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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The EV-1 reportedly cost over $100,000 to build. How many actual, real customers were queuing up to hand over checks for $100,000 to buy one?
That's a speciality, one of model. What I wonder is how much did a Rav4 EV cost to build. Simple, based on currently existing model. Enough range. All it needs is a biofuel generator and a price tag.
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.
Those are the most important skills I've ever learned. My parents taught me them, not the school system. The problems I see in our school system are three-fold: writing, research, science, and sports. First, writing. And by writing, I don't mean handwriting, cursive, etc., that's a dying business. I mean writing documents, such essays, technical documents, articles, etc. This has to be done on a computer, like it or not. Pen and paper is just too slow and too inefficient for the purpose of writing massive papers. It will be expensive too. It will take forever to grade the student papers - ask a professor. Second, research. Students have to learn how to use google, libraries, wikipedia(!) and other tools that can teach them things. If students don't know how to learn on their own, they cannot function in today's society. Third, science. We don't teach science. We teach chemistry, biology and physics, but we never really teach science. Students have to learn the real principles of science. How do you design an experiment? What criteria invalidate a study? What methods can evaluate something? They have to be able to answer these questions. I want second graders asking people what the control condition is. Fourth, sports. Get rid of them. All of them. Sports don't serve any purpose in school. They waste time, money, and create a culture in which people who can throw a ball around are the most valuable. They also are causing obesity, not preventing it, because, students only spend 16 minutes active in gym class. If you believe that the causes of obesity are inactivity, you should push to get rid of PE classes. You could get better results if you ripped out all the sports, shortened the school day, and let kids just play in the newly freed time.
Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).
How well did your system handle pedestrian detection? Because, I recently (less than 2 years) attended a talk by someone from the Stanford autonomous cars lab. I was just about to get my license, so I asked if the system could pass the driving test. The answer was that it could not, because pedestrians would not be detected by the system. And that "for the most part, anyway" is trouble too.
I would like to know why won't direct drive work. If you just rip out the transmission, and put the motor in (assuming you mounted it properly), wouldn't it be existentially equivalent to putting a motor inline after the transmission? For example, you can see BMW transmission mod on this page: link. I think it would fit.
I have to think about the automatic upgrade idea. Thanks for looking at my idea. I don't know as much about cars as I would like.
SUV drivers (via the paradoxical effect from braindead CAFE laws).
SUV drivers simply bought (and sold) products on the open market. No one was inherently hurt by their choices. Environmentalists came in and said, no, you can't buy all products. You can't buy nuclear energy. Then they told the SUV drivers they were evil. Who's at fault here? The way I see it, the SUV drivers engaged in a harmless activity. The environmentalists made it harmful.
Cleaning up the atmosphere also contributed a bit to global warming as well. Damn Clean Air Act. =)
Don't get me started. The clean air act makes it basically impossible to convert vehicles to alternative fuels. To get a conversion system certified, you need to pay $100,000+ per model, per model year, per engine option package. That makes it completely non-cost effective for a small business to do so. Because if someone comes with a 1999 camry instead of a 1998 (even though there's no difference between the two outside of some buttons), $100,000 dollars. The clean air act means we cannot convert vehicles to clean fuels. This needs to be fixed.
The problem is that Bartlett ignores what Simon says about population growth limits. Simon thinks that population growth will stop as the effectively unlimited resources develop the world. Not keep growing. This needs to happen as soon as possible. The fact is, because of all the development, they are down to 2.45 births per woman in India. Slightly above replacement rate. India was originally the population growth apocalypse. Now it's Africa. In 20-40 years, the population growth apocalypse will be over. Environmentalists will find a new problem, though.
When you listen to what both have to say, you find that what Julian says is right, provided you simply ignore the living conditions of those in societies where resources are so scarce, they are as good as absent - Africa for instance.
This is a common environmentalist alter-cast. Simon does talk about the plight of the less developed. It's not a result of wealth countries, but a lack of education. The problem is, how can they build a road to the starving people? How can they build and maintain a truck? They can't, because they don't have the education. They can't get education, because the dictators keep them on their knees. Food scarcity, as Simon notes, is inversely correlated to transportation.
Julian talks of how technology will keep coming up ("optimist") so that we will deal with energy scarcity effectively, by innovating our way out of the problem.
Because we already have. It's government regulations, caused by environmentalists, that are the problem. Not technology.
Bartlett wrong - bases data on simple, aging extrapolations
Simon right - notes effects and trends that render those extrapolations wrong
Anti-nuclear Environmentalists - responsible for global warming
Dictators and Oppressors of all types - responsible for world hunger
But if you live in USA, you may not even know that a world exists outside your 50 states.
I do know about that world. Funny how it's okay to say all these things about the USA, but if I said them about Japan or China, I would be racist.
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
Simply wrong. Patently false. The ocean contains 4 billion tons of uranium. That's 850 years in crap reactors. In good reactors, 100000 years or more. But, even then, there's also the impact of erosion, that puts more uranium back in to the ocean. Some numbers suggest that billions of years might be possible with erosion. It's irrelevant, because we'll probably have unimaginable energy sources in 800 years.
Unless you're arguing that the earth's resources are not actually finite
Not in any significant way. Those resources are vast. 100's to 1000's of times greater than what the doomers say they are. The doomers say that known those resources will be used up in X years, and fail to take into account that in X years, because of price increases, known reserves will be bigger than they are now. Capitalists will: recycle the materials, find methods of mining lower concentrations, and find new reserves. In the 1980's, the doomers said that we would run out of chromium and some other metals by 1990-2000. Julian Simon said, no, we won't. He took a bet on metal prices, and won. The prices of chromium and the other metals fell through the floor. If resources were becoming scarcer, why would this happen, over and over, as Simon points out in the ultimate resource? Because the principles of scarcity and doom are wrong. Simply wrong. It's not trendy, but the truth never is.
Are we living in the movie Idiocracy, where morons can make patently irrational suggestions like this, and get modded up to 5?
The problem is that the truth is patently irrational. Heavy objects don't fall faster. The doomers are probably not morons, but they are insane. They keep saying and doing the same things, over and over again, and expecting different results. Doomsday is always 10 years away, and will forever be. When we travel the galaxy in spaceships, people will be scared that there might not be enough chrome to plate there wings.
I wonder about replacing the transmission with an electric motor, and the starter with a generator. Then you would have an "easy" plug-in series hybrid. You could put a generator in an electric conversion, but you'd need at least 3 10kW generators. Using generators would produce a lot of pollution compared to the engine, and placing them in a car like that could violate the clean air act by being considered an engine swap.
If you used currently existing engine, you would not violate the clean air act by swapping the transmission. You would also save money buy not having to buy all those generators.
Capacitors are 10 times heavier than lead acid batteries. They are also insanely expensive. No way you'd want to use them in that storage application. As cited above, the aforementioned economic issues prevent even once through battery storage from being cost effective. Now we have to double that cost ineffectiveness?
I don't think they would bury the battery packs. They would need replacement too often. As far as I know, there's no lithium in the caps.
Capacitors and fast charging are the natural language processing of greenness. Only cost effective technology = lead-acid batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
please see this post. I think I have all the objections. Basically, we've got trouble with comparing electric trains to gas cars.
Even a Japanese train. See the link. But I'll take the Tesla please.
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.
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.
The EV-1 reportedly cost over $100,000 to build. How many actual, real customers were queuing up to hand over checks for $100,000 to buy one?
That's a speciality, one of model. What I wonder is how much did a Rav4 EV cost to build. Simple, based on currently existing model. Enough range. All it needs is a biofuel generator and a price tag.
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.
Those are the most important skills I've ever learned. My parents taught me them, not the school system. The problems I see in our school system are three-fold: writing, research, science, and sports. First, writing. And by writing, I don't mean handwriting, cursive, etc., that's a dying business. I mean writing documents, such essays, technical documents, articles, etc. This has to be done on a computer, like it or not. Pen and paper is just too slow and too inefficient for the purpose of writing massive papers. It will be expensive too. It will take forever to grade the student papers - ask a professor. Second, research. Students have to learn how to use google, libraries, wikipedia(!) and other tools that can teach them things. If students don't know how to learn on their own, they cannot function in today's society. Third, science. We don't teach science. We teach chemistry, biology and physics, but we never really teach science. Students have to learn the real principles of science. How do you design an experiment? What criteria invalidate a study? What methods can evaluate something? They have to be able to answer these questions. I want second graders asking people what the control condition is. Fourth, sports. Get rid of them. All of them. Sports don't serve any purpose in school. They waste time, money, and create a culture in which people who can throw a ball around are the most valuable. They also are causing obesity, not preventing it, because, students only spend 16 minutes active in gym class. If you believe that the causes of obesity are inactivity, you should push to get rid of PE classes. You could get better results if you ripped out all the sports, shortened the school day, and let kids just play in the newly freed time.
Here you go.
Electric vehicle's analytical engines.
Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).
How well did your system handle pedestrian detection? Because, I recently (less than 2 years) attended a talk by someone from the Stanford autonomous cars lab. I was just about to get my license, so I asked if the system could pass the driving test. The answer was that it could not, because pedestrians would not be detected by the system. And that "for the most part, anyway" is trouble too.
I would like to know why won't direct drive work. If you just rip out the transmission, and put the motor in (assuming you mounted it properly), wouldn't it be existentially equivalent to putting a motor inline after the transmission? For example, you can see BMW transmission mod on this page: link. I think it would fit.
I have to think about the automatic upgrade idea. Thanks for looking at my idea. I don't know as much about cars as I would like.
SUV drivers (via the paradoxical effect from braindead CAFE laws).
SUV drivers simply bought (and sold) products on the open market. No one was inherently hurt by their choices. Environmentalists came in and said, no, you can't buy all products. You can't buy nuclear energy. Then they told the SUV drivers they were evil. Who's at fault here? The way I see it, the SUV drivers engaged in a harmless activity. The environmentalists made it harmful.
Cleaning up the atmosphere also contributed a bit to global warming as well. Damn Clean Air Act. =)
Don't get me started. The clean air act makes it basically impossible to convert vehicles to alternative fuels. To get a conversion system certified, you need to pay $100,000+ per model, per model year, per engine option package. That makes it completely non-cost effective for a small business to do so. Because if someone comes with a 1999 camry instead of a 1998 (even though there's no difference between the two outside of some buttons), $100,000 dollars. The clean air act means we cannot convert vehicles to clean fuels. This needs to be fixed.
I wonder how high this could fly if a big model rocket was added, so it started when the balloon burst?
When you listen to what both have to say, you find that what Julian says is right, provided you simply ignore the living conditions of those in societies where resources are so scarce, they are as good as absent - Africa for instance.
This is a common environmentalist alter-cast. Simon does talk about the plight of the less developed. It's not a result of wealth countries, but a lack of education. The problem is, how can they build a road to the starving people? How can they build and maintain a truck? They can't, because they don't have the education. They can't get education, because the dictators keep them on their knees. Food scarcity, as Simon notes, is inversely correlated to transportation.
Julian talks of how technology will keep coming up ("optimist") so that we will deal with energy scarcity effectively, by innovating our way out of the problem.
Because we already have. It's government regulations, caused by environmentalists, that are the problem. Not technology.
Bartlett wrong - bases data on simple, aging extrapolations
Simon right - notes effects and trends that render those extrapolations wrong
Anti-nuclear Environmentalists - responsible for global warming
Dictators and Oppressors of all types - responsible for world hunger
But if you live in USA, you may not even know that a world exists outside your 50 states.
I do know about that world. Funny how it's okay to say all these things about the USA, but if I said them about Japan or China, I would be racist.
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
Simply wrong. Patently false. The ocean contains 4 billion tons of uranium. That's 850 years in crap reactors. In good reactors, 100000 years or more. But, even then, there's also the impact of erosion, that puts more uranium back in to the ocean. Some numbers suggest that billions of years might be possible with erosion. It's irrelevant, because we'll probably have unimaginable energy sources in 800 years.
Unless you're arguing that the earth's resources are not actually finite
Not in any significant way. Those resources are vast. 100's to 1000's of times greater than what the doomers say they are. The doomers say that known those resources will be used up in X years, and fail to take into account that in X years, because of price increases, known reserves will be bigger than they are now. Capitalists will: recycle the materials, find methods of mining lower concentrations, and find new reserves. In the 1980's, the doomers said that we would run out of chromium and some other metals by 1990-2000. Julian Simon said, no, we won't. He took a bet on metal prices, and won. The prices of chromium and the other metals fell through the floor. If resources were becoming scarcer, why would this happen, over and over, as Simon points out in the ultimate resource? Because the principles of scarcity and doom are wrong. Simply wrong. It's not trendy, but the truth never is.
Are we living in the movie Idiocracy, where morons can make patently irrational suggestions like this, and get modded up to 5?
The problem is that the truth is patently irrational. Heavy objects don't fall faster. The doomers are probably not morons, but they are insane. They keep saying and doing the same things, over and over again, and expecting different results. Doomsday is always 10 years away, and will forever be. When we travel the galaxy in spaceships, people will be scared that there might not be enough chrome to plate there wings.
I wonder about replacing the transmission with an electric motor, and the starter with a generator. Then you would have an "easy" plug-in series hybrid. You could put a generator in an electric conversion, but you'd need at least 3 10kW generators. Using generators would produce a lot of pollution compared to the engine, and placing them in a car like that could violate the clean air act by being considered an engine swap.
If you used currently existing engine, you would not violate the clean air act by swapping the transmission. You would also save money buy not having to buy all those generators.
Capacitors are 10 times heavier than lead acid batteries. They are also insanely expensive. No way you'd want to use them in that storage application. As cited above, the aforementioned economic issues prevent even once through battery storage from being cost effective. Now we have to double that cost ineffectiveness?
I don't think they would bury the battery packs. They would need replacement too often. As far as I know, there's no lithium in the caps.
Capacitors and fast charging are the natural language processing of greenness. Only cost effective technology = lead-acid batteries.
Link.
Don't worry about it.
-Wood powered hummer drivers association.