And replacing batteries every 2 years, you did say "battery will last for 2 years max", if not sooner will be expensive for GM. Some Slashdotters above said the Volt was going to cost $35,000, however here's a "Forbes news item that says it will cost $40,000. Now I don't know how much the batteries cost but if they cost $2000 replacing them every 2 years, if not sooner, will cost more than $10,000 over 10 years. And that's just counting the cost of the battery not labor or other expenses. Suddenly that $40,000 is now less than $30,000. That is unless the costs of the batteries fall.
And your Prius thing is just one of the ignorant arguments that need to die. Toyota uses different chemistry there (NiMH to be exact).
Okay, so I may of been wrong in using the batteries Toyota uses as an example of how how they will last. I was ignorant, didn't know, they used different battery technologies.
Is nuclear fusion grouped under the renewable energy category?
I don't know. I got the budget information from a chart printed in "Technology Review" and it didn't say anything about fusion.
I don't think lack of funding is what is keeping us from attaining a net-gain fusion reaction.
The CIA doesn't want fusion, the world economy would crash if there were free energy. They'll even level several Chicago city blocks in a hydrogen explosion and kidnap or kill scientists to prevent it from getting out.
in the mode you described battery will last for 2 years max.
According to one source the batteries "will be guaranteed for 10 years/150,000 miles." Using those numbers that would be 15,000 miles per year. Yet an Aussie taxi cab company puts on 125,000 miles a year on it's Toyota Priuses.
simple math dictates that as demand grows so will the costs.
Simple economics dictates that as energy costs grow more people will generate their own. As utility companies raise their rates more and more people will install geothermal, solar, wind turbines, and or other alternative energy sources. Then with the economy of scale manufacturing costs will drop to an equilibrium.
Just because a hybrid vehicle is out there on the road, doesn't mean that that battery pack has the bulk of its storage capacity intact.
What would be an acceptable batter life for you? Does 125,000 miles a year meet you standards? Here's a taxi cab company that gets that. They replaced the batteries in two taxis, one after it had more than 200,000 miles and the other after it had more than 340,000 miles.
at some point the battery is going to need replacement when it's out of warranty.
The Toyota Prius was introduced into the US in 2001. I wonder how many of them have had the batteries replaced. Here's an article about an Aussie taxicab company owner who puts more than 125,00 miles on his Priuses a year and hasn't had problems, after more than 200,000 miles 2 batteries did need to be replaced. Heck I had to replace the battery in my car, which is not a hybrid, after about 45,000 miles. If a Prius used as a taxi doesn't have problems I doubt many others will have problems with them.
Do you really think gas is only going to cost $5 in, forget 10, 5 years? Hell, last summer it got up to $4.50 a gallon. I would not be surprised if gas reached $10 a gallon in 5 years. That 12,000 miles of yours would then cost $4000.
Of course if you buy the cheaper Camry then invest the money you otherwise would have spent on the Volt in 5 or 10 years you may be able to pay cash for your own new Volt. Especially if you invest in GM and it's suppliers.
My gosh, my Saturn has about 46,000 miles on it so it much of been brutalized. Except I only put about 5,000 miles a year on it whereas most people put more miles on their cars. When I renew my car insurance and am asked how many miles I drive a year, they'll put down 12,000 because that's the lowest their forms go.
Rather than borrow money from other countries to pay for your government you should pay for it, which means higher taxes.
Bullshit! Government needs to stop spending so much. If the US government stayed within it's constitutional limits federal income taxes could be abolished and replaced with user fees, pollution tax, and maybe a low sales tax.
Having visited America the roads are horrible
That's because one of those user fees, in this case fuel tax, isn't high enough to cover the cost of roads. Actually instead of a fuel tax, to pay for roads, there should be a mileage fee. Charge by how many miles are driven.
I suspect what will happen long term is that indeed, electricity for your car will be quite a bit more expensive than electricity for your home as a result of taxation. What will probably end up happening is, in the future, electric cars will have special plugs, that fit only in special outlets which are metered separately. There may be some sort of electronic connection between the car and the outlet as well, with secure/encrypted communication to prevent tampering or plug converters.
I don't see how the government, in the US, can do that If the government tried to require special plugs there's no way it could enforce it, too many people would have the skills to replace plugs.
The other option, considerably less palatable due to privacy implications is to charge at license plate renewal time a tax based on miles driven in the state by using a state mandated GPS unit installed in the car.
I have proposed a mileage charge to be paid when license plates are renewed. However it does not require any sort of GPS or tracking. All it requires is two odometer readings. When a vehicle gets a license plate the odometer is read, then when the tags are renewed it's read again. I am one of those who prize my privacy, and have repeatedly stated I do not trust government and that I fear it more than any terrorist, yet I don't have a problem with it knowing how many miles my car was driven. Heck, the odometer reading is already required when I renew my tags.
I couldn't for the life of me think of why mileage-based tax was better than the tax-per-gallon that we currently use.
Actually if you think about it it should make sense. A car that gets 40 MPG can put just as much wear and tear on the roads as a car that only gets 20 MGP. The 40 MPG vehicle can drive twice as far for the same cost as the 20 MPG vehicle putting twice as much wear and tear on the roads. So it's freeloading. The same can be applied to vehicles using biofuels.
I really don't think this is the end of the world. And the best part- for us nuclear fans- is that a big electricity crunch would be just the stimulus needed to build new plants. I know it takes a while to get them online but the transition to electric vehicles won't happen overnight, either.
Ah but nuclear power plants can't be built as fast as wind turbines can. Doing a quite search the Salem Nuclear Power Plant was the largest electrical generation nuclear powerplant. It has 2 reactors, one capable of generating 1,174 MW and the other 1,130 MW for a total of 2,304 MW. However if you erect 20 5 megawatt wind turbines a month in 2 years you'll add 2,400 MW of capacity. Could a nuclear powerplant be built and brought online in 2 years?
Backed by French government loans Areva, also owned by the French government, started building the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland in 2005. Originally it was scheduled to be built in 2009 as "the world's largest and safest nuclear plant". Today, it's not scheduled to be finished until 2012 at the earliest, and it's 2 to 3 billion dollars over budget. Fact is is cost overruns for nuclear powerplants considerably add to their costs. As the freemarket institute CATO reprint of a "Forbes" magazine article says, the nuclear power industry is "Hooked on Subsidies". Notice where it says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
somehow, I say a few billion of this bailout money should be going to nuclear fusion research.
The $787 Billion stimulus plan approved in February had $45.1 Billion allocated for renewable energy incentives. Another $3 Billion was for the Department of Energy and $.3 Billion for the Department of Defense for R&D. Smart Grid got $11 Billion, energy efficiency and renewable energy grants got $16.8 Billion, and other things got $8.4 Billion. Altogether energy got almost $100 Billion.
By that you mean the California voters who voted to deregulate to the system we got?
Except it wasn't deregulated, regulations were shifted. Such as the separation of generation and transmission, then the prices distributors could charge users was capped but generators were allowed to sell electricity for whatever price they could get. Wholesale energy prices in CA increased 500%. It simply was not profitable to sell electricity in CA.
Do you know what caused the rolling blackouts in California in 2001? It was not because of lack of generation or transmission capacity, it was all because prices for instate electricity users was capped but wholesale prices increased 500%. Electrical generators were able to sell energy to out of state buyers for more than could be charged to instate buyers.
Those blackouts are mostly due to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes for power plants and transmission lines
No, those rolling CA blackouts was because of bad regulations. CA separated ownership of electrical generation from ownership of distribution. At the same tyme the state also capped the charges distributors could charge to electrical consumers, but the generators were not capped. Wholesale electricity costs increased more than 500% but prices were capped for instate customers. A wind farm capable of generating 240 megawatts of electricity sat idle, because it was not profitable to build the transition capabilities.
Quite simply CA's rolling blackouts was not caused by NIMBYs.
know that other US cities have dire problems with their power grids now. I've heard of rolling brownouts in Cali. Can't imagine the extra load of thousands of charging EVs would do much to help the situation.
While charging may happen during peak demand, in CA that is when it's nice a sunny and when solar energy is abundant. And one of the reasons for the rolling blackouts in CA several years ago was because of bad regulations. The so called deregulation was not that at all, instead regulations were changed. Whereas before it happened afterwards a company could not both generate electricity and distribute it. ownership of generation and distribution were separated. Next, while distributors had a cap on how much they could charge electrical consumers, generators had no such cap on what they could charge distributors. If the price distributors had to pay was higher than they could charge their clients, they either ate the cost or they stopped distributing electricity. Meanwhile electrical generators were able to sell electricity to out of state distributors who were not capped on how much they could charge. During the blackouts a wind farm capable of generating 240 gigawatts of power sat idle. Why? Because the distribution powerlines were not there. Why would a business build powerlines if it could not sell electricity for more than what the generator sold it for?
I didn't say it wasn't. By the same token diesel started out as a biofuel well. Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, ran his engine on oil made from plants. Among those he used was peanut oil and hemp seed oil.
running on pure ethanol (or bio-diesel) is a sustainable form of energy and could likely be done in sufficient volume to power our aviation needs.
I doubt it but it might be possible. As it is now because of deforestation in order to plant palm tree oil plantations to feed Europe with biofuels Indonesia has become the third largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China which passed the US last year, and the US.
rumor has it that some guy named T Boone Pickens ordered 667 windmills and doesn't have anyplace to put them up
Actually Boone does have someplace to put them, a lot of them at least. When he released his plan I supported him at first. My support ended when I learned the plan was part of his plan to steal water. He wants to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer, which runs and supplies water from South Dakota to Texas, on his west Texas ranch and build a pipeline from there to Dallas where he wants to sell it. However the Ogallala is already being pumped dry faster than it can be replenished. If Pickens has his way he'll reap tremendous rewards while farmers and cities from South Dakota to his ranch will lose the water they need.
He threatened that if he doesn't get the water he won't erect wind turbines.
Maybe in other posts but not in the postI replied to.
Till the wind farm is up and providing economical electricity, that snub stands.
Wind turbines should be able to be erected faster that EVs are manufactured. Erect twenty 5 megawatt wind turbines a month and you add more than 1 gigawatts of capacity a year. The hardest part isn't erecting the wind turbines, it's adding capability to the grid. However because failures in the grid cost the US $80 to $188 billion a year. So the grid needs to be upgraded, and made smart, anyways.
lets start small and doable
I agree, however solar and wind is doable and can start slowly. For instance as I say above erect 20 wind turbines a month.
As it stands today, I can purchase several cheap (junk) trimmers for the price of a feeble battery string trimmer.
I bought a Craftsman plug in electric trimmer from Sears last year for about $50. I would have preferred one with a battery pack but they cost more as you say. What I find ironic was that I also bought a battery powered drill for $50 as well.
A ICE trimmer cost less than the replacement battery of an electric.
You also got to consider the likelihood that as full or majority electric power cars start to become popular, you're going to see governments at the state, local and federal level attempting to make up for lost tax revenues.
What conservatives, I, and others of different political positions have proposed is a tax on mileage. The way it would work, at least in my proposal, would be that when people renew their license plate tags their odometer would be read then they'd be charged according to how many miles were driven since the last odometer reading. If owners were concerned about one yearly bill they didn't know how big it's be then monthly or quarterly they could file the mileage for that month or quarter.
To take it a step further and make it a net zero tax, the average amount taxpayers would see their fuel cost rise would be subtracted from their income tax. If the average driver saw their fuel costs rise $100 a month then their income tax and holdings would drop $100 a month. This could also be applied to electricity sourced from carbon producing sources.
Suffice it to say, driving one of these, especially on a short commute, will really save money, as well as the environment, but don't count on power being (as) cheap for long if we see a lot of these types of cars take to the streets.
As outlined above alternative energy sources will become competitive with coal, petroleum, and other conventional energy sources.
And also don't forget that China and India are getting into the car phase driving demand even higher. I don't think they will be able to afford Volts any time soon.
That's alright Indian car manufacturer Tata already has EVs.
Eventually it'll become simply a niche product for things that simply can't run practically on electricity (such as airplanes, where without an ungodly wingspan and crippled speed a batter just can't hold enough energy to make up for it's weight).
Aircraft manufacturers and airliners both are testing using biofuels. Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with BioJet-A fuel. In another test a biofuel was used in another Boeing that flew across the Pacific. Of course I don't think it's realistic to believe biofuels will fuel most air travel.
Slashdot Mirror
needed
And replacing batteries every 2 years, you did say "battery will last for 2 years max", if not sooner will be expensive for GM. Some Slashdotters above said the Volt was going to cost $35,000, however here's a "Forbes news item that says it will cost $40,000. Now I don't know how much the batteries cost but if they cost $2000 replacing them every 2 years, if not sooner, will cost more than $10,000 over 10 years. And that's just counting the cost of the battery not labor or other expenses. Suddenly that $40,000 is now less than $30,000. That is unless the costs of the batteries fall.
And your Prius thing is just one of the ignorant arguments that need to die. Toyota uses different chemistry there (NiMH to be exact).
Okay, so I may of been wrong in using the batteries Toyota uses as an example of how how they will last. I was ignorant, didn't know, they used different battery technologies.
Falcon
Is nuclear fusion grouped under the renewable energy category?
I don't know. I got the budget information from a chart printed in "Technology Review" and it didn't say anything about fusion.
I don't think lack of funding is what is keeping us from attaining a net-gain fusion reaction.
The CIA doesn't want fusion, the world economy would crash if there were free energy. They'll even level several Chicago city blocks in a hydrogen explosion and kidnap or kill scientists to prevent it from getting out.
Falcon
in the mode you described battery will last for 2 years max.
According to one source the batteries "will be guaranteed for 10 years/150,000 miles." Using those numbers that would be 15,000 miles per year. Yet an Aussie taxi cab company puts on 125,000 miles a year on it's Toyota Priuses.
Falcon
simple math dictates that as demand grows so will the costs.
Simple economics dictates that as energy costs grow more people will generate their own. As utility companies raise their rates more and more people will install geothermal, solar, wind turbines, and or other alternative energy sources. Then with the economy of scale manufacturing costs will drop to an equilibrium.
Falcon
Just because a hybrid vehicle is out there on the road, doesn't mean that that battery pack has the bulk of its storage capacity intact.
What would be an acceptable batter life for you? Does 125,000 miles a year meet you standards? Here's a taxi cab company that gets that. They replaced the batteries in two taxis, one after it had more than 200,000 miles and the other after it had more than 340,000 miles.
Falcon
at some point the battery is going to need replacement when it's out of warranty.
The Toyota Prius was introduced into the US in 2001. I wonder how many of them have had the batteries replaced. Here's an article about an Aussie taxicab company owner who puts more than 125,00 miles on his Priuses a year and hasn't had problems, after more than 200,000 miles 2 batteries did need to be replaced. Heck I had to replace the battery in my car, which is not a hybrid, after about 45,000 miles. If a Prius used as a taxi doesn't have problems I doubt many others will have problems with them.
Falcon
Do you really think gas is only going to cost $5 in, forget 10, 5 years? Hell, last summer it got up to $4.50 a gallon. I would not be surprised if gas reached $10 a gallon in 5 years. That 12,000 miles of yours would then cost $4000.
Of course if you buy the cheaper Camry then invest the money you otherwise would have spent on the Volt in 5 or 10 years you may be able to pay cash for your own new Volt. Especially if you invest in GM and it's suppliers.
Falcon
My gosh, my Saturn has about 46,000 miles on it so it much of been brutalized. Except I only put about 5,000 miles a year on it whereas most people put more miles on their cars. When I renew my car insurance and am asked how many miles I drive a year, they'll put down 12,000 because that's the lowest their forms go.
Falcon
Why can't both hybrid and clean diesel owns accept the fact that they're both good solutions...?
Why not use both? I'd like a hybrid that uses a diesel engine that uses biodiesel.
Falcon
Goats or GTO?
Falcon
Rather than borrow money from other countries to pay for your government you should pay for it, which means higher taxes.
Bullshit! Government needs to stop spending so much. If the US government stayed within it's constitutional limits federal income taxes could be abolished and replaced with user fees, pollution tax, and maybe a low sales tax.
Having visited America the roads are horrible
That's because one of those user fees, in this case fuel tax, isn't high enough to cover the cost of roads. Actually instead of a fuel tax, to pay for roads, there should be a mileage fee. Charge by how many miles are driven.
Falcon
I suspect what will happen long term is that indeed, electricity for your car will be quite a bit more expensive than electricity for your home as a result of taxation. What will probably end up happening is, in the future, electric cars will have special plugs, that fit only in special outlets which are metered separately. There may be some sort of electronic connection between the car and the outlet as well, with secure/encrypted communication to prevent tampering or plug converters.
I don't see how the government, in the US, can do that If the government tried to require special plugs there's no way it could enforce it, too many people would have the skills to replace plugs.
The other option, considerably less palatable due to privacy implications is to charge at license plate renewal time a tax based on miles driven in the state by using a state mandated GPS unit installed in the car.
I have proposed a mileage charge to be paid when license plates are renewed. However it does not require any sort of GPS or tracking. All it requires is two odometer readings. When a vehicle gets a license plate the odometer is read, then when the tags are renewed it's read again. I am one of those who prize my privacy, and have repeatedly stated I do not trust government and that I fear it more than any terrorist, yet I don't have a problem with it knowing how many miles my car was driven. Heck, the odometer reading is already required when I renew my tags.
Falcon
I couldn't for the life of me think of why mileage-based tax was better than the tax-per-gallon that we currently use.
Actually if you think about it it should make sense. A car that gets 40 MPG can put just as much wear and tear on the roads as a car that only gets 20 MGP. The 40 MPG vehicle can drive twice as far for the same cost as the 20 MPG vehicle putting twice as much wear and tear on the roads. So it's freeloading. The same can be applied to vehicles using biofuels.
Falcon
I really don't think this is the end of the world. And the best part- for us nuclear fans- is that a big electricity crunch would be just the stimulus needed to build new plants. I know it takes a while to get them online but the transition to electric vehicles won't happen overnight, either.
Ah but nuclear power plants can't be built as fast as wind turbines can. Doing a quite search the Salem Nuclear Power Plant was the largest electrical generation nuclear powerplant. It has 2 reactors, one capable of generating 1,174 MW and the other 1,130 MW for a total of 2,304 MW. However if you erect 20 5 megawatt wind turbines a month in 2 years you'll add 2,400 MW of capacity. Could a nuclear powerplant be built and brought online in 2 years?
Backed by French government loans Areva, also owned by the French government, started building the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland in 2005. Originally it was scheduled to be built in 2009 as "the world's largest and safest nuclear plant". Today, it's not scheduled to be finished until 2012 at the earliest, and it's 2 to 3 billion dollars over budget. Fact is is cost overruns for nuclear powerplants considerably add to their costs. As the freemarket institute CATO reprint of a "Forbes" magazine article says, the nuclear power industry is "Hooked on Subsidies". Notice where it says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
Falcon
somehow, I say a few billion of this bailout money should be going to nuclear fusion research.
The $787 Billion stimulus plan approved in February had $45.1 Billion allocated for renewable energy incentives. Another $3 Billion was for the Department of Energy and $.3 Billion for the Department of Defense for R&D. Smart Grid got $11 Billion, energy efficiency and renewable energy grants got $16.8 Billion, and other things got $8.4 Billion. Altogether energy got almost $100 Billion.
Falcon
By that you mean the California voters who voted to deregulate to the system we got?
Except it wasn't deregulated, regulations were shifted. Such as the separation of generation and transmission, then the prices distributors could charge users was capped but generators were allowed to sell electricity for whatever price they could get. Wholesale energy prices in CA increased 500%. It simply was not profitable to sell electricity in CA.
Falcon
Do you know what caused the rolling blackouts in California in 2001? It was not because of lack of generation or transmission capacity, it was all because prices for instate electricity users was capped but wholesale prices increased 500%. Electrical generators were able to sell energy to out of state buyers for more than could be charged to instate buyers.
Falcon
Those blackouts are mostly due to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes for power plants and transmission lines
No, those rolling CA blackouts was because of bad regulations. CA separated ownership of electrical generation from ownership of distribution. At the same tyme the state also capped the charges distributors could charge to electrical consumers, but the generators were not capped. Wholesale electricity costs increased more than 500% but prices were capped for instate customers. A wind farm capable of generating 240 megawatts of electricity sat idle, because it was not profitable to build the transition capabilities.
Quite simply CA's rolling blackouts was not caused by NIMBYs.
Falcon
know that other US cities have dire problems with their power grids now. I've heard of rolling brownouts in Cali. Can't imagine the extra load of thousands of charging EVs would do much to help the situation.
While charging may happen during peak demand, in CA that is when it's nice a sunny and when solar energy is abundant. And one of the reasons for the rolling blackouts in CA several years ago was because of bad regulations. The so called deregulation was not that at all, instead regulations were changed. Whereas before it happened afterwards a company could not both generate electricity and distribute it. ownership of generation and distribution were separated. Next, while distributors had a cap on how much they could charge electrical consumers, generators had no such cap on what they could charge distributors. If the price distributors had to pay was higher than they could charge their clients, they either ate the cost or they stopped distributing electricity. Meanwhile electrical generators were able to sell electricity to out of state distributors who were not capped on how much they could charge. During the blackouts a wind farm capable of generating 240 gigawatts of power sat idle. Why? Because the distribution powerlines were not there. Why would a business build powerlines if it could not sell electricity for more than what the generator sold it for?
Falcon
Ethanol IS a biofuel ;).
I didn't say it wasn't. By the same token diesel started out as a biofuel well. Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, ran his engine on oil made from plants. Among those he used was peanut oil and hemp seed oil.
running on pure ethanol (or bio-diesel) is a sustainable form of energy and could likely be done in sufficient volume to power our aviation needs.
I doubt it but it might be possible. As it is now because of deforestation in order to plant palm tree oil plantations to feed Europe with biofuels Indonesia has become the third largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China which passed the US last year, and the US.
Falcon
rumor has it that some guy named T Boone Pickens ordered 667 windmills and doesn't have anyplace to put them up
Actually Boone does have someplace to put them, a lot of them at least. When he released his plan I supported him at first. My support ended when I learned the plan was part of his plan to steal water. He wants to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer, which runs and supplies water from South Dakota to Texas, on his west Texas ranch and build a pipeline from there to Dallas where he wants to sell it. However the Ogallala is already being pumped dry faster than it can be replenished. If Pickens has his way he'll reap tremendous rewards while farmers and cities from South Dakota to his ranch will lose the water they need.
He threatened that if he doesn't get the water he won't erect wind turbines.
Falcon
Well, I mentioned several issues
Maybe in other posts but not in the postI replied to.
Till the wind farm is up and providing economical electricity, that snub stands.
Wind turbines should be able to be erected faster that EVs are manufactured. Erect twenty 5 megawatt wind turbines a month and you add more than 1 gigawatts of capacity a year. The hardest part isn't erecting the wind turbines, it's adding capability to the grid. However because failures in the grid cost the US $80 to $188 billion a year. So the grid needs to be upgraded, and made smart, anyways.
lets start small and doable
I agree, however solar and wind is doable and can start slowly. For instance as I say above erect 20 wind turbines a month.
As it stands today, I can purchase several cheap (junk) trimmers for the price of a feeble battery string trimmer.
I bought a Craftsman plug in electric trimmer from Sears last year for about $50. I would have preferred one with a battery pack but they cost more as you say. What I find ironic was that I also bought a battery powered drill for $50 as well.
A ICE trimmer cost less than the replacement battery of an electric.
Batteries for the drill cost about $10.
Falcon
You also got to consider the likelihood that as full or majority electric power cars start to become popular, you're going to see governments at the state, local and federal level attempting to make up for lost tax revenues.
What conservatives, I, and others of different political positions have proposed is a tax on mileage. The way it would work, at least in my proposal, would be that when people renew their license plate tags their odometer would be read then they'd be charged according to how many miles were driven since the last odometer reading. If owners were concerned about one yearly bill they didn't know how big it's be then monthly or quarterly they could file the mileage for that month or quarter.
To take it a step further and make it a net zero tax, the average amount taxpayers would see their fuel cost rise would be subtracted from their income tax. If the average driver saw their fuel costs rise $100 a month then their income tax and holdings would drop $100 a month. This could also be applied to electricity sourced from carbon producing sources.
Suffice it to say, driving one of these, especially on a short commute, will really save money, as well as the environment, but don't count on power being (as) cheap for long if we see a lot of these types of cars take to the streets.
As outlined above alternative energy sources will become competitive with coal, petroleum, and other conventional energy sources.
And also don't forget that China and India are getting into the car phase driving demand even higher. I don't think they will be able to afford Volts any time soon.
That's alright Indian car manufacturer Tata already has EVs.
Falcon
Eventually it'll become simply a niche product for things that simply can't run practically on electricity (such as airplanes, where without an ungodly wingspan and crippled speed a batter just can't hold enough energy to make up for it's weight).
Aircraft manufacturers and airliners both are testing using biofuels. Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with BioJet-A fuel. In another test a biofuel was used in another Boeing that flew across the Pacific. Of course I don't think it's realistic to believe biofuels will fuel most air travel.
Electric powered planes are also being developed. "Electric Aircraft Technology Effort Gets Boost at Oshkosh". Even the Chinese are developing them.
Falcon