Your post reminded me of something I haven't seen mentioned here - In pretty much any system you're going to have numerous vulnerabilities, which you will mitigate with controls(being generic here).
Take a house or building. Incomplete list, of course: Depending on attack, all of these are vulnerabilities:
Doors - Lock, Door Body, Frame
Windows - Glass, Lock, Frame
Walls & Roof
Now, there's also covert and non-covert entry. Picking a lock is covert, busting a window isn't. It's a sliding scale really; busting a hidden window may be more covert than picking the front door.
The trick to security is to determine your budget, list up all your vulnerabilities, then figure out a plan to 'even up' your worst vulnerabilities while staying in budget.
As such, in a home buying premium 'unpickable' locks is typically not necessary. You'll quickly make it so picking the lock isn't worth it - but you may fail to address the other vulnerabilities. Instead, you might as well pick one for features such as being able to rekey it yourself, electronic entry, durability/reliability, even appearance.
One quick fix may be to buy some long, heavy duty screws and put them into your door frame, and replace the screws that came with your locks and hinge hardware. Longer screws = more strength against break attacks. They're generally cheap; even $20 will go a long ways towards making your door harder to kick in. After that, you're probably better off looking at your windows - bars on the windows, if you're that paranoid.
An automatic alarm system gives you some depth, but be careful of monitoring companies - some don't take their own alarms seriously.
If your goal is to reduce gas consumption, then just raise the MPG requirements on new cars.
We tried that. I remember reading studies that showed that increasing mpg tends to increase miles driven. Lower cost per mile = more miles driven. It also lead to the SUV craze due to requirements not being as tough on them.
Actually, it does. It might not affect you and your 53Km commute, at least immediately, but it doesn't have to affect you. It just has to affect somebody, a portion of the population.
What gasoline is is a fairly inelastic good - thus it takes a relatively large price change to see real changes, it does happen.
Step 1 is people driving less - batching up their trips more, going to the grocery every other week rather than every week. Not driving as far on vacation, etc... Also seen is people driving slower Step 2 has people buying more fuel efficient cars. Step 3 is people tending to select homes and/or work that are closer together.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned for the power savings is that in an extremely high random read environment where SSDs shine the most, you're generally looking at one SSD replacing multiple hard drives.
If you can get rid of 5 15k drives and replace it with 1 SSD, the capital cost difference is vastly reduced, if not eliminated, even before you look at power savings.
It's more like a 30A 240V circuit could power your entire house EXCEPT for your AC system. It could probably do smaller house AC systems, but it'd have to be dedicated.
Should run an oven or even just a burner just fine, along with the lights.
Do you have a source on this figure? Big LiIon batteries are already more limited by the service of the house/building than by the charging limit of the battery, and the only 10X figure I remember about batteries would be EEStor's ultracapacitors, and to my knowledge they're still vaporware.
If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.
I'm in an area where electricity is expensive, and we heat with fuel oil.
One idea I've had is to build a cogeneration system. Basically, fuel oil is diesel. So I'd get a standard diesel generator, but rather than running the cooling system outside, I'd have it hooked into my house heating system. For even more efficiency, rather than emit the exhaust directly outside, I'd pass it through a heat exchanger first.
Note: This is safe if done correctly, but you have to know what you're doing, and seal the exhaust outlets up good. Even then, I'd highly recommend a carbon monoxide sensor.
That way I'd produce power at more or less 80% efficiency, by 2/3rds of it would be heat from oil I'd be burning for heat anyways, alloing me to burn fuel oil to produce electricity at nearly 80% efficiency.
Preventing factor? Capital cost of the system outweighs the payback period.:(
More and more homes, especially those outside of the midwest, much less outside the country, are getting the advanced meters. My parents have a switch on the water heater and air conditioner that allows the power company to turn it off during peak times, in exchange for a cut on their rate.
Same thing on the car charger should have the same effect.
That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?
He mentioned 'electric or not'. I once figured out that for ~$300 and some machine work I could make a device to convert my truck into a generator and get ~50kw out of it.
Thing is, my truck's engine is generally going to be more efficient w/fewer emissions than tiny generators.
If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs
I use ~300kwh a month, which is ~10kwh/day, or about 2.4 days using the Leaf's 24kwh battery system. 24kwh@20 cents = $4.80 of electricity.
The 'standard' for EVs is around 3.6-3.8 miles per kwh, 86.4-91.2 miles per charge. I'd hardly call that excessive, and gives a cost of 5 cents per mile(using expensive electricity), when a car is closer to 13 cents(using $4 gas).
Your generator can theoretically make 180 kwh a day, but generators have to be sized for peak load, not average load. Odds are you're quite a bit under that most of the time.
but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner?
Who says the 'typical Japanese home' runs all this stuff, especially during a power outage?
Review of the source of that article shows that it's misleading.
Figure 44 shows nuclear passing renewables(including hydro) for electricity production in 1974, and still in the lead today.
Figure 59 shows "renewables" leading worldwide energy production since the graph start in 1970. It's in BTUs, so includes things like burning wood.
Rereading the article, it boils down to that more is now being invested into renewable power, than nuclear power. Given that we aren't building a lot of nuclear plants, that's not surprising. Despite that, renewable power isn't trending upward significantly enough to pass nuclear anytime soon; most of the increase is in natural gas.
It may not be an impossible task, but if inventing the next generation of EV were easy and cheap--and in this context, I'd suggest that a $500,000 investment is cheap--then everyone would be doing it.
It's doubtful that the $500k was the sole source of funding for the company. It's far more likely that it's the city that's out of $500k from things like forgone property taxes, perhaps the 'factory' went up on public land that was given to the company worth ~$500k, etc... Meanwhile there's lots of other investors out there that have lost their investment.
Not saying this makes it all that much better, or less of a gamble.
To keep the analogy more accurate though, against proper encryption and a strong pass phrase, you'd have to upgrade the 'safe' to one that is designed to wash it's contents in acid or fire if it detects tampering such as drilling.
It's not so much that they're incompetent, it's that proper encryption is that strong.
emember, my standard is that we are having a discussion about whether TCO of EVs is higher or lower than vehicles powered by ICEs, and my argument is that we are not able to determine this yet because there is not enough data available.
We do have enough data, however, to determine that the average cost is overwhelmingly to the advantage of the gasoline engine, at this time. I've said before that there's nothing wrong with EVs that a battery that costs half as much for twice the power(energy, really) wouldn't fix.
It's not the electric motors that are killing EVs today. It's the batteries. I have no problems believing that maintenance costs are lower, but neither are we re-engining gasoline vehicles like we used to; and the life of cars is actually increasing, on average.
You'd need to have an electric vehicle last 20 years, including the batteries, vs a an average of 10-12 years for a gasoline, for it to make sense.
I doubt you're going to get $11k off of a $15k vehicle, not even a $33k one. The California $10k rebate, assuming the leaf qualifies for the whole amount, is only available in California, and might not make it into the budget this year; the state's in financial trouble, after all. Even with it, you have a remaining $8k penalty for a less flexible vehicle. At 'around' $2k in fuel/maintenance options, that's 4 years to pay off, not including cost of capital. Besides, such a rebate isn't sustainable if 'everyone' would be buying the electric cars with it.
As fore reliability; new vehicles of whatever stripe tend to be very reliable these days. While there's more that can go wrong with a gasoline vehicle, yes, we've put so much developmental effort into it that they're extremely reliable regardless. If anything, the electric paths currently make component failure in an EV more likely to disable the vehicle completely. I've heard of it happening to a few civics(though being a hybrid, they're actually more complicated than pure EV or gasoline vehicles).
No, because that would be fucking stupid, because what we're talking about is EV vs. ICE, not cheap vs. expensive. Try to keep up, please.
I certainly wouldn't call it stupid, seeing as how I've already shown that an EV vehicle tends to be around twice as expensive as an equivalent ICE. While I don't have the statistics(I'm sure the insurance companies do). I figure it's somewhere around 1-4% that a vehicle will be totaled any given year. Let's say 2%. Thus, the potential loss cost of a $15k vehicle, of whatever fuel, would be $300. For a $33k vehicle, that's $660.
As for keeping up - The reason I look to be behind you at the moment is that I'm about to lap you.
Remember, my standard isn't that electric vehicles are uneconomical for everyone, it's simply that they're uneconomical for most. If you have a driving style that suits one almost perfectly, can convince your work to let you charge for free(IE pay you more), get the government to give you money for buying one(subsidizing you), insurance to cut you a break(not to mention be a good driver), etc... Then it can make sense. Me, I wouldn't hit the 12k/year with my current driving habits, and when I busted it, I busted the range of the Leaf as well.
I once built a spreadsheet to track all this, I wish I knew where it had gone off to. The general result though, is that EVs aren't worth it until gas gets far higher; and if you go by the costs of new renewable electricity, even higher.
Do you meant alternate fuel rebates or the dealer 'discounts' they use to move more vehicles? Vehicles in high demand tend to not get them; I don't happen to have the average sale price data handy, so I put MSRP against MSRP.
You've shown the initial purchase price is higher, but we don't really know how the maintenance cost difference will affect the TCO yet.
I'd tend to think that I've shown more than that, personally. Or was all my work on adding in fuel costs wasted?
I mentioned maintenance for the gasoline engine several times in my post. Thing is, cars are lasting longer and longer without needing huge amounts of it. I also used $4 a gallon gasoline and free electricity. Use the current $3.40 gasoline, that's $144 for maintenance, per year.
The most frequent maintenance I can think of would be 3 oil changes a year, at ~$50 a pop. $150 for that. Let's double it to $300, that's still less than what I'd estimate the electricity costs at. The roadster is like 3 miles to the kwh, at 10 cents each, that's $400 in electricity. I'm going to consider that a wash, on average.
I've provided sources on both capital and operational costs for various vehicles - perhaps you can do some figures to add in maintenance costs, vs the differences in insurance costs between a cheap vehicle and one that costs twice as much?
MSRP sources. Tesla Roadster: $109k-128k; Lotus Elise $51-55k Nissan Leaf: $33k. Nissan Versa or Ford Fiesta: $15k.
12k average miles, a bit high for a 2 door coupe or a short ranged electric car. It's 48 miles a 'work day' - 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. 33 miles for 365 days a year. Thus, I consider this 'high end' for a car that has a range of 73 miles.
Sport Option: 12k miles@23mpg(Elise) = 522 gallons, $2.1k fuel cost(@$4/gallon). $50k@5% interest = $2.5k. IE you can pay the increased fuel costs by leaving the money in investments to pay for the gas. Admittedly, this doesn't include maintenance, but even at a couple thousand a year it'd take quite a few for the cost of oil changes, engine maintenance to make up that cost difference; by the time that happens you'll be looking at needing to maintain the batteries of the roadster, not cheap itself. Add in that unless you're getting the electricity for free; you're actually 'only' saving 50-80% of the fuel costs.
Economy Option: 12k miles@30mpg = 400 gallons, $1.6k fuel cost. With an increased cost of $18k, that's a decade of fuel, with some left over for maintenance.
I stand by my remark that, outside of special circumstances, electric vehicles are currently more expensive overall.
I figure that my mile estimates are high, I didn't put gasoline maintenance in there, but neither did I figure in battery changes nor the cost of electricity for charging.
they have whatever cost they have right now, although that cost may not have been established.
Have I established that, at least under ordinary circumstances, electric vehicles are more expensive?
Nothing larger than a golf cart, personally. Living in rural areas, they don't stock them. Even the golf cart was fun though.
My point was more about the economy electric cars - Toyota Scion iQ, Nissan Leave, and Mitsubishi i. The Tesla Roadster is a different matter.
But if performance is what you're shopping for, there are plenty of gasoline vehicles that offer more performance for less*, thus my comment. You can get a Elise for a lot less than a Roadster.
*Outside of special areas like parking decks, inside, etc...
No gears? Even the Roadster has gears, if not a conventional shifter. Okay - it has a 1 speed transmission, but it still has a gear box.
You can synthesize gasoline from natural gas, and using intermediary stages and advanced chemistry to transform biological fats/oils and even carbohydrates into something you can pour directly into modern gas tanks.
Now, I happen to agree that electric motors are GREAT!. I've said before that with gasoline you have a lousy engine and a incredible energy store; with electric you have a great motor and a incredibly lousy energy store. The energy store has been moving towards 'just lousy', while 'incredible energy store' has been adding 'costly to fuel' on there.
By that token; everything I've seen for 'economy' electric cars is that they're still cheaping out on the power curve to try to compete, price wise, with gasoline. The greatness of electric as a motor doesn't mean much if they're sticking the equivalent of a lawnmower engine in it.
That's what I get for dashing off a comment - when I said 'these vehicles', I was referring to those in the article - the Toyota Scion iQ, Nissan Leave, and Mitsubishi i, not electric vehicles in general.
Electric vehicles can indeed be a hoot - but just like with gasoline vehicles; you pay a premium for performance, and the base price for electric is higher than that of gasoline; primarily due to the batteries.
Fun, of course. The problem with this is that unless you take especial pleasure from being 'green', these cars aren't enjoyable. They're not even superior, practicality wise, than a cheap 4 door sedan, yet cost more.
Electric cars would really take off if they truly had a lower total cost of ownership, but at this point they don't.
Yes, but most cops trolling for speeders are going to be using some form of speed gun. It's harder, but not impossible, to get a cyclist with one. Plus, they're generally after those going +10 or more over - +5 is only if they're not getting bites otherwise.
It's fairly rare, but has happened. Like I said - the bicyclist in question tends to be PROUD of his speeding ticket.;)
DUI riding a bicycle? I've heard of people getting a DUI while changing the oil in their car, and a quick search showed that somebody got arrested for DUI while walking beside their bicycle in their own yard...
As for giving a bicyclist a speeding ticket, there's a few problems: 1. Relatively hard to hit with a radar gun 2. Tickets are generally not going to get you much 3. bicyclists tend to view them as badges of honor.;)
Detecting cancer in a year or two in a 72 year old is probably already pre-existing; it takes time to develop to detectability, much less life-threatening size.
It also depends on how much dosage they allow these seniors to get - if they follow current guidlines, even the more expedient 'emergency' levels, it might only raise their chances 5%.
Then again, it might kill an existing cancer(though not likely). You just don't know.
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Your post reminded me of something I haven't seen mentioned here -
In pretty much any system you're going to have numerous vulnerabilities, which you will mitigate with controls(being generic here).
Take a house or building. Incomplete list, of course:
Depending on attack, all of these are vulnerabilities:
Now, there's also covert and non-covert entry. Picking a lock is covert, busting a window isn't. It's a sliding scale really; busting a hidden window may be more covert than picking the front door.
The trick to security is to determine your budget, list up all your vulnerabilities, then figure out a plan to 'even up' your worst vulnerabilities while staying in budget.
As such, in a home buying premium 'unpickable' locks is typically not necessary. You'll quickly make it so picking the lock isn't worth it - but you may fail to address the other vulnerabilities. Instead, you might as well pick one for features such as being able to rekey it yourself, electronic entry, durability/reliability, even appearance.
One quick fix may be to buy some long, heavy duty screws and put them into your door frame, and replace the screws that came with your locks and hinge hardware. Longer screws = more strength against break attacks. They're generally cheap; even $20 will go a long ways towards making your door harder to kick in. After that, you're probably better off looking at your windows - bars on the windows, if you're that paranoid.
An automatic alarm system gives you some depth, but be careful of monitoring companies - some don't take their own alarms seriously.
If your goal is to reduce gas consumption, then just raise the MPG requirements on new cars.
We tried that. I remember reading studies that showed that increasing mpg tends to increase miles driven. Lower cost per mile = more miles driven. It also lead to the SUV craze due to requirements not being as tough on them.
, IT DOES NOT WORK, in the real world
Actually, it does. It might not affect you and your 53Km commute, at least immediately, but it doesn't have to affect you. It just has to affect somebody, a portion of the population.
What gasoline is is a fairly inelastic good - thus it takes a relatively large price change to see real changes, it does happen.
Step 1 is people driving less - batching up their trips more, going to the grocery every other week rather than every week. Not driving as far on vacation, etc... Also seen is people driving slower
Step 2 has people buying more fuel efficient cars.
Step 3 is people tending to select homes and/or work that are closer together.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned for the power savings is that in an extremely high random read environment where SSDs shine the most, you're generally looking at one SSD replacing multiple hard drives.
If you can get rid of 5 15k drives and replace it with 1 SSD, the capital cost difference is vastly reduced, if not eliminated, even before you look at power savings.
It's more like a 30A 240V circuit could power your entire house EXCEPT for your AC system. It could probably do smaller house AC systems, but it'd have to be dedicated.
Should run an oven or even just a burner just fine, along with the lights.
Fridge: ~6A startup, 2A running .2A each.
Lights: 60W equivalent CFL is 12-14W each, call it
TV: 32" 1.75A max.
So you're only up to 10 Amps at 120V running a fridge, 10 lights, and a 32" TV.
You have 50A to go. You can run an oven and a burner or two off the remainder.
Do you have a source on this figure? Big LiIon batteries are already more limited by the service of the house/building than by the charging limit of the battery, and the only 10X figure I remember about batteries would be EEStor's ultracapacitors, and to my knowledge they're still vaporware.
If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.
I'm in an area where electricity is expensive, and we heat with fuel oil.
One idea I've had is to build a cogeneration system. Basically, fuel oil is diesel. So I'd get a standard diesel generator, but rather than running the cooling system outside, I'd have it hooked into my house heating system. For even more efficiency, rather than emit the exhaust directly outside, I'd pass it through a heat exchanger first.
Note: This is safe if done correctly, but you have to know what you're doing, and seal the exhaust outlets up good. Even then, I'd highly recommend a carbon monoxide sensor.
That way I'd produce power at more or less 80% efficiency, by 2/3rds of it would be heat from oil I'd be burning for heat anyways, alloing me to burn fuel oil to produce electricity at nearly 80% efficiency.
Preventing factor? Capital cost of the system outweighs the payback period. :(
More and more homes, especially those outside of the midwest, much less outside the country, are getting the advanced meters. My parents have a switch on the water heater and air conditioner that allows the power company to turn it off during peak times, in exchange for a cut on their rate.
Same thing on the car charger should have the same effect.
That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?
He mentioned 'electric or not'. I once figured out that for ~$300 and some machine work I could make a device to convert my truck into a generator and get ~50kw out of it.
Thing is, my truck's engine is generally going to be more efficient w/fewer emissions than tiny generators.
If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs
I use ~300kwh a month, which is ~10kwh/day, or about 2.4 days using the Leaf's 24kwh battery system. 24kwh@20 cents = $4.80 of electricity.
The 'standard' for EVs is around 3.6-3.8 miles per kwh, 86.4-91.2 miles per charge. I'd hardly call that excessive, and gives a cost of 5 cents per mile(using expensive electricity), when a car is closer to 13 cents(using $4 gas).
Your generator can theoretically make 180 kwh a day, but generators have to be sized for peak load, not average load. Odds are you're quite a bit under that most of the time.
but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner?
Who says the 'typical Japanese home' runs all this stuff, especially during a power outage?
Review of the source of that article shows that it's misleading.
Figure 44 shows nuclear passing renewables(including hydro) for electricity production in 1974, and still in the lead today.
Figure 59 shows "renewables" leading worldwide energy production since the graph start in 1970. It's in BTUs, so includes things like burning wood.
Rereading the article, it boils down to that more is now being invested into renewable power, than nuclear power. Given that we aren't building a lot of nuclear plants, that's not surprising. Despite that, renewable power isn't trending upward significantly enough to pass nuclear anytime soon; most of the increase is in natural gas.
It may not be an impossible task, but if inventing the next generation of EV were easy and cheap--and in this context, I'd suggest that a $500,000 investment is cheap--then everyone would be doing it.
It's doubtful that the $500k was the sole source of funding for the company. It's far more likely that it's the city that's out of $500k from things like forgone property taxes, perhaps the 'factory' went up on public land that was given to the company worth ~$500k, etc... Meanwhile there's lots of other investors out there that have lost their investment.
Not saying this makes it all that much better, or less of a gamble.
To keep the analogy more accurate though, against proper encryption and a strong pass phrase, you'd have to upgrade the 'safe' to one that is designed to wash it's contents in acid or fire if it detects tampering such as drilling.
It's not so much that they're incompetent, it's that proper encryption is that strong.
emember, my standard is that we are having a discussion about whether TCO of EVs is higher or lower than vehicles powered by ICEs, and my argument is that we are not able to determine this yet because there is not enough data available.
We do have enough data, however, to determine that the average cost is overwhelmingly to the advantage of the gasoline engine, at this time. I've said before that there's nothing wrong with EVs that a battery that costs half as much for twice the power(energy, really) wouldn't fix.
It's not the electric motors that are killing EVs today. It's the batteries. I have no problems believing that maintenance costs are lower, but neither are we re-engining gasoline vehicles like we used to; and the life of cars is actually increasing, on average.
You'd need to have an electric vehicle last 20 years, including the batteries, vs a an average of 10-12 years for a gasoline, for it to make sense.
I doubt you're going to get $11k off of a $15k vehicle, not even a $33k one. The California $10k rebate, assuming the leaf qualifies for the whole amount, is only available in California, and might not make it into the budget this year; the state's in financial trouble, after all. Even with it, you have a remaining $8k penalty for a less flexible vehicle. At 'around' $2k in fuel/maintenance options, that's 4 years to pay off, not including cost of capital. Besides, such a rebate isn't sustainable if 'everyone' would be buying the electric cars with it.
As fore reliability; new vehicles of whatever stripe tend to be very reliable these days. While there's more that can go wrong with a gasoline vehicle, yes, we've put so much developmental effort into it that they're extremely reliable regardless. If anything, the electric paths currently make component failure in an EV more likely to disable the vehicle completely. I've heard of it happening to a few civics(though being a hybrid, they're actually more complicated than pure EV or gasoline vehicles).
No, because that would be fucking stupid, because what we're talking about is EV vs. ICE, not cheap vs. expensive. Try to keep up, please.
I certainly wouldn't call it stupid, seeing as how I've already shown that an EV vehicle tends to be around twice as expensive as an equivalent ICE. While I don't have the statistics(I'm sure the insurance companies do). I figure it's somewhere around 1-4% that a vehicle will be totaled any given year. Let's say 2%. Thus, the potential loss cost of a $15k vehicle, of whatever fuel, would be $300. For a $33k vehicle, that's $660.
As for keeping up - The reason I look to be behind you at the moment is that I'm about to lap you.
Remember, my standard isn't that electric vehicles are uneconomical for everyone, it's simply that they're uneconomical for most. If you have a driving style that suits one almost perfectly, can convince your work to let you charge for free(IE pay you more), get the government to give you money for buying one(subsidizing you), insurance to cut you a break(not to mention be a good driver), etc... Then it can make sense. Me, I wouldn't hit the 12k/year with my current driving habits, and when I busted it, I busted the range of the Leaf as well.
I once built a spreadsheet to track all this, I wish I knew where it had gone off to. The general result though, is that EVs aren't worth it until gas gets far higher; and if you go by the costs of new renewable electricity, even higher.
You forgot to take the discounts...
Do you meant alternate fuel rebates or the dealer 'discounts' they use to move more vehicles? Vehicles in high demand tend to not get them; I don't happen to have the average sale price data handy, so I put MSRP against MSRP.
You've shown the initial purchase price is higher, but we don't really know how the maintenance cost difference will affect the TCO yet.
I'd tend to think that I've shown more than that, personally. Or was all my work on adding in fuel costs wasted?
I mentioned maintenance for the gasoline engine several times in my post. Thing is, cars are lasting longer and longer without needing huge amounts of it. I also used $4 a gallon gasoline and free electricity. Use the current $3.40 gasoline, that's $144 for maintenance, per year.
The most frequent maintenance I can think of would be 3 oil changes a year, at ~$50 a pop. $150 for that. Let's double it to $300, that's still less than what I'd estimate the electricity costs at. The roadster is like 3 miles to the kwh, at 10 cents each, that's $400 in electricity. I'm going to consider that a wash, on average.
I've provided sources on both capital and operational costs for various vehicles - perhaps you can do some figures to add in maintenance costs, vs the differences in insurance costs between a cheap vehicle and one that costs twice as much?
Wouldn't the technically minded person be more likely to build their own?
[citation needed]
MSRP sources.
Tesla Roadster: $109k-128k; Lotus Elise $51-55k
Nissan Leaf: $33k. Nissan Versa or Ford Fiesta: $15k.
12k average miles, a bit high for a 2 door coupe or a short ranged electric car. It's 48 miles a 'work day' - 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. 33 miles for 365 days a year. Thus, I consider this 'high end' for a car that has a range of 73 miles.
Sport Option:
12k miles@23mpg(Elise) = 522 gallons, $2.1k fuel cost(@$4/gallon). $50k@5% interest = $2.5k. IE you can pay the increased fuel costs by leaving the money in investments to pay for the gas. Admittedly, this doesn't include maintenance, but even at a couple thousand a year it'd take quite a few for the cost of oil changes, engine maintenance to make up that cost difference; by the time that happens you'll be looking at needing to maintain the batteries of the roadster, not cheap itself. Add in that unless you're getting the electricity for free; you're actually 'only' saving 50-80% of the fuel costs.
Economy Option:
12k miles@30mpg = 400 gallons, $1.6k fuel cost. With an increased cost of $18k, that's a decade of fuel, with some left over for maintenance.
I stand by my remark that, outside of special circumstances, electric vehicles are currently more expensive overall.
I figure that my mile estimates are high, I didn't put gasoline maintenance in there, but neither did I figure in battery changes nor the cost of electricity for charging.
they have whatever cost they have right now, although that cost may not have been established.
Have I established that, at least under ordinary circumstances, electric vehicles are more expensive?
Nothing larger than a golf cart, personally. Living in rural areas, they don't stock them. Even the golf cart was fun though.
My point was more about the economy electric cars - Toyota Scion iQ, Nissan Leave, and Mitsubishi i. The Tesla Roadster is a different matter.
But if performance is what you're shopping for, there are plenty of gasoline vehicles that offer more performance for less*, thus my comment. You can get a Elise for a lot less than a Roadster.
*Outside of special areas like parking decks, inside, etc...
No gears? Even the Roadster has gears, if not a conventional shifter. Okay - it has a 1 speed transmission, but it still has a gear box.
You can synthesize gasoline from natural gas, and using intermediary stages and advanced chemistry to transform biological fats/oils and even carbohydrates into something you can pour directly into modern gas tanks.
Now, I happen to agree that electric motors are GREAT!. I've said before that with gasoline you have a lousy engine and a incredible energy store; with electric you have a great motor and a incredibly lousy energy store. The energy store has been moving towards 'just lousy', while 'incredible energy store' has been adding 'costly to fuel' on there.
By that token; everything I've seen for 'economy' electric cars is that they're still cheaping out on the power curve to try to compete, price wise, with gasoline. The greatness of electric as a motor doesn't mean much if they're sticking the equivalent of a lawnmower engine in it.
That's what I get for dashing off a comment - when I said 'these vehicles', I was referring to those in the article - the Toyota Scion iQ, Nissan Leave, and Mitsubishi i, not electric vehicles in general.
Electric vehicles can indeed be a hoot - but just like with gasoline vehicles; you pay a premium for performance, and the base price for electric is higher than that of gasoline; primarily due to the batteries.
what's the financial point of a porsche?
Fun, of course. The problem with this is that unless you take especial pleasure from being 'green', these cars aren't enjoyable. They're not even superior, practicality wise, than a cheap 4 door sedan, yet cost more.
Electric cars would really take off if they truly had a lower total cost of ownership, but at this point they don't.
Yes, but most cops trolling for speeders are going to be using some form of speed gun. It's harder, but not impossible, to get a cyclist with one. Plus, they're generally after those going +10 or more over - +5 is only if they're not getting bites otherwise.
It's fairly rare, but has happened. Like I said - the bicyclist in question tends to be PROUD of his speeding ticket. ;)
Thus they tend to not hand them out much.
DUI riding a bicycle? I've heard of people getting a DUI while changing the oil in their car, and a quick search showed that somebody got arrested for DUI while walking beside their bicycle in their own yard...
As for giving a bicyclist a speeding ticket, there's a few problems: ;)
1. Relatively hard to hit with a radar gun
2. Tickets are generally not going to get you much
3. bicyclists tend to view them as badges of honor.
Detecting cancer in a year or two in a 72 year old is probably already pre-existing; it takes time to develop to detectability, much less life-threatening size.
It also depends on how much dosage they allow these seniors to get - if they follow current guidlines, even the more expedient 'emergency' levels, it might only raise their chances 5%.
Then again, it might kill an existing cancer(though not likely). You just don't know.
Do you expect the pot growers to know what they're doing that well? Or have the proper tools?