I just find it funny that when I lived in a state with NO car inspections, I was able to drive and drive and drive 150,000 miles without needing any major repairs (a replaced leaky radiator and that was it). Then suddenly I move to a state with annual inspections and my car (a different car) requires major fixes every time I go there. It's suspicious.
It's also suspicious that my vibrating wheel problem required 3 visits to the Dodge dealer. Am I asking too much to expect the mechanic to repair the problem the FIRST time? Or even the second time?
After the 3rd time of non-fixing I decided to just give up, and put-up with the vibration.
>>>Lower maintenance cars - rotate the tires & change the wiper fluid
Spend $10,000 to buy new batteries every 100,000 miles. That's the gasoline equivalent of buying a whole new engine every few years. My last car lasted 360,000 miles so if it acted like an EV1, I would have spent 30,000 dollars on batteries! That's the major flaw with electric vehicles.
After reading this post and all the others that preceeded it, claiming that the potential energy in a gallon of gasoline is "variable" and not a fixed 33.6 kilowatt-hours, one thing keeps popping into my head:
'I can not believe I'm talking to a group of nerds.'
I would expect this kind of fuzzy thinking from a Next Top Model contestant, but not from a group of brainy persons. Sad, sad, sad. Drop everything, do not pass go, and sign-up for Freshman College Physics immediately. Even if you've already taken it I'd say you need a refresher, because Potential Energy is NOT variable.
The only other explanation I can think is that the Anti-Gasoline/ Pro-EV Defenders resemble relgious zealots. They CAN think logically - they simply choose not to, because logical thinking challenges their belief system (which is based on faith and feel-good emotions, not facts).
Lets imagine that I built a horribly-inefficient engine that simply sucks the Gallon of gasoline out of the tank, and then spit it out the exhaust pipe w/o burning it. I'd be getting 0 MPG with that car (since it's not moving), but the energy density of the gasoline it "used up" will still be 33.6 kWh per gallon.
That basic fact does not change. "You cannae change the laws of physics!" to quote a famous engineer.
>>>The amount of energy in a gallon of gas entirely depends on the efficiency of the engine
Not correct. A gallon of gasoline is precisely 33.16 kilowatt-hours. Therefore if you have an EV that uses 33.16 kWh of electricity during a test, then you know it burned the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. And that's how the EPA assigns an MPG rating to an electric car.
Neither is my Mitsubishi sportscar or my New Beetle, but the government considers both to be 5-seat cars. Ditto the Lupo. I go buy the OFFICIAL figures not my own opinion.
>>>How about a [kg-X / km], where X is any desired pollutant that you care to measure?
I already referred you to greenercars.org which does exactly that. You can order their annual published report and read a pollution break-down for all current model cars, and not just at the car, but from oil-well-to-destruction.
You can also look to the EPA which also measures the grams per mile of every model car, and then rates them LEV (low emission vehicle), ULEV, or SULEV. Hybrid cars are SULEV. Electric cars are also SULEV due to emissions from the electrical plants, although they can be ZEV if you use solar power or hydropower.
At least when I'm driving *I'm* in control of my fate, not some dingbat train engineer who's busy testing instead of watching the road. I've gone 20 years without hitting anything and I don't want that to change.
As for the trains not running to the beach or mountains, yes that could be fixed easily, but it doesn't change the fact a train requires an extra hour of travel time from my home to my job. BOTTOM LINE: Trains are not as flexible as owning your own conveyance (car, wagon, or horse). That's why I have to spend an extra half-hour walking to the station, and back, whereas my vehicle sits literally only 30 seconds from my door.
It's the distance from my door to the station that adds the extra hour to a train commute. I don't care if gasoline rises to $50 a gallon and forces me to downsize to a 1-seater commuter. I want the convenience of my own private car sitting 30 seconds walk from my door, because wasting an hour every day walking to the train station is bullshit.
Oh and one more thing:
You think 4-lane highways are ugly. What makes you think steel rails running everywhere is any more attractive? That looks ugly as shit in my mind's eye. Only a religious nutjob thinks that is a "better" future.
>>>The amount of energy in a gallon of gas entirely depends on the efficiency of the engine burning it.
Completely and totally false. You should be embarrased to make such an incredibly stupid comment (and you call yourself a nerd or geek???). A gallon of gasoline is precisely 33.16 kilowatt-hours. It does NOT vary. Therefore if you have an EV that uses 33.16 kWh of electricity during a test, then you know it burned the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.
>>>About the two-seater: Some of us want the ability to carry more than two (or three in extreme circumstances) people
That's fine. Keep your current SUV or whatever for those 1% of trips that need that capacity, and use the 250mpg two-seater during your daily trips.
Alternatively you could take two separate cars. In those few rare times (virtually never) I don't have enough room in my two-seater Insight, we just take two cars. The overall MPG average in that case is still 35mpg... still better than ualing around an SUV everywhere.
It's not a division by zero error, because electric cars are not perpetual motion machines. When the EPA or similar organizations compare EVs to regular cars, the electricity used by the car during the efficiency test is converted to the equivalent gallons of gasoline burned, and the EV is given an "MPG" rating. Therefore no #DIV0 error.
Bottom Line: ACEEE.org found the GM EV1 is no better than a ~50mpg Prius or Civic.
Yes. Exxon-Mobile and other companies have been drilling all over the place, but so far nobody's found any hydrogen underground. The fuel cell car won't run without that.
>>>wasting tons of money to make four-lane highways
Building train tracks isn't any better. I don't want to be one of the dead people inside a D.C. Metro train. Also if I did ride one of those things, it would take me 2 hours a day to get to work instead of the usual 1 hour.
And of course there's the freedom to be able to leave D.C. and drive to the beach, or west to the mountains. There's no way to do that in a train.
No not really. A 5-seat Lupo 3L gets 88mpg on the highway. The new VW 2-seater arriving after Christmas gets 250mpg on the highway.
Show me an electric car that can exceed that? It doesn't exist. In fact the best EV ever made (GM EV1) is no better than a Prius (~50mpg) according to greenercars.org and falls short of an Insight (66mpg).
>>>>>begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser.
>>This rings to me as an attempt to manhandle HTML/Javascript/CSS into a use case for which it is not intended.
I disagree. Today's websites don't do it, but in the simpler 1990s era of pure HTML, the website DID render before completing download. The browser was expected to grab the HTML first, render the page with "X" placeholders, and then download the images last. That way the user could read the website even with the image only partially present.
So yes prerendering the webpage before download was completed *was* the original intent of the web. It is only lately that webpages have shifted away from that, and I for one would like to see them restore it.
>>>Conversely, some of the fast websites use basic TEXT and skimp on the graphics.
I concur. On my 50kbit/s dialup connection the sites that load fastest are the ones that resemble old 90s-era sites - just plain text and images. The slow ones are those sites that have to preload some javascript, flash, or other executable before they can display anything. Staring at a blank screen for 2 minutes is annoying.
>>>NO UNNECESSARY graphics. Graphics that add pretties but don't add anything else are not allowed.
Well I disagree with you on this. First off, 25 megabyte??? I don't think I've ever seen a GIF or JPEG take-up that much room. You exaggerate.
Second, images aren't really a big deal on fast connections because they zip right through, and on slow connections virtually all dialup ISPs provide compression. So a 100 kilobyte photo would be squeezed to about 20 kilobyte before being sent over the phoneline... a mere 3 seconds.
I still like Ms. Pac-Man. If ever a perfect arcade game was designed, this is it. It's challenging but not so hard as to scare people off. It's easy to learn and plays fair (no rubberbanding like those cheating race games). And it has cool neon vsuals and otherworldy sound effects that draw the player into a world different from our own.
Yeah except I stood there and watched him poor fluid into the car. And it did more than just fix the vibration - it also fixed the steering which was getting more and more difficult to turn.
Also you make a false assumption that my car has ABS. It does not. As the mechanic explained it to me, low brake/steering fluid makes everything tighten up so that the wheel doesn't want to turn. That creates vibration and gradual loss of power steering.
False. The bills are high because the equipment used is high. They're not stealing from you. In fact just last night NBC had a story about Medicare, and how every medicare patient treated the doctors *lose* money. The U.S. Medicare doesn't pay enough to cover actual costs.
Your complaint reminds me of shoppers on Ebay who complain that the 1 penny game I sold them is too much because I charged $5.00 S&H. They don't seem to realize that these things don't ship for free. Yes the customer paid $5.01 to my account, but paypal kept one dollar, and ebay kept approximately one dollar, and the envelope cost me 50 cents, and postage is about $2.40. I'm not overcharging. I'm barely breaking even on that deal with just ten pennies kept in my wallet.
But still the customer complains. The same applies to overhead for doctors. It costs a lot because the equipment is not free. The bill is high, because the doctors' costs are high.
Not true. The actual cost for that Best Buy tech is closer to $30/hour due to the free benefits they provide to the guy, plus desk or space to work, plus overhead (lighting, heating) to make that space comfortable.
For an engineer like me the cost is $100/hour, although I only get about 40% of it in my paycheck.
So anyway the $50 sounds about right. $30 cost to have the tech in the store, plus twenty dollars profit.
I don't know how much your loss cost you, but let's say it was $100. Geek Squad works for Best Buy? If yes, buy a $100 item from Best Buy, take it home, then return an empty envelope to the store. Provide the tracking number to your credit card, explain that the item was returned, and then file a chargeback.
Now you're even. They stole $100 from you via fraudulent repairs; and you stole it back.
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I just find it funny that when I lived in a state with NO car inspections, I was able to drive and drive and drive 150,000 miles without needing any major repairs (a replaced leaky radiator and that was it). Then suddenly I move to a state with annual inspections and my car (a different car) requires major fixes every time I go there. It's suspicious.
It's also suspicious that my vibrating wheel problem required 3 visits to the Dodge dealer. Am I asking too much to expect the mechanic to repair the problem the FIRST time? Or even the second time?
After the 3rd time of non-fixing I decided to just give up, and put-up with the vibration.
>>>They have like 50k apps in bearly over a year.
And that's the flaw. In a free market that doesn't require Central Economic Planning (aka apple approval), that number would be 100 times bigger.
>>>Lower maintenance cars - rotate the tires & change the wiper fluid
Spend $10,000 to buy new batteries every 100,000 miles. That's the gasoline equivalent of buying a whole new engine every few years. My last car lasted 360,000 miles so if it acted like an EV1, I would have spent 30,000 dollars on batteries! That's the major flaw with electric vehicles.
greenercars.org already does this calculation (from oil well to wheel). All you have to do is buy their annual report.
The end result is they found the EV1 is no cleaner than a Prius, and not as clean as an Insight or Civic GX (natural gas).
>>>If you think the new VW 2-seater has an efficient combustion engine...
The 88mpg Lupo engine is over 50% efficient according to Volkswagen, so as an educated estimate the 250mpg two-seater engine is close to 75%.
For comparison electrical power plants average 40% nationwide, while the latest and greatest "clean coal" electric plants average 60-70%.
After reading this post and all the others that preceeded it, claiming that the potential energy in a gallon of gasoline is "variable" and not a fixed 33.6 kilowatt-hours, one thing keeps popping into my head:
'I can not believe I'm talking to a group of nerds.'
I would expect this kind of fuzzy thinking from a Next Top Model contestant, but not from a group of brainy persons. Sad, sad, sad. Drop everything, do not pass go, and sign-up for Freshman College Physics immediately. Even if you've already taken it I'd say you need a refresher, because Potential Energy is NOT variable.
The only other explanation I can think is that the Anti-Gasoline/ Pro-EV Defenders resemble relgious zealots. They CAN think logically - they simply choose not to, because logical thinking challenges their belief system (which is based on faith and feel-good emotions, not facts).
(sigh)
Lets imagine that I built a horribly-inefficient engine that simply sucks the Gallon of gasoline out of the tank, and then spit it out the exhaust pipe w/o burning it. I'd be getting 0 MPG with that car (since it's not moving), but the energy density of the gasoline it "used up" will still be 33.6 kWh per gallon.
That basic fact does not change. "You cannae change the laws of physics!" to quote a famous engineer.
>>>The amount of energy in a gallon of gas entirely depends on the efficiency of the engine
Not correct. A gallon of gasoline is precisely 33.16 kilowatt-hours. Therefore if you have an EV that uses 33.16 kWh of electricity during a test, then you know it burned the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. And that's how the EPA assigns an MPG rating to an electric car.
>>>A VW Lupo is not a 5-seat car.
Neither is my Mitsubishi sportscar or my New Beetle, but the government considers both to be 5-seat cars. Ditto the Lupo. I go buy the OFFICIAL figures not my own opinion.
>>>How about a [kg-X / km], where X is any desired pollutant that you care to measure?
I already referred you to greenercars.org which does exactly that. You can order their annual published report and read a pollution break-down for all current model cars, and not just at the car, but from oil-well-to-destruction.
You can also look to the EPA which also measures the grams per mile of every model car, and then rates them LEV (low emission vehicle), ULEV, or SULEV. Hybrid cars are SULEV. Electric cars are also SULEV due to emissions from the electrical plants, although they can be ZEV if you use solar power or hydropower.
At least when I'm driving *I'm* in control of my fate, not some dingbat train engineer who's busy testing instead of watching the road. I've gone 20 years without hitting anything and I don't want that to change.
As for the trains not running to the beach or mountains, yes that could be fixed easily, but it doesn't change the fact a train requires an extra hour of travel time from my home to my job. BOTTOM LINE: Trains are not as flexible as owning your own conveyance (car, wagon, or horse). That's why I have to spend an extra half-hour walking to the station, and back, whereas my vehicle sits literally only 30 seconds from my door.
It's the distance from my door to the station that adds the extra hour to a train commute. I don't care if gasoline rises to $50 a gallon and forces me to downsize to a 1-seater commuter. I want the convenience of my own private car sitting 30 seconds walk from my door, because wasting an hour every day walking to the train station is bullshit.
Oh and one more thing:
You think 4-lane highways are ugly. What makes you think steel rails running everywhere is any more attractive? That looks ugly as shit in my mind's eye. Only a religious nutjob thinks that is a "better" future.
>>>The amount of energy in a gallon of gas entirely depends on the efficiency of the engine burning it.
Completely and totally false. You should be embarrased to make such an incredibly stupid comment (and you call yourself a nerd or geek???). A gallon of gasoline is precisely 33.16 kilowatt-hours. It does NOT vary. Therefore if you have an EV that uses 33.16 kWh of electricity during a test, then you know it burned the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.
>>>About the two-seater: Some of us want the ability to carry more than two (or three in extreme circumstances) people
That's fine. Keep your current SUV or whatever for those 1% of trips that need that capacity, and use the 250mpg two-seater during your daily trips.
Alternatively you could take two separate cars. In those few rare times (virtually never) I don't have enough room in my two-seater Insight, we just take two cars. The overall MPG average in that case is still 35mpg... still better than ualing around an SUV everywhere.
Dear Anonymous coward #1 and #2:
It's not a division by zero error, because electric cars are not perpetual motion machines. When the EPA or similar organizations compare EVs to regular cars, the electricity used by the car during the efficiency test is converted to the equivalent gallons of gasoline burned, and the EV is given an "MPG" rating. Therefore no #DIV0 error.
Bottom Line: ACEEE.org found the GM EV1 is no better than a ~50mpg Prius or Civic.
Yes. Exxon-Mobile and other companies have been drilling all over the place, but so far nobody's found any hydrogen underground. The fuel cell car won't run without that.
>>>wasting tons of money to make four-lane highways
Building train tracks isn't any better. I don't want to be one of the dead people inside a D.C. Metro train. Also if I did ride one of those things, it would take me 2 hours a day to get to work instead of the usual 1 hour.
And of course there's the freedom to be able to leave D.C. and drive to the beach, or west to the mountains. There's no way to do that in a train.
>>>a 500mcm
A what? I hope that's not micrometers because such a thin wire would not carry 1000 amps.
No not really. A 5-seat Lupo 3L gets 88mpg on the highway. The new VW 2-seater arriving after Christmas gets 250mpg on the highway.
Show me an electric car that can exceed that? It doesn't exist. In fact the best EV ever made (GM EV1) is no better than a Prius (~50mpg) according to greenercars.org and falls short of an Insight (66mpg).
>>>>>begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser.
>>This rings to me as an attempt to manhandle HTML/Javascript/CSS into a use case for which it is not intended.
I disagree. Today's websites don't do it, but in the simpler 1990s era of pure HTML, the website DID render before completing download. The browser was expected to grab the HTML first, render the page with "X" placeholders, and then download the images last. That way the user could read the website even with the image only partially present.
So yes prerendering the webpage before download was completed *was* the original intent of the web. It is only lately that webpages have shifted away from that, and I for one would like to see them restore it.
>>>Conversely, some of the fast websites use basic TEXT and skimp on the graphics.
I concur. On my 50kbit/s dialup connection the sites that load fastest are the ones that resemble old 90s-era sites - just plain text and images. The slow ones are those sites that have to preload some javascript, flash, or other executable before they can display anything. Staring at a blank screen for 2 minutes is annoying.
>>>NO UNNECESSARY graphics. Graphics that add pretties but don't add anything else are not allowed.
Well I disagree with you on this. First off, 25 megabyte??? I don't think I've ever seen a GIF or JPEG take-up that much room. You exaggerate.
Second, images aren't really a big deal on fast connections because they zip right through, and on slow connections virtually all dialup ISPs provide compression. So a 100 kilobyte photo would be squeezed to about 20 kilobyte before being sent over the phoneline... a mere 3 seconds.
I still like Ms. Pac-Man. If ever a perfect arcade game was designed, this is it. It's challenging but not so hard as to scare people off. It's easy to learn and plays fair (no rubberbanding like those cheating race games). And it has cool neon vsuals and otherworldy sound effects that draw the player into a world different from our own.
Runnerups - Space Invaders, Missile Command, DDR
Yeah except I stood there and watched him poor fluid into the car. And it did more than just fix the vibration - it also fixed the steering which was getting more and more difficult to turn.
Also you make a false assumption that my car has ABS. It does not. As the mechanic explained it to me, low brake/steering fluid makes everything tighten up so that the wheel doesn't want to turn. That creates vibration and gradual loss of power steering.
False. The bills are high because the equipment used is high. They're not stealing from you. In fact just last night NBC had a story about Medicare, and how every medicare patient treated the doctors *lose* money. The U.S. Medicare doesn't pay enough to cover actual costs.
Your complaint reminds me of shoppers on Ebay who complain that the 1 penny game I sold them is too much because I charged $5.00 S&H. They don't seem to realize that these things don't ship for free. Yes the customer paid $5.01 to my account, but paypal kept one dollar, and ebay kept approximately one dollar, and the envelope cost me 50 cents, and postage is about $2.40. I'm not overcharging. I'm barely breaking even on that deal with just ten pennies kept in my wallet.
But still the customer complains. The same applies to overhead for doctors. It costs a lot because the equipment is not free. The bill is high, because the doctors' costs are high.
Not true. The actual cost for that Best Buy tech is closer to $30/hour due to the free benefits they provide to the guy, plus desk or space to work, plus overhead (lighting, heating) to make that space comfortable.
For an engineer like me the cost is $100/hour, although I only get about 40% of it in my paycheck.
So anyway the $50 sounds about right. $30 cost to have the tech in the store, plus twenty dollars profit.
I don't know how much your loss cost you, but let's say it was $100. Geek Squad works for Best Buy? If yes, buy a $100 item from Best Buy, take it home, then return an empty envelope to the store. Provide the tracking number to your credit card, explain that the item was returned, and then file a chargeback.
Now you're even. They stole $100 from you via fraudulent repairs; and you stole it back.