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Electric Mini Cooper Has Rough Start
TopSpin writes "BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its Mini has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is 'learning quite a bit as we go.' Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets."
Isn't it the car dealer who has to tell the client the charging specs? Then the client can have the right picture of how he is going to manage charging his car.
Also, when you "try" your car's acceleration, it's obvious that you will get a shorter range. It's true with a gas powered car, and so it is with an EV.
Cnosidering the plolution caused by bruning stuff, I don't think bio feuls will slove all your porblems.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
BMW initially had to learn about infrastructure of houses and electrical-regulatory agencies in introducing the electric Mini to the U.S., Steinberg said. A key problem was getting approval for the recharging plug, which was originally designed for the European market, according to the executive.
You Europeans and your superior plugs...you may have won this battle, but we will win the war.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
That was true ten years ago. But we do realize now that plant based fuels and recycled french fries oil can't power all the cars all over the planet. Unless you want to pay 45$ for your Mini Wheat or 75$ for your pop corn. And transform Central Park, the Bois-de-Boulogne and countless other urban parks into.... cornfields!
O RLY? The problem is solved? Exactly where can I buy these plant based fuels?
As the demand for biofuels causes competition with food production resources (land, water),
the cost of biofuels goes up. And they're not cheap now!
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces?
I work on my own vehicles, which makes me long for EVs. No more fuel-soaked hands, for one thing. Just moving pollution controls from the car to the power plant is a huge win, too. If you wouldn't rather have an EV than an ICE given similar performance characteristics, you don't understand the problem. With that said, we are going to need battery technologies that are more useful if we're going to make the switch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Call it a beta!
Of course, BMW's demanding a lot of money, so maybe the Google example isn't the best.
Do the Microsoft! Shell out your hard-earned money to be part of their QC team!
Flameage and massive negative moderation in 3...2...1....
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
They prefer the term "early adopters" and without them we wouldn't see half the new risky products that appear on the market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.
Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.
So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.
Right, we are talking about new BMWs here. The original "green fashion" has already been adopted by the poor. It's called walking.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
The problem is not solved considering biofuels are neither cheap, nor can you manufacture enough of them even if you covered the entire world in corn/soy. Switchgrass ethanol is too expensive, the manufacturing processes have lousy efficiency. Algae biodiesel theoretically could do it, provided anyone could actually do it in a large scale on the cheap. You can use biofuels for military and aerospace requirements, but it is too expensive for people's cars.
Even palm oil biodiesel and sugar cane ethanol are not good enough.
There is enough spare electric capacity in off-peak times to power several dozen million vehicles in the US alone.
I'm still confused about this hybrid thing. Go to Europe, and you see the same Dodge minivan picking up kids in front of school, but with a turbodiesel. I know the market is manipulated there too, but I'd prefer the established 40- 45 mpg tech of a TD. The 335d is a great example. More Torque than the titans of Detroit of old. A Peugeot Diesel was my renta-car, and it feared no Berlin Taxi. I'd take a Jetta TDI over a Prius, etc.
Apparently, their owners were mostly happy with the thing, despite its 1990s shortcomings and lack of charging stations, until GM decided to kill the program and take away all the vehicles, in typical GM-style idiotic managerial fashion
They were happy because GM leased the cars to them at a loss. If they were forced to pay retail rates for the vehicles I doubt many people would have kept them. Not to mention the expensive and frequent battery replacements (they used lead-acid batteries and given the EV discharge/recharge cycles, they weren't expected to last very long).
Only the most recent developments in Lithium Ion technology have made it possible to get good performance, life, and range out of the large battery packs you need in a vehicle.
GM's mistake wasn't killing the EV1, it was discontinuing the entire program after the EV1 phase was complete. If they had kept developing better batteries and EV technologies the entire time they would be much further ahead re: the Volt than they are now.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
$75 for popcorn? You mean the theatres will give us a discount? Awesome!
Theater isn't limited to security. There's a lot of "green theater" out there, searching for rich suckers. One of the rich that sometimes gets suckered is the government. I regard hybrids and the Prius somewhat skeptically. It's fuel economy isn't all that great, actually. Manufacturers are still ignoring a lot of low hanging fruit. They haven't smoothed the undersides of their cars. The rims are not aerodynamic. Car bodies are closer to teardrop shapes than bricks, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. They're getting better with weight, but they're still using too much steel where lightweight composites or aluminum or lighter alloys could go. Until fairly recently, they wouldn't even use lighter oils (for instance, 5w20 instead of 10w30), one of the cheapest, easiest ways to get a little more fuel economy.
Much better than the Prius is the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a turbodiesel that gets 65 MPG, and it still doesn't cover all the easy ways to increase fuel economy. It's not a hybrid. Proof that a lot more can be done, and that manufacturers have yet to get really serious about fuel economy.
So where is the 100 MPG vehicle? I've heard of quite a few prototype vehicles that get over 200 MPG. It can be done, what's the hold up? Not enough competition in the automobile market, I guess.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
One important problem of the electric car is the time you have to spend charging it.
However, this doesn't happen with an hydrogen car like the Honda FCX Clarity car.
And it is also cheaper than the electric Mini (600$ a month)
More info at:
http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/
For any interested- The article fails to mention that this is/was an evaluation program initiated by BMW. The electric Cooper is not available through standard channels. I received an invitation to evaluate one but because I rent an apartment I didn't meet the minimum requirements to participate. One of the stipulations was that you had to have an enclosed parking area (i.e. a garage) and were willing to have the required charging equipment installed in that garage. There were some other requirements as well, but that was the one that prevented me from considering it. FWIW the invitation was pretty explicit about the performance differences between the gas and electric models as well as your responsibility during the evaluation period. Anyway, I wound up leasing a 2009 Clubman and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner- 'Fun to drive' is a huge understatement.
No surprise there. Corn is horrifyingly inefficient for producing Ethanol as a fuel. Ethanol is highly miscible with water making extraction of the fuel its self rather energy intensive to say nothing of the production of fertilizers etc being petroleum derived. Algae biodiesel and mycodiesel show much more promise. The mycodiesel can run off a cellulose feedstock which is handy because that's mostly what you have as a by-product of extracting the lipids from algae. The lipids are fairly hydrophobic so extraction from a liquid medium isn't that hard. The only real problem is efficiently breaking the cells and pressing the oils out of them. Another option is drying the algae and reforming the material using thermal depolymerization and fischer tropsch reactions to synthesize hydrocarbons among many other useful chemicals. There's even a patent on using a strain of bacteria that can produce ethanol from syngas which is a product of the thermal depolymerization. iofuels aren't dead, the important game changing ones are just ignored in favor of that failure named corn derived ethanol.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Corn biofuel is extremely inefficient, and, depending on where you get your numbers energy negative. But there are other crops with far higher potential efficiencies. Biofuel is definitely part of the solution, but not if we keep letting fucking politicians and their corn subsidies determine science.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Same could have been said for microwave ovens, computers. Somehow, demand causes all kinds of change. When gas hits a high enough cost, building an entirely new *anything* might be cheaper.
If you can afford a $70k electric vehicle (or whatever Tesla things are going for nowadays), you qualify as being caught up in the "green fad" in my book... in more than one way, too.
Ahh, another poor fool who thinks Tesla is about the environment. Hint: its a sports car with instant acceleration.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hey it's a good idea. Had we been on electric automobiles for the past 80 years the crossover between automobiles, portable computers, robotics, and space exploration would have been significant.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
So, you just watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, didn't you? =)
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I watched the video and the BMW was driven BEHIND the Prius at "speeds as fast as possible".
I think that favors the BMW significantly considering the how close the BMW was driven behind the Prius, the Prius was doing most of the work pushing the air out of the way for it.
What a horrible test on so many levels, its completely useless to base anything on it.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Somewhere along the line, someone didn't quite think this electric vehicle revolution through...
Pollution, smog, limited fossil fuels, accidents, traffic jams, gas supply problems, getting oil from 3rd world countries.
Somewhere along the line, someone didn't think this combustion engine automobile revolution through... yet it happened anyway just as the electric vehicle revolution might.
Here's hoping that whatever will eventually replace electric vehicles (if they ever become dominant) will be absolutely problem free.
That was not a "mistake". The purpose of the "EV1 phase", as you call it, was to construct a demonstration designed to "prove" (or, at least, to create the impression) that the ZEV mandate in California could not practically be met, as part of GM's efforts to have that mandate altered. Once the mandate was altered, the overall purpose for which that program that the "EV1 phase" was part of had served its purpose, so naturally both the "EV1 phase" and the entire program were terminated.
Your mistake is thinking that the program was aimed at creating viable, production electric cars. It was a political maneuver that acheived its political aim, and then was terminated.
Awwww, not this shit again. The DOE has stated that almost 80% of a US fleet of electric vehicles could be charged from off-peak (night) power generation, without building any additional plants. Raw materials? It's going to be far easier to come up with those than more oil (which is slowly running out). The electrical revolution has already been thought out, and it's running full steam ahead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
A lot of electric power plants sit idle most of the time. They exist only for peak power demands. If most of those cars recharge overnight, you might not have to build a single extra plant.
I don't know stats. It may be that some would be needed. It may be that the peak power plants are the most inefficient and dirtiest. But it's not nearly as bad as you imply.
Infuriate left and right
Actually, in BC electric baseboard heaters are fairly common. The advantages are that you can independently control each room and don't need to have a duct system. Thus you can heat only the bedroom at night, and turn the rest of the house down. Most newer houses are going with forced air heat pumps though as they're much more efficient when the temperature difference between inside and outside is relatively small (most of the year on the coast). The heat pumps are electric powered but move substantially more heat than they consume. Some of the more expensive houses are going with heat recovery ventilation too.
Openning the window may help with that.
I'm unsure how should I respond to that :-) May I ask, have you driven a car in Canada, in winter? I suspect not, because you need an ice scraper to remove the *thick* ice from the glass (outside) before you can hope that the heat from the heater will melt the rest. Without the heater all the windows will be opaque in, say, 10 seconds after you get in.
But yes, opening a window is a popular way to look outside, and I did that more than once. That assumes that you *can* lower the window - and that is not always true. And in any case, driving with window(s) open in winter, when it is snowing, is not my standard of comfort. Note that in the car comfort often translates into safety.