewer restrictions on Enron. Or rather, they were, but in the worst way possible.
Let's add some more facts to this discussion.
You talk about GM refusing to sell, service, or support EV1s outside of the tiny corner where they were running their project. Yet you completely ignore why they did this. I can only surmise that you are either being disingenuous or, more likely, you simply don't know.
So allow me to inform you. The batteries in the EV1 were extremely sensitive to cold, which ruled out most of the US due to the phenomenon we call "winter". There were also concerns about how they would respond to humidity, which ruled out all of the remaining places which get humid. Take a map of the US, eliminate all of the places which ever get cold or humid, and what remains is essentially GM's approved EV1 area.
This alone should tell you that the EV1 was not ready for full-scale sales and production. But it goes a lot farther than this. The EV1's design wasn't up to the rigorous safety requirements that any production car must meet. As a research project this made a great deal of sense. As a production car, obviously this simply could not work.
GM spent a billion dollars on the EV1, and leased them for half of what they would have charged if they had been trying to make money at it. A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
Of course GM never intended to sell any EV1s. That's pretty well implied by "research project". It was intended to give them experience for building an eventual production model electric car. The experience it gave them was, alas, that a production model would be impractically expensive. The truth of this should be obvious given that no car maker has ever built such a thing in the decade since the EV1 project was cancelled. Perhaps GM is colossally stupid. Given how much money they've been losing that proposition is pretty reasonable. But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them? No, they are not. Nobody is building electric cars because technology and demand simply haven't met yet.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
They avoided millions in liability risk from having experimental products rolling on the roads outside of their control.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Ah, liberal politics: Politicians deciding to spend other people's money on ideas that no business in its right mind would invest in, due to limited profitability. Billions of dollars of tax money being spend on something with extremely limited benefits, if any.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
Maybe because the GGP said that customers were to blame for the death of the electric car and I (and reality) was disagreeing with him. Good information, but I think all the reasons you listed are ancillary to the issue of after market parts which is the real reason we don't have EVs. GM is a very large company and while losing a billion USD is a lot, if they wanted to dominate the market, they would have pushed on. Instead they wanted to preserve the current business model. Understandable, but like I said above, against the public good.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
So....
Once I buy the car, it's my problem. As long as GM clearly says "no more parts, these are one-offs" when I sign the check, what's to support?
It's not much different than buying any other discontinued car (such as ones whose builders are out of business).
I understand the desire to stop the program at the corporate level, but they could have set a wildly high price and let some collectors keep them. Could also have just gifted them to some universities (although, I can understand that such an action might reveal technologies to the competition).
(South park is never off topic!) : P
_-_-_GSLUG_-_-_
Except that GM's experiment with them showed that they could not be sold at anything remotely approaching a profit. Nothing to do with aftermarket parts, and pushing on with such an obvious boondoggle would not do anything for the public good. But believe what you like....
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Get our screwed-up tort system fixed and perhaps this stuff could have happened. As it stands now, having a few hundred experimental vehicles on the road is a tremendous liability risk. GM was willing to take that risk when it was part of a program designed to lead to a production-worthy car, but once that program ended the risk became unacceptable.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Why? Would you spend your own money on something if you knew you could have somebody else buy it for you?
All they have to say is "But GM and Ford and Citigroup and A.G. Edwards and ... are getting government money for big projects like this. We really need it, otherwise we may have to do lay offs to save up the money." And then our idiot "representatives" will act like it's the end of the world and start throwing money.
We're basically fucked now that big corporations know the government will print money for them.
Maybe not
Because the same people who promote electric cars, are also the people that recoil from even the word "nuclear"
No, we just recoil at the way Bush pronounces it. We have no problem with nuclear energy.
The real problem is that good reactors are expensive. People don't want to invest so much in infrastructure because it's "socialist".
Sounds great. In fact why not put up solar panels and power the whole city, and while we are at it I'm sure there are lots of other stuff we could do too!
Look people, fact of the matter is that our government has been broke for a LONG time. Treasury is PRINTING money to bail out citibank.
It's over. Everything that's expensive and requires BIG infrastructure is going nowhere.
It may not seem like it now, but next year is going to suck. The dollar is going to drop like a rock and the rest of the world is going to stop lending cash to the U.S. government (at all levels). Once that hits the fan the true cost of what we THINK we have will be facing us.
Dreams of high-tech Eco powered society are done. Nobody will be able to afford it.
On the plus side big pollution will probably go down as well as we will not be able to afford that either.
I don't know about the Bay Area, but the LA area already has a lot of EV charging terminals at various places that were installed when the EV1 was on the road. Obviously more would have to be installed as the number of EVs on the road increased... but the point is they were already there.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
The idiocy of the US is the fault of the EPA which continues to use the misleading MPG rating for fuel economy. Given how bad our educational system is, its not reasonable to expect consumers to re-do the math themselves.
In terms of actual dollars per mile the Prius is only marginally better than the (significantly cheaper) Corolla.
Here's the thing I don't get. How come electric car manufacturers don't run pilots in my home town of Winnipeg.
Ok, so the -35C in January is a little hard on the batteries, and the auxillary heating systems might not be able to keep up. But have any of you ever been to Winnipeg, specifically downtown and looked at the outdoor parking lots??!?! They almost ALL have electrical outlets for drivers to plug their cars in! We already have the infrastructure in place!
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
The Prius is a land yacht, and any one that drives one should be hauled off to the gallows for their "let them eat cake" attitude. Here's a car that gets 100mpg and fits a normal human being just fine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Z4R2uLv-A
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Actually, Gray was just the poor sap left standing when the music stopped. The deregulation was courtesy of Pete Wilson, who skated out quite handily before the wreckage he caused came back to haunt the state.
ehintz
Given that EV1 production ceased nearly a decade ago and no major car manufacturer has seen fit to take up the cause, I'm going to have to say that electric cars probably weren't going to be profitable at the time, considering that none of them seem to think that they could be profitable now. Perhaps they're all a bunch of morons, but I doubt it. I can believe one of them being stupid, or several of them, but all of them? No way.
It's telling that the real successes for alternative cars in the past decade have been hybrids, not electrics. Hybrids are much less radical and eliminate essentially all of the massive downsides of pure electrics. Even the Chevy Volt, being marketed as an "electric car", is really just a standard serial hybrid with the ability to charge its batteries from external power and some mind-bending PR applied.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
The grid is barley taxed during the night, so this is a match made in heaven.
Until you find out some surprises about people's real usage patterns for their cars
Diesel powered cars in europe get better economy because they are turbocharged small diesel engines. Normal (naturally aspirated) diesel engines are large and heavy. Both get good efficiency. The reason why they get good highway economy in Europe is that there is less breathing losses in the small engines wrt to the large ones.
And the lower power to weight ratio of diesels wrt their gas powered cousins, is another reason why they get better economy. When compared to a small gasoline engine of roughly the same power output (compare a 110HP 2.0L Turbo Diesel to a 110HP 1.1L Turbo Gas), their economy isn't that much better (67 versus 57). So European diesel buyers are giving up 0-60 times for better economy.
A Prius is vastly overpowered compared to either of those. It has a 76HP 1.5L normally aspirated 16V I4 engine plus a 67HP electric motor for a total of 143HP (145 DIN HP). It accelerates much faster than your standard turbo diesel car. It gets 46MPG on the highway, but that is using the much tougher new EPA driving tests at 75MPH peak with the AC on. Using the European tests, it gets 56.7MPG on the highway (4.2L per 100km). After adding in the fact that diesel fuel has about 15% more energy than gas per volume, or about the equivalent of 65.2MPG. What it excels at though is urban economy. There it gets 48MPG (EPA) and 47.3MPG (Euro (5.0L per 100km)). The european turbo diesel cars don't get anywhere near that. And the Prius would do even better with a smaller turbocharged engine, say about 1.0L Turbo gasoline engine making those 76HP. Its more efficient and lighter in weight.
European turbo diesels are still overpowered, just not as much as gasoline powered cars are over here. Here most engines are normally aspirated and get their high power via large displacement and/or high speed. This is bad for highway economy. However its even worse for urban driving. The smallest Focus engine here is a 16V DOHC 2.0L making 140HP. To do 90MPH (faster than is legal here), it only needs about 35HP (the 140HP allows 132MPH max). The real reason for the high power is to get low 0-60 times of 8.3 seconds (5 spd man). It gets 24MPG (EPA (9.9L/100km)) in the city and 35MPG (EPA (6.8L/100km)) on the highway. In Europe that same car has a 1.4L 8V gas engine getting only 74HP but a higher highway MPG of 47 (5.1L/100km). But to go from 0-60, it takes 14.1 seconds and tops out at 107MPH (the gearing is wrong for max speed).
A 40HP engine (about 400cc turbocharged gasoline or 1000cc turbocharged diesel) alone would take 28 seconds to go from 0-60, but top out at over 90MPH and get about 63MPG (EPA) or 78MPG per European standards. Adding a plug in hybrid to that of about the same power 40HP or 30KW, would put the 0-60 times back under 14 seconds, yet boost urban MPG to about the same 78MPG (EPA or European). Turbo diesels get about 30-40% efficiency. Gasoline turbo engines get 25 to 35%. Base load power plants get from 36 to 48%. Combined cycle plants (gas turbine Brayton followed by a steam turbine Rankine) can get up to 60% efficiencies. Most of the higher efficiencies in engines are for the large slow stationary engines. Of course that is all at the high efficiency point. The wide operating range of most car engines pushes those numbers down greatly. The base load plants operate at peak efficiency 24/7.
Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego â" though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
I always thought that was how EVs could be viable for long trips.
I liked the interview of its CEO at Web 2.0 summit. http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/a-conversation-with-shai-agass.html
Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.
I'm an Australian, and I've traveled a bit and spent a lot of time in San Fran, using the BART and MUNI to get from my relatives place in Pacifica to various places around.
I agree it sucks for commuting, unless the place you want to go happens to be on a connected line on the BART/MUNI lines. Fortunately most of the places I've been going to have been (well, not Pacifica - it's a fucking $40 cab fare from there to Daly City which I discovered last time).
I almost totally agree with the GP. I agree with some of what you said, but I think the Bay Area could (logistics aside - those fucking hills are a killer, not to mention quake-proofing everything) definitely benefit from improved public transport (using your nomenclature) around the city area. At the moment its a bit of a chore.
I've just come from spending 3 months in Europe and have been reminded again of the awesomeness of properly done transport systems. I think there's enough people in and around SF to justify a system (again, ignoring logistics, which I think would be the biggest roadblock there).
From the time I've spent in the US though, it'll be a long, long haul to get people out of cars onto public transport. It needs to be made cheap, clean, safe, and (most importantly) useful by having those links you're talking about.
I'd love to come to the US and see Euro/Japan style public transport to get around in. I really do not look forward to repeat visits and the fact that to get anywhere I have to drive or get a taxi.
Yet you completely ignore why they did this. I can only surmise that you are either being disingenuous or, more likely, you simply don't know.
That's rich from someone that leaves out one of the more direct reasons. CA and AZ gave cash to buyers. Well, in the case of leases, it is a capital reduction. Compare, say, Dallas and LA and tell me which is more humid. The winters in areas where it was offered were often colder than Dallas winters too. But they only offered it in places where there were large payments for electric vehicles at the time. But no, that had nothing to do with it. And you are the bringer of truth (as approved by GM).
A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
And that would be news to me. I thought they were road worthy (as in being NHTSA crash tested).
But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them?
I think that the US auto makers have done the embrase-and-puke method of preventing competition. I know people that hate foreign cars because they read Unsafe at Any Speed and link the Corsair to foreign products. Aircooled rear engine is unsafe at any speed. I happen to own one of the last aircooled mass-production vehicle sold in the US (which also happened to be rear engined), and it is unsafe at any speed, but mainly because I'm the one behind the wheel. American turbos in the '70s and before were so horrible that no one wanted turbos when the Japanese brought over some decent ones in the '80s. The EV1 was done poorly enough that it actually made people more grumpy about electric vehicles. "If GM can't make it work and destroys everyone they sell, what hope does some podunk maker like Toyota have?" It continually amazes me, but most people I know that only buy American cars use a failed American car project as one of the reasons that the foreign car makers are bad. Not that I think the makers really could pull off that purposefully, but it is a nice side effect they enjoyed.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius.
For someone that has such insight, sometimes you really miss the ball. Name three cars sold for an (unconfirmed) loss that was expected when the project was started. I'll give you a hint. EV1, Prius I and Insight. Can you now see a similarity?
The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
The hybrids weren't ready for prime time, but Honda and Toyota did it anyway. And you know what? They didn't screw it up like GM. That's my point. GM screwed up, and looking at another set of money-losing cars show how it could have been done, if GM didn't have its head up its ass.
Learn to love Alaska
No, its a midsize car.
Um. WTF?
Some people need a car that can fit more than a normal human being. Some people are above average size. Some people shop. And it only gets ~80 MPG (US). And drivers can hardly be blamed for not buying a car that hasn't been available for more than 40 years, and probably wasn't street legal most places, and of which only 50 were made.
So why not rearrange the cities? The Bay area is still growing rapidly, it would seem, and the newer bits (I'm at the north edge of San Jose, for example) absolutely suck as places to live, because the population density is so low that there are no services. Nada. It's a thirty minute walk to buy groceries, a 50 minute walk to eat supper (with the possible exception of a Spanish language sports bar that sells quasi-pizza), there's nominally s Starbucks here, but it closes at, what, 8PM or something. The city planners are clearly retards. They need to draw lines and say NO MORE CONSTRUCTION OUTSIDE THIS LINE. Then they need to tear up every second street inside that boundary and make them pedestrian areas with light rail down the middle instead. Remove whatever zoning restrictions are separating the residences and the services. Charge for road use and make the light rail free, instead of the other way around.
There's no downside. The current arrangement is insanity.
So you're saying California is ahead of the curve?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
of mining exotic minerals, manufacturing them into batteries, and then cleanly disposing of said batteries at the end of their life cycles?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
you should also add in the equivalent costs for electric: energy used to mine coal and get it to power plants, energy used to mine lead, nickel, cadmium, and other heavy metals and manufacture batteries with them (and then dispose of them as toxic waste), etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is a commercial proposal from that guy from Israel who runs BetterPlace. First he was going to wire Israel with charging stations. Then it was Hawaii. Now it's the SF Bay Area.
I'd be more impressed if he actually deployed something before announcing the next vaporware deal. They haven't even demoed a working prototype of the automated battery-exchange station. There's a an animated video, but it's just conceptual.
The first two locations made more sense. On a small island, electric cars could work - you just can't take a long trip. Since Israel doesn't get along with most of its neighbors, there's not much cross-border car traffic, and the country is small. But the SF Bay Area is a big step up from there.
The whole battery-exchange idea seems too complex mechanically. It requires a big standardized battery pack across a range of vehicles.
It's interesting to think about how one might make the battery-exchange system work. You need a very rugged connector suitable for heavy current, blind mating, and bad weather. Such devices are rare, but the New York City Transit Authority has had them on subway cars since 1914. Subway cars can be coupled and uncoupled without anyone going near a coupler, and the couplers connect air and electrical lines. So there's a mechanism that can do the job.
Diesel powered cars in europe get better economy because they are turbocharged small diesel engines. Normal (naturally aspirated) diesel engines are large and heavy.
I used to drive a Golf II Diesel (non turbo charged, 1.6L, 60HP or so), which consistently got 5 l/100km which is about 47 MPG. Thats great economy, and there is nothing large and heavy about it.
Think about it: We're talking about a car that was manufactured from 1983 - 1992!
Its messed up that 25 years ago they made a car that got a mileage that most cars can't hit today.
I bet 6 months after installation the left-wingers in SanFran realize that they don't have the electric grid & sufficient generation capacity to keep the cars on the road.
Those cars would for the most part be charged at night, where we have vast excess baseload capacity anyway.
"Public transit on the other hand focuses on being a 'vehicle replacement' so people in lower density areas can actually give up their cars." There are a lot of places in Japan where people can give up their cars. It is not perfect yet, but the system is still expanding. A good transit system would go a long ways to helping with the problems in the US. As you said, it is not the whole solution, but if it is done right, it will go a long ways.
Until we'll have batteries that can last 12+ hours of continuous use (average and versatile use, not just stable-mph highway run), I wouldn't ever consider buying an exclusively electric vehicle. Yes, I could buy one for short range rides, and have a hybrid or else for real life distances (I wouldn't even dare to think about how an e.g. 1000+ mile ride - not that unfrequent for me - would be, and how long it would take), but having a gazillion cars is a stupid idea, although I guess car makers would love it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I thought the fleet of EV-1s at the Berkeley BART station was a good start, but someone kiboshed those. Lister?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
There is no need for "an essential electric vehicle infrastructure". what is needed are cars that run off the current infrastructure.
There's a car in india called the Reva that runs off electicity, and can be charged from any common power socket. Sure, it's a bit crap, but I'm sure Californian ingenuity can come up with a better design.
If the californian govt. wants to encourage electric car usage, they should sponsor design competitions, or offer tax breaks on electic cars, etc. etc, not plough money into massive top-down infrastructure projects.
Well, that's what I think anyway.
The Fail Infrastructure, that is, our Fearless Leadership, is an awesomely resilient and redundant system. The popular dissent is used as a tool to explain failure, rather than as useful input for promoting the greater good. Just look at the sheer weight of influencing factors and know the system will sink under he weight of profit-taking. I have a newspaper clipping from the early '60s of a certain tomorrowland fantasy they called Bay Area Rapid Transit. I will say no more.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
They don't even have enough electricity to keep their lights on, never-mind handle the load of millions of vehicles trying to charge up all the time.
I am not an engineer, but I worked with auto parts for a while. AFAIK, the main issue is that propane does not act as a lubricant for the valves in the combustion chamber. Special hardened valve-seats are wanted in the cylinder head(s). We had a customer who wanted to save the $1K difference by using a toyota car head in his fork-lift. I always wondered how that worked out. [chuckle]
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It also means that there's little to no market for the Chrysler Whale-On-Wheels 2000(tm) or whatever it's called - you can't refuel 'em, you can't park 'em.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Its messed up that 25 years ago they made a car that got a mileage that most cars can't hit today.
No, it's expected. Vehicles today are much heavier because of extra safety (and other) features and therefore need more powerful engines to have the same relatively performance.
The Golf Mk 2 weighs (according to Wikipedia) between 900 and 1200kg. The current Mk5 Golf weighs between 1300 and 1600kg.
From a bit of googling, it looks like the 1.9L diesel Golf average about 45-50mpg. Considering it's producing about 50% more power andpushing a vehicle around 40% heavier, that's pretty impressive. Stick that modern engine into your old Golf and the fuel economy (and performance) would be significantly better.
It was just a humorous response to the humorous idea that the Prius is a midsized car. My first midsized car was a Dodge Dart, which by today's standards is a land yacht. They get smaller every year so I figure pretty soon midsized will mean you don't have to tie your groceries to the roof of the car.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The same year (2006) corolla gets about 32 mpg. I have two friends with toyota corollas.
In years I don't drive like a total dick, 30,000 miles cost me $1112 ($2 for about 556 gallons). The corolla cost $1876 ($2 for about 938 gallons).
So I save $764 a year. When gas was at $4, I saved $1528.
Besides, I like the car anyway. Try fitting 2 single kayaks INSIDE a corolla.
THL phish sticks
Why can't the utilities use their existing profits for this?
As a Libertarian leaning conservative, I say,"Because, we don't want them to."
My reasoning:
We have public roads, because it doesn't make sense to have one entity controlling the means of commerce. Early Europe was hampered by the fact that you had to pay a toll on every road you crossed when you traveled. The founding fathers looked on that, saw what a mess it was, and wrote into our Constitution that the Federal government should control interstate commerce and be responsible for building and maintaining the roads.
The Federal government needs to build and maintain a national power grid for the exact same reason. If I, being in North Carolina, want to buy power from a solar grid plant in Arizona or a windmill farm in Montana, I have to pay a toll to multiple companies between here and there. The machine of commerce becomes clogged with multiple little contracts and breaks down. A company in Illinois could have the power to "cut off the air supply" to the Montana wind farmers when they want to move into that industry. Small players are easily kept out of the market by big players, simply by controlling access.
Today, anyone can start a trucking company and offer to haul your freight, simply by abiding by the published laws and paying for the requisite taxes and stamps. If I want to break into the power generation business, I have to deal with a company, that may not necessarily want to make a deal with me.
Build a national grid with published interconnect standards, and you create a market. Obama talks a good game about "investing in new technologies", but the fact is that the government has a VERY poor track record of picking viable technologies, when compared to investors that are putting their own money and jobs on the line. The government decrees what the state of affairs will be, writes it in a document, and creates a body of law to force their decree. Investors will put their money into several small ventures, then build on those that show promise. The investors never stop evolving their technology, because they never have anything written down that decrees what the future must be.
Create the market, and you cut loose those investment hounds of war to do what they do best. That's why I believe the government should build a national electric grid (and also why I believe they should get the hell OUT of education business).
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
We're basically fucked now that big corporations know the government will print money for them.
vs. individuals knowing the government will print money for them?
It was so sad to see all the websites calculating which candidates tax plan would save you the most money? I guess elections have always been for sale, but I don't recall it being so blatant. This was the first time I've seen the price of a vote pegged at $1000(US) in a nationally televised political debate. It's as if the Titanic is sinking, and the officers were arguing over which shipmate should get the china vs the crystal.
We were fucked when the populace realized that they held the strings of the public purse.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
They may rearrange themselves -- if the transport is built, people will prefer to live within walking distance of shops and a station.
They do here in London anyway -- any advert for a place to rent says something like "5 minutes walk to station, 3 minutes from high street with shops and bars, 6 minutes from large supermarket". Or a cheaper place might say "15 minutes to station, 10 minutes from shops, 10 minutes on bus to supermarket". The most important factors influencing the price of a flat are 1) affluence of an area, 2) how far it is from a station, 3) how far it is from decent shops.
A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
And that would be news to me. I thought they were road worthy (as in being NHTSA crash tested).
I think I may have misread this initially. I see now that they were fully crash tested. However they did have many other faults and therefore were not production ready, although they were up to safety standards.
But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them?
I think that the US auto makers have done the embrase-and-puke method of preventing competition. I know people that hate foreign cars because they read Unsafe at Any Speed and link the Corsair to foreign products. Aircooled rear engine is unsafe at any speed. I happen to own one of the last aircooled mass-production vehicle sold in the US (which also happened to be rear engined), and it is unsafe at any speed, but mainly because I'm the one behind the wheel. American turbos in the '70s and before were so horrible that no one wanted turbos when the Japanese brought over some decent ones in the '80s. The EV1 was done poorly enough that it actually made people more grumpy about electric vehicles. "If GM can't make it work and destroys everyone they sell, what hope does some podunk maker like Toyota have?" It continually amazes me, but most people I know that only buy American cars use a failed American car project as one of the reasons that the foreign car makers are bad. Not that I think the makers really could pull off that purposefully, but it is a nice side effect they enjoyed.
And we all know that the US is the only country in the world that actually matters....
Come on, now. Apply a little brain. Even if GM some how managed to destroy the entire American market for electric cars via its ineptitude, why didn't some Japanese or European manufacturer build one for their home market? The fact that no electric car has been sold in the US might be attributable to the things you say. The fact that no electric car has been sold in Japan or Europe... not so much.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius.
For someone that has such insight, sometimes you really miss the ball. Name three cars sold for an (unconfirmed) loss that was expected when the project was started. I'll give you a hint. EV1, Prius I and Insight. Can you now see a similarity?
And yet the Prius has made a crapload of money for Toyota in the long run. GM expected the same of the EV1 but it turned out not to work. More to the point, the vastly different characteristics of a hybrid mean that its success means nothing about the EV1's potential success.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
The hybrids weren't ready for prime time, but Honda and Toyota did it anyway. And you know what? They didn't screw it up like GM. That's my point. GM screwed up, and looking at another set of money-losing cars show how it could have been done, if GM didn't have its head up its ass.
This just makes no sense. Hybrids were very much ready for prime time. A car which goes just as far as a regular car, which fills up at regular stations, and which requires zero special equipment at home? People were willing to buy hybrids because they offered nicely improved fuel economy at a small premium in price without sacrificing range. People were not willing to buy EV1s bec
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
His one paragraph is certainly far more detailed and comprehensive than the zero paragraphs we've seen to back up the original claim.
All of the numbers in the grandparent post are sourced from fairly authoritative sites, and the math he does on them is simple, so anyone can check his results rather than simply believing his conclusions. If you think he's wrong, then how about you say where he's wrong, and provide evidence for that claim, rather than simply waving your hands about some alleged analysis that may or may not even say what it was claimed to?
Evidence beats assertion. If someone doesn't back up their claims, why should we believe them?
It's fun to drive
The only thing less fun to drive than a tippy econobox is an under-tired tippy econobox with a few hundred pounds of battery weight tacked on for good measure.
Well, maybe just north from central California. We don't really have much use for LA or San Diego but if we bring Oregon and Washington along with us we can create the society from Ecotopia (or maybe even Cascadia).
Web consulting +
It's expected by whom -- anonymous Slashdot posters? Listen to the DOE. Centralized power plants are more efficient and have better pollution controls than cars. Also, it's far easier to clean up a couple hundred power plants than 250 million tailpipes.
With our *current* grid, here are various calculated pollutant changes:
CO2: -27%
PM10: +18%
SOx: No change
NOx: -31%
VOCs: -93%
CO: -98%
Furthermore, these pollutants will be more displaced away from where people are breathing and end up higher in the atmosphere, unlike car emissions which tend to be at ground-level in crowded areas. Now, picture our grid after carbon cap & trade is in place for a decade or so, and what that'll do to these numbers.
Oh, and I should add that this assumes no change in vehicles for increasing efficiency when switching to EVs. Quite to the contrary, EVs tend to be very streamlined so that they don't need as big of a battery pack to go as far.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Considering that the diesel Golf and Bora/Jetta actually handle, drive, etc like (ie have basically the same dynamics as) the normal fun-to-drive gas versions, and in fact, often actually feeling peppier around town due to their power being more at lower rpms than higher rpms as with gas engines, it's all the more amazing. None of the weird mixing of brake pads and weak regenerative braking (since batteries can only be recharged so fast) + then getting 15hp or whatever electric motors to integrate well with an 80%+ power-by-gas-engine drivetrain while lugging around all the weight of the redundant drive system, all the 20% losses (due to maximums of about 80% efficiency) at every form of energy conversion (mechanical to electrical to chemical and back etc) versus just the one of chemical to mechanical of diesel engines, etc etc that are intrinsic to "hybrids". The current hybrids on US market really are just stupid compared to diesels.
In fact, if you look at the hybrid versions of vehicles that are offered both as hybrids and as simple gasoline versions with equivalent performance, you almost never see more than 2-5 mpg improvements with the hybrid. And they cost like $10k more (even if the govt covers much of that). Meanwhile, diesels basically across the board get 30% better efficiency than their performance equivalents in gasoline powered models and at same high standards in driving dynamics.
There's nothing misleading about using MPG to rate fuel economy.
(Except insofar as the assumptions underlying the tests don't represent actual driving conditions, but that doesn't seem to be much of a problem with the newer ratings.)
Dollars/mile may be useful for financial planning, but have nothing to do with "greenness". That being said, I'd like to see the definition of "marginally better" and the supporting detail for this argument.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
People tried to buy the EV1 and were turned away. I don't know the quantities that they would have been sold at, but GM never ever tried. If they were going to sell them below cost, limit access, and screw over owners (in the owners minds, GM made it clear they weren't evern going to sell a single one and let anyone keep it), they should have just left it a prototype. A road running prototype should have been used only for what Honda and Toyota did. Get something that would make money at 100,000 units a year on the road, even if it's only at 20,000 units a year for a loss.
GM should have released it widely for sale, or not released it. To step one toe into the market gives not only a failed vehicle that people know them by, but also incredibly poor business practices that screwed over actual customers and potential customers (ones that walked into dealerships with money, and were turned away). GM screwed up in multiple different ways.
Car buyers have demonstrated that they really like hybrids and so far there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any significant number of people would buy EVs, not even EVs done right, not even EVs done right in the absence of an obvious GM screwup.
The evidence is that electric vehicles, when offered, have always sold out. There hasn't been a single modern electric vehicle that hasn't had a 100% sell rate. Every company that sells them, even one-off expensive sports car things, sells every one they make before they make it. And you assert there is no demand. Sure, they don't sell, but that's because no one makes them. If EV1s were available to everyone everywhere at 20% over cost of making them, I think they would sell enough to cover development cost over 5 years (or sooner). The demand from the EV1 was about right for that, though that was at a supposedly suppresed cost. I don't think GM did it because they thought it would be viable. They made the decision to pull them off the roads before they ever delivered the first one. That's not the actions of someone that tried to sell them and failed. That's the actions of someone that planned on having them fail and worked hard to meet that goal.
Or can you come up with another reason why they would release a product with a plan to destroy every one after 5 years before they ever delivered a single one? Perhaps it was a failed R&D project they tried to turn into a PR stunt? The EV1 failed, not because they didn't sell, but because GM directly caused their failure by taking them back and destroying them. I'm not sure how you blame that on the lack of demand, when there were lines to get them.
Learn to love Alaska
Even if this was true (and depending on driving profile, the Corrolla uses anywhere from about 1.4 to about 1.6 times the fuel of the Prius, so in terms of fuel costs, it really isn't true), you expect, all other things being equal, the fuel economy of a compact car to be better, not worse (even if "marginally") than a midsize car.
With a Prius you get better fuel economy and greater utility.
You also pay a lot more up front. Whether that's worthwhile to you depends on your priorities.
GM never tried to sell them. It met the legislative demand by making them available for lease only, effectively cutting out the entire majority of the market that prefers ownership, tried very hard to make them impossible to get to avoid them becoming too popular, because it was trying to kill the legislative mandate and if the cars were popular, that political position would have been undermined, and then when it did kill the mandate, stopped leasing the cars.
You are ignorant.
1. It's not a tippy econobox.
2. It doesn't have a few hundred pounds of battery weight.
3. Having never driven one, you have even less reason than usual to comment on it.
Enjoy your ignorance.
Infuriate left and right
[rant]
I might note that the problem of US cities not working well with efficient transportation is tied to suburbanism, which is tied to crime, which in turn is tied to corruption. As far as I can tell, corruption is indigenous to the human species, displaying itself most often in those who are in political power in almost every institution (public, private, not for profit). That said, it shows up less in some places (say, Churches) and more in others (say, public schools).
I pick those two, because interestingly, the child abuse problems are far worse in the public schools than in (for example) the Roman Catholic Church. But you can't sue the schools due to certain laws (refer back to 2nd sentence of post). So the schools shuffle the abusers around...
But when I was back in Lithuania, the cities basically were set up not to require private transportation beyond foot or bike. A typical city was 20-30k people, and had apartment buildings, sometimes with commercial units on the ground floor. The apartment buildings themselves were in blocks, about 100' off the main roads, which were lined with other commercial entities. Typically speaking, it was no more than a 5 minute walk to *whereever* you wanted to go. For those few things that had to be carried out at a particular location, it was no more than a 30 minute walk.
Walk.
Bicycles are faster, and were an option.
Now, you might ask "if corruption is universal, what's the difference between the former Soviet cities and the American ones"? Basically, it is that the Soviets were singleminded about their "planned" state. Us Americans still have all of our wicked plans, but we try to hide it in Capitalist Speak. Consider it a case of "Animal Farm" in reverse, if you will.
That doesn't mean that I prefer the Soviet "solutions". I don't. What I would prefer is to abandon corruption and crime. Then we could live together in more efficient cities. I do prefer the Lithuanian setup to the US setup. But I don't consider worse, more immediate evil corruption to be better than hidden, sneaky evil corruption.
That's all.
[/rant]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
People tried to buy the EV1 and were turned away. I don't know the quantities that they would have been sold at, but GM never ever tried. If they were going to sell them below cost, limit access, and screw over owners (in the owners minds, GM made it clear they weren't evern going to sell a single one and let anyone keep it), they should have just left it a prototype. A road running prototype should have been used only for what Honda and Toyota did. Get something that would make money at 100,000 units a year on the road, even if it's only at 20,000 units a year for a loss.
Of course GM never tried selling it. They determined before that point that it was not worth selling.
You don't think that the only way big companies decide whether a product is worth selling is to release it and see whether anyone buys it, do you? That's not how the world works. The whole EV1 project revealed to GM that this car was not going anywhere. They never tried selling it because it would have cost them an enormous amount of money to try, money which they were basically guaranteed to lose.
The "long" waiting lists were meaningless. First, they were not very long. It's hard to find good information on this, but the best information I was able to find was that roughly one thousand people were on the waiting list. This sounds like a lot compared to the roughly one thousand EV1s that were actually produced, but it's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to what demand needs to exist for a car company to make money on something. And keep in mind that this "long" waiting list of one thousand people was at a price which was enormously subsidized by GM. Jack the price up to a more realistic level and watch those people evaporate. You quote "only" 20,000 units a year. The EV1 did 5% of that figure over its entire lifetime. Average production was something like 2% of that level per year.
GM should have released it widely for sale, or not released it. To step one toe into the market gives not only a failed vehicle that people know them by, but also incredibly poor business practices that screwed over actual customers and potential customers (ones that walked into dealerships with money, and were turned away). GM screwed up in multiple different ways.
So how do you propose that they gain real-world experience with electric vehicles? Should they just magically know everything ahead of time?
Running a pilot project like the EV1 is a perfectly reasonable way to go. It's not GM's fault that the people who leased the things with full foreknowledge that it was a research project, they would not be allowed to hold on to them permanently, and that there was no option to buy, decided to forget about all of that and complain loudly despite being told all of this in advance.
Let's line up the facts here. GM put down one billion dollars of its own money to research electric vehicles. They subsidized roughly 50% of the cost to every single lessee. The leases explicitly stated that there was no option to buy. At the end of the program, GM's experience indicated that demand and technology simply couldn't be made to meet at the time, and so they elected to discontinue the program. Due to the liability concerns from losing control over a thousand experimental vehicles, they enforced the no-purchase clause of the leases and destroyed the cars. The people who had them at 50% under cost really liked them and got upset that GM was doing exactly what they said they would do when they leased the things.
At what point in all of this is GM at fault in any vaguely reasonable fashion? Sounds to me like GM's customers were just a bunch of whiners who either couldn't be bothered to understand that they were participating in a res
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I never said GM tried to sell them. I said that it showed they could not be sold at a profit. You do not need to actually sell a product to do this.
As for the rest, if the electric vehicle concept was ready to make money for anyone who decided to make one in 1998, why didn't any other car companies do it? Perhaps GM was stupid, but every single major automobile manufacturer on the planet? No way.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
remove the index2.pl in the url, that should help. use just www.slashdot.org as url.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Does BART have a bad reputation? Every time I've been to SF I have been impressed by transit. Between the BART/Muni/CalTrain I have been able to get every place I needed to go without a car, relatively quickly and hassle-free. I had a car once in SF, due to traveling up PCH and hated it. Parking was a bitch, I had to get up early to move my car twice, and even though it burned like fire I paid $25 to park my car for a single night. Not to mention sitting in traffic, wishing I could be underground in a nice train actually getting somewhere without the stress.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Actually, in order to show that it cannot be done (in a particular environment), you would need to attempt every reasonable method of doing so. Otherwise, you would just show that the particular strategies you tried were unsuccessful.
GM did not try any strategies of selling them, and so did not show they could not be sold at a profit. They grudgingly made them available for lease, did everything they could to prevent them from being popular, and withdrew them from the market as soon as they were able to.
They didn't "show" anything about selling electric vehicles, since they never even tried to do that.
If you want to make the "well, no one did it, so it must not have been a good idea" argument, knock yourself out, but that's a completely different (and utterly fallacious on its face) argument from the "GM showed that it can't be done" argument.
There wasn't anything about the GM program that indicated it could be done, and a lot that wasn't. I'll concede that this is not absolute proof, but it's still a good argument. All the available evidence suggests that GM made the right choice with the EV1 in every respect except PR. Had they pushed ahead with mass production, evidence is that it most likely would have flopped, hard, and cost the company considerably more than the one billion dollars they lost on the program in reality.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Hah what a joke. You're an idiot, stick to your little conspiracy theory blogs or whatever over there in SF and I'll stick to doing what I do -- developing technology to save energy.
I didn't mean to misrepresent BART. I am terribly served by BART but I guess I don't have enough business in the tiny fraction of the state that IS well served by that system. I feel that it disserves the vast majority of the people in this region. If you like to get drunk at ball games or shop at a few select places you might feel very well served. Lucky you. I'd have just made a lighter, less expensive system that went more places, or further, or more often, or faster, or at night, or anything to mitigate the punitive system that I've enjoyed on MY commute. It costs a rocket, compared to any of the other "services" that we provide ourselves with. Don't even get me started about CALTRANS. Or AMTRAK. Bastards.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Running a pilot project like the EV1 is a perfectly reasonable way to go
It can't have been a pilot program. It was an abandoned orphan project before the first car was shipped. If every car was sold at a loss, they'd have saved more by never making them. They had to have known the costs and sales prices, so why make something that will lost you money? You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume.
Um... it was a failed R&D project. How many times do I have to say that before you'll listen?
It wasn't an R&D project once they shipped cars. I understand what you are saying, and I disagree. That you continue to say it doesn't make it any more true. R&D stopped, and production started, and it failed in many ways past that point in time.
You quote "only" 20,000 units a year. The EV1 did 5% of that figure over its entire lifetime. Average production was something like 2% of that level per year.
So, when offered to less than 15% of the US, the line for them was twice production. If demand was flat (not saying it would be, but that is a mathmatically simple assumption), and demand was twice the 1k/yr availability, they would have sold 15k per year. That's close enough to my 20k for me.
I think this is the key. Forget about all these facts and arguments. Car companies like to make money.
I'll agree with that. Now, look at the EV1 and tell me whether it made any money. Look at it and tell me if they made 1k per year vs 2k per year, would they have had greater or less profit? If they had sold 0 per year, would they have had greater or less profit? From what I have been told, it seems that if they had made 0 available, then they would have made money. They had already determined it was a failed project before the first car was delivered, so why sell them if it would only lose them more money? It just doesn't make sense to me.
It's ten years later and nobody is making mass-produced electric cars anywhere in the world. It's very difficult to square that with the idea that they were ready to go in 1998 but GM killed them.
I believe it. The rest of the world can't do electric cars like us. We have lots of coal and cheap electricity. We also have outlets by all our cars at night. Garages, carports, and all that are common in the US. In a lot of the places with cheap electricity, they are older than the US and they have a significant portion of housing created before cars. As such, street parking is much more common, and that makes it impractical to charge cars. The US is better suited to an all-electric vehicle for commuting and charging overnight than most of the rest of the world.
I can't tell you why GM killed the EV1. I can tell you that they killed it long before it had been given a chance, they turned away thousands of willing customers in the tiny portion of the US they offered it, and they complained about how bad the experience was. It was either a success that they purposefully killed, or it was a failure that they promoted for years at increasing loss. Either way, they made a bad business decision. There was nothing about the EV1 that went the way it was supposed to, except the performance of the car. Strangely, the predictions and the reality of the car matched almost exactly (other than everyone has always over-estimated range). So they either made insane predictions in the dropping of prices for things they had no idea about, or they knew it was going to be a failure many years before they officially declared it a failure before they delivered the first car. Or, it was capable of making money, and they killed it anyway. Since none of the explanations make sense, why are you so quick to condemn one and promote your own unsubstantiated theory?
Learn to love Alaska
The european turbo diesel cars don't get anywhere near that. And the Prius would do even better with a smaller turbocharged engine, say about 1.0L Turbo gasoline engine making those 76HP. Its more efficient and lighter in weight.
Conversely I bet that eurodiesels could do even better than the prius if they incorporated prius style electric tech with their coventional engines. Instead, hybrid tech is ridiculed.
I don't understand why turbo-diesels weren't used in the current hybrids sold here in the US. Diesel engines generate most of their power at high rpm's where they best compliment electric engines. I'm guessing it has something to do with the reason(s) why diesels in general don't do well here, but it's a mystery to me.
Considering that the diesel Golf and Bora/Jetta actually handle, drive, etc like (ie have basically the same dynamics as) the normal fun-to-drive gas versions, and in fact, often actually feeling peppier around town due to their power being more at lower rpms than higher rpms as with gas engines...
I think you meant lower speeds, not rpm's. Old diesels like the OP had were sluggish at low rpms, though modern turbo-diesels run at higher rpm's where they generate more power.
None of the weird mixing of brake pads and weak regenerative braking (since batteries can only be recharged so fast) + then getting 15hp or whatever electric motors to integrate well with an 80%+ power-by-gas-engine drivetrain while lugging around all the weight of the redundant drive system, all the 20% losses (due to maximums of about 80% efficiency) at every form of energy conversion (mechanical to electrical to chemical and back etc) versus just the one of chemical to mechanical of diesel engines, etc etc that are intrinsic to "hybrids".
Well appearently the charging system is capable enough. Hybrids like the prius force charge themselves to maintain a 30-70% level for battery life cycle purposes. Furthermore, much of the energy used to recharge the batteries would be otherwise completely lost in a non-hybrid system. The question is, does the system pay for itself over it's useable lifetime. AFAIK, the car manufactures have determined that it is worthwhile; my guess is that the kind of people who would buy these cars would ask these kinds of questions.
In fact, if you look at the hybrid versions of vehicles that are offered both as hybrids and as simple gasoline versions with equivalent performance, you almost never see more than 2-5 mpg improvements with the hybrid.
Are you talking about trucks or SUV's? Cars with hybrid engines tuned for efficiency get three times better mileage than that. When I was looking at hybrids (about 3 years ago) the calculations I ran showed it to pay for itself over about an 11 year period.
The big advantage of the Prius for Toyota was the experience of developing an electric vehicle infrastructure. Not just the external infrastructure (getting emergency personnel to learn how to open one up in an accident without being killed, arranging all the battery management etc) but internal: electric power trains, distribution systems etc at volume. They are way further down the learning curve (in the real manufacturing meaning of the word I mean) on this than anyone else at this point, even Honda.
It was gravy that it sold well and now is beyond "gravy" in its volume, image, etc. But it would have been a success without that just for the learning.
You made an implicit connection between deregulation and Enron; but the problems ran much deeper than that, to the point where when deregulation occurred, it had practically no impact - Enron was already in deep over its head.