Engyo
Prince of Dorkness!
No argument - but the specific application to on-the-road vehicles is quite recent.
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electric cars--when?
- Thread starter kai
- Start date
Dirty Penguin
Master Of Ceremony
I see what you mean. The Nissan Leaf can go 100 miles on a single charge but then you need to charge it. The Volt can only go 40 on a single charge but will switch over to the gas (petrol) to give you up to 350 mile range. Even if you don't get a chance to charge it you can stop at the gas station to refuel.... I drive a V8.....I love the power and I love the comfort. I don't want a car that I view strictly for driving from point A to point B. I like a car that looks and feels good not just functional. If it doesn't look good and fee good to drive then I'm going to hate to have to drive it. I could downsize my V8 to a mini cooper or a prius or a leaf but I find them to be ugly little shizzles....
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Dirty Penguin
Master Of Ceremony
No argument here.....Although I like that you get the best of both worlds with the Volt. But gasoline vehicles like the Chevy Cruze can be a viable alternative for some. Some of these small cars like the Cruze have some decent head room, style and general appeal and seem to be good on gas as well as emissions.
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Batteries have been used in cars for a century now. But I quibble....the point is that I expect improvement in battery technology to be
slow in coming. Technology is already just about as mature as the IC engine, with room for improvement in both. It could even be that
IC engines have more potential for improvements in efficiency, eg, adiabatic engines, carbon fiber components, combustion chamber
improvements, alternative fuels, variable displacement, variable valve timing, increased diesel usage, infinitely variable transmissions.
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Engyo
Prince of Dorkness!
Awww, you're just sayin' that because of all that oil company stock...........................
Oh, I wish I'd invested in that instead of other things. But I know people who were involved in battery research & development for many years.
It just looks like they need some breakthroughs, since evolutionary development & tweaking are yielding mediocre results. I truly wish it were
otherwise. And I'm familiar enuf with engine technology to see that there's vast room for improvement. If you can patent a hi-temp ceramic
with some ductility for an adiabatic engine, you'll be a billionaire.
Btw, if our appetite for oil suddenly decreased, the oil companies would still do well...supplies will still dwindle, & prices will still rise.
Hydro is very efficient. If the speed and the weight of the water is calculated and torque measurement is taken at the shaft then this would be true. But the electrical alternator is suspect according to me I guess, but time will tell.
Also if the water is accelerated by a static devise that gave a negative resistance then there would be more available energy from the same amount of water.
Victor Schauberger was said to have done this evidently. He placed his own design of turbine in the river and constructed no dam. Evidently.
There is a basic problem though. When something is moving it is awkward to apply force. If the turbine matches the speed of the water there is no torque. There must be a speed difference.
There is a huge amount of force in the water especially if an attempt was made to stop it instantly. There is a lot of lost force and this could be what Schauberger did he turned a little of it into reducing friction.
Not much anymore...they still use wires. As recently as the 1980s, I worked with the guys at GM who were on their electric van program.
They were still using lead acid batteries.....same as 80 years earlier. It was more a government boondoggle than a real commercial
endeavor. Not very practical. At the time, Ford was working on exotic battery technologies, but none panned out.
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I looked at one of these today. 40mpg and not ugly or expensive.
Hyundai Elantra: Safe & Stylish Cars – Most Interior Among Small Cars | Hyundai
Hyundai Elantra: Safe & Stylish Cars – Most Interior Among Small Cars | Hyundai
I drove an Elantra as a rental car for a while - I liked it.
However, my wife's got a thing against Hyundai (I think she's still holding a grudge over the Pony), so we probably won't be getting one any time soon.
Dirty Penguin
Master Of Ceremony
I like it.....
The body is really similar to the volt. While it's not all electric or electric to gas like the Volt, it's considerably cheaper than the volt. Heck, it appears to be cheaper than the Prius as well.....
hhmmmmm, choices, choices....I'm putting that one on my list of possibilities.
Cheap fuel stingy ordinary cars....now there's a technology that's an available technology.I like it.....
The body is really similar to the volt. While it's not all electric or electric to gas like the Volt, it's considerably cheaper than the volt. Heck, it appears to be cheaper than the Prius as well.....
hhmmmmm, choices, choices....I'm putting that one on my list of possibilities.
I just had another thought:
There's a big push right now (in some areas, and sometimes meeting major resistance) to change consumer behaviour through shifts in the cost of car use and ownership: less fixed cost, more variable cost. Even if it costs you the same total amount per year, if you set things up so that a person has a higher marginal cost every time they decide to drive to the store for milk instead of walk, rational people will drive less.
For instance, most people's insurance is a fixed amount per year regardless of how much they drive. Or... I know that you give your insurer an estimate of your annual mileage when you renew your policy, but really, there's no mechanism that says "if you decide to walk instead of drive today, you'll save $X.XX in insurance."
Same with road taxes: some are built into the cost of fuel, which is variable, but in many places, the money you pay for the road and highway infrastructure you use mainly comes from income tax, property tax, and other sources that have nothing to do with how much you drive.
So... in the name of environmentalism and changing driver behaviour by changing the considerations of their rational decision-making, the idea is to reduce the proportion of car costs that are fixed (i.e. don't depend at all on how much you drive) and increase the proportion that are variable (i.e. directly depend on how much you drive), because when it comes to travel decision-making, fixed auto costs are generally sunk costs: when a rational person decides whether to drive or walk to the store, the costs that matter are ones like fuel, or wear-and-tear. Car and insurance payments shouldn't factor into that immediate decision at all, because they're common to all options: even if you walk to the store right now, your car payment is going to be exactly the same.
It strikes me that electric vehicles go against this principle. Instead of helping to shift to more fixed costs, these vehicles actually do the opposite: You're buying an expensive car with the hope that it'll be cheaper to run. They increase the fixed costs and decrease the variable costs.
If people are rational (which is a big "if", I know), then just based on basic Econ 101 principles, we know that this will lead to more auto use as people switch to electric cars.
Now, by itself, that may be fine: the emissions of a single electric car are lower than a comparable conventional car. However, an electric car still takes up as much space on the road as any other car. Electric cars still contribute just as much to congestion as other vehicles, and as long as there are conventional gas-powered cars on the road, more congestion will mean more pollution.
So... more electric cars will mean:
- a segment of the driving population will have reduced emissions themselves.
- that same segment will drive more (since their variable costs are lower).
- Therefore, the rest of the driving population will increase their emissions (since that increased driving by electric car owners contributes to congestion for everyone).
I guess the question is whether the decrease in emissions from the electric vehicles makes up for the increase in emissions for everyone else. Since this tradeoff is dependent on congestion, it probably depends quite a bit on how bad congestion is in your area already... IOW, if you're out in the country where there is no "rush hour", then an electric vehicle is probably a wise choice. If you're in gridlock in the big city, then you're probably doing a lot worse by driving an electric vehicle than you would be by taking the bus or the train.
Hmm.
There's a big push right now (in some areas, and sometimes meeting major resistance) to change consumer behaviour through shifts in the cost of car use and ownership: less fixed cost, more variable cost. Even if it costs you the same total amount per year, if you set things up so that a person has a higher marginal cost every time they decide to drive to the store for milk instead of walk, rational people will drive less.
For instance, most people's insurance is a fixed amount per year regardless of how much they drive. Or... I know that you give your insurer an estimate of your annual mileage when you renew your policy, but really, there's no mechanism that says "if you decide to walk instead of drive today, you'll save $X.XX in insurance."
Same with road taxes: some are built into the cost of fuel, which is variable, but in many places, the money you pay for the road and highway infrastructure you use mainly comes from income tax, property tax, and other sources that have nothing to do with how much you drive.
So... in the name of environmentalism and changing driver behaviour by changing the considerations of their rational decision-making, the idea is to reduce the proportion of car costs that are fixed (i.e. don't depend at all on how much you drive) and increase the proportion that are variable (i.e. directly depend on how much you drive), because when it comes to travel decision-making, fixed auto costs are generally sunk costs: when a rational person decides whether to drive or walk to the store, the costs that matter are ones like fuel, or wear-and-tear. Car and insurance payments shouldn't factor into that immediate decision at all, because they're common to all options: even if you walk to the store right now, your car payment is going to be exactly the same.
It strikes me that electric vehicles go against this principle. Instead of helping to shift to more fixed costs, these vehicles actually do the opposite: You're buying an expensive car with the hope that it'll be cheaper to run. They increase the fixed costs and decrease the variable costs.
If people are rational (which is a big "if", I know), then just based on basic Econ 101 principles, we know that this will lead to more auto use as people switch to electric cars.
Now, by itself, that may be fine: the emissions of a single electric car are lower than a comparable conventional car. However, an electric car still takes up as much space on the road as any other car. Electric cars still contribute just as much to congestion as other vehicles, and as long as there are conventional gas-powered cars on the road, more congestion will mean more pollution.
So... more electric cars will mean:
- a segment of the driving population will have reduced emissions themselves.
- that same segment will drive more (since their variable costs are lower).
- Therefore, the rest of the driving population will increase their emissions (since that increased driving by electric car owners contributes to congestion for everyone).
I guess the question is whether the decrease in emissions from the electric vehicles makes up for the increase in emissions for everyone else. Since this tradeoff is dependent on congestion, it probably depends quite a bit on how bad congestion is in your area already... IOW, if you're out in the country where there is no "rush hour", then an electric vehicle is probably a wise choice. If you're in gridlock in the big city, then you're probably doing a lot worse by driving an electric vehicle than you would be by taking the bus or the train.
Hmm.
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Interesting.
Another thought: the limited range of electric vehicles probably means that their market appeal is almost exactly opposite to the types of driving environment where they'll do the most good.
The farmgirl who drives 200 km a day on low-traffic country roads isn't going to buy an electric car, while the lawyer who drives 60 km a day from the suburbs to downtown even though she could take commuter rail will... and will think that she's being "green" because she has no tailpipe emissions.
The same goes for hybrids, too... to a lesser extent. From the law of conservation of energy, they'll use just as much energy to haul themselves around at constant speed as a similar conventional car. Where they have a real competitive (and market) advantage is in congested conditions: that's when the features like reduced idling, regenerative braking, and the ability to run the gas engine at its most efficient speed all the time really make a difference between their performance and a conventional car... however, these are precisely the sort of conditions where the real "green" thing to do would be to get out of your car altogether.
Page 6 and 7 of this report are especially relevant, where they categorize and quantify the average total cost of auto use, and then consider what the effects of increased-efficiency vehicles would be on those costs:
http://www.vtpi.org/ster.pdf
An excerpt:
Like I said before, the "big ticket" items in terms of reducing the effects of auto use are:
- land use planning: let people live close to where they work.
- transit: give people an alternative to the car (though transit needs density to be viable, which falls back on land use planning).
- reduce trips where possible, especially peak hour trips: telecommuting, etc. (and to a lesser extent flexible hours).
- carpooling: get people who are travelling between the same origin and destination into the same vehicle.
Reducing tailpipe emissions are fine in and of themselves, but I think they're far down the list from these items.
You get credit for providing salient excerpts from the links.
Your approach looks well thought out.
Dang it! I gots nuthin to argue about!
Your approach looks well thought out.
Dang it! I gots nuthin to argue about!