That's part of it. Suspension design also affects wear-and-tear, as does heavy braking or acceleration. And the average number of passengers in a vehicle is probably a bigger factor than anything else in vehicle weight, which doesn't get included into these costs.
Okay, so the "unfair" commentary is a little bit of flame-bait. But I'm astonished at the level of scorn I've seen on EV drivers in public forums. Many EV drivers have already spent far more than other drivers trying to help the environment, paying more for their vehicles (and thus higher sales tax), installing charging stations/solar panels, etc. And some people are fiercely opposed to the $7500 federal tax refunds on ideological grounds. I live in a state where politicians seemingly want us EV drivers not just to pay our fair share for road use, the proposed legislation would have had us pay considerably higher taxes than for other, similar vehicles.
I got into an ideological debate on another forum over whether fuel taxes exist solely for road maintenance, or also as a disincentive for consumption due to environmental concerns and preservation of natural resources (oil reserves). There are strong arguments on both sides. On the one hand the money today goes to roads (or is supposed to) and not the environment, on the other if we don't care about pollution we may as well tax by miles driven or vehicle weight, or both.
Weight-based fees also unfairly nail electric vehicle drivers, because the batteries tend to weigh more than an equivalent internal-combustion drivetrain.
That's it, exactly. You can use agile to weed out developers who can't think for themselves, who really are of no use in a development team anyway.
The methodology debate kind of misses the point. Agile is no silver bullet. A high-functioning team can be successful with agile, or with various other methodologies for that matter.
A dysfunctional team isn't going to succeed with agile, or with anything else.
This is where you are dead wrong. Please don't state as fact your opinions that are not based on research.
That's not opinion; it's physics.
Are you ignoring my point or do you really not get it? Of course some efficiency is lost when converting energy from one form to another. What I am telling you is that FAR MORE energy is lost burning gasoline to obtain mechanical energy than storing electricity to drive an electric motor.
The OP was stating the obvious, but the implication was that electrical cars lose more energy than ICE vehicles, which is far from true.
I know this probably doesn't make enough of a difference to matter; but did you know that, as motor windings heat up, the resistance goes up; and as the resistance goes up, the heat goes up.
Yes, all circuits have resistance. But the heat lost in most electrical circuits is far far less than the heat from a gasoline motor.
BTW, since I drive about 42 miles a day to work and back, I would get REAL tired of always worrying about finding an outlet at each end of the journey, especially since it would be basically impossible at the "work" end.
The Chevy Volt is made for drivers like you. Plug in where you can, burn gas if necessary.
"And worse yet, losing overall efficiency in the process."
This is where you are dead wrong. Please don't state as fact your opinions that are not based on research.
My Volt is about 4x more efficient running on electricity than a similar ICE car. A gallon of gas is equivalent to 33 kWh of energy, and will propel a compact sedan for 30+ miles (let's say one mile per kWh just to round off the numbers).
Driving my Volt around town, I get on average 4 miles per kWh. The battery capacity on a full charge is 11 kWh, good for 40-50 miles of driving.
The reason for this is that the electric motor is far more efficient at converting stored energy into mechanical energy. For one thing, very little energy is wasted as heat.
The power utilities are also much more efficient at converting fossil fuels into stored energy or mechanical than your portable generator or gas-powered vehicle due to efficiencies of scale.
This is why EV's are so compelling--they are literally a breakthrough in efficiency.
The actual article is titled "Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Struggle to Maintain Owner Loyalty". Shame on Slashdot for not getting even the title correct, since it has little bearing on electric vehicles.
The example in the article claims a 10-year payback at current fuel prices for a Toyota Camry hybrid. It doesn't say how many miles/year that is based on but I've tried to recreate the calculation, and I think it must have been 13,000 miles/year driving, which is far fewer than some people drive. And this is based on 41 MPG combined for the hybrid model compared to 28 MPG for the standard Camry, a difference of just 13. (This gap widens to 18 if you do mostly city driving.)
And worse, no comparable example is quoted for electric vehicles, which can have an effective MPG in triple digits. Given that some EV's are not much more than similar hybrids in cost these days, EV's offer a far better value proposition. Pure hybrids aren't that attractive for either environmental or cost reasons, given that the mileage improvements are modest over their standard counterparts. I wouldn't be surprised if some hybrid owners were trading in for SUV's, but I'd also expect to see hybrid owners trading for pure EV's. Hybrids without charging ability or significant battery storage are going to get squeezed out of the market.
(Disclaimer: I drive a Chevy Volt, and I love my car.)
Oh dear, an economic/political rant on Slashdot...
The US cannot go bankrupt. We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Get over it.
This "waste" creates jobs and spurs R&D. It inflates our money supply at a time when the economy is sluggish, and boosts the private sector. Why are people complaining?
If you think taxpayers are funding this "waste", you're wrong. Taxpayers pay taxes, that's it. Unless the budget is balanced there's no association between federal spending and revenue, they are just two different dollar totals on the books. (And I'm not advocating balancing the budget simply to curtail spending.)
If you think our children (or grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc.) are going to have to pay off this debt, that's also incorrect. Federal debt is always serviced by issuing more currency.
I'm not saying the government can spend without limit, but there are no hard limits. The practical limits are set by inflation rates and real resources. At present, real resources are abundant and inflation is low. So let's raise spending. If we reach 99% employment and inflation sets in, we can curtail government spending.
This isn't solely my view--lookup Modern Money Theory. Many economists understand these principles of a fiat currency. Few politicians do, unfortunately, and they like to throw around words like "debt" and "waste" without understanding their meaning.
Volt does not have a "traditional gasoline drivetrain", nor anything close. There's no conventional transmission and a generator is utilized to supply power from an internal combustion engine. What differences specifically do you want to elaborate on?
The generation 1 Volt (2011 - 2015 model years) has several drive modes. It's not a parallel hybrid under most circumstances, though it's hard to say how often my Volt operates this way. The motor only runs in CS or "Hold" modes, and the theory I think is that at certain speeds the engine is more efficient when driving the wheels directly.
It certainly has nothing to do with power--when I have enough remaining charge, the motor never runs (unless driving in temperatures below 15F), and I can drive any speed I like.
Also I don't remember the Volt ever advertised as a "hybrid". It is an EV with a range extender. In electric mode, it operates just as a EV would.
(The obvious differences between a Volt and Tesla are battery capacity and the range extender motor. Tesla's range is due to battery capacity, but there's a reason the Tesla costs twice as much as a Volt.)
Re:Let's see if HTTP/2 is adopted faster than IPv6
on
HTTP/2 Finalized
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· Score: 1
That isn't at all true. My laptop has both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. When I make a request to google.com, I'm using IPv6, when reaching sites that don't have IPv6 I fall back to IPv4. As a user I don't even notice this.
Similarly, HTTP/2 has to be implemented on clients and servers before it will be functional, else both endpoints need to agree to fall back on HTTP/1.1.
There's some additional network configuration needed before IPv6 is useful, but no need to convert anything.
Let's see if HTTP/2 is adopted faster than IPv6.
on
HTTP/2 Finalized
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· Score: 2
Existing standards that are "good enough" tend to be hard to replace.
Your claim smacks of hyperbole, but that aside I've also had to use code from developers who like to name their methods x(), f1(), t2() you get the idea. I can't tell if they're too lazy to type more than that, or they are striving to make all code fit in a 40-column window (ala GW-Basic), or they hate the idea that anyone else would ever try to read and comprehend their code.
Exactly right, but your sensible viewpoint doesn't belong anywhere on a blog site, apparently. No, you can't completely describe the Volt as a plug-in hybrid, EV, series or parallel hybrid, or whatever--it's a Volt and there's nothing else exactly like it.
I read this forum having come from other EV forums where readers are complaining endlessly that the Volt isn't a true EV, that it has far too limited range, that it was designed as a parallel hybrid and should've been a series hybrid, etc. Folks. This is all new stuff. If you want to change the world, stop posting drivel that drives away readership.
And BTW I'm sure GM would've loved to have released an EV in 2010 with 200+ mile range, one hour charge times, and a sub-$25k price. The reality is that it wasn't practical in 2010, and may be only barely practical today given the economics involved and the state of the technology.
The Volt is a great stop-gap. It gave us something to buy these past four years while we wait for more advanced EV's to become feasible and hit the market. The drivetrain is complex, but apparently has a very low failure rate. The ICE will run frequently or continuously in extreme conditions, but most drivers can expect lifetime averages well over 100 MPG driving in real-world conditions. Why can nobody simply call this what it is: A technical coup for GM.
Can't argue, and thank you for the interesting examples. I don't think HTTP is perfect, I was wondering out loud whether it is merely good enough.
Seems to me though that most of those problems arise from sloppy implementations (like you said, did they read the docs??) which supports my 2nd point. A perfect specification isn't going to prevent poor implementations.
One, it remained a relatively simple protocol. Yes there are a lot of nuances around content negotiation, transfer encodings and such but at its core it is a simple, flexible and effective protocol to use, and can be implemented quite efficiently via persistent connections and pipelining. It was designed for response caching as well, and the CDN infrastructure is in place to make use of caching whenever possible.
Two, despite the simplicity of HTTP/1.1, a shocking number of implementations get it wrong or don't use it efficiently. Pipelining is disabled in many implementations due to compatibility concerns, and few applications can use it effectively. Many applications make excessive and unnecessary use of POST requests which are inherently not cacheable and result in many synchronous requests performed over high-latency connections. (SOAP was notorious for that.)
I'm skeptical that any protocol revision can improve on HTTP/1.1 sufficiently without making it harder to implement correctly than it already is.
If there were a broad initiative to begin to use the features of HTTP/1.1 properly, as they were designed, most of the shortcomings would vanish without the need for a new protocol.
Hydrogen fuel cells might become viable in the future, who knows. That doesn't mean we shouldn't develop the technology, but in the meantime, we need alternate energy today, and you can buy and drive an electric car now. I plan to look closely at electric cars for my next vehicle. By the time (5-10 years) I'm ready for another, if fuel cells are available, I'll consider those too, but they don't help me now.
You're talking about the party that screams about deficits and the federal debt when they do not control the white house, yet passes measures that raise the deficit when they are in power.
Thinking logically won't help you understand politics. Here are the rough priorities of the GOP party (and Dems for that matter):
- Tell voters whatever it takes to get (re)elected, - Promote legislation that satisfies their campaign contributors (i.e. big business), - Do whatever it takes to block the other party from getting elected (into *any* office).
Do these priorities sometimes conflict? Sure. Is that a problem? Only if you make it a problem. You see?
Slashdot Mirror
That's part of it. Suspension design also affects wear-and-tear, as does heavy braking or acceleration. And the average number of passengers in a vehicle is probably a bigger factor than anything else in vehicle weight, which doesn't get included into these costs.
Okay, so the "unfair" commentary is a little bit of flame-bait. But I'm astonished at the level of scorn I've seen on EV drivers in public forums. Many EV drivers have already spent far more than other drivers trying to help the environment, paying more for their vehicles (and thus higher sales tax), installing charging stations/solar panels, etc. And some people are fiercely opposed to the $7500 federal tax refunds on ideological grounds. I live in a state where politicians seemingly want us EV drivers not just to pay our fair share for road use, the proposed legislation would have had us pay considerably higher taxes than for other, similar vehicles.
I got into an ideological debate on another forum over whether fuel taxes exist solely for road maintenance, or also as a disincentive for consumption due to environmental concerns and preservation of natural resources (oil reserves). There are strong arguments on both sides. On the one hand the money today goes to roads (or is supposed to) and not the environment, on the other if we don't care about pollution we may as well tax by miles driven or vehicle weight, or both.
Weight-based fees also unfairly nail electric vehicle drivers, because the batteries tend to weigh more than an equivalent internal-combustion drivetrain.
That's it, exactly. You can use agile to weed out developers who can't think for themselves, who really are of no use in a development team anyway.
The methodology debate kind of misses the point. Agile is no silver bullet. A high-functioning team can be successful with agile, or with various other methodologies for that matter.
A dysfunctional team isn't going to succeed with agile, or with anything else.
This is where you are dead wrong. Please don't state as fact your opinions that are not based on research.
That's not opinion; it's physics.
Are you ignoring my point or do you really not get it? Of course some efficiency is lost when converting energy from one form to another. What I am telling you is that FAR MORE energy is lost burning gasoline to obtain mechanical energy than storing electricity to drive an electric motor.
The OP was stating the obvious, but the implication was that electrical cars lose more energy than ICE vehicles, which is far from true.
I know this probably doesn't make enough of a difference to matter; but did you know that, as motor windings heat up, the resistance goes up; and as the resistance goes up, the heat goes up.
Yes, all circuits have resistance. But the heat lost in most electrical circuits is far far less than the heat from a gasoline motor.
BTW, since I drive about 42 miles a day to work and back, I would get REAL tired of always worrying about finding an outlet at each end of the journey, especially since it would be basically impossible at the "work" end.
The Chevy Volt is made for drivers like you. Plug in where you can, burn gas if necessary.
Jeff
"And worse yet, losing overall efficiency in the process."
This is where you are dead wrong. Please don't state as fact your opinions that are not based on research.
My Volt is about 4x more efficient running on electricity than a similar ICE car. A gallon of gas is equivalent to 33 kWh of energy, and will propel a compact sedan for 30+ miles (let's say one mile per kWh just to round off the numbers).
Driving my Volt around town, I get on average 4 miles per kWh. The battery capacity on a full charge is 11 kWh, good for 40-50 miles of driving.
The reason for this is that the electric motor is far more efficient at converting stored energy into mechanical energy. For one thing, very little energy is wasted as heat.
The power utilities are also much more efficient at converting fossil fuels into stored energy or mechanical than your portable generator or gas-powered vehicle due to efficiencies of scale.
This is why EV's are so compelling--they are literally a breakthrough in efficiency.
If you worship them properly, a crumb or two may trickle down...
When I say "anywhere", I mean anywhere on Earth. US political parties aside.
Right, so, unchecked corporate power takes the place of government regulation.
At least with the government we hold elections. I think there are good reasons Libertarianism has never been fully implemented anywhere.
The actual article is titled "Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Struggle to Maintain Owner Loyalty". Shame on Slashdot for not getting even the title correct, since it has little bearing on electric vehicles.
The example in the article claims a 10-year payback at current fuel prices for a Toyota Camry hybrid. It doesn't say how many miles/year that is based on but I've tried to recreate the calculation, and I think it must have been 13,000 miles/year driving, which is far fewer than some people drive. And this is based on 41 MPG combined for the hybrid model compared to 28 MPG for the standard Camry, a difference of just 13. (This gap widens to 18 if you do mostly city driving.)
And worse, no comparable example is quoted for electric vehicles, which can have an effective MPG in triple digits. Given that some EV's are not much more than similar hybrids in cost these days, EV's offer a far better value proposition. Pure hybrids aren't that attractive for either environmental or cost reasons, given that the mileage improvements are modest over their standard counterparts. I wouldn't be surprised if some hybrid owners were trading in for SUV's, but I'd also expect to see hybrid owners trading for pure EV's. Hybrids without charging ability or significant battery storage are going to get squeezed out of the market.
(Disclaimer: I drive a Chevy Volt, and I love my car.)
Oh dear, an economic/political rant on Slashdot...
The US cannot go bankrupt. We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Get over it.
This "waste" creates jobs and spurs R&D. It inflates our money supply at a time when the economy is sluggish, and boosts the private sector. Why are people complaining?
If you think taxpayers are funding this "waste", you're wrong. Taxpayers pay taxes, that's it. Unless the budget is balanced there's no association between federal spending and revenue, they are just two different dollar totals on the books. (And I'm not advocating balancing the budget simply to curtail spending.)
If you think our children (or grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc.) are going to have to pay off this debt, that's also incorrect. Federal debt is always serviced by issuing more currency.
I'm not saying the government can spend without limit, but there are no hard limits. The practical limits are set by inflation rates and real resources. At present, real resources are abundant and inflation is low. So let's raise spending. If we reach 99% employment and inflation sets in, we can curtail government spending.
This isn't solely my view--lookup Modern Money Theory. Many economists understand these principles of a fiat currency. Few politicians do, unfortunately, and they like to throw around words like "debt" and "waste" without understanding their meaning.
(checking out my window) Detroit is still here. Doesn't look like a missle strike.
And this surely isn't the only city in America to experience an economic downturn.
The Detroit jokes are getting a bit old and tired guys, that is all...
Absolutely agree. Once the infrastructure is in place. As it is, I still can't even charge my Volt at work...
Surely this is what GM had in mind when they produced the Bolt EV concept car. It's quite obvious they are indeed working on it...
Volt does not have a "traditional gasoline drivetrain", nor anything close. There's no conventional transmission and a generator is utilized to supply power from an internal combustion engine. What differences specifically do you want to elaborate on?
My hunch is that they won't because there is no advantage to be gained in doing so.
The generation 1 Volt (2011 - 2015 model years) has several drive modes. It's not a parallel hybrid under most circumstances, though it's hard to say how often my Volt operates this way. The motor only runs in CS or "Hold" modes, and the theory I think is that at certain speeds the engine is more efficient when driving the wheels directly.
It certainly has nothing to do with power--when I have enough remaining charge, the motor never runs (unless driving in temperatures below 15F), and I can drive any speed I like.
Also I don't remember the Volt ever advertised as a "hybrid". It is an EV with a range extender. In electric mode, it operates just as a EV would.
(The obvious differences between a Volt and Tesla are battery capacity and the range extender motor. Tesla's range is due to battery capacity, but there's a reason the Tesla costs twice as much as a Volt.)
That isn't at all true. My laptop has both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. When I make a request to google.com, I'm using IPv6, when reaching sites that don't have IPv6 I fall back to IPv4. As a user I don't even notice this.
Similarly, HTTP/2 has to be implemented on clients and servers before it will be functional, else both endpoints need to agree to fall back on HTTP/1.1.
There's some additional network configuration needed before IPv6 is useful, but no need to convert anything.
Existing standards that are "good enough" tend to be hard to replace.
Your claim smacks of hyperbole, but that aside I've also had to use code from developers who like to name their methods x(), f1(), t2() you get the idea. I can't tell if they're too lazy to type more than that, or they are striving to make all code fit in a 40-column window (ala GW-Basic), or they hate the idea that anyone else would ever try to read and comprehend their code.
There's got to be a nice balance.
Exactly right, but your sensible viewpoint doesn't belong anywhere on a blog site, apparently. No, you can't completely describe the Volt as a plug-in hybrid, EV, series or parallel hybrid, or whatever--it's a Volt and there's nothing else exactly like it.
I read this forum having come from other EV forums where readers are complaining endlessly that the Volt isn't a true EV, that it has far too limited range, that it was designed as a parallel hybrid and should've been a series hybrid, etc. Folks. This is all new stuff. If you want to change the world, stop posting drivel that drives away readership.
And BTW I'm sure GM would've loved to have released an EV in 2010 with 200+ mile range, one hour charge times, and a sub-$25k price. The reality is that it wasn't practical in 2010, and may be only barely practical today given the economics involved and the state of the technology.
The Volt is a great stop-gap. It gave us something to buy these past four years while we wait for more advanced EV's to become feasible and hit the market. The drivetrain is complex, but apparently has a very low failure rate. The ICE will run frequently or continuously in extreme conditions, but most drivers can expect lifetime averages well over 100 MPG driving in real-world conditions. Why can nobody simply call this what it is: A technical coup for GM.
Can't argue, and thank you for the interesting examples. I don't think HTTP is perfect, I was wondering out loud whether it is merely good enough.
Seems to me though that most of those problems arise from sloppy implementations (like you said, did they read the docs??) which supports my 2nd point. A perfect specification isn't going to prevent poor implementations.
Two remarkable things about HTTP/1.1.
One, it remained a relatively simple protocol. Yes there are a lot of nuances around content negotiation, transfer encodings and such but at its core it is a simple, flexible and effective protocol to use, and can be implemented quite efficiently via persistent connections and pipelining. It was designed for response caching as well, and the CDN infrastructure is in place to make use of caching whenever possible.
Two, despite the simplicity of HTTP/1.1, a shocking number of implementations get it wrong or don't use it efficiently. Pipelining is disabled in many implementations due to compatibility concerns, and few applications can use it effectively. Many applications make excessive and unnecessary use of POST requests which are inherently not cacheable and result in many synchronous requests performed over high-latency connections. (SOAP was notorious for that.)
I'm skeptical that any protocol revision can improve on HTTP/1.1 sufficiently without making it harder to implement correctly than it already is.
If there were a broad initiative to begin to use the features of HTTP/1.1 properly, as they were designed, most of the shortcomings would vanish without the need for a new protocol.
Hydrogen fuel cells might become viable in the future, who knows. That doesn't mean we shouldn't develop the technology, but in the meantime, we need alternate energy today, and you can buy and drive an electric car now. I plan to look closely at electric cars for my next vehicle. By the time (5-10 years) I'm ready for another, if fuel cells are available, I'll consider those too, but they don't help me now.
You're talking about the party that screams about deficits and the federal debt when they do not control the white house, yet passes measures that raise the deficit when they are in power.
Thinking logically won't help you understand politics. Here are the rough priorities of the GOP party (and Dems for that matter):
- Tell voters whatever it takes to get (re)elected,
- Promote legislation that satisfies their campaign contributors (i.e. big business),
- Do whatever it takes to block the other party from getting elected (into *any* office).
Do these priorities sometimes conflict? Sure. Is that a problem? Only if you make it a problem. You see?