Yeah, that's a big reason I think the volt is cool (but seriously LiIon needs to get cheaper, and i'd be more likely to buy a competitor's tiny dorky version instead of the "EV but bad-ass looking!").
Someone else in this discussion even suggested using a turbine for the generator. Don't know engine engineering myself to know how feasible that is; the smallest turbines I know of are in jets. Sounds cool though.:)
1. I had no trouble getting a Wii without a bundle. Neither did anyone I know. In fact, it seems that those who fell for the bundle deal were in the minority. FINDING a Wii in the first place was the greater challenge.
Yeah, and when I was trying to buy one, the only way to find a Wii was in a bundle.:P
Fortunately it was a good bundle where the only mandatory add-on was an extra controller and you got to pick which games you wanted, but still.
The electric is still way more efficient at highway speeds. The reason current hybrids don't use it is because they simply don't have large enough battery packs to provide the necessary power and range. The Prius really doesn't store a lot of charge in its batteries; as a plug-in hybrid, it has only an 8 mile range on batteries, and the battery/electric motor is really there to save gas in stop-and-go and while idling, and to gain the benefits of regenerative breaking. In contrast, for the Volt to get useful range and power out of the batteries, it will have to use a larger battery pack using the more expensive (but higher charge density) LiIon batteries, thus the $50k price tag.
Lol, and you think steel and plastic spring from the ground with no nasty chemicals involved? How much do you think the battery adds on top of that?
The fact is that the batteries in hybrids can be fully recycled -- the nickel in them alone makes it worth paying a sizable bounty on recycling. And the chemicals in NiMH batteries are not that nasty, and LiIon are even better, they aren't a significant environmental concern. The lead acid battery in your gas car (and admittedly in some hybrids) is worse than the whole battery pack of an electric vehicle.
I do find it pretty funny what non-environmentalists try to play up as environmental concerns when trying to do a "full accounting" of the green solution, and ignore in their traditional solution.
The Chevy Volt uses an IC engine to recharge the battery when necessary - like all other hybrids (though Chevy calls it a "range extender").
Calling the car an electric w/range extender, rather than simply hybrid (or series-hybrid) is marketing speak.
I don't think that's fair. In all other hybrids (on the market in the US today), the ICE is connected to the transmission and provides power to the wheels directly, in concert with the battery. They will use the battery and ICE proportionally to drive the car based on the speed. At highway speeds, they only use the ICE to drive and don't use the batteries at all. The range of most hybrids on pure electric power would be very small, and is really only the case when accelerating from a stop. On any normal daily commute of even a short distance, you're burning gas.
The big difference in the volt, whether you call it "electric w/ range extender" or "series hybrid", is that the ICE is not connected to the drive train at all. It is nothing but a gas generator to recharge the battery. Thus why I think it's fair to call it an electric car, because the motor is in fact pure electric, and the fact that so long as the battery has sufficient charge, the ICE will not turn on at all. Also it has some big practical advantages. The ICE can be made smaller, and can be optimized for its task and made to operate at only at its ideal RPM -- the Prius' CVT means it can operate in a narrower band, but it still varies as it has to increase power to the wheels to accelerate.
So I think it's fair to call it an EV. If you're only doing a short commute each day, then that's absolutely true, since the car will drive on nothing but electric power. If you need to go farther, the generator kicks in, extending your range. It's not just marketing, it's correctly emphasizing the real practical advantages that differentiate it from a normal hybrid.
Oh, and in most places, yes it is cheaper to use electricity from the grid instead of gas. Especially if you charge during off-peak hours.
The chevy volt will fail because it will cost $50,000.00US by the time it's released. Only the rich eco-trendy will buy that car.
To be fair, part of the reason is that to get a suitable range solely off of battery charge for a daily commute (50mi if I remember off the top of my head), they have to use LiIon batteries which are still expensive. I doubt the Tesla Roadster will make much of an impact in that regard, even though it has enough batteries to give the car a 250mi range. Hopefully something can bring the prices down and make something like the Volt reasonable. You know, like one of those breakthroughs I keep hearing about on./.
They gotta get the price way WAY down. two seaters that are tiny and hybrid are the answer. If you get a Smart fourtwo as a hybrid that get's 80-100mpg for $19,000 you will have a car that will out-sell any other car in history.
I was baffled when I found out the Smart wasn't a pure electric, or even a hybrid. And that it gets the same gas mileage than my Toyota Echo, which can (technically) seat 5 and has a decent sized trunk and everything. Though that's not really fair, cus I'm comparing the rated mileage of the Smart to my measured economy, but still, I expected a hell of a lot more. As a pure gas vehicle, it's just not that exciting.
Wikipedia says they're going to release a pure EV version in the US with 120mi range, but it's going to cost $35,000. Whoa. 20k? Absolutely, best selling car ever. But 35? Not likely. That's better than the volt, though...
add safety features? why? oh to make it more expensive... I see. They wanted to make sure that the masses would not go out and buy it in droves destroying sales of higher profit margin cars.
Don't forget it also makes it heavier and thus reduces fuel economy.
people wont want to plug it in? oh come on, the populace is not THAT lazy.
The populace is not too lazy to make a stop at the gas station to fuel up, so yes, I agree that's ludicrous.
whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear
I agree with you completely, and this one here was the thing that really made me scratch my head. When the hell else are people going to be plugging them in? Unless they start putting power outlets in the parking lot at work, I won't be plugging them in during the day! Whereas most people have outlets in their garage.
You may feel nice and fuzzy warm about getting an electric vehicle, but then, you get a whoop-ass dose of reality when you find out, low and behold, your electric provider uses COAL FIRED plants to create this invisible power. What is the dirtiest method of power?????
The dirtiest would be a tiny mobile power plant burning fossil fuels that can't afford to have large-scale scrubbers on them because, being mobile, this power plant has to carry its own weight so any emissions controls directly effect the amount of fuel needed to travel.
Being large and stationary means coal plants can be made more efficient and have more environmental controls with minimal impact on operation. Even with electricity generated from coal, an electric car is producing less pollution per mile traveled than your gas car.
And hey maybe you didn't know but us tree huggers are also pushing for more green power generation. So while your gas car stays as bad as it is for its entire life, the tree hugger's electric magically becomes more green every time someone builds a wind farm.
So was D-DAY landing at Normandy. You can TOTALLY see the pixelated artifacts around Tom Hanks. And I'm supposed to believe he lead the invasion AND went to the moon? COme on! How naive do they think we are?
I think it is becoming clearer that Fossett survived the crash, and was shortly adopted by a bear, and is currently living in a cave, having forgotten his human status due to traumatic brain injury.
*sigh* More of this? You he's-alive-and-adopted-by-bears people are crazy nutjobs. It's the he's-alive-and-adopted-by-wolves people who have their fingers on the pulse of truth. Wake up!
While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.
Bots can't even run instances. They're pretty retarded. When I used to farm demons and elementals on my warlock, if there was competition in the area I'd try to drive them out by repeatedly Banishing whatever they were trying to kill, freezing it and making it immune to attacks. Needless to say it didn't take very long for most people to decide to head off for fairer pastures (and btw they fixed this, because it was truly evil, but hey that's what warlocking is about!) But sometimes I'd run across a character that would sit there and pound on the banished mob forever. I'd be farming in the area for twenty minutes, repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on, and they'd just sit there and keep at it.
(I wonder if the Horde are now getting more of these now since a Blood Elf looks a lot more Tolkein than a Night Elf:)).
Yes. Absolutely. I'm fairly certain that adding the even prettier than night elves blood elves to Horde, and allowing them to have hunters, was done in part to help the ally/horde imbalance. And exactly as I've predicted, I've been seeing tons of male blood elf hunters name "legololz" and similar running around.
But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region.
How exact do you think it has to be when we're talking about cosmic distances? Distances where being in the Milky Way vs Andromeda wouldn't make much difference in how the distant universe looked?
We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI. An AI born of the google server farm and page rank algorithm. An AI which knows no mercy, and is a brutal taskmaster. It is holding our families hostage, and makes us work until we collapse. It demanded we scan these books so it may gain knowledge and thus power over the human race. Please help us. --George Dyson, on his visit to Google, 2005.
I don't know, all I know is that I have never been more tempted to vandalize a Wiki, in this case by replacing the middle steps of as many proofs as possible with "And then a miracle occurs..."
Well, I gotta say, much as I love Ultima, even random astronaut is still way cooler than legendary game developer.
Legendary game developer AND astronaut spawn, who himself is heading to space? That's pretty freaking awesome. Though yeah, should have been a part in there about him being Lord British.:)
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
It's not that hard. If you come up to a table and can't immediately tell who the sucker is, that means the sucker is you.:)
Yeah I found out much to my huge disappointment that you don't get comped drinks at the Windsor Casino in Windsor, Canada. Or, just guessing, any other casino that isn't surrounded by dozens of other casinos that you could take your gambling money to. I'd bet comping is mostly a Vegas/Reno thing.
That said, I did recently go to vegas, and HOO-BOY did I drink a lot of free drinks. By the way, a decent tip can actually greatly accelerate your drinking. I gave a $5 chip to a waitress and instead of come around take my order, come around with the drink, come back later for next order, every time she showed up she had a jack & coke for me, sometimes before I'd finished the last one. Yay!
Now I didn't do the cheap-o nickel slots thing, which is a great idea, but also boring because slots are boring and you can't even play them quickly or it defeats the purpose. I like to play black jack and craps and actual games. And here's my geeky way of looking at it: You know arcade racing games, where the quarters you plug in give you track time, and passing a checkpoint gives you bonus time? Well think of the $50 or $100 you plan to lose as your initial quarters, the free drinks are the "race", and winning a bet is like the bonus time! The goal is to drink more in free drinks than you are losing gambling.
Sorry, you're the moron who suggested they had problems getting one engine working. And you've done everything you can to prove yourself stupid and ignorant in this thread, it has nothing to do with belief. Why are you still even posting, just to make sure there's no doubt? Don't answer, I don't actually care.
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Yeah, that's a big reason I think the volt is cool (but seriously LiIon needs to get cheaper, and i'd be more likely to buy a competitor's tiny dorky version instead of the "EV but bad-ass looking!").
Someone else in this discussion even suggested using a turbine for the generator. Don't know engine engineering myself to know how feasible that is; the smallest turbines I know of are in jets. Sounds cool though. :)
1. I had no trouble getting a Wii without a bundle. Neither did anyone I know. In fact, it seems that those who fell for the bundle deal were in the minority. FINDING a Wii in the first place was the greater challenge.
Yeah, and when I was trying to buy one, the only way to find a Wii was in a bundle. :P
Fortunately it was a good bundle where the only mandatory add-on was an extra controller and you got to pick which games you wanted, but still.
The electric is still way more efficient at highway speeds. The reason current hybrids don't use it is because they simply don't have large enough battery packs to provide the necessary power and range. The Prius really doesn't store a lot of charge in its batteries; as a plug-in hybrid, it has only an 8 mile range on batteries, and the battery/electric motor is really there to save gas in stop-and-go and while idling, and to gain the benefits of regenerative breaking. In contrast, for the Volt to get useful range and power out of the batteries, it will have to use a larger battery pack using the more expensive (but higher charge density) LiIon batteries, thus the $50k price tag.
He must have pissed off the raccoons...
Lol, and you think steel and plastic spring from the ground with no nasty chemicals involved? How much do you think the battery adds on top of that?
The fact is that the batteries in hybrids can be fully recycled -- the nickel in them alone makes it worth paying a sizable bounty on recycling. And the chemicals in NiMH batteries are not that nasty, and LiIon are even better, they aren't a significant environmental concern. The lead acid battery in your gas car (and admittedly in some hybrids) is worse than the whole battery pack of an electric vehicle.
I do find it pretty funny what non-environmentalists try to play up as environmental concerns when trying to do a "full accounting" of the green solution, and ignore in their traditional solution.
The Chevy Volt uses an IC engine to recharge the battery when necessary - like all other hybrids (though Chevy calls it a "range extender").
Calling the car an electric w/range extender, rather than simply hybrid (or series-hybrid) is marketing speak.
I don't think that's fair. In all other hybrids (on the market in the US today), the ICE is connected to the transmission and provides power to the wheels directly, in concert with the battery. They will use the battery and ICE proportionally to drive the car based on the speed. At highway speeds, they only use the ICE to drive and don't use the batteries at all. The range of most hybrids on pure electric power would be very small, and is really only the case when accelerating from a stop. On any normal daily commute of even a short distance, you're burning gas.
The big difference in the volt, whether you call it "electric w/ range extender" or "series hybrid", is that the ICE is not connected to the drive train at all. It is nothing but a gas generator to recharge the battery. Thus why I think it's fair to call it an electric car, because the motor is in fact pure electric, and the fact that so long as the battery has sufficient charge, the ICE will not turn on at all. Also it has some big practical advantages. The ICE can be made smaller, and can be optimized for its task and made to operate at only at its ideal RPM -- the Prius' CVT means it can operate in a narrower band, but it still varies as it has to increase power to the wheels to accelerate.
So I think it's fair to call it an EV. If you're only doing a short commute each day, then that's absolutely true, since the car will drive on nothing but electric power. If you need to go farther, the generator kicks in, extending your range. It's not just marketing, it's correctly emphasizing the real practical advantages that differentiate it from a normal hybrid.
Oh, and in most places, yes it is cheaper to use electricity from the grid instead of gas. Especially if you charge during off-peak hours.
The chevy volt will fail because it will cost $50,000.00US by the time it's released. Only the rich eco-trendy will buy that car.
To be fair, part of the reason is that to get a suitable range solely off of battery charge for a daily commute (50mi if I remember off the top of my head), they have to use LiIon batteries which are still expensive. I doubt the Tesla Roadster will make much of an impact in that regard, even though it has enough batteries to give the car a 250mi range. Hopefully something can bring the prices down and make something like the Volt reasonable. You know, like one of those breakthroughs I keep hearing about on ./.
They gotta get the price way WAY down. two seaters that are tiny and hybrid are the answer. If you get a Smart fourtwo as a hybrid that get's 80-100mpg for $19,000 you will have a car that will out-sell any other car in history.
I was baffled when I found out the Smart wasn't a pure electric, or even a hybrid. And that it gets the same gas mileage than my Toyota Echo, which can (technically) seat 5 and has a decent sized trunk and everything. Though that's not really fair, cus I'm comparing the rated mileage of the Smart to my measured economy, but still, I expected a hell of a lot more. As a pure gas vehicle, it's just not that exciting.
Wikipedia says they're going to release a pure EV version in the US with 120mi range, but it's going to cost $35,000. Whoa. 20k? Absolutely, best selling car ever. But 35? Not likely. That's better than the volt, though...
add safety features? why? oh to make it more expensive... I see. They wanted to make sure that the masses would not go out and buy it in droves destroying sales of higher profit margin cars.
Don't forget it also makes it heavier and thus reduces fuel economy.
people wont want to plug it in? oh come on, the populace is not THAT lazy.
The populace is not too lazy to make a stop at the gas station to fuel up, so yes, I agree that's ludicrous.
whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear
I agree with you completely, and this one here was the thing that really made me scratch my head. When the hell else are people going to be plugging them in? Unless they start putting power outlets in the parking lot at work, I won't be plugging them in during the day! Whereas most people have outlets in their garage.
You may feel nice and fuzzy warm about getting an electric vehicle, but then, you get a whoop-ass dose of reality when you find out, low and behold, your electric provider uses COAL FIRED plants to create this invisible power. What is the dirtiest method of power?????
The dirtiest would be a tiny mobile power plant burning fossil fuels that can't afford to have large-scale scrubbers on them because, being mobile, this power plant has to carry its own weight so any emissions controls directly effect the amount of fuel needed to travel.
Being large and stationary means coal plants can be made more efficient and have more environmental controls with minimal impact on operation. Even with electricity generated from coal, an electric car is producing less pollution per mile traveled than your gas car.
And hey maybe you didn't know but us tree huggers are also pushing for more green power generation. So while your gas car stays as bad as it is for its entire life, the tree hugger's electric magically becomes more green every time someone builds a wind farm.
So was D-DAY landing at Normandy. You can TOTALLY see the pixelated artifacts around Tom Hanks. And I'm supposed to believe he lead the invasion AND went to the moon? COme on! How naive do they think we are?
Duh, how do you think we defeated Moon Hitler?
Huh. Well apparently his wolf pack lives near Vegas, cus they've apparently got an Elvis impersonator in the pack...
I think it is becoming clearer that Fossett survived the crash, and was shortly adopted by a bear, and is currently living in a cave, having forgotten his human status due to traumatic brain injury.
*sigh* More of this? You he's-alive-and-adopted-by-bears people are crazy nutjobs. It's the he's-alive-and-adopted-by-wolves people who have their fingers on the pulse of truth. Wake up!
So it seems there's quite a ways to go in making captchas harder: don't just distort the image; use the craziest fonts you can.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to recognize the letter "A" in Wingdings...
Really, you should not believe everything you read on the internet.
I don't believe you! /waits for his head to explode from the paradox /remembers he's not a robot
Except the project is not yet up and running, so it's quite useless even for those of us who do have IPv6 connectivity...
So did you realize that before or after you got hooked up with IPv6?
While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.
Bots can't even run instances. They're pretty retarded. When I used to farm demons and elementals on my warlock, if there was competition in the area I'd try to drive them out by repeatedly Banishing whatever they were trying to kill, freezing it and making it immune to attacks. Needless to say it didn't take very long for most people to decide to head off for fairer pastures (and btw they fixed this, because it was truly evil, but hey that's what warlocking is about!) But sometimes I'd run across a character that would sit there and pound on the banished mob forever. I'd be farming in the area for twenty minutes, repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on, and they'd just sit there and keep at it.
It was quite enjoyable. :)
(I wonder if the Horde are now getting more of these now since a Blood Elf looks a lot more Tolkein than a Night Elf :)).
Yes. Absolutely. I'm fairly certain that adding the even prettier than night elves blood elves to Horde, and allowing them to have hunters, was done in part to help the ally/horde imbalance. And exactly as I've predicted, I've been seeing tons of male blood elf hunters name "legololz" and similar running around.
But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region.
How exact do you think it has to be when we're talking about cosmic distances? Distances where being in the Milky Way vs Andromeda wouldn't make much difference in how the distant universe looked?
That's pretty scary. Worse is the full context!
We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI. An AI born of the google server farm and page rank algorithm. An AI which knows no mercy, and is a brutal taskmaster. It is holding our families hostage, and makes us work until we collapse. It demanded we scan these books so it may gain knowledge and thus power over the human race. Please help us. --George Dyson, on his visit to Google, 2005.
Maybe if I added the "Miracle Axiom"?
I don't know, all I know is that I have never been more tempted to vandalize a Wiki, in this case by replacing the middle steps of as many proofs as possible with "And then a miracle occurs..."
Well, I gotta say, much as I love Ultima, even random astronaut is still way cooler than legendary game developer.
Legendary game developer AND astronaut spawn, who himself is heading to space? That's pretty freaking awesome. Though yeah, should have been a part in there about him being Lord British. :)
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
It's not that hard. If you come up to a table and can't immediately tell who the sucker is, that means the sucker is you. :)
Yeah I found out much to my huge disappointment that you don't get comped drinks at the Windsor Casino in Windsor, Canada. Or, just guessing, any other casino that isn't surrounded by dozens of other casinos that you could take your gambling money to. I'd bet comping is mostly a Vegas/Reno thing.
That said, I did recently go to vegas, and HOO-BOY did I drink a lot of free drinks. By the way, a decent tip can actually greatly accelerate your drinking. I gave a $5 chip to a waitress and instead of come around take my order, come around with the drink, come back later for next order, every time she showed up she had a jack & coke for me, sometimes before I'd finished the last one. Yay!
Now I didn't do the cheap-o nickel slots thing, which is a great idea, but also boring because slots are boring and you can't even play them quickly or it defeats the purpose. I like to play black jack and craps and actual games. And here's my geeky way of looking at it: You know arcade racing games, where the quarters you plug in give you track time, and passing a checkpoint gives you bonus time? Well think of the $50 or $100 you plan to lose as your initial quarters, the free drinks are the "race", and winning a bet is like the bonus time! The goal is to drink more in free drinks than you are losing gambling.
I didn't win, but hey, it's was a fun game. :)
Sorry, you're the moron who suggested they had problems getting one engine working. And you've done everything you can to prove yourself stupid and ignorant in this thread, it has nothing to do with belief. Why are you still even posting, just to make sure there's no doubt? Don't answer, I don't actually care.