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GM Criticized Over Chevy Volt's Hybrid Similarities
Attila Dimedici writes "This article says the Chevy Volt is not what GM claimed it was: an Extended Range Electric Vehicle. The Volt is simply a plug-in hybrid. Instead of a vehicle that is only driven with the electric drive train that uses a gasoline engine to charge the batteries, the Volt actually uses the gasoline engine to drive the front wheels at speeds above 70 miles per hour or when the batteries run down. Additionally, the Volt gets nowhere near the 230 mpg that GM was claiming for it. If this is all true, why did GM misrepresent the car? The facts as stated in the article make the Volt a pretty decent competitor to the Prius and other hybrids already on the market."
A post at the Car Connection blog takes the opposing view, saying that accusations of GM "lying" are overhyped, since the capability to power the wheels with gasoline is reserved for situations where electricity isn't a viable option. The author says GM didn't mention this ability before now due to concerns over patents and competition from other companies.
Because hybrids like the Prius were already on the market, and "eventually, we'll get around to releasing a slightly-better hybrid on much the same model" isn't the kind of sales pitch that gets people to buy a conventional GM car now while deferring purchasing a hybrid for later.
Sending the message "we are going to real soon now come out with an electric car that will make hybrids obsolete" is somewhat better as an effort to slow the success of the existing, already-on-the-market hybrids.
Not on price. It's fucking forty thousand dollars! It's an ECONOMY car!
Sheesh.
People are pissed because they still owe us (US taxpayers) nearly 50 billion dollars. This was the big 'ace in the hole' the used in part to sell the bailout to us.
This piece of shit is not going to put GM on the road to recovery, and the US taxpayer on the road to becoming whole again.
Seriously, A TRUE serial hybrid using multiple engine/generators DOES make sense for something like the hummer or even a semi. BUT, for small cars? Nope. Far better that these are pure electrics, and if you need a 'range extended', then simply buy a gas car. Here in the states, most families own 2 cars. It makes sense for most homes to buy an electric. But the idea of a car carrying both gas/electric makes zero sense. BTW, for those that think that trucks/hummer/semis do not make sense, well, let me point out that many trucks are used for job sites. As such, the engine/generator/battery is GREAT for providing electricity. Likewise, for a semi, the bulk of the time, the semi is cruising. As such, a simple engine/generator/motor can provide the power to move it. What is interesting is that an electric motor has far more torque than does an engine. This avoids the expensive and complex transmissions that semi's have. As such, it is perfect for getting heavy loads moving.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Its a car that primarily electric driven and uses the gas engine when the batteries/motor can't cut it. Is it really that important what it's called? It's a car designed to be 'green' and that's what it's being sold as. The only thing that GM should be criticized for is the over estimation of the range you can expect. What we call is it pretty moot.
If anyone was at all surprised by any of this, I have a bridge to sell them.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Definitional semantics" = "using words everyone else in the industry understands". Maybe in unicorn-land where he lives, the Volt isn't a hybrid, and GM didn't lie to everyone else about the nature of the vehicle, but that's where we are now.
Dog is my co-pilot.
You expect the US government to advertise without streatching the truth a little? Come on. Polititians?
--I like turtles...
for most daya to day urban running it'll be electric. For long trips it'll be hybrid, so watt is all of the fuss about? The USA has such low oil prices it's lucky to see hybrids at all. I have an old Prius for gadget value, using EV mode to stealth around car parks etc. Still get worried when the motor stops at traffic lights etc. I would like to add the engine stop feature to my 'normal' car.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
So, if the batteries are dead, the car runs like a regular gasoline-powered vehicle. And people are upset by this? Isn't that a great feature? I'd be kind of pissed if I drove a Volt, were stranded in the desert because the batteries died, and when I complained, "jeez, why can't you just make it so if the batteries are dead, the gas engine runs the car?" "Naw, then it wouldn't be an 'electric vehicle!'"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
That transmission is expensive to have in there, and expensive to run. The more layers that you have, the worse your performance. In addition, the higher your maintenance costs are.
My guess is that they did not add this for the end consumer. I am guessing that they added this to increase their bottom line.
As I have said all along, you would have to be a fool to buy a volt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
From the car connection blog:
Okay, I think that's a fair point, but in my view it does make a difference. It means the Volt has to have a transmission, which means extra weight and maintenance issues, and all the complexity of an ICE-based drivetrain. It means the Volt's ICE may have to run over a range of RPMs rather than solely running at an optimal RPM.
So while I'm in tentative agreement that this isn't necessarily a lie, and that the Volt can still look appealing versus other hybrid options, it still makes a difference and reduces some of the advantages the Volt had.
The enemies of Democracy are
They told us "real" numbers even though it was years from completion. They top speed they said that it would have was impressive. The range they claimed it would have was unbelievable. They also claimed that it would be 100% electric. I thought to myself: "yea f-ing right."
I want an electric car with a small generator that runs off gas or diesel. Just a normal electrical car with a small generator and a fuel-tank. It will increase somewhat in size, but there is no reason to make anything complicated out of it.
The Volt uses a planetary gearset where the main gear is driven by the primary electric motor. The planet and ring gears can also optionally by driven by the engine and a second assist electric motor when needed. This allows the computer to continuously vary the power source that is driving the wheels. The only part of this equation that was not previously known was that the engine can directly give torque to the wheels under certain circumstances (without going through a generator).
Typical operation for a daily commuter is stop and go traffic of 20 miles or less each way, which means the typical commuter in a Volt will use only the electric motor. The gasoline engine will never even start up. The Volt also comes with plug-in support from the factory. These two things are what make it different than existing hybrid cars. If you can sell these cars and start moving them in large numbers then you can start moving the battery prices down and scaling the electric-only range up. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good otherwise you'll never ship anything. We know that in software, in hardware (think 1st gen iPod), and it is just as true in cars. The Volt is a necessary evolutionary step and I hope it sells really well because battery prices will drop and we can take the next step even sooner.
I also find it disingenuous to run the Volt around with drained batteries so you can see its "true" MPG (whatever your definition of "true" is with this sort of test). That's like saying a hard-top convertible sucks because I wanted to see how it performed in the rain but purposely left the hard top in the garage. The whole point of the Volt is using 100% electric power for most people's daily commutes. If my commute is 37 miles round-trip, then the Volt gives me infinite MPG, which makes no sense because the electricity does have a cost to it. This just highlights how inadequate MPG is as an efficiency measurement.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
A poorly run company made a poor decision? Who could've seen that coming?
Not that I'm bitter about what they did to Saturn...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...did they benefit from because of this misrepresentation.
There can be absolutely zero doubt that they knew they were being deceitful, although the purpose may have been relatively innocuous; however, when you add this to the other deceitful tactics they've already employed and have been debunked (230mpg anyone?) a pattern of behavior seems to emerge that would require seriously mitigating circumstances which aren't readily apparent.
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For all the press and attention that the Volt is getting (and one can't forget to mention the capital cost, R&D, and engineering that went into it), the Electric Focus is actually a better example of electric car technology. It's _not_ a hybrid, but a pure electric vehicle with a 100/160 mile/km range. I suppose you could tow a generator behind it if you don't have a second car for a road trip.
--Jim (me)
...when you had to work extra, and the batteries are not fully charged to begin with and now it's cold. Would hearing the sound of the engine starting make you smile, or frown?
There still must be some detail missing from this picture.
They added the extra complexity of a power combining mechanism for extra efficiency and then only use at 70MPH and beyond.
That is outside EPA testing parameters, which means this extra complexity won't add anything to the all important for marketing EPA numbers.
So just how bad would the efficiency have to be through the ICE/Generator/Motor to add extra complexity to be used over 70MPH.
Something really doesn't add up.
I have a 15 mile commute (each way), and rarely am able to reach speeds of 70mph on my way to work -- 35 - 45 is more typical.
The Volt would give me an all-electric commute, yet I can still drive it 200 miles to Tahoe on the weekends.
The all-electric Leaf will give me around 70 miles of range, so no long weekend trips.
The plug-in Prius (official version, not aftermarket conversions) would give me around 15 miles of all electric range.
I fail to see the controversy - most people can have an all-electric commute with the Volt. It was already known that the ICE engine would kick in to supplement the battery, the fact that it supplements via mechanical connection in addition to charging seems immaterial.
Why dont they have the ICE drive the generator which then drives the electric motor which drives the wheels? And do that at all speeds in all cases where the battery is out of juice?
If the electric motor can handle highway speeds when the battery is full, there is no reason it cant handle highway speeds being driven by the generator set.
If there are no mechanical linkages between the ICE and wheels, it becomes possible to swap the ICE (or ICE and generator) for something different. Such as a fuel cell. Or a different and better ICE.
Also, the ICE would be able to be run without a transmission and be tuned to always run (when its running) at exactly the right speed to most efficiently run the generator.
Also because they know that electric cars and hybrids can't yet compete in fuel economy or greenhouse emissions (well to wheel) with small light ICE driven cars. The whole electric car industry is lying in the same way. In New Zealand Toyota was successfully sued under the false advertising laws for their gas mileage claims. The bottom line is that private cars are no longer a viable solution to our transport needs due to energy shortages and the companies that manufacture private cars can not admit this as it means going out of business.
40,000 price tag plus interest, fuel, electricity, tires etc? The govt better help out GM by adding a 6 dollar a gallon federal gas tax to make it at least a break even proposition buying one.
Got Code?
In any sane world, this would be considered a FEATURE.
The issue seems to be a matter of terminology -- people expect an "electric vehicle" to only be powered by electricity, dammit, and if I'm out of volts my Volt should be out of miles, period. Personally, I don't think I'd ever want to be stuck on the side of the road for the sake of terminology. I must not be the right market for electric cars.
Now, getting 30 MPG when the manufacturer claims 230, that's a different issue. That's like buying a Mustang GT rated at 18 MPG and getting, like, 2. My first thought is "Your honor, we would like to provide a new Chevy Volt equipped with one gallon of gas to the defendant Mr. Akerson and have him demonstrate a travel distance of 230 miles." "Court will recess for one month while the defendant pushes his car to the next state."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Generators typically use Honda (or similar) 5 to 10 HP motors that have very little emission controls. Never mind the reduced MPG from towing a trailer. The following compares lawn mower (i know they are not the same as a generator but they have similar motors) to a car. http://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm
Whatever program they benefited from, it's probably small potatoes compared to the nearly $50billion they got from US taxpayers, for doing nothing other than asking. If I remember, politicians were bending over backwards to finance the volt, for no other reason than it's an American car.
Qxe4
No need to wait. I guess I'll go ahead and by the Prius.
Try reading to the end of the sentence before replying:
"... or when the batteries run down"
Now does it make more sense?
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so. Therefore it isn't an issue. Or at least that is the case with the identical Vauxhall Ampere sold in the UK. The rest of Europe uses km/h for its speed limits and the speed limit is typically between 110 km/h and 130 km/h. 70 mph is 112km/h.
Simple, all those claims were true before they added the radio, AC, heater.
To anyone who truely believed that the Volt would extend range to 230MPG: I have a bridge I want to sell you that is only slightly used. The entire purpose for Electric Vehicle research and exploration is to be carbon-free. Basically, the Volt is a hybrid and hybrids are largely the half-assed attempt towards being carbon-free. Really we should go all the way or not do it at all. It would seem to me that instead of hybridization, we should be promoting hydrogen fueling station and converting out internal combustion engines to hydrogen fuel not dicking around with hybrid drive systems. While continuing to use our internal combustion engines on hydrogen, we perfect fully electric vehicles. This will never happen because of King Oil, and to some extent, the inertia of the Big 3. I am looking to Tesla Motors for the next big thing.
Depending on where you're driving in the US - the main market for Chevrolet - the legal speed limit may be 75mph or even 80mph.
Where does the law state that you cannot exceed 70MPH? It is true that most public roadways do enforce speed restrictions, however, last time I looked at a map, there were many areas of the world, including the USA, not covered by public roadways.
You clearly don't live in Texas, where it is completely legal to drive at 80 mph where marked.
You people need to read the articles and use your brains.
The articles clearly state that the "new" mpg stats are if you never plug the thing in. If it runs 100% on its gasoline engine to charge batteries in real time, then it gets 25-40mpg depending on circumstances.
The 230MPG is some kind of "pollution" conversion that they do, the EPA hasn't established a standard for this, but basically it is "If you drive the car 40 miles each day, and charge it every night, so you never burn a drop of gas, then the pollution created generating the electricity to power the car is equal to the pollution you would create if the car got 230MPG" That has been understood since the beginning. GM never claimed it would get 230MPG running on gasoline. To try to say that was their claim now is completely unfair and completely idiotic.
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.
Oh yeah? Here in Arizona the interstates are 75mph. In parts of Texas it's 80mph.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I do believe the no speed limit sections of the autobahn are in Europe.
Who cares? the US Government owns most of GM, so the money just goes back to where it was before...
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so. Therefore it isn't an issue. Or at least that is the case with the identical Vauxhall Ampere sold in the UK. The rest of Europe uses km/h for its speed limits and the speed limit is typically between 110 km/h and 130 km/h. 70 mph is 112km/h.
I routinely drive from Phoenix to LA and back. The speed limit is 75 on I-10 between Phoenix and Blythe. In CA it drops to 70. If you're doing 75 you'd better not be in the passing lane because the average speed on that road is 85 to 90 for cars in my experience. I've driven that route more than 50 times...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Where I live, cops can pull you over for driving an unsafe speed in their judgment. On a clear day you can use the posted speed limits as a defense ("but the sign says I can drive 65"), but you certainly can't use the lack of a sign as a defense.
I'm not buying a new car until I can have one that doesn't burn anything at all, for any reason.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
AFAIK, a hammer has three parts: a head, a handle, and a wedge that holds head and handle together.
There's no reasonable way those three parts could end having a total price of $400.
hmm I thought parts of montana had un restricted areas. Also if I export the car to Europe with as part of a move the autobahn is an option. Also it's not cut and dry the over 70 is illegal even if the speed limit is 70, overtaking a car for example, or other such "emergency" maneuvers. Most people have a race track nearby that they may take the car to.
The issue for me here, is I was informed that the Volt was a serial hybrid, and not a parallel one. I know I was considering the Volt over the Prius for the simplified drive train, and mechanical systems; as well as the increased efficiency that a serial hybrid should provide.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I'm interested to see how politicians, who backed the GM bailout for reasons advertised as being related to the Volt, respond to this. GM could be in a spot of bother if congress thinks they've been hoodwinked some... ;)
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These are LIES spread by the largely homosexual electric car community. (Remember the Simpsons.)
1. YOU CAN'T PLUG IN A STOCK PRIUS
2. All Electric Cars aren't practical for many people (DESPITE WHAT ECO-NAZIS SAY)
For people who commute to work but drive around town on weekends, the Volt can be all-electric on weekends.
For people like me who have short commutes to work, but may need to do long drives once or twice a week, the Volt will be all-electric most days, and a gas-powered car several days a month. For people like me with PV on the roof, the Volt is a great idea. I'll have ZERO carbon footprint most days, and NO RANGE ANXIETY.
Don't listen to gay eco-nazis, or jealous Prius owners.
Even if you were referring to the maximum speed allowed on public roadways (which isn't the same as the maximum speed that it is legal to drive ever), several US states have 75-80mph maximum speed limits.
Sho nuff, bring back horses. Fodder can be grown locally, no oil derivatives used to provide locomotion, and if worse comes to worse, you can eat them. Hides make good shoes and sports equipment. Best part: idle youth can be put to work shoveling horse shit instead of posting it on slashdot.
I make a trip on I5 in California about once a month and the posted speed limit is 75mph but most of the traffic usually goes around 80 or more. Which of course should never happen because of laws.
Actually it isn't unfair and/or idiotic at all. If you use a commonly used metric to describe an attribute of your car and that commonly used metric doesn't mean anything close to what you're using it for, you're being deceitful.
Saying 230mpg is dishonest. Saying "carbon footprint equivalent of 230mpg" (or some variant thereof) is not dishonest. It is quite obvious to everyone why they elected to go the dishonest route, but I'll spell it out anyhow - "it makes for amazing headlines and PR, and we can explain it away later..."
It's like if I advertised a new HDD as being 25000RPM when what I actually meant is "it has the carbon footprint of a HDD that would go 25000RPM, it doesn't actually go that fast..."
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70mph will get you run off the road here in Texas where road speed limits can go up to 80mph (129 kph).
This is old news. The EV-1 was GM's truly electric car back about 20000. It was a "world beater/best in the world" at the time. I'm serious. Unfortunately it was cut due to internal politics. The managers who did it should be tried for treason. See:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
The management walked away from a product their customers couldn't wait to get their hands on. Having customers pounding on your door who want to give you mone is an enviable position. This illustrates the incompetence of the management.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Montana has speed limits:
http://www.doj.mt.gov/driving/drivingsafety.asp#speedlimits
And they even expect you to operate your vehicle in "a careful and prudent manner".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You mean like how they're trying to patent the Prius' drive train as if it's their own, while selling the car for years as if it's not a Prius clone?
I have no problem with Chevy releasing a "full hybrid" that is also a Plug-In Hybrid. But to sell it as a battery electric vehicle with onboard range extender is disingenuous. Just tell us it's a PHEV. By being sneaky, you just piss people off unnecessarily.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Stop cheering me up...
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There are no posted speed limits where I was talking about. Think: race tracks, private roadways, etc. All places people might want to drive a Volt, without any speed limits.
The talk and reports up to the release was on how the gas engine was purely as a generator for power for the electrical system, which would simplify the drive system of the car, as there would be no duplication of effort on the gas side. The upshot of this was purported to be a light more efficient gas engine that could produce better MPG as a generator to the electric system then would a hybrids gas drive system.
Chevy said multiple times this was the case (electric car w/gas generator, better efficiency, less complexity) that is not what was presented.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
What have the Romans ever done for us?
When the goofy "230 MPG" figure came out, everyone knew it was meaningless and based on a very twisted definition that had no relationship with reality. If you're still bitching about it then you're being dishonest, even moreso than GM.
GM wasn't bailed out to make the Volt, they were bailed out to save the entire manufacturing base of the US. If GM had gone under then they would have stiffed every supplier and sub-supplier in the chain meaning that the entire manufacturing base in the US would have gone bust. That would have affected every auto company as well as most military contractors. That was not an acceptable outcome, bailing out GM was as much about national security as the strategic petroleum reserve is.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Let's see, let's compare EPA-preliminary controlled methodology to totally arbitrary and un-controlled random car writer random drive, and DRAIN THE DAMN BATTERIES.
When there's a large difference, let's call the manufacturer a liar and conflate this with government-ownership while we are at it.
What about the Nissan Leaf? Will it get the claimed 367 MPG in this writer's random non-plugged-in "test"?
No one will ever drive the exact EPA-mandated cycle in this car or any other. And I certainly hope no one will buy a Volt and never plug it in, or they get what they overpaid for...
As for whether it's better than a regular hybrid, one assumes that is a function of your commute. Mine is 13 miles, and I rarely get over 70 on the way to work, so in theory it's perfect. Would I get one? No, but that's because I like sports car style, and acceleration, which for me outweighs any environmental or monetary concerns (yes, I'm going to hell).
Plenty of stretches of highway here in Colorado -- and nearby states -- where the speed limit is 75 mph.
-- Alastair
The would have bankrupted, reformed, settled on debts, and been roughly in the same position they are now except probably much more profitable. Yes, it would have spread the pain, but the bailout did the same anyhow - just to everyone who didn't bet on the auto industry.
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It kind off reads like it is overly biased to me.
Aw, horseshit!
IIRC it wasn't long after the original superbowl ads that we knew everything from the looks and implied specs were not going to be met. I would have seriously considered buying the car they showed in the original ads - an electric (or hybrid) vehicle with looks to match was promising. The final form looks as blah as a Prius or Civic Hybrid, so no thanks. (and yes, I'm shallow that I care what the car looks like more than I care about MPGs)
Texas has a speed limit of 80 mph between San Antonio and El Paso on Interstate Highway 10. Other roads in that area have similar day time speed limits. Texas is also quirky in that it is a Reasonable and Prudent state which means under various conditions the posted speed limit means nothing and you can be giving a speeding ticket for driving too slow, or too fast when driving the posted speed limit all depending on what other traffic or the weather is doing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States
All of this means that in Texas, you can be a very short trip away from a road where the only safe speed to drive is over 70 mph. Never mind the large number of private race tracks people use with various club events like SCCA, or various performance car owners clubs.
And having the gas engine kick in and drive the wheels directly at 70 mph or with low batters is an interesting issue in and of itself. If you are in the middle of turning the car to a new direction, the results could even potentially cause the car to suddenly change handling characteristics.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
Awesome. You just made my day. That was a good laugh. Thanks!
sure, but 75> 70 anyways.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
WTF? Since when is driving over 70 mph universally illegal. Last time I drove in Europe, the autobahn I was on had no speed limit. I was hitting top speeds of about 160 km/h (about 100 mph) and cars were passing me like I was standing still. I believe there are a few states (Montana? Texas?) in the USA with no speed limits on some highways, and for sure I have seen highways posted at 75 mph limit.
I don't think you have ANY clue what you are talking about. One of my dads larger accounts is Timken. Among other things Timken makes bearings, they make lots of bearings for the auto industry, but they also make lots of bearings for the military. Neither customer base is large enough to sustain the enterprise but combined it's enough of a market to make a decent profit when things are going well. Timken is important enough to the military that their bearing plant in Canton Ohio had its own thermonuclear warhead during the cold war. Had GM gone bankrupt and stiffed Timken then Timken would have gone bankrupt and there would be no domestic supplier of a whole host of critical parts. If you WANT the government dependent on some supplier in Malaysia or mainland China for critical parts then you're a fool.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The would have bankrupted, reformed, settled on debts, and been roughly in the same position they are now except probably much more profitable.
They could also have eliminated the bloated union contracts that make them essentially a pension and benefits company that happens to make cars as a sideline. The real bailout wasn't for the companies, it was for the unions.
I got one of those new electric cars and I love it. It's great. It's in the shop right now though- I'm having a gas engine put in but other than that it's great!
Groucho not Karl.
Montana speed limits are a fairly recent thing. Back in the 70's my old man got pulled over in eastern Montana for impeding traffic. He was doing 85 at the time, and getting passed by everyone. The state trooper told him to pick it up or he would write him a ticket.
That's been gone for a while now by order of the federal government under the guise of safety. However, accidents on those roads have gone up since then from drivers going to sleep at the wheel as the roads go for many miles without a corner or change of scenery and people just nod off from boredom. As far as I'm concerned this was just another instance in a long line of the feds bullying the states over the last half dozen or so decades just to get people used to seeing the feds interfere with everything.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Timken is important enough to the military that their bearing plant in Canton Ohio had its own thermonuclear warhead during the cold war.
I'm confused. Timken was so important that the military gave allocated a nuclear warhead for it? To do what, blow it up if necessary?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Esp. in this case. They have a transmission now in there, which chews up fuel. But ignore that nightmare. The fact is, that an ICE that is tuned and runs at a single speed is MUCH more efficient than a variable ICE/Transmission. In fact, that ICE can run as high as 45%. OTH, the ICE/Transmission runs below 22%. And how efficient are generators/Motors? In the 90% levels.
The problem is that maintenance and weight will contribute to lost money/efficiency.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And my guess is, they ran the numbers, ran a prototype on the track, and realized that for a detroit car it just had too wimpy of performance, so they made the front drive part off of the ICE later to give it some more zip. I'm betting on a major design change moment half way through the development, part of why this has taken so long. A pure electric with a simple onboard generator is not that hard to make. I mean shoot, if you had one of those electric conversion trucks already, you could make a "range extender" in one hour tops at home depot, buy genny, stick it in the back, drill four holes and bolt it down using some heavy rubber grommets as washers,. or alternately stick it in a trailer where it belongs for those four long range trips a year to grammaws and the beach, etc.
In fact, first company to make an aftermarket range extender genny trailer for the nissan leaf is going to sell a lot of them, if they pretty it up and especially if they make it a diesel with a good quiet muffler and also make it so it can hold a little vacation cargo as well. I thought of this awhile ago but just don't have the scratch to start a company like that. You'd need to find out first what their plug looks like and what it will draw charging and running at the same time to size the genny, and that's about it. Matching paint for nissan paint jobs an A+ bonus. Here's another hint, make it lightweight dual axle, not a single, so it can be parked safely and easily all the time with that weight in it.
There, someone run with that idea and think of the dirt kickin shit poor AC who gave it to you as you are lighting off your cigars with benjamins.
Nope, it is not. It is marketing.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Well, I'm disappointed, but it may well make sense if you just have one gear, and thus a much cheaper, lighter gearbox etc. No lower gears, no revers, a larger electric motor than the generator, so you can hit batteries for acceleration, but not drag a big generator around that you almost never need.
Plato seems wrong to me today
Sorry, but if Timken isn't diversified enough to survive the bankruptcy of ONE of their customers then Timken has the problem, not me. If Timken bankrupted, they'd reorganized and so on and so on down until you get a workforce and income realignment and can move on. You seem to be under the impression that bankruptcy means a company is destroyed. I don't think YOU have any clue about what you're talking about. Different types of bankruptcies yield different results.
If you think the government isn't already dependent upon suppliers outside of the US, then I would suggest you're the fool.
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No, the Russian's had it targeted with one of their warheads because it was a strategic asset.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Oooh, now you're talking crazy talk ;)...
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Since the ICE drives the wheels above 70MPH, we can guess that electric alone can't exceed 70MPH.
And also they should give subsidies to people buying Ferrari and Lamborghini cars since they're also so damn expensive...
- These characters were randomly selected.
The bottom line is that private cars are no longer a viable solution to our transport needs due to energy shortages and the companies that manufacture private cars can not admit this as it means going out of business.
What evidence do you have to back up this popular, yet incorrect assertion? The fact is that public transport at least, consumes more energy per mile than cars. Why? here is the data and the reasons. It is not the answer, especially when you include the insane costs of transit operation, vs. the incredibly cheap costs of highway construction. Finally, repeat after me, there is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is an energy collection, storage, and distribution problem. Energy exists all around us. 175 petawatts hits us constantly from the sun. 1000's of years, minimum, is locked in fission fuels. Even wind can provide more than the total energy use. If you want to consider fusion, we have literally oceans of energy ready. The problem is capturing and storing this energy. It's just too expensive. The volt, and other "toys" provide us the technology that we need to solve this shortage.
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I'd be much more impressed by your braggadocio if you could point to a post you made predicting this just after the Volt was announced...you know, not with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight...
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.
That's like building a house with no door locks simply because burglary is illegal.
In the beginning, there was null.
Best reply ever!
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.
Oh yeah? Here in Arizona the interstates are 75mph. In parts of Texas it's 80mph.
I can understand the confusion... let me explain. Texas is a red state... and seeing how this is a product of Obama motors I doubt it will even function in texas nevermind be allowed to exceed the pre determined max speed. You may note that Texas was recently denied disaster funds for the areas affected by the hurricane... same reason. Maybe next time those texans will vote the right way.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
The ICE only drives the wheels when going over 70mph AND the batteries are run down. The summary says OR, this is incorrect.
If you charge up, you do still have 25-50 miles of all-electric range, even at over 70mph.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I think that's kind of ridiculous. Drain the gas out of it and drive it; works fine, even on the expressway. How is that not an electric car in anyone's book?
What if there is an imminent accident and you need to briefly accelerate above 70 to avoid it while slowing down would make it worse.
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When was it that any car required zero maintenance? If it has moving parts things either have to be lubed or have parts that wear and need replacing. I don't get this whole "well I'll have to do maintenance on it so it sucks" mantra that gets repeated time and again. It's a vehicle, it needs maintenance or it will not function correctly for long if it is abused. It would be nice if you could just drive and drive with no worry, but I don't care what car it is, it NEEDS maintenance.
Might this be a attempt at bad PR by the competition? After reading this kind of makes me think it is. It's like most have read misinformation and run with it.
Because people clearly buy hybrid cars for track use.
Why is everyone shocked about this development?
Of course it's not full electric. GM is not going to produce another production electric car. Especially one that is going to be SOLD to people.
They're deeply entrenched in the oil industry, and now they're owned by an entity that starts wars to favor said industry. the US government.
My prediction when they were crying for money was that the volt would either never see the light of day, or it would still use gas somehow.
aaaand looking at the price, they're gonna pull their diesel fiasco all over again and make it almost as expensive as a full electric (the tesla model S is going to be $49k) while not being nearly as reliable.
Then the government will suspend funding to any EV startups claiming that after investing money into EVs, that they are still far from efficient, and then will do everything to make sure companies like Tesla fail, such as taking away any special credits, and having a sudden influx of regulations, fees, and even a few pleasant visits from the IRS to shake EV companies up. Eventually making it so that only hybrids will be the only efficient vehicles. After all, as long as cars can still use gas, everything will be just A-okay.
This car will set EV back for a long time. The government will use twisted fucking logic and its muscle to make sure that happens.
What? I knew it had a gasoline engine and an electric motor, but no one told me it was a HYBRID! What the hell is this shit!?
80? really? Wow, that's fast. I had to look that up for myself; here's a link: Texas Raises Rural Speed Limits to 80MPH.
There are overhead costs with a second car. In some nations there are per car taxes quite in excess of the US registration tax. And car insurance almost doubles with the second car. Even worse with the third.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Not really fair to drag horses into this. I say we take all the commie fascists who want us to get rid of our cars and have them pull us around in rickshaws.
And that of course is just the posted limits which I've found is often not what the actual limits on a given road usually are. Here in AR the limit is 70MPH on the freeway but the cops don't care to bother unless you hit above 80-85MPH depending on road conditions. Talking to cops most said they consider "safe driving speed" more than caring about actually posted limits and on the long flat freeways don't care if you drive 85MPH as long as you aren't being stupid like playing with your cell.
As for TFA they probably lied because hybrids suck compared to small ICE vehicles, at least ATM. when you figure in the most substantial use of resources is in the manufacture of a vehicle, and a good well built ICE can last 20 years if well maintained VS...what do those batteries last now? 5 years under perfect conditions? Unless your last vehicle was a Hummer I just don't see a hybrid breaking even for most folks. Hell my Ranger gets a whole 14MPG (according to the government. I've found it gets more like 22-26 depending on conditions and whether my foot is feeling leaded that day) but since it is low maintenance, paid for, and I only average one 100 mile trip a month with the rest being under 30, I actually don't have to spend that much for gas as long as I keep my foot off it. with our hot summers I doubt the batteries on one of those hybrids would last more than 3 years around here, making any gas I could have saved irrelevant.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
YMMV. 80 is really fast for an old Ford Fiesta, but barely cruising for an Audi R8. It's also really fast if you're 85 years old, not nearly as fast if you're 25.
I'm guessing the Volt will do just fine at 80 MPH, along with most modern cars. It just won't be as efficient compared to a slower speed.
It needs a gas engine to go "speeds above 70 miles per hour" ?
So what, thats the speed limit around here. Maybe theres some states like Montana that don't have speed limits, but an electric car is probably not the best option out there.
Yes I know most people don't always obey speed limits, but you know that energy consuption increases with the square of the speed, so driving faster than 70 is not a good idea (unless you are going downhill with a a tail wind, or drafting behind a semi.
Apparently. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=prius+drag+race&aq=f
And I thought the stink behind horses would have been bad. Are you trying to punish us?
I would recommend everyone to have a read of the link - its not as cut and dry as parent makes it seem and its actually quite a interesting discussion on energy efficiency.
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Your citation also proves that moderate ridership is more efficient than cars. It also ignores that train systems run LESS train-cars and less trains during non-commuter hours to even out density per total number of train-cars.
Factoring these in, plus lower maintenance costs of rail vs asphalt, mass-transit is still a win.
It's like the tag says: they're lying because they're government owned and operated now. That, and they're GM: one of the best examples of incompetence screwing over good concept and design to result in a bad products since... uh, well, quite a while.
The Volt has a number of deficiencies, the least of which is not the use of a gas engine to recharge batteries and/or drive the wheels directly. It's an awesome looking car, but they dropped the ball in many, many different ways: they could've gotten similar results from a diesel turbine-powered direct drive electric.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yes. Arizona and Texas. Those are EXACTLY the target markets for an eco-car like the volt.
The most obvious difference is that the Volt has a far bigger battery. The Prius' EV range is only one or two miles.
There must be other differences though, as a planetary gear system driven by both a ICE and an electric motor is patented by Toyota (and somebody else, that is currently suing Toyota.) A few years ago, GM was touting a more advanced hybrid system, using a couple of clutches to more efficiently transfer power (the Prius' system is wonderfully simple, but not as efficient as it could be.)
Living in Texas makes people ignorant. An ex of mine posted some BS about how she hates that her taxes are going to help people getting financial help from the government. When I met her, her mother was getting subsidized housing and she had health insurance from the government herself. That and what they let the schools teach their children about history.
Sorry but speed limits are a must in 99% of the situations if the scenery is that boring they should watch some porn to keep them awake.... Then again maybe not.
"They also parrot GM's new line of 25-50 miles of all-electric — a far cry from the 230 MPG they originally marketed — that the "Volt provides 25-50 miles of real-world electric operation no matter how hard you flog it."
But while even providing only 10% of the fuel economy initially touted, these more real-world figures are merely an exaggeration."
230mpg is the claim about 'gas mileage' under average operating conditions (i.e., 40 miles a day or whatever for the typical driver). 25-50 miles refers to the all-electric range, those two numbers are not comparable. This is obvious to anyone who isn't (a) stupid or (b) intentionally lying.
Honda Insight == 90mpg. If I carry a friend it increases to 170 people-miles/gallon.
The VW Lupo 3L gets similar numbers but can carry 5 people, and get 440 people-miles/gallon. And then there's that soon-to-be-released gets 240 MPG for one person and 480 with two people. Can mass transit beat any of these? Not even close. A typical buss or train averages the equivalent of 25 people-miles/gallon.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.
It must be nice to live near the west or east coast and never go anywhere. The REALITY is that there are lots of states where 70 and 75 mph are perfectly legal, and therefore the gasoline engine would kick in.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>That and what they let the schools teach their children about history.
That Thomas Jefferson supported the abolition of slavery? That blacks played in integral part of America's revolution and early history? Yeah that's horrible. Texas and other states should return to liberal texts that pretend none of that ever happened. /end sarcasm
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>80? really? Wow, that's fast.
Not when you consider Congressional Law requires interstates to be spec'd for 125 mph speeds. 80 is only 2/3rd of the maximum safe travel speed.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
would not have already realized that it is a hybrid.
I mean WTF did they think it ran on... Magic?
Well if they claimed that, then they would have a lawsuit from Apple to deal with, I mean Apple claims that their iPad is Magic.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/190134/apple_ipad_will_beat_netbooks_with_magic.html
Ya know..... if you did just a little bit of research..... you'd know that US Priuses are now ten years old. I've not heard of rampant failures at the 5 or 3 year mark. Have you?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Why?
Because our engineers are carp but our marketing/advertising departments are gold.
Big talkers, no doers.
Sit back with a bag of popcorn and watch as the U.S.A. continues to slip to a third world country.
>>>speed limits are a must in 99% of the situations
Except in Montana, where speed limits are only needed on 1% of the roadways. Who the hell does Congress think it is to order Montana to impose limits, when its citizens don't want them?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What I get out of that link if that we're just doing it wrong. And if you put in more than a half-assed token effort and actually build out a proper mass-transit system, it DOES beat the car. Sure, galveston's transit is a POS. In texas, that doesn't surprise me.
New York looks like they know what they're doing. But the stand-out on that list is JR-East... beating out even motorcycles. The lesson I see there is that we should fire all the nimrods at amtrack, BART, and etc., then hire the Japanese to do it right.
Imagine all the people...
Both those first points are refuted in the article. The systems take into account that less trains and cars get run. The way these numbers are calculated is by taking the total energy consumption and the total amount of passenger miles provided by the system. It takes in to account less trains, less cars, more trains, more cars, signals, people sticking their hands out the windows, and just about everything else.
The key car-vs-train comparison is that of a Tesla roadster to a Japanese electric train. Japanese trains have high ridership and insane efficiency. The fact that they are only about 25% below an American electric car is troubling. Given that Japanese do less than 50 percent of their passenger miles in cars, the lowest in the G8, I suspect that they might know something about trains. Even though the train is 25% less than the solo car, average cars have 1.54 people in them, so after that it becomes really close. So close in fact, that other trivial factors make the difference. Like how hard the driver accelerates, the wind and sun, etc. However, the tie breaker in favor of the electric car to the electric train is the charging. An electric train has to use electricity when it needs it. That is often near peak time. An electric car can use off peak electricity. Estimates range that from 80 to 100 percent of US EV demand could be provided by off peak electricity without building any new powerplants. If the cars (or trains) had to guzzle all that electricity during the day, the grid just couldn't take it. It would be inefficient too, because a lot of energy is wasted starting and stopping powerplants. Battery powered cars could essentially turn the grid into a hybrid, cutting fuel use in the powerplants.
As for the issue of maintenance, we need some data on train track maintenance costs. What we have though, is data on road maintenance. This paper (PDF alert) that we pay between 172.5 and 433 billion dollars for the roads. We do 4274.251 billion passenger miles in private vehicles. This translates to about 4-10 cents per passenger mile in roads, parking, police, and other related costs. It does not include military or global warming, but these are not car problems. These are oil problems. There is also a flaw in this study. It did not take into account that buses and big trucks do a lot more damage to the roads (up to 1000x) than cars. If we reduced the usage of such vehicles (another story - vanpools are more efficient than buses), we could cut costs big.
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And drive Tesla roadsters. Which beat Japanese trains when you put the right numbers of people in them. See above post for details. Watch out for gasoline vs. electric.
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Your sarcasm has me a little confused as to which part was sarcasm please clarify. Maybe I'll understand better when I get some sleep.
Even a Japanese train. See the link. But I'll take the Tesla please.
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{{Citation needed}} ... at least for this assertion that electric cars can't compete for fuel economy. There may have been a successful lawsuit in terms of mileage claims, but that isn't the same thing as poorer fuel efficiency.
The advantage of electical distribution is that the energy delivery is incredibly efficient, widespread, and can be made from a wide variety of energy stocks. It takes gasoline (or at least other petroleum products) to move gasoline to a convenient location, and that also doesn't take into account the refinery energy costs involved and a whole bunch of other factors that impact the efficiency of converting a barrel of petroleum to mileage in your automobile. Petroleum can be converted directly to electricity with only minor losses at a power generation facility burning unrefined crude oil if necessary, not to mention how economies of scale apply to industrial levels of electricity production making it much more efficient. In theory, you could even build a generic boiler system that simply takes whatever fuel stock is handy at the moment and burn that substance to drive the generators even at a single facility. That is certainly something which can't be done with most automobiles. So you have an oil embargo.... fine, burn some coal or if you are desperate even some wood or other "renewable" resources in a pinch. Electricity doesn't care and the end-users of electricity certainly don't care or for that matter even know how their electricity is generated.
As for the need for private cars, public transit generally doesn't work for on demand point to point travel at all hours including semi-rural locations. An automobile meets that market. I've known people who live in New York City or other major metro areas that can seem to get along and live their lives without an automobile, but that unfortunately misses a huge segment of society that doesn't live in that environment. In addition, there are "urban planners" who are designing cities in a way that simply don't permit people to live without an automobile. If I have to get my daughter to the emergency room of a hospital at 4 a.m. living in suburbia, I can't count on a taxi being around much less a city bus to be able to get me there before she dies from appendicitis. Yes, that has happened to me too, where it was a critical thing to worry about and I was grateful that an automobile was available for me to use.
There is a real need for automobiles and wishing them away isn't going to happen any time soon. Changing these kind of lifestyles is something that will take generations if you really want to force public transit, and in a democratic environment expect that there will be people pushing back against the idea too even if it is plainly obvious that it should happen. Not only that, but some people happen to like living in suburbia and can't stand major urban high density housing situations.
I think speed limits should be federally necessitated thing but its should be up to the states as to what those speeds are when it comes to highways and state routes and up to the cities when talking about city streets. Hell if its as barren and the stretches of roads are long as hell I see no problem with 90mph speed limits but if you want to go unlimited I would hope you'd have the infrastructure autobahn style to back it up.
I read that the target price for the Volt in Canada is 35,000.
I'd been lead to believe that it was a real hybrid with all-electric drive and a gasoline engine as a backup power source/generator.
Without that the Volt is just not worth the money. Another GM failure on the way.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Montana did at one time remove all posted speed limits on some stretches of rural interstate highway, but it turns out that it was being abused and treated as a sort of drag strip. Also, the highways in America really aren't built up to the standards of the Autobahn, which was also one of the problems: there were some German tourists familiar with the Autobahn driving in Montana who followed the customs of the Autobahn and it didn't really mesh in very well with the American judicial/law enforcement community.
It was an interesting experiment, but the people of Montana decided to put the speed limits in with just a few years of "unlimited speed limits" in place. BTW, even at the time the speed limits were "unlimited", you still had to maintain control over your vehicle and in fact without the formal speed limits it made fighting a speeding ticket much harder. It was based upon "driving conditions", which are very subjective.
I'm not surprised that some people still think Montana has unlimited speed highways as it was a major news item when it first happened.
You actually have to look deeper into the whole transport issue. The single issue that most drives waste in personal commutes, the one thing that controls it and ramps up the cost, the human loss of productivity and pollution - 'Lack of Job Permanence'.
Corporate greed drove up commute costs, the disposable work force means people can not live close to the place of employment, within in reasonable 'WALKING' distance, unless they want to sell their home every few years and relocate close to their next temporary position.
Even with that, for the majority of people the the light weight energy efficient electric car has more than sufficient range for their daily driving distance, as they would recharge their vehicle each night at the vehicles home charging station.
The big car manufacturers are still 'driven' by greed and their fossil fuel holdings. The electric car is off course still really waiting for a cheap, lightweight and, high capacity, battery (without cost inflating patents with grossly inflate the price).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Eh, I wouldn't be impressed by that, either. Given the number of conspiracy theorists and flat-out idiots who frequent these forums, it would be shocking if SOMEONE hadn't made such accusations. I'd be much more impressed if he could point to a prediction which had been based on a rational analysis of the situation, rather than FUD.
Also, as the claims being made in this article seem to be at least partly blown out of proportion, I think I'll hold off until I can actually see one of these vehicles in action before making any concessions about his predictive powers.
plus you'll look deadly cool with the iNeigh.
Public transportation is not viable in most of the US. The distances are too great. If you want to spend 3 hours getting to work, then that's your choice I suppose.
I get the joke, but it is also a bit interesting to consider this seriously:
So, how much does it cost to maintain a horse?
Food/grain
If not grain, how much acreage is required to have the horse(s) mainly subsist from the naturally occurring grasses?
How much will that acreage cost in property taxes?
What about local zoning ordnances that disallow "farm" animals?
Vet costs/medical care/medicine/ (don't want my horses getting ticks/flees/etc)
What about shoeing?
Barn, infrastructure to support proper care when temperatures drop/bad weather, etc.
Speaking of care, how much time to spend brushing, cleaning, etc? This is an animal with a personality, you know. Needs some regular attention if you want it to listen/behave when you decide to go out.
I am just guessing, but doesn't sound real practical right now...the economy would have to really really tank bad to make these even seem slightly reasonable.
However, I do like your idea of allowing youth to be doing something useful. Shoveling horse apples is the kind of thing that will cause a kid to want to pay attention in school so that he doesn't have to do that for the rest of his life...unless he likes it...then, more power to him.
Interesting thought at 2am.
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At the beginning I guess: Evidence, the links you provided have plenty, thank you for saving me answering this part.
The fact is that public transport at least, consumes more energy per mile than cars.
Actually if you read that table again, you will see that cars are the worst on the list, with the exception of light rail. I could not find the light rail figures in the data linked (no I didn't read all of it so if someone could point me to the relevant table I would appreciate it) so I can only presume the examples cited are among the worst run and designed public transport systems in the world. Apart from this the car is the worst, followed by buses.
the incredibly cheap costs of highway construction
What evidence do you have to back up this? Highways are massively expensive especially in city centres. Highways cost around $1 million per lane mile in the most simple circumstances and as commuter tansit around a large already built up city they are astronomical, not to mention the upkeep and repair costs of highway are much higher than rail. some figures if you have as much trouble accessing that link as I am at the moment you can view screenshots of it here
In addition these figures are for mass transit in the USA, an unashamed car culture. As your own link notes:
Don't Europe and Asia do better? Much better. This Australian Study cites figures saying that Western Europeans use only 76% of U.S. BTUs/pm in their private transport, and only 38% in their transit -- 2.5 times more efficient. Rich Asians do even better at transit -- they are almost 4 times as efficient in terms of energy/passenger-mile.
So it is possible to do it 4 times better than those figure that the car is already at the second to last place on.
Finally
Finally, repeat after me, there is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is an energy collection, storage, and distribution problem.
Well I hate to break it to you, but collection, storage and distribution problems result in there being less energy available for use than we want and need, this is the definition of a shortage
tell me about it. those two states receive zero sunlight that, in some impossible future, could be harnassed by any moving object with pv panels. they may as well be california or nevada.
You have to look beyond corporate greed and understand that high transportation costs is the result of a specialized work force. In a disposable work force, it's the other way around. In china, they can have worker dorms where workers never touch anything transit system at all except a path. That is because they are unspecialized, and so all work at the same job, same company, same place. In America, where we show some respect for our employees, we have to drive, in order to have the size of houses we want, and the jobs we want. Temporary positions, IMO, are a necessity in specialist fields.
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It's not viable in the UK also. We do 98 percent of all our ground travel in cars in the USA, while they do 85 of their ground travel in cars.
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Most studies of this kind of thing are done by the companies trying to promote electric cars like GM and Tesla. Finding one without such bias is rather difficult. I have however looked long and hard in the past and can vouch for this citation which also comes with a spreadsheet with calculations comparing two comparable cars. The phrase "private cars are no longer a viable solution to our transport needs" was not intended to mean we should scrap all cars tomorrow. I was suggesting that we plan for a future without them, which as you point out will take generations and require changes to all sorts of ideas especially things like urban panning, again as you already pointed out.
Its not deceitful, you just have to have a sliver of a brain, and use it. Generally when someone makes an outlandish claim to me, my first reaction is "well, that is clearly not possible following the rules of how the world works that I know, so either this person is lying to me, or they are applying a different set of rules" Then I proceed to figure out which they are doing.
In this case, there IS NOT AN HONEST STRAIGHT FORWARD WAY for GM to represent the mileage of this car, because the GOVERNMENT has not provided a way to do so... Sure that leaves the door open for applying whatever standard GM chooses, but it doesn't excuse people from using their brains to at least attempt to understand things. Hence my claim that people are being idiotic. If you just blindly believe someone when they say "Oh I have this 25k RPM Hard Drive" then yes, you are an idiot.
The key car-vs-train comparison is that of a Tesla roadster to a Japanese electric train.
This sounds fair, just promise me two things:
firstly the cost of the Tesla roadster must be factored in, sure it is fine to talk about how much you spend on electricity but the car costs over 100k which is prohibitive for most commuters.
Secondly, you seem to be using very well researched, long term, realistic statistics for trains. Please don't make the common mistake of accepting the manufacturer's claimed figures for the electric car. Nothing less than comprehensive actual use road statistics from a reliable source and a large sample set will be paid the least bit of attention. Actually this may be difficult as the sample set may not exist. I guess we can be lenient about sample size given the circumstances but only if the methodology is excellent.
You make an excellent point. The impending energy crisis will not be caused by a shortage of energy, but by our infrastructure which currently lacks the ability to harness, store, and distribute existing sources of energy to sustain our current use. Heat, light, mechanical energy (wind, running water), chemical energy (burning fossil fuels, biodiesel) , nuclear energy (from fusion or fission.... uranium or thorium), etc. are abundant. Fossil fuels may be dwindling, and it may take some time to replace such energy-dense matter -- particularly oil and natural gas which can be easily transported to refuel vehicles and/or heat homes. We will invest in research & expensive new infrastructure when the time comes and the expense can be shown to be economical.
firstly the cost of the Tesla roadster must be factored in, sure it is fine to talk about how much you spend on electricity but the car costs over 100k which is prohibitive for most commuters.
I totally agree with the high cost. It is a good car for the price though. That's why we have volt, model S, leaf, and hopefully tesla white star coming soon.
Secondly, you seem to be using very well researched, long term, realistic statistics for trains. Please don't make the common mistake of accepting the manufacturer's claimed figures for the electric car. Nothing less than comprehensive actual use road statistics from a reliable source and a large sample set will be paid the least bit of attention. Actually this may be difficult as the sample set may not exist. I guess we can be lenient about sample size given the circumstances but only if the methodology is excellent.
Yes. That figure is similar to many general estimates of EV energy consumption, as well as the energy consumed by many of the better DIY EV builds. It can at least be regarded as within a factor of two. It's too late for me to dig up all the data right now, but it's a good estimate, IMO. I'll find some big papers on the issue later.
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Seriously, Who the fuck cares? not me....
Sorry, but if Timken isn't diversified enough to survive the bankruptcy of ONE of their customers then Timken has the problem, not me.
It's their problem because their workers aren't willing to work for $1 per day (as their Chinese counterparts do.) That would allow them to drop prices and sell on the international market because then they could compete with Chinese factories. But as things are, their products are too expensive, and so they have only a couple of customers who buy from them for reasons that have little to do with the free market.
If Timken bankrupted, they'd reorganized and so on and so on down until you get a workforce and income realignment and can move on.
It's against the US law to realign the workers' salaries down to the Chinese level, even if you had any workers who accept such a great deal. You can reorganize until you are blue in the face, but unless you scrap all your existing machines and buy only robotic manufacturing lines you can't do it. And since you are bankrupt you aren't going to buy anything; the only possible outcome of such reorganization would be the fire sale of all assets, likely for the price of scrap metal.
Different types of bankruptcies yield different results.
That is true. Sometimes a company needs the excuse of a bankruptcy to dump unfavorable contracts, impossible obligations and to postpone payments on some debts. In this case, however, by and large they are against the wall. The problem is that they are operating in a rich country. It is expensive to hire workers, buy stuff and pay taxes in a rich country. Your competition is in a poor country, and you can't compete with them on price. There is very little you can do, short of customs tariffs, WTO complaints and all that follows.
If you think the government isn't already dependent upon suppliers outside of the US, then I would suggest you're the fool.
The government knows that, and some people in the government want to reduce this dependency. But most don't care, as it appears.
Sho nuff, bring back horses. Fodder can be grown locally, no oil derivatives used to provide locomotion, and if worse comes to worse, you can eat them. Hides make good shoes and sports equipment. Best part: idle youth can be put to work shoveling horse shit instead of posting it on slashdot.
Problem is, the entire thing is carbon-based energy. And we all Know that Carbon Energy is Dirty and Evil.
Great "study" - empty public transportation is not efficient.
The proper question is: Will be more efficient to move majority of people from cars to public transportation? (it is simple - make driving cars more expensive and extend public transportation network).
"The fact is that public transport at least, consumes more energy per mile than cars."
This is not true, at least not according to your own link and assuming you mean 'more energy per mile per passenger' which would be the only sane unit to compare both.
I have a rule of thumb in choosing whether to take the car or public transportation; driving alone in a car is always less efficient than taking public transportation. The numbers in the linked article seem to warrant this rule, see the efficiency for a solo driven car, which is third worse in the list.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
``If you use a commonly used metric to describe an attribute of your car and that commonly used metric doesn't mean anything close to what you're using it for, you're being deceitful.''
Problem is, they couldn't have. The EPA had not established a standard test cycle for the kind of car that the Volt is. So as far as using the commonly used metric the way it's commonly used (i.e. reporting performance on the EPA test cycles), it could not have been done. This has been known pretty much from the beginning. Now, they could have done any number of things. They could have tested their car on one of the already established EPA test cycles. They could have claimed "MPG? For most city driving, you won't be using any gasoline at all!" They could have cooked up some kind of equivalence formula. Or they could have waited for the EPA to come up with a test cycle for their kind of car, and gone with that.
According to many sources on the web, the 230 miles per gallon figure was based on preliminary/draft specifications for a new EPA city test cycle developed specifically for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, with final ratings to be determined by testing after the EPA test cycles for PHEVs would be determined. Does that strike you as GM being deceitful?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
More accurately, it's like building a gun that can't shoot, because in certain situations that might be illegal.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Evolution of the Volt as seen by me.
Promised: Oh wow! That's a pretty shape. I'd buy that.
Actual: Uhh, that's nearly as sexy, but if they keep the drive train idea...
Promised: Oh, hey, I drive more than 70 freeway miles a day. This fits my needs better than an all-electric.
Actual: How is this better than a diesel VW? But at least they are developing something interesting like the Jaguar C-X75 drive train...
Promised: You know, if it is a series hybrid, I bet you tinker with the car. Simple drive train.
Actual: How is this different than a Prius again? If I wanted a Prius...
Promised: a car that actually made me consider a hybrid as suitable to my needs.
Actual: I wonder what Honda is doing...
So you get spanked and go "joke!!!". Nah, you got buttfucked and are trying to backpedal.
Stop and go is not a problem in an EV. If you're moving, you use power, if you're not, you don't.
And, typically, the range is the expected range after 5 years.
All this fuss over a few percentage points difference in consumption. It's not really achieving anything. A real low energy substitute for a car looks like this.
That's true for a lot of autobahnen in Germany. France, Spain, Italy and Austria, for example, have general speed limits, and also a Toll on motorways, while Germany has (as of now) still no toll for private cars (PKW) under 3,5 metric tons on highways.
"Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so"
Come on, think global. Don't stick to yesterday. Why would I be interested in a car that can't go 160 km/h (it's a quite decent speed on many parts of the autobahn in germany).
From TFA;
There is a bit of a paradox within these numbers. In spite of them, it is generally the green move for any individual to take existing mass transit over their car. That's because the transit is running anyway, so the incremental cost of carrying one more passenger is indeed less than just about any private vehicle. It is similarly green to carpool in somebody else's car that's going your way.
As such, these numbers should not make you feel better about taking your car instead of the train. Particularly solo, since solo drivers are what make the car's average efficiency worse while carpoolers make it better.
Nice try tho.
empty public transportation is not efficient.
And this is one problem that can be addressed by throwing processing power at the problem. Static timetables were a good solution when they had to be worked out by hand and posted on a noticeboard. Now, it's entirely feasible for bus stops to let people enter their desired destination - and for people to do it elsewhere via the Internet, especially from a mobile phone with GPS - and dynamically schedule busses based on customer demand. Give a lower price for people willing to have more uncertainty in their departure / arrival times, or to book sufficiently in advance, and you can avoid having empty vehicles driving around.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A lighter car certainly will be more energy efficient. But your Daihatsu is a complicated beast, you better drive a simple 2cv to make a statement. You can fix it yourself and the footprint was made in the previous century.
But calling a prius transmission unreliable is not the truth in recent models. It works different that your rocket car, but that is not by definition complicated. The fact is that it is much harder to troubleshoot any modern car (as a non-professnional) then it was 20 years ago, due to all the electronics in the car.
And hybrids are nothing but hype. I get 44mpg in my 2006 Honda Civic on a regular basis by simply driving sane. NOT hypermiling, but driving like a normal person should be. The Civic Hybrid get's only 2-4 mpg more than my car does for a nearly $10,000 premium in price and about the same in TCO. At $4.00 a gallon that equates to 5000 gallons of gas I have to burn to make up the difference in cost. Plus, the civic is eLEV already so it's "save the planet" rating is as high as any of the hybrids are already. and that is only if you plug your ears and ignore the fact that the battery pack in your hybrid did more to destroy the planet than driving a SUV in 1st gear only for the first 4 years. The heavy metals and nasty chemicals in those packs, and the manufacture process is incredibly toxic, and produced in countries where eco laws do not strictly force them to keep the containment of the nasty chemicals out of the environment.
If I had Hybrid money I'd be buying a more expensive car that is worth the money spent. BMW 328i NEW costs less than the joke that is the Chevy Volt.
I'd rather drive the BMW and have a well built car with some creature comforts than the crappy built chevy that has GM's tracker record of making engineering blunders and premature failures.
Plus the BMW new, I pay NO maintenance costs for 3 years. Oil changes, everything are 100% free. Chevy you have to add the price of those into it's cost. (Not a BMW fan, that's why I drive a civic. I pulled this info from their websites.)
Honestly, I see only those trying to look eco-trendy buying hybrids. You do not save any money, you really don't save the planet, why get a econo class car for a luxury class price?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Terrific! Can you please find me some mass transit that doesn't go the opposite direction that I want it to? My area has nothing but buses that go the wrong way at +/- 15 minutes of their scheduled time...
The main thing the GP and the article misses is there's been hardly any push to make rail transport energy efficient. We use heavy rail vehicles, so almost everyone walks away after a (very rare) accident, even at well over typical car speeds. Energy is a small cost of running a passenger train -- especially an electric one -- and we consider safety, speed, cost and reliability before it.
It looks like the study mentions that, and that they can only go so far before they cut into the schedule too much for it to be convenient any more.
Anyway, the problem that I have (and, I think, many people do) is that mass transit is exceedingly poorly thought out in my area, turning a 1.2 hour (each way) driving commute (with horrendous traffic, so I look into mass transit every couple weeks to see if something changed or I missed an option) into a three hour quest.
Worse, is that because of the way it's laid out, and the fact that the place I work is in an area much more affluent than my job, means that I can only afford to move close enough to cut that three hour mass-transit commute down to just under two hours, with a three mile cab ride during the winter.
By poorly thought out, i mean that there is no transit option that follows the ring roads, so if you want to go to from one suburban area to a tangentially adjacent one, you have to go 20 miles into the city and then return after one or two transfers.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You can't compare a hypothetically full car with the average-filled train. It would be just as silly as comparing a hypothetically full train -- using a complete guess of 400 passengers gives almost 900mi/gal, several times more efficient than anything else on the list.
The article already includes a 1.57-passengers car (35mi/gal), and an average train of 22 passengers (48mi/gal).
I think it is hurting GM more to keep promising this car and to keep delaying releasing it.
What a ridiculous apologist you are. You first suggest that it isn't deceitful for them to make a claim THEY KNOW TO BE FALSE because they're worried they can't convey something else appropriate. Then you suggest there isn't a straight forward way for GM to represent the mileage of this car because they government hasn't given them a way - that's baloney. It's quite simple. Mile Per Gallon refers to fuel efficiency and/or consumption, electric range is something completely different. GM knew this and knows it now, but that doesn't matter to them. They can act like they didn't realize it was totally misleading - apparently people like yourself don't find it misleading at all.
You didn't see Nissan lying their a**es off by seriously claiming 367mpg (they brought it up as a joke after GM made idiots out of themselves.)
Testing has shown that the Volt actually gets 32mpg in the city and 36mpg on the highway, and that electric range was at most (during these tests) 35 miles. This means that with a 9.8 gallon tank the total range of the vehicle is (assuming 40 miles EV driving - which is generous) only 393 miles.
So, a car with almost 10 gallons of gas in it and a range of less than 400 miles is not being intentionally misleading by claiming 230mpg? LOL.
None of this makes the Volt a bad car because by all accounts its a great (if a little heavy and expensive) step towards an EV future, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about deceitful and deliberately misleading advertising.
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Factoring these in, plus lower maintenance costs of rail vs asphalt, mass-transit is still a win.
If you're comparing rail vs auto's, it's far from a win. Building and installing rail is amazingly expensive and takes a long time. Then, what happens if you put the rail in a place where no one wants to go or ride on a train? You're severely limited in your ability to adapt to population density shifts because of the incredible expense and lead time required to get the rail installed.
I'd love to see more mass transit available, but rail, as attractive as it is on the surface, is a huge waste. Bus service is much more efficient than rail and capacity can easily be shifted as needed. For longer distances, it would be more cost effective to provide air service.
The more we keep putting rail up as the solution to our transportation problems, the more people we lose in changing things in a positive way as they see that the whole process of getting rail in place is just a political exercise in how much money can be put into the politicians and corporate exec's pockets. The rail always ends up going where someone with influence owns some property that they can make money on and in the end doesn't relieve any problems. Billions are spent by tax payers. Billions are made by politicians and their corporate buddies. And, the problems still exist.
Spend those billions on buses and dedicated lanes for them to move past traffic and you'll see the problems clear up much more quickly. Keep hyping rail and eventually no one believes there's a workable solution.
Wow, I'm shocked! Marketing wasn't 100% accurate!!! Perhaps the newspapers of the world will unite in condemning the corporation?
The facts do not support the conclusion you or the person who wrote what you linked to suggest.
The figures say that Mass transit in the US would be better if more people used it. The figures clearly say that a car being used by one person generates more BTU's than any other transport, except light rail, which quiet frankly I'd love to see the source data behind THAT set of figures, seems astronomically high for light rail.
haha
good invention
and i say good design
That's why I've taken to hunting humans. Those bastards produce 3-5x their body weight in CO_2 annually!.
And if you've ever seen them in action, it's clear that 90% of them are unnecessary...
80? really? Wow, that's fast.
Nah, that's not fast. That's rush hour speed along some DFW highways.
Yes, it very much is deceitful. They knowingly and willingly used an unapproved metric to advertise using a common fuel consumption metric that sounded absolutely fantastic. People keep trying to confuse misleading and/or deceitful with illegal or technically incorrect.
It doesn't matter that they used some unapproved approach for measuring MPG, what matters is that they knew that it was incredibly misleading. You didn't see Nissan claiming (except as a joke at GM's expense) that the Leaf gets 367mpg - although technically they could. Why didn't they? Because they didn't want to be dishonest.
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Ford released the 2011 Fiesta, which gets 40 miles per gallon on the highway and isn't a hybrid. The 2012 Focus(compact, not subcompact) will get 155 horsepower, has a lot of features, get the 40ish miles per gallon on the highway non-hybrid as well, and sells for $17000 to $25000(with almost all options, $24000 for the 5-door Titanium version with premium package. With these sorts of prices, what does the Volt(a hybrid, not an all-electric car) provide?
Cost of ownership has to be considered as well, since you will be paying for electricity to charge the batteries, plus putting gas in the Volt as well. The environmental impact for the battery production is also left out. If the batteries are produced in China, then the pollution from battery production may be there instead of here, but pollution is still being produced. So it doesn't save the planet, it just hides it in a place that has zero environmental laws.
So, NIMBY may apply when it comes to these things, but the cost of electricity is already very high, and for the Volt, is it cheaper to get your electrical power from plugging it in, or from the gas generator in the car? I'd say that Ford has the right approach, get gas engines to 50 miles per gallon, because that will be cheaper for the owner than the electric needed to charge an all-electric. 40 miles per gallon is already a huge improvement over what most cars are getting, and at 155hp, provides a decent amount of power as well. Or you go with the 305hp Mustang that gets 31 miles per gallon on the highway. Either way, does GM have ANY cars at this point, gas or electric, which have a GOOD total cost of ownership?
BTW, I like the paper in terms of at least expressing a strong arguments of concern about a wholesale adoption of electric automobiles. Still, statements like this one in the paper like this one make me think there is a definite axe to grind with regards to its authors: "There is a deeply ingrained American attitude that says that the reward for all your hard work is the right to squander precious energy." (p. 138)
I could cite other parts too, but there is a political axe to grind with this paper that goes beyond merely documenting efficiency of various vehicles and trying to prove the case that somehow the concept of electric vehicles isn't necessarily the best way to go for moving people from point "A" to point "B". It does make you think, and seriously thank you for posting the link to this paper.
The Volt will be awesome. 90% of the time it is an electric vehicle. People are whining about it using gas to directly drive the front wheels. At least the option is there. The other option is pull over and charge up. I'm sure the engineers did it for a reason (like its needed or more efficient).
Quit bitching. This is progress. Seems like they were looking for anything to complain about.
Depends. Some parts of the US have no speed limit. Even in some well traveled states the speed limit is as high as 85MPH. Even some highways in Texas have a 80MPH speed limit - which means it doesn't qualify for federal highway funds - despite paying taxes on those same highways.
Regardless, the car is designed for limited distance commutes where high speed and long distances are the exception.
The articles is really a bunch of trollish bullshit. Is it an electric car? Does it run on electric motors? Does it have batteries to allow it to travel non-trivial distances on electric motors. The answer is absolutely yes to all of them. By any meaningful metric, it absolutely is an electric car. Its an electric car which attempts to address the needs whereby the LEAF falls short; and for exactly the same reasons people don't want a LEAF.
As for the MPG rating, this is a fundamental flaw of government standards which has been known to be generally useless for electric/hybrids for over a decade now and highly questionable for even ICE vehicles. Lobbyists have maintained the standard because it makes their MPG numbers appear better than they are, which allows them to road more poor mileage vehicles than would otherwise be possible. As a side benefit, using the government mandated method, it provides completely useless and bogus results for hybrid and electric vehicles.
People are now blaming the Volt for the government's failing in allowing them to be bought and paid for via lobbyists. Long story short, this is nothing but absolutely bullshit. If you are the least bit stirred, aside from anger at the stupidity and ignorance of the article, then you don't know enough of the subject matter to be justified in the first place.
1) If day/night is a problem you could just as easily use the batteries you would use for the cars, but stick them in a building and use them for trains. More likely, you'd store the energy some other way.
2) How will you reduce the truck use of roads? Railways? Seems like you're investing in railway tracks anyway now.
3) "Japanese trains have high ridership and insane efficiency" The first is correct, but has there been anywhere near the effort that's gone into making the Tesla energy efficient for the train? The train doesn't carry its power source, so there's only energy cost and environmental concerns driving reduced power consumption, not technical necessity.
So after putting together a massive R&D effort, and building an ultra-complicated semi-hybrid vehicle, you get a staggering...37MPG |:-|
http://www.bambootrading.com/1800/1822.JPG
I am not impressed.
And anyone who says one fucking word about safety can die in a fire...since cars still don't have safety-bladder fuel cells after all these decades. What good will your curtain airbags do you when your fuel tank gets a fine crack, spills fuel all over the crash site and burns everyone involved in the accident alive? The safety arms race has left cars hauling around a thousand or more pounds of "safety" that is worth precisely dick when the metal eggshell under your rear seat cracks.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've heard different numbers for that "spec" but never seen any source. Do you know that for sure, or did you just hear it somewhere?
You must be from the UK, standing on the wrong side of the street
But this article that was cited certainly makes a strong compelling case for encouraging carpooling as a significant alternative to mass transit infrastructure, particularly for people who do medium to long-range commuting. It is also something that I think much of the direct government money involved with the building of mass transit enterprises could be used instead to help organize and perhaps even help subsidize some carpooling alternatives. This would be especially true in suburbia where most other forms of mass transit are horribly inappropriate
I remember when I was a taxi driver doing a comparison between the fleet of taxis where I was at (a mostly suburban Utah County, Utah) where the other drivers working for the cab company and I sat down during some down time and calculated the real cost of providing bus service for the county (at the time about 15 bus route mainly concentrated among the high population centers... it has expanded somewhat, but the principle still holds true). After figuring in our own wages, costs of new high fuel efficient automobiles and presuming lousy gas mileage far worse than even used cars, we calculated it would be either a wash or even a modest net savings to taxpayers if we simply provided taxi service for direct point to point delivery of passengers. This did not include the fares but it did include published federal, state, and local subsidies that were being used to pay for the bus system. That was merely calculating the raw costs involved including passenger loads, presuming about 1.5 passengers per taxi trip, and not even suggesting perhaps that a fleet of hybrids in a "subsidized taxi fleet" might also help with environmental issues. It also calculated in the costs to pay for the drivers @ about 3x minimum wage.
There are definitely many places where urban bus systems really aren't cost effective and can cause more harm to the environment, the pocket books of the taxpayers involved, and on top of all that can put in a major inconvenience for those who need to use them. Furthermore, a taxi fleet could be much more scalable to the passenger demand needs. I'm not saying that a free public taxi system is necessarily the best route to go for a public transportation infrastructure, but it certainly ought to be something to consider.
So how do you propose people living in rural areas to travel? You expect someone to ride their bicycle 20 miles to the store in freezing rain or ninety five degree f heat?
Free Martian Whores!
A very limited (you need a severe disability) free taxi service exists here. I don't know anything about it, beyond what's on that page, although I've seen smaller vehicles than the one pictured -- that would qualify as a decent-sized bus in much of Scotland!
The first bus services grew from taxi services.
Isn't that a misunderstanding of the bankruptcy process? Unless GM couldn't show that it would be profitable again, ever, then the company would keep running pretty much the same way it has been. Except they would renegotiate benefits and pensions and debts.
If Timken had to declare bankruptcy it would be the same thing. The judge isn't going to say "Sorry Timken, we're melting down your machinery, and salting your factory floors so nothing grows there."
It's worth noting that government bureaucracies move no slower (and often faster) than private industry bureaucracies.
This is adequately demonstrated by GM's glacial pace of operations; the most significant innovations at GM in the last 80 years were driven by government mandates (seatbelts, fuel efficiency, pollution control, etc.) GM is literally slower than the intentionally deliberate processes of a democratic republic!
Organizations that have no bureaucracy - that run tight - can be very fast by comparison. But despite political rhetoric to the contrary, being a "government" bureaucracy does not automagically make something inefficient.
Any sort of bureaucracy (or large consensus-process effort) slows things down. That's why the military doesn't stop to vote on stuff on the battlefield - even the Finns save that kind of process for base camp. Dictatorship is fast and risky, checks and balances are slower and (most of the time) safer.
In a capitalist economy, investors decide which kind of leadership an enterprise needs at any given time, until a company grows too large to be led by anyone or anything but its own inertia. I think GM hit that wall decades ago.
They didn't even attempt to hide that though. After the US government, the union is the largest shareholder of the new GM. Followed by Canada for some weird reason..
The Tesla "Model S" is going to be costing about $50k per vehicle, and if you add in maintenance costs for a convention internal combustion engine over the lifespan of about 150,000 miles driven in the vehicle, that model starts to get real attractive compared to new cars. It still doesn't compete on the really low end, but Tesla is trying to push after the "luxury" automobile market like BMW, Lexis, and Cadillac rather than the cheaper end vehicle. The Model S isn't going to be a high performance sports car, but it is going to be a full-sized family vehicle capable of holding 3-4 kids plus parents and some groceries. The Roadster has trunk space for a golf bag and that is about it. That size was by design on the Roadster too.
There is a "Blue Star" vehicle that is supposedly going after the lower tiers of the auto industry, but I'm not holding my breathe for that to get built. The Model S, on the other hand, is already at the production prototyping stage with versions already on the highway so far as verifying performance and getting it ready for the battery of tests needed to get something into serial production.
We need a higher gas tax anyway. And this is coming from a guy who drives a sport wagon that gets 19 MPG in mixed driving.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
As always, GM sucks rhino. 230 mpg my ass
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
Imagine all the people...
I thought that some roads in Arizona were posted "Safe and Prudent" with no actual limits as such.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I live in NY City and regularly drive from the Eastern end of Long Island to the city limits at night. If it's not the end of the month when ticket quotas need filling, and my Valentine Radar Detector plugged in, I regularly drive at speeds in excess of 80 mph
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
There is a slight problem with that.
My monthly fastpass, good for unlimited in-town transit, costs me $70. Just how much does a Tesla run for?
And no, I don't live in New York or Japan. So yeah, by your numbers, it might be more energy-efficent to drive. (Though it'd be slower and I'd have the additional expense and headache of parking... no thanks.) What that says to me still though; is that the solution is not to abandon transit in favor my car, but to fire the people running it and hire the people who know how to run it correctly to build out a proper network.
Imagine all the people...
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
So where DO you live? And how far are you traveling?
In the DC area (Best mass transit I've experienced in the states to date), if I wanted to do Door to Door commuting from my house in Springfield to Crystal City, here is how it would work:
I get up at a specific time, walk to the bus stop (5 minutes). I wait for the bus (5 minutes). Then I ride the bus to the Springfield Franconia station (30 minutes). I then wait for a train (usually one waiting, so 2-3 minutes). I ride this to Crystal City (30 minutes) and walk to my office (5 minutes).
Door to door, that is 1 hour 7 minutes on a perfect minimum delay day.
If I drive, it is 11 miles, and takes me 30-50 minutes (30 low traffic, 50 high traffic)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The speed limits take into account weather and other driving conditions. When it's night time and raining, even 65 can be too fast. If there's snow on the ground it's WAY too fast. That 125 also assumes optimal maintenance on the vehicles; if your tires or shocks or brake pads are worn, 125 would be almost suicidal.
And the cars and highways can be safe on a dry sunny day, but half the people driving them have two digit IQs.
Free Martian Whores!
If Public Transport would take you 3 hours to get to work, your alternative would be DRIVING at least 2 hours. ughh. That's unthinkable. At least I can sleep on most of my commute.
The GM volt drives the wheels from the engine when the battery is depleted AND the speed is more than 70mph. Both conditions have to be met before the outer ring of the planetary is unlocked and powered by the gas engine.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I think there's some more factors as well. In China there's a lot less material goods to worry about. I'm willing to bet that you'd be a lot more mobile if jobs provided living quarters and it only took a suitcase or two for you to move.
What if, in the USA, if the standard wasn't just for the appliances such as fridge, washer and dryer to maybe stay, if the furnishings were too? Beds, table, chairs, etc...? People would be a lot more mobile without all that heavy stuff to move around.
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
I don't read AC A human right
EASE OF USE is also an important factor which I forgot to mention. Not only do the Honda Insight, VW Lupo, and VW 1 L car get ~90 MPG and ~240 MPG per passenger, they are only a few steps from your house. In contrast the nearest train station (for me) is 30 minutes walk. And I'd get soaked or frozen going there.
Also the train doesn't run in the middle of the night, which I might need for an emergency or because I feel like getting some milk at the local store.
I compared my travel time (car) versus my boss (train), and mine was twice as fast. 45 minutes for me versus 90 minutes for him.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Don't remind me please.
San Francisco. I guess transit here must be better than DC, even though I could catalog a long list of complaints. And the link I was originally replying to doesn't mention MUNI, but I can't imagine them being anywhere near as competent as Japan Rail, or even New York.
The bright spot, though, is that the busses are tracked by GPS and post real-time locations and ETAs to the web. So I can walk out my door, go 5 minutes to the bus stop, and be there pretty much just as the next bus is getting there. Then it's a fifteen minute ride downtown, and another five minute walk to the office. Without that GPS, I'd have to allow for another 10 minutes, give or take.
Imagine all the people...
>>>Japanese trains have high ridership
That's because they treat the people like sardines, shoving them into trains. I'll keep my car, rather than put up with that inhumane shit.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The texts that existed in the past skipped major portions of US history, in order to create an anti-founding father slant (a bunch of rich people that killed blacks for fun).
The just-revised texts re-insert those missing events, mostly revolving around black patriots and attempts by the 1780s revolutionaries to create a colorblind society, back into the books. No the textbooks aren't perfect, but they are a hundred times better than what they looked like a year ago.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's why some states have two different limits - one for "regular" travel and a second one for night/rain conditions.
Also a lot of times politicians overrule engineers. They will recommend travel at 85, but politicians will set it to 65 simply because that's the state law. There's no rationality to it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Thomas Jefferson did support the abolition of slavery. He felt that it was an institution whose time has served its purpose and that it should happen gradually, over the course of a couple of generations rather than all at once, but that it was important to end the institution at some point in the future. At the time he was alive, it was a dying institution as it was with many slave holders emancipating their slaves... usually at their death. Most of them didn't want their children to continue to be slave holders.
Economics was the major driver here, and it was the invention of the cotton gin that placed renewed interested in slavery for the southern U.S. states. Dixie was one of the first places to be hit during the industrial revolution for a supply of dirt cheap labor to mass produce cheap stuff for sale to the rest of the world. Cotton and linen became common exports to Europe and ended up being used for paper production (usually recycled used clothing) bedding and clothing. Why the Cotton gin made such a difference was the ability to act as a labor multiplier and allowing varieties of cotton that could grow in a much wider group of climates than the earlier varieties that were commonly used for clothing. This renewed demand for labor and the economics supporting slavery in the early 1800's is what made the U.S. Civil War so ugly as huge economic interests were on the line.
If you are trying to be sarcastic, at least try to use a valid analogy or something resembling truth.
I'd long wondered why it was taking them so long to put a genny in the trunk of an EV-1. Having to take the genny apart and wedge in a transmission connection to the drive wheels would certainly explain a couple of months delay.
Though I still don't understand why it is taking them so long....
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
The problem is most commuters, myself included, are fleeing the local city government due to its failure to police and educate its residents. There's a perfectly good apartment building across the street from my employer with reasonable rents, yet I live 20 miles away because it would border on child abuse to send my kids to one of the worst school districts in the nation, and neither my family nor my stuff would be safe living there. An arcology would be an epic fail in most big cities.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
are fleeing the local city government due to its failure to police and educate its residents.
Yeah, that's something to fix, alright. Perhaps we stick a private school in the skyscraper as well?
I don't read AC A human right
My travel time to work by bicycle is 15-20 minutes, depending on how I feel. On a good day it would be about the same by car, but perhaps once a week it would be twice that (i.e. normally the cars are slightly faster than me, but are held up by having to go through more traffic lights and a slightly longer route. About once a week I cycle past a very long traffic jam that seems to hardly move. At night the journey is probably 10-15 minutes by car.).
My manager walks to work, I think it takes her about 25 minutes *.
One colleague walks for about 35 minutes.
Two cycle for about 30-40 minutes *.
One takes a local train for about 25 minutes, I assume he walks to the station (0-10 mins, I don't know where he lives) *.
One takes a long distance train + a local train for about 1h15 minutes *.
One drives for a week, gets fed up, and takes the train for the next week. In either case the journey takes 1h45m *.
Another does the same, but seems to usually take the train. Maybe its faster, or maybe she and her husband share a car, or maybe something else. I don't know where she lives.
I'm certain all the people with a * own a car, some of the others might. Many of the cars are probably only used at the weekend.
We need some genetic engineering on horses. Join old technology with new. What we need are horses crossed with a dachsund, to convert a simple horse into a mass transit vehicle. You might have problems with the critter trying to pee on itself.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the batteries is covered under the 5 year warranty, correct? Nobody is gonna complain about what they get "for free". While we haven't seen any long term studies on the battery reliabilities of these in various climates (Have you?, I haven't) but every other battery I've ever seen was actually affected by heat and cold, and if they came out with some new tech that magically made it go away I'm sure we'd have heard of it.
Finally one has to look at the demographic they are currently being sold to. Not too long ago I saw an article that said the average hybrid owner made 200k per year. if that is true they are much more likely to own a garage, something most folks don't have. Placing the car in a climate buffered garage would negate a lot of the temp changes when not in use, whereas if these things were pushed onto the general public they'd have to sit in driveways and parking lots during the nasty winters and scorching summers. Ever leave a laptop battery out in a hot car? Now imagine that same battery costing $5k.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
33808 road deaths last year sounds pretty inhumane to me.
This country had 2222 road deaths and zero rail passenger deaths last year, and zero deaths (so far) this year. (Last year four people were killed on level crossings, and one maintenance worker by a passing train.)
So buy a different fucking car asshole
Maybe, not that I've seen. I've heard that some roads in Montana in areas with an exceptionally low population density have no speed limit.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Assuming, of course, you don't have to replace a $30,000-$40,000 battery pack every 3-5 years. The problem with the Roadster is that the laptop batteries they're using (or at least used initially... not sure if they've fixed this yet) only support about 300-500 charge/discharge cycles before they're seriously failing.
Hybrids, including the Volt, solve this problem by short-cycling the batteries. On my 2003 Prius, they only run 40% of battery capacity, so after 130,000 miles, it's virtually good as new. They extended this to 60% starting in the 2004 model year (they also cut down on the number of cells, so the capacity is the same). These are both NiMh, but the same seems to be true of Lithium based technologies.
The Volt is supposed to have a newly engineered cell that supports more cycling, more like 5,000 charge-discharge cycles (at least, that was their goal). That gets you about 200,000 miles on a battery, if you believe the 40 mile range as a useful average. And yet, at least in the original design, they weren't going to charge the battery on-the-road, as a hybrid does ... you'd run it down, then the ICE takes over until you recharge it at home.
It sounds like they fixed this, at least, and the generator is actually charging the batteries in-flight. The writeup I read is here: http://gm-volt.com/2010/10/11/motor-trend-explains-the-volts-powertrain/
Basically, they've switched around the positions of the two motor/generators and the ICE in this design, versus the Prius. It looks like, while technically the ICE is providing power to the same system as the main drive motor, its intended purpose is to run the generator. Much as the Prius's smaller motor/generator drives to change the effective gear ratio between the big motor and the ICE, you could claim it's proving some motive power, since technically it's adding power to the system, but that's a tiny side-effect of its real function.
-Dave Haynie
Others have "driving too fast for conditions" as well. And yes, an many of not most cases there is little rationality.
Free Martian Whores!
I sure hope GM gets rid of the gasoline engine. Or provides an option to buy an electric-only version. That sure would make the initial sticker price lower and the maintenance would be much easier/cheaper. I see little reason to go over 70 mph (ever). And this is the speed limit of most of the populated United States (US speed limits by state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States
Even if you do regularly drive the interstate in a 75mpg limit state here is how the time difference for a 40 mile commute:
40 mile trip @ 75 mph = 32 min
40 mile trip @ 70 mph = 34 min
hmm... just a two minute savings for the cost of an entire combustion engine. ie: NOT WORTH IT.
And this assumes all interstate driving. Non-interstate driving at maximum speed is covered entirely by electric.
And if you live in a state with 80 mgp interstate... well your saving 4 minutes for buying the gasoline engine + fuel.
In other words... if you think 70 mph is not fast enough and reason to continue buying or using a combustion engine vehicle... then you are a selfish person who thinks saving a minute or two every day is more important than not digging up (polluting/destroying) all of north america (starting with Alberta) just to separate oil from the dirt.
I have an all electric vehicle. I know the savings is incredible. I now get 1600 mpg according to what I pay for electricity vs how much fuel I could buy at the same cost. I measured this over 1 month... it is accurate. My daily commute is equivalent to the cost of 250 days of public transit. My maintenance costs are 1/10 compared to my old gas car (no oil change, air filters, spark plugs, transmission fluid, etc, etc, etc). I speak from experience. Car companies fear electric cars due to their low maintenance and lack of requirement for existing infrastructure (no gas station required and less garage/service visits).
Conclusion: If an american car company sells (not lease) an all electric car... like the Chevy Volt IS... then invest in that company. They will sell a lot of them. Then buy one yourself and enjoy the benefits.
What aircraft that has toilet seats in it makes high-G maneuvers? This isn't a fighter we're talking about.
You have to remember that time is money - people are willing to pay quite a bit of money to save time. Cars also provide quite a bit of storage space.
So to really start cutting down on car usage, you're going to have to make public transportation faster and more convenient, not just cheaper.
Most bus systems operate on a spoke system - To get to a destination that's six miles away, I might have to travel like 10 miles to get downtown, then 10 miles back on another bus, adding up to 'I might as well walk' amounts of time.
It's part of the reason I like PRT - individual on demand non-stop cars can actually be faster than cars. Go with an electrified rail system and it can beat cars in efficiency and pollution as well.
I don't read AC A human right
Thomas Jefferson did support the abolition of slavery. He felt that it was an institution whose time has served its purpose and that it should happen gradually, over the course of a couple of generations rather than all at once, but that it was important to end the institution at some point in the future. At the time he was alive, it was a dying institution as it was with many slave holders emancipating their slaves... usually at their death. Most of them didn't want their children to continue to be slave holders.
Yeah, I'm sure that must have been very comforting to the 182 slaves which he didn't even bother to free after his death. He did free five slaves, both before his death and also in his will, but I don't think those really counted since those five slaves were finally proven to be his very own kids.
If you are trying to be sarcastic, at least try to use a valid analogy or something resembling truth.
Yeah, the next time you hear a politician say that he supports universal health-care, but only a couple of generations from now, or that he supports green energy, but only a couple of generations from now, that will probably be Steve Colbert saying it -- that's how absurd your statement about Thomas Jefferson being some kind of delayed-abolitionist really sounds to the rest of us (especially, since he didn't even say anything of the sorts one way or another. For all we know, Thomas Jefferson may very well have been a closeted-delayed-abolitionist, but making that claim when there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever -- only shows a very strong bias on your part).
We don't WANT for anyone to have to go bankrupt. What we WANT is for a company to produce quality merchandise at a reasonable cost. We WANT a company whose employees compensation does NOT greatly exceed what are COMPETITIVE wages/benefits. We want a company to NOT be stolen from it's shareholders and given to the labor union. But sadly we didn't get what WE want.
You mean color blind like trying to have the school books call the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade" and pushing that the free market is awesome. Pushing that the country was founded on christian standards. Minimizing the importance of the separation of church and state. School books are about cold hard facts. They should not be biased towards anyone's political stance and that includes an American bias making our government seem superior to others. The changes were voted on by people with political and religious agendas not by scholars and educators. How long before creationism must be taught in schools or evolution banned?
Znerk got his ass handed to him for shooting his mouth off and on technical issues in computing znerk had little to NO clue about:
'
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1815608&cid=33865512
and here again on technical issues in computing:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1815608&cid=33869788
and lastly on technical issues in computing, znerk being shot down yet again, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1815608&cid=33869788
Funniest part is Znerk came into that thread, tossing names at others there, and then znerk made huge technical blunders on HOSTS files versus AdBlock and started calling names even more and lying even after those urls above, and then znerk only getting caught in it by his own words quoted proving he is a liar (which znerk stupidly tried to deny no less).
Don't believe a word he says in other words.
Znerk was flat out caught lying today here of all things (where he won't admit to name tossing and his first post in that exchange showed him calling others there idiots no less, quoted).
Hilarious, and realize znerk is an 8 digit userid utilizing troll who got his behind handed to him for shooting his mouth off on things he has no clue in and then tossed names at the ac named apk who corrected him (nicely considering how znerk called him all sorts of names there, only making znerk look more the frustrated and childish fool).
Oh yeah? Here in Arizona the interstates are 75mph. In parts of Texas it's 80mph.
And that's the minimum speed.
Speeds above 70 mph is illegal anyway here
This is blinging
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-manufacturers/vauxhall/8058746/VoltAmpera-secrets-revealed.html
"Owners of the Chevrolet Volt and Vauxhall/Opel Apera will need a little local knowledge about uphill sections of their route, after the company finally lifted the lid on its technology this week. Drivers will need to anticipate steep, long hills well in advance so they can engage a special "Mountain Mode" which engages the petrol engine early to make electricity to allow full power up hills.
Claiming that pending patents (granted on September 21) prevented it from revealing more about the extended-range battery car's technical specification, GM revealed its new car will operate in four major modes, one of which, Mountain Mode, will need to be activated at least 20 minutes before reaching said mountain if full power is to be maintained. General Motor's engineer Larry Nitz claims the four-mode system extends the existing 40-mile battery power range by another couple of miles and makes the driveline between 10 and 15 per cent more efficient."
I would assume that the Volt would be harder on the batteries than a Prius. The Prius tries really hard to not fully discharge or fully charge the batteries as that is what's hardest on them, instead the Prius generally keeps them around 40-80% charged. On the other hand, batteries on the Volt are going to regularly charged to 100% and nearly fully discharged at times. I expect that will shorten their life somewhat.
The problem is the cost to society of that $70 pass. Transit riders pay %25 of their costs, while car drivers pay %80. In addition, I'm guessing(!) your pass is subsidised by other transit riders, meaning that %25 is even worse. Even Japanese transit cannot beat the electric car. While having Japanese run transit might make it better, huge trains simply can't compete with small, personal vehicles weighing 2-3 tons.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
make driving cars more expensive and extend public transportation network
A common fallacy. We are talking about the difference between a Japanese electric train and an American electric car. Zero. Japan, where gas is $4.24. My guess is that you don't like car drivers and want to punish them for using a superior mode of transportation. If you would like to use inferior modes of transportation, please pay for them instead of robbing car drivers to pay for them.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Har Har Har.
So essentially, this clown has a long track record of making claims about subjects he knows pretty much nothing about? Hell, he doesnt even seem to ever know the terminology used in the fields he is pretending to know-for-a-fact about. Simply amazing.
"His name was James Damore."
In this country, 0.79 fatalities per 100 million car passenger mile in 2008 (year used for car comparisons because it is the latest with complete data), and 2.2 fatalities per 100 million train passenger miles in the year 2006, the lowest year. Switching to trains could grow the figure to over 90000 people per year. More people die of flu and cold than of cars. What country, are you in?
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
BTW, you might be interested to know the intra-national transit breakdown in your country:
UK transit, in billion passenger kilometers:
Cars, vans and taxis: 686 (%84.4)
Buses and coaches: 50 (%6.16)
Motor cycles: 6 (%0.739)
Pedal cycles: 5 (%0.616)
All road: 747 (%92.0)
Rail: 55 (%6.77)
Air: 10 (%1.23)
Total: 812
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
I.E., a vanpool, which is IMO the best form of public transport.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
I propose that people in rural areas drive the most efficient possible ICE car for their purposes, until something better is available. Most of the energy savings from reducing car use would have to be gained in metropolitan areas. There are a lot of cars in metropolitan areas so this should yield significant savings.
In the UK for 2006 (latest I can find with numbers rather than graphs here):
2.5 car deaths per billion passenger km (i.e. terametre, Tm)
0.1 rail deaths per passenger Tm
(and 31 / cyclist Tm , 36 / pedestrian Tm -- less car use would also reduce these. More rail could increase deaths from people jumping barriers at level crossings, or maybe reduce them if trains are more frequent so people know the risk is higher?)
US in passenger Tm: ...and the rail figure isn't comparable. See the note in the table "A Train-mile is the movement of a train (which can consist of many cars) the distance of 1 mile. A Train-mile differs from a vehicle-mile, which is the movement of 1 car (vehicle) the distance of 1 mile. A 10-car (vehicle) train traveling 1 mile would be measured as 1 Train-mile and 10 vehicle-miles. Caution should be used when comparing Train-miles to vehicle miles."
4.9 car deaths per passenger Tm (0.79/0.161)
2 train fatalities in 2006 from the table you linked. I don't know which kind of rail journeys (from here) that includes -- perhaps just Amtrak? Amtrak provided 54.1 hundred million passenger miles in 2006, which comes to 0.2 deaths per passenger Tm.
huge trains simply can't compete with small, personal vehicles weighing 2-3 tons.
2-3 tons!? Aim lower, a small European car weighs about 1 ton!
Battery technology is one of those things that is seeing huge changes at the moment, and the role of batteries in automobiles that hold a large charge for an electric automobile is one design realm that has yet to really mature. Tesla has been more than up front about the fact that their batteries are essentially a ramped up laptop battery.
I will indeed give kudos to General Motors in terms of their battery research, and that is one area that they certainly have an engineering lead, where GM has been putting some significant R&D resources over the course of a couple of decades into finding better battery technology.
One company that I bumped into that seems to have some interesting potential for an automotive battery pack with some real kick, and a relatively low cost is Fluidic Energy out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Somehow they were able to convince the U.S. Department of Energy to help support their research, and are now on their second round of funding in addition to some private financing for their projects. If you believe the hype that this company is claiming, in theory an electric vehicle with a 1000 mile driving is possible with this technology, at a cost that is "considerably less" than the typical Lithium-ion batteries. The company website is rather sparse, but a Google search for the company does bring up some other interesting articles about this company, including a video of the inventor of the concept used for this company.
what do those batteries last now? 5 years under perfect conditions? .
Actually the battery on a Toyota Prius comes with a 10 year/100,000 mile warranty, so even if you get one that only lasts about 5 years, they will replace it for free.
Damn right this is flamebait.
I've seen quotes of the New revised books published online. They don't do any of that.
Minimizing the importance of the separation of church and state.
That was only ONE man's opinion. That is not what they actual law states, nor what the other ~5000 founding fathers believed. You overemphasize the importance by picking one man's opinion above the other ~10 million or so citizens that lived at the time of the Constitution's ratification.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>zero rail passenger deaths last year
Oh.
I guess I just imagined the slaughter on the DC Metro then? Or the two Amtrak trains that piled into one another? And you know what? Even if car deaths were 1/2 a million a year, I'd still prefer my car because the train station is a 30 minute walk through freezing rain and snow and sleet. I don't feel like dying of exposure - I feel like taking my car.
I have that right (freedom to travel w/o restriction, except at international borders).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>In this country, 0.79 fatalities per 100 million car passenger mile..... 2.2 fatalities per 100 million train passenger miles
How dare you post FACTS?
You troll.
(mindset of typical environmentalist)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>In this country, 0.79 fatalities per 100 million car passenger mile..... 2.2 fatalities per 100 million train passenger miles
How dare you post FACTS?
You troll.
(mindset of typical environmentalist)
Did you read my reply?
That's 2.2 deaths per *train* 100-million-miles, not per train passenger 100-million-miles. When you take into account the number of passengers on the train it comes to 0.2 deaths per train passenger billion-kilometres compared to 4.9 deaths per car passenger billion-km (convert to 100-million-miles if you wish, I wanted km to compare to the British figures).
You'll notice that I gave the figure for USA road deaths, since I'm almost certain you're American, then gave a different figure for "this country". Looking at the table, 2222 road deaths corresponds to the UK.
There were zero rail passenger deaths in the UK in 2009, and have been none so far this year. This could be because the decades-old technology to stop trains passing red signals is used here, as it is in other places in the USA (Including the DC Metro, where it wasn't correctly maintained).
In any case, I'm still safer taking Amtrak across the US (or taking the DC Metro for 3000 miles) than driving.
I have that right
And now I'm certain you're American ;-)
There is a great article about this at the other volt website. In electric mode, Volt can run the main motor, and the motor/generator in tandem -- So both are connected to the drive train. the generator has to be connected to the drive train for regenerative breaking. The engine is connected (clutch) to the motor/generator so the engine is connected to the drive train thru the motor generator. I am having trouble picturing a car that has regen-braking without this setup. I don't know if the Volt will pull power off the generator while it is being turned by the engine -- don't see why not. This is cool!
But for some reason GM has been making up a story about the Volt's propulsion -- making some people upset.
The story I heard was that the motor was for range extension only. Then just lately, they said the engine helps out only after 70 mph.
Now it comes out that the engine can help out above 30mph. Unfortunately, GM has been telling a story about the Volt being a parallel hybrid, using the generator to extend range only. If you think this is the end of the story -- lol
>>>>>>>>In this country, 0.79 fatalities per 100 million car passenger mile..... 2.2 fatalities per 100 million train passenger miles ;-)
>>>>>
>>>>>How dare you post FACTS? You troll.
>>
>>Did you read my reply? That's 2.2 deaths per *train* 100-million-miles
.
No actually you said "passenger miles" which is the standard unit for measuring effects per passenger. 0.79 deaths per passenger mile would be lower than 2.2 deaths per passenger mile. The car is safer according to that stat.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's what Black Gold Alchemist wrote, and he's misunderstood the source he's quoting from.
Read it for yourself if you refuse to believe me.
Sorry about this. Math mistake made here.
Newer, better data from here.
Commuter rail: 124 deaths/11049 million miles = 1.12 deaths per 100 million passenger miles
This is for a direct comparison. I'll look for other types.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
How is that stranger than using a Civic for private racing? People can and will do whatever they please with their private property. Its not for the rest to judge that they ought not do something that does no harm.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.
Fuck you, you prissy shit.
You're clearly the type of smug asshole who goes around saying "What need has anyone of ...?" about anything you're too much of a pansy to consider.
Fuck you and all other milquetoasts of your ilk, goddamned wee, cowerin', timorous beasties.
Among other things Timken makes bearings, they make lots of bearings for the auto industry, but they also make lots of bearings for the military.
Let's not forget how extensively they're used by railroads.