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100-Year-Old Electric Car Design Makes a Comeback
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Mar 17, 2008 11:54 AM
from the they-do-make-em-like-they-used-to dept.
from the they-do-make-em-like-they-used-to dept.
CNet's Green Tech Blog is reporting that Detroit Electric plans to release a small number of cars based around a car designed nearly 100 years ago. Detroit Electric is a joint venture between Santa Rosa, CA-based electric transportation specialist, Zap and China's Youngman motors. "Back in 1917, a Detroit Electric cost anywhere from $1,775 to $2,375--in other words, fit for the proletarian or plutocrat. The cars could go 65 miles to 100 miles on a battery charge, but only go at speeds ranging from 6 miles per hour to 25 mph."
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Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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That said, there are other animals that are better suited than horses for mountainous terrain, although I have no idea if any of them are as intelligent or easily trained as a horse.
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Such a lovely place, that Eastern front (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's move to the ecological paradise or the early 19th century, people in Europe and America weren't dying too much of disease and cold (at least if you could get clean water.) You were just walking though mud and horse shit up to you knees, or dying of cancer at 40 from a atmosphere constantly polluted by wood and coal smoke.
I'll take our media cluster-fuck-slash-ecological apocalypse anytime.
Parent
Re:Such a lovely place, that Eastern front (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Such a lovely place, that Eastern front (Score:4, Insightful)
Solution: End all births.
Parent
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rj
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Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:4, Informative)
The idea that Polish cavalry attacked tanks is Nazi propaganda. Stop repeating it. The Nazis made it up so that it made the Poles look stupid. Tanks always have infantry support and machine guns so that nobody (cavalry or infantry) can approach them and put bombs in their treads. You entire post is some sort of redeeming myth built upon Nazi propaganda.
Parent
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell you're not living with a horse vet like I do... nor do you have horses yourself like we do... otherwise you'd see that horses are among the most fickle creatures ever to be kept by humans. Murphy is an optimist when it comes to horses: give a horse something to hurt itself on and it will. Keep some horses together and soon you'll see that some of them eat to much and develop laminitis (hoof wall shear) while others don't get to eat enough and soon resemble the Grim Reaper's skin-and-bone nag. Ride them and they'll need regular shoeing and/or hoof care otherwise you'll soon have more dog chow than you can chow. And when it comes to that, even if you were inclined to have your dogs eat your horses you'll probably find that those horses have been treated with some medicine one time in their lives which makes it illegal for them to be used for animal or human consumption - at least that's the way it is here in Europe. So if you plan to use genetically modified horses may I suggest crossing them with a wolverine or some other creature with better healing capacities?
Bicycles are a better alternative...
Parent
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Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending on how oil consumption goes, I can see bicycles becoming MUCH more popular in the near future. Right now it's not feasible for me to ride one to work (I live 25 miles away), but I'm looking at moving to a location that's only 3 miles away from work and might certainly look into riding my bike each morning (though the savings wouldn't be huge - doesn't take much gas to go back and forth 3 miles to work each day).
Parent
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Seinfeld on horsepower (Score:3, Funny)
Reminds me of Seinfeld's take on the subject.
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:4, Informative)
They also have this charming habit of defecating and urinating w/ great regularity...
William
(who as a youth, would help a neighbor plow his field w/ a horse)
Parent
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In fact General Howe's largely unsuccessful New Jersey campaign in the winter of 1777 is often called The Fo
Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:5, Insightful)
San Francisco installed cable cars in the 1870s, when they knew that electric trolleys were only a decade away -- because they simply couldn't wait. Their streets were getting hit with some 55,000 gallons of horse whiz, and the concomitant number of road apples, per day. Foot, wheel and hoof traffic stirred it up into a goo so slippery that the horses couldn't make it up the hills; they kept slipping on the cobblestones and breaking legs. At one point the city was shooting an average of one horse per day.
Then automobiles came along and the cities got all polluted.
rj
Parent
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Re:Why no go back to horses sometime? (Score:4, Insightful)
The other issue is that that's going to need to be some pretty impressive genetic engineering; at the moment a horse can develop life-threatening injuries from potholes so small that you wouldn't feel them in a car, and need replacement parts (shoes) with startling regularity.
Parent
Article doesn't have much to it. (Score:5, Informative)
This was my Father's era and he was a "prole". Working as a logger he earned somewhere around $200-300/year. The earliest data for per capita income I could find was 1929 here:
http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-33.pdf/ [census.gov]but even then it was ~$700/year.
So how does a car that cost 3-4 years salary qualify as being "fit for the proletariotarian"?
In today's terms that car would cost ~$120,000!
Aside from a announcing a publicity stunt by a company cashing in on a green fad in visible and public low-carbonism (believe me the replica cars will *not* be for the proles!) this article is shamefully low on any actual news or facts.
Just a bit of hype.
Re:Article doesn't have much to it. (Score:5, Informative)
Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $2375 1917 dollars have the same buying power as about $39000 2008 dollars. That inflation is based on the CPI.
Parent
Re:Article doesn't have much to it. (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct. Problem is that in 1917 the "proles" weren't making $2375 1917 dollars. They were making a few hundred.
Doing CPI, GDP, or per capita back that far is pretty difficult but there was no way this vehicle was even close to the proletarian price range. the article just used it to be cute without regard to the facts.
Parent
interesting income comparisons... (Score:4, Insightful)
But you are right that $700/year was the average annual income back in the 20s. On the other hand, the average annual income today is $26k, so things do work out roughly (i.e., the car is still a larger-than-unity fraction of a year's income.) I think the distinction here needed is not average income, but average income per household (today that is more like $48k.) Of course, there's the mean/median/mode distinction as well, but this isn't a statistics class so I'll spare us all.
Parent
Who Killed the Electric Car? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who Killed the Electric Car? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this gets posted to every /. article that even tangentially refers to electric vehicles.
Conspiracies are interesting but in the end the Prius sort of proved that while there is a chunk of the relatively affluent who will buy electric cars the consumer gestalt as a whole was never waiting with baited breath only to have their hopes dashed by Big Oil or any other conspiracy faves.
Parent
Re:Who Killed the Electric Car? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Priuses aren't largely driven by "the affluent". They're mostly a middle class car. And they've been a stunning success; Toyota has said not to expect any more increases in sales next year because they can't produce them any faster [autobloggreen.com].
3) "In the end" is hardly applicable [energy.gov]; the adoption of hybrids keeps expanding, and automakers are offering more and more options. GM, for example, plans to release a new hybrid modelevery three months for the next four years [autobloggreen.com].
4) As for electric cars, there are a lot of myths. Here they are, all broken down [daughtersoftiresias.org] for you.
5) Yes, you are correct that there was no conspiracy to kill the EV1. The EV1 was never designed to be profitable; like all of its competitors, it was solely a byproduct of the CARB mandate. It was produced in tiny numbers, with tech far worse than what is available nowadays, based on a design that shared no common infrastructure with other GM vehicles (a "one-off"), and so forth. The leases were heavily subsidized. GM wanted nothing to do with actually making EVs, and as soon as the CARB mandate was overturned, they were quite glad to be rid of them. So were the other manufacturers who also had similarly unprofitable EVs. It was a horrible PR move, and GM realizes that now, but it made sense on the books, especially since GM was bleeding money at the time. And as for the "liability" argument, GM was 100% correct; lawsuits add hundreds of dollars to the cost of every car made in the US, and an owner can't disclaim liability for *someone else's* lawsuits. And as for the battery argument, please -- if GM cared about the EV1, they wouldn't have *sold the batteries* in the first place. They had already shut down many other part lines before CARB was overturned anyways; even if they had the batteries, they still couldn't have made more. The conspiracy arguments get crazier and crazier from there (like GM destroying the EVs because they wanted to "hide" them, yet in a fit of insanity they donated them to museums, but then they put pressure on the museums to hide them...)
Parent
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I don't care how fast electric cars can go, or how quiet they are, or even how much torque the have. The show-stopper has and continues to be charge time and range. Range isn't long enough for charge time to not matter, and charge time is too short that the limite range is an issue.
I don't care how many smelly hippies claim all they need is 20 miles a day. That's not nearly good enough for public consumption.
U
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Hype
Re:Who Killed the Electric Car? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but they also go through more charge/discharge cycles; PHEV batteries are stressed more. I edited the wiki to reflect your criticism and this fact.
They talk about cheaper, longer-lasting batteries with high energy density.
Cheaper, not yet. Safe and long lasting, yes, you can get them. If you want low volume, your only option, really, is to buy DeWalt power packs and dissect them for the A123 cells, and that'll run you about $2/Wh. However, if you buy in bulk, you can get batteries from any of a dozen or so automotive battery makers for notably less (except for AltairNano, whos batteries in bulk still cost around $2/Wh).
Great! But they also have less than 10% the energy density of lead-acid batteries, and the cost is prohibitive.
Not necessarily. The EEStor supercapacitors due out this year are to have several times the energy density of *li-ion*. Several teams are working on nanotube supercapacitors with the energy density of li-ion. This is all covered on the page.
They then go on to talk about the cost of running a car based solely on the cost to charge, ignoring the cost of periodically replacing the battery.
Incorrect. Maintenance costs are also discussed on the page.
The cheapest car I've seen with a decent range is the Th!nk City
Th!nk isn't particularly cheap, and its stats are pretty lousy (~60mph top speed, for example). You mentioned Aptera; it's much better performing and cheaper. There's also the MiEV (minivan-styling) and MiEV sport (style like a cross between a Prius and a VW beetle) ($24-25k), the VentureOne (tandem two seater, automatically tilts into turns like a motorcycle) ($25k), and about a dozen more due-out-soon in the $20-35k range. The only thing that the $20-35k rangers don't have is >120 mi or so range unless they're PHEVs. The batteries, not yet being in mass production, are too expensive for that. In five years or so, that won't be the case, and you should easily get 200-250 miles range in that price range.
Parent
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6mph - 25mph???? (Score:4, Funny)
Bah! The human body won't survive higher speeds! (Score:3, Funny)
Yay for Zap! (Score:3, Interesting)
Zap car review (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/reviews/2008-zap-xebra-review/ [thetruthaboutcars.com]
Porsche designed an earlier hybrid (Score:4, Interesting)
6 to 25 MPH (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And this is being brought back why? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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The only way for me to be encouraged to read TFA is if someone links a printer-friendly version. I'm not wading through fifty two paragraph screens. Or has C|NET renounced the madness and rehabilitated itself to the point that I would actually RT C|NET's FA?
Re:And this is being brought back why? (Score:4, Informative)
most of the arcticle is about the old detroit electric and the company that used to make it. the only paragraph of interest is this:
"To promote itself, Detroit Electric--a new joint venture between Zap and China's Youngman Automotive Group--plan to release a limited number of cars based around the Detroit Electric, an electric car produced by the Anderson Electric Car Co. in the early part of the 20th century."
my guess is that it's gonna be something like the P/T cruiser, prowler or new beetle. a modern design inspired by a (very) old one.
Parent
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It does encourage one to comprehend the article one is reading
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Re:And they still work! (Score:5, Insightful)
I will predict you are 100% wrong. That in 50 years we will have roads paved with something and cars will be run on something other than pure electricity. Heck, even the ROMANS didn't use dirt roads when they could avoid it. And that was 19 centuries before asphalt.
Parent
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I'll buy that future cars will be lighter-weight, and that wheels will be narrower than they are now. Current cars are heavy because of safety mandates, and I think future cars will get their safety from lighter materials and active computerized evasion of danger. Wheel width gives better g
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Re:Comparable Speed/Range? (Score:4, Interesting)
The speed and range of gasoline-powered cars was higher. It was hard to tell, though, because tire failure back then was so common people spent half their time patching or changing them.
I wonder what improvements could be made to the machine given modern materials and technology. A top speed of 40 mph and a range of 50 miles, for example, would make it a really good choice for a lot of basic city driving. My daily trip to work, all my shopping and a significant part of my social life...probably 90% of my transportation needs...would fall within those parameters. I'm sure a lot of people could say the same.
Parent