Movie : " Who Killed The Electric Car "

lol

 

You lose roughly a third of the energy produced in an engine or powerplant burning fuel. You lose a third of that 2/3's transmitting it over powerlines. Electric cars use more energy and therefore pollute more than a gas burning car.

I agree things need to change, but there are so many alternatives to your alternative that by putting all of your eggs in the electric car basket, you are the alternative equivalent of the big oil industry.

BTW 'you' is used as a general term.

 

The "electric car" is just another way for cities to import energy and export their pollution (and garbage). Look up how much of our electricity is generated by burning coal. Even hydroelectric plants produce greenhouse gasses (from the artificial lakes). Electricity isn't clean -- it just puts the exhaust pipe where you don't see it.


I have great hopes for government fuel cell technology.

DOE is trying to figure out how to stuff more hydrogen into palladium to safely carry hydrogen in a fuel cell car. (Brilliant, given how heavy palladium is to cart around in an electric car.)

But they need to figure out what exactly the matrix is -- nobody quite knows yet how palladium stores hydrogen, and what effects impurities have on it.

I also note that nobody can quite figure out why that infamous Utah electrolytic "cold fusion" seems to work once in a while, but never reliably, either -- and it seems to relate to the impurities.

The Gov's greatest achievements are their unforseen accidents ... like the Internet.
(And look at all the spin-offs from military and space race technologies -- like Velcro and microprocessors.)

It would be classic if fuel cell research inadvertantly produced the answers the independent researchers need to make electrolytic fusion work.

I'd love to see the government discover cold fusion by accident.

It would be nice to get some benefit from all the government mistakes, once in a while.

 

It should be applauded that this car was recalled and destroyed. There is a side not seen when a new energy technology arrives to the marketplace and stuffed into a car. The masses see these few thousand or so cars as salvation of air quality to competing volcano eruptions and oceanic greenhouse gasses, the fact may well be, that these cars are dangerous! I rarely ever post hearsay as having any merit, but I was told a story of a firefighter attempting to cut into an electric car to rescue the trapped driver in his hybrid, when the saw blade hit one of the main power lines routed through the car and killed the firefighter instantly. Though I cannot find that exact story, the very fact that batterymobiles pose a threat to rescue workers is very real.

Firefighters are wary of gas-electric cars
http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special21/articles/0613hybrid13.html

 

Toyota will kick GM into stone age. Just wait and see. They are going to release a plug-in electric car. Next, people will be putting solar panels over their home (costs are coming down fast and efficiency is going up) and charge their toyotas using that.

Result:

- Utility & big oil gets to take a hike.

Hydrogen fuel cell is nothing but repackaged big oil.

 

BP & Kyocera are the 2 biggest manufacturers of solar panels

Honda plan on releasing a production Hydro car in 08 or 09

 

And plug-ins and solar panels are also nothing but repackaged big oil (which doesn't help anyone except those in the layer skimming off some money from the oil-to-money-to-subsidy conversion ).

But don't worry, even GM now admits that their "image" was negatively impacted by stopping the EV1 so they plan to do a plug-in -- even if it wastes net energy.

 

Who killed the electric car? PHYSICS, at least so far as making it a viable project.

GM didn't produce the EV-1 because they thought they could market it. They knew they couldn't. They were forced to produce the piece of crap by the eco-tards in California. They burnt over one billion dollars on the project for absolutely no reason.

Electric vehicles are entirely, completely worthless and will continue to be so until someone designs a battery technology that can actually make them feasible. And even then you'll be paying several times more to operate a given car, given the losses involved in producing, transferring and storing electricity, than you would burning gasoline.

With the advances in IC engine design over the last few decades, we have regular, gas burning engines that have extremely low emissions, and in most cases get better mileage than hybrids, and don't end up generating toxic battery waste every few years.

 

Simba only has 1 part of this mess....



Our old incompetent Roger Smith made famous by Michael Moore's Roger and ME is really the biggest turd in this pile.

GM Knew the car was a "Non Starter" WAY too expensive to make, maintain or even operate. (again just diverting the tailpipe to coal fired electric plants etc...) BUT the car was put on the road with tremendous fan fare to distract the general public and the share holders of GM's stock that there was no food in the cupbord. It (And Saturn, the purchase of Hughes areo, Gulfstream, EDS and other things were all multi billion dollar rat's nests that kept people from realizing his leadership was going to ruin the company)

 

They have that now -- there's even a company working on ways to make it pumpable at service stations. Heat the palladium hydride, and hydrogen comes out.

But palladium stores 400 times its *volume* in H2, not 400 times its *mass*. Look up the atomic weight of palladium. It's like carrying around a whole second car in weight, to get a reasonable amount of H2 storage.

Then hook the fuel cell terminals up to electric motors.

And watch the snails out-run you.

You're probably too young to remember the Chrysler turbine car. It ran on cheap kerosene instead of highly refined gasoline. Which is one reason why aviation jumped wholesale from piston engines to turboprops (and turbofans) which suck fuel faster --- but it's cheaper fuel. And the engines are far lighter, and run much longer between services. All of which sounded good for cars too.

But it had lousy torque. And torque is what you need in traffic. Especially if you're running heavy.
(Aircraft just went to longer runways.)
(Which raises the question -- if these new computer designed fugly melted blob cars are "aerodynamic", why do they keep upping the horsepower specs? Time for a code review?)

Electric and turbine cars have always fallen short of internal combustion when it comes time to drive them on real roads.

Experiments with hydraulic drive systems (using regnerative braking) had interesting results, but also suffered from high cost and high weight issues.