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Americans Refusing To Wait For Mainstream EVs
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Aug 14, 2008 12:54 PM
from the voltage-too-low dept.
from the voltage-too-low dept.
hazehead writes "The growing trend of folks refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles is starting to get some press. From DIY tinkerers in Atlanta trying to keep money from going overseas (or simply from leaving their wallets) to a guy in Oregon building an open source Civic conversion kit, Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands."
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Highly Irregular (Score:5, Insightful)
> Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands.
Don't worry. The regulators will put a stop to it. Can't have people going around doing things without permission.
Re:Cooking Oil in CA. That's California (Score:5, Informative)
Eventually all biofuels (including old frying oil) will be subject to fuel taxes and they want to be sure that it all flows through "legitimate businesses" that they can compell to collect the taxes for them.
What do you mean "eventually?" [newsobserver.com]
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Conversion Kits (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on the area (Score:5, Informative)
There are quite a few folks in the Seattle area tooling around in home-brew electrics, including a co-worker of mine who's done a nice job with a Miata. There are two local factors that encourage this. One is that, being in Boeing's backyard, it's fairly easy to obtain a surplus jet-engine starter motor. The other is that most of our electricity comes from falling water, and therefore is relatively cheap.
Re:Depends on the area (Score:5, Informative)
We have an active electric vehicle group [veva.bc.ca] here in Vancouver. Their cars are almost all DIY conversions. We don't have Boeing jet engine starter motors, but we have an active group and cheap electricity.
The cars are all usable on the road, 100+ km/h top speed, none of this golf cart neighbourhood vehicle nonsense. The range varies from 70 km per charge for lead acid batteries to 200+ km per charge for the fancy stuff. Since my commute is 10 km each way, I have followed this with interest.
...laura
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Not true (Score:5, Insightful)
EVs are way more frugal with their power compared to gasoline engines. So much so, that even taking into account loss in transmission lines and energy lost in charging batteries, you still come out ahead. I'll take an extra $100 on my electric bill than at the gas station any day... plus I don't have to make a special trip to 'fill up' the car.
Gas engines are at best about 30% efficient... as in only 30% of the energy consumed actually goes to making momentum for moving the car.
This is just more BS perpetuated by those who stand to lose their income streams from oil, including car mfgs who stand to lose the income stream of spare parts, since EVs are waaaaay more reliable than gas or diesel engines.
I can't wait until somebody finally gets around to making a full EV car that seats two with ABS and Airbags, PS, Heat and AC, even if it only goes 100 miles. If they can do it under $25k I'm there with cash in hand.
And that's how things are supposed to be! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect... Let the government worry about courts, police, and military. The rest we'll do ourselves, thanks.
Very wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Common argument, but so very wrong, because producing electricity in large power plants, even from really disastrous ones as coal or oil, is very much more efficient than producing it in millions of small engines.
Subsequently adding cleaning solutions is also very much simpler/cheaper than doing the same to millions of small engines.
And later changing the production from one system (say coal or oil) to another (say nuclear, wind or solar) is very much simpler than to replace millions of cars.
Electric... fuel? (Score:5, Funny)
Other components such as a fuel injector were replaced with their electric counterparts
What's the electric counterpart to a fuel injector? A... wire?
--sabre86
when you fill your SUV (Score:4, Insightful)
your cash goes to:
1. Chavez in Venezuela to support anti-American jingoism
2. Putin in Russia to support Russian Neoimperialism such as in Georgia
3. Bin Laden via Saudi Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist form of Saudi Islam that gives rise to treating women like cattle, nonSunnis like subhumans, and Islamic terrorism in its myriad forms wherever such groups are supported by conservative Arabic funds
the American government doesn't seem to think getting off foreign oil is as much a priority as the American people think it is. The priorities of the American government conflates dependency on foreign oil with other foreign problems that, if they examined many problems around the world more carefully, they would see that it is the American people and their SUVs that fund those problems in the first place. this complacency is partly our own fault, for not hammering our leaders on this issue hard enough. likewise, you can complain to GM about building SUVs instead of electric cars, but we as Americans buy SUVs instead (until quite recently)
we need electric cars supported by a new wave of modern nuclear power plants. of course there are better sources of electricity than nuclear, but most of these are boutique and cannot scale like nuclear can. this includes wind and solar. but i don't really care to champion nuclear that much as i care about the need to get off foreign oil, any way possible. so please, invest in solar and wind as well, let us find new ways for nonnuclear tech to scale
modern nuclear via pebble bed reactors just does not go chernobyl, and via breeder reactors waste in lifespan and quantity is dramatically reduced (1/10th quantity of waste, a few centuries instead of 10,000 years of radioactivity, and lower radiation levels of safer forms of radiation). breeder reactors also dramatically increasing energy yeild, and allow us to use thorium as well as uranium. security concerns are real with nuclear technology, but if we spent 1/1000th of the amount of money and lives we spend securing our petroleum in iraq on securing breeder reactors instead (they make plutonium, that's the danger with breeder reactors), we would still be many orders of magnitude safer than our current status quo of funding terrorism and russian imperialism and anti-american jingoism like we do now. of course even thorium will run out in a century or two, but if we haven't mastered fusion technology by then, we are doomed anyways, or would have found a way to scale wind and solar by then
zero reliance on foreign petroleum by 2025. whoever enunciates that idea the loudest amongst a range of candidates in any contest before you, elect them to Senator/ President/ Congressman/ Dogcatcher
if petrodollars were to dry up on the international stage, many of the intransigent problems that all peoples of the world face today, not just Americans face, would dry up as well
thems the facts. get with it America
no more foreign petrodollars. stop feeding your damn SUVs
So true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I saw those damn "If you smoke pot, you're supporting terrorist" all I could think about was the distasteful regimes we buy our oil from.
Well said.
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Can-do spirit (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only is this a great example of the American can-do tradition, hopefully it will also go a long way toward dispelling the myth that cars are too complicated for "regular people" to deal with.
Think about it. When my parents were graduating from high school (1969) it was a given that people would know the basics of how to service a car. For guys especially, it was just something that guys "should" know. These days the attitude is more like, "meh, it's too complicated, leave it to the experts".
Let's hear it for can-do, rather than pay-someone-else-to-do.
SUE! (Score:4, Funny)
Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands."
How dare they??? I want government oversight of this dangerous endeavor immediately! I want it taxed, and regulated and I want government subsidies.
How dare people do things without asking for government permission!
They need to make sure that these vehicles can pass all the safety regulations. You know, to protect the children. Do it for the Children! Won't anyone think of the children????
OMG This is crazy. These people are Terrorists! They are out to destroy America! How dare they!
And don't forget Illegal Aliens. I know they are involved somewhere.
I want one of THESE to go with my Tesla... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love an electric car. But a few times a year, I drive from the Bay Area to San Diego. This [mrsharkey.com] is the perfect solution to the problem.
Petrolium use in America - Where do we target 1st? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
I think more most people it's not about being "green" so much as the low price of running the vehicle... with the cost of electricity compared to gas EVs get the equivalent of 200MPG. Not to mention the other benifits such as smooth and quiet operation, no nasty oils, coolants, or other crap to keep up with, and of course a "full tank" every time you leave your garage.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
Electric cars are a huge win there, too. The complex emissions control nightmare that U.S. law requires makes the drive train incredibly failure-prone. Automatic transmissions make them doubly so. Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often. It is like using a shiny new computer with monitor and printer where a printer-calculator would do the job. The simpler the device, the less failure-prone it will be.
With electric cars, you have basically four parts: a battery, a bunch of heavy gauge wires, a charge controller, and an electric motor. All of those are generally simple devices except the charge controller. Okay, so there are a few other things like an electrically-powered pump for your power steering and a modified A/C system, but in terms of the drive train itself, you get rid of a lot of crap. You get rid of the internal combustion engine, the computer that controls it, the transmission, potentially the radiator and hundreds of feet of water hoses (that leak), the oil pan (that leaks), the oil hoses (that leak), the fuel pump, most of the vacuum system, the catalytic converter, and the entire exhaust system, all of which are fairly frequent points of failure. Add to that dozens of sensors that no longer apply, including emissions compliance sensors (O2 sensors, catalytic converter temperature sensors, NOx sensors, etc.), axle speed sensors (largely used to verify the transmission is working correctly), vacuum line pressure sensors, etc.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically. Much less. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the reason auto manufacturers are dragging their heels is that, ignoring people who upgrade for appearance reasons or because their old car is too small to meet their needs, people are likely to replace their vehicles much less frequently than they do now. If the average person drives a car for 300,000 miles before they sell it and require no maintenance in the process, a $30,000 car costs only $0.10 per mile average, not counting energy costs. And that's a conservative estimate of EV longevity once we solve the problem of short battery lifespan. There's every possibility you'll have a rust hole where your feet should go before the electric motor or wiring gives out.... :-)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
Why stop and recharge as often if you can just put solar panels on the car and increase your miles per watt. Once the general public sees the value in not wasting the constant barrage of energy (from the sun) we receive everyday we might just start the trend we are looking for.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Informative)
they already do this in some places - i live in NC and here you can get a time of use meter - which does exactly what you are asking for.. we get reallllllllly cheap off peak power and we pay higher than normal for peak times.
mix that with our dish washer and washer/drier that has a wailt x hours ability.. and we just load it up and have them run at 2am
doing this (along with setting comps to go standby while we are at work and wake up before we get home) dropped our power bill from about 250 to ~120$ a month..
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yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
If we move our transport systems over to electricity, then change the way we generate that electricity, it does a great deal.
Also, its a hell of a lot easier to control emissions from power stations then it is to control millions of cars pouring exhaust fumes into the air in cities.
Its going to take a while to get the somewhat large number of nuclear power stations and solar power farms the US now wants up and running, but it is going to happen, and when it does, things will get a lot better.
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Re:yes it does (Score:4, Insightful)
Compared to the years it takes to amortize the Crazy Dictators and Wackadoos financial baggage that comes with buying a great portion of your energy from places trying their hardest to be run by medieval-minded mysoginistic violent theocrats like the people running Iran, or blowhard Marxist buffoons like Hugo Chavez? Nukes have indirect and long terms costs, but so does having to buy oil from crazy people.
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
From my understanding, about half that cost comes from dealing with the inevitable lawsuits that occur whenever a nuclear power plant is about to be built. Most power companies run all their available nuclear power plants at full capacity (and hydroelectric if they have them) and then take care of the rest of the power needed with fossil fuel generators. The cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear power is a lot cheaper than fossil fuels, but there has been a lot of trouble building nuclear power plants due to legal issues. Hopefully that is changing now.
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
According to an article in National Review I read recently, nuclear power proponents are hoping that the combination of advances in nuclear technology, high oil prices, and the relatively light carbon foot-print of nuclear power power will encourage and enable reductions in some of the bureaucracy.
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
Not good enough. I need:
a) 300+ miles per fill up
b) 5 min fill ups
c) 700+ mi daily range
d) Infra everywhere I go
Yawn. Everyone thinks that at first. Statistics unassailably reveal that most of you are wrong. For the tiny fraction of people who do need that spec, then, sadly, an EV is not the car for you. EVs don't have to solve everyone's problems all the time at first. They can still be extremely useful for the other 90% of us in the meantime.
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Informative)
[EVs] can still be extremely useful for the other 90% of us in the meantime.
So how do you enjoy your EV? (I thought so)
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. I drive our EV several times per week, and we love it. In the past 18 months there were exactly two times that its 100-mile range wasn't adequate. The first time, we just used our gas car, which we've since sold. The second time we traded cars with a neighbor. The EV is powerful, efficient, and fun to drive, so we have about a dozen friends who are happy to trade cars for a week if we need to take a long trip.
Hope that answers your question.
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Re:yes it does (Score:5, Insightful)
OMG!! This partial solution doesn't fix EVERYONE'S problems?! Then what the hell good is it? Just because 80% of the cars out there drive 10 to 20 miles, sit in the sun for 8 hours and then drive another 10 to 20, doesn't mean a solution that will allow them to drive it for practically nothing is worth a damn. Damn liberal idiots with your goofy, do nuthin' solutions.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Interesting)
Apples != oranges.
The 35% infrastructure efficiency must be compared to the efficiencies both of extracting combustible materials from crude oil, vegetable sources, or reclaimed sources; and of transporting the resulting fuels to the end user. I don't have a figure. It's probably in the 50-80% range.
The 20% vehicular efficiency of IC-powered vehicles should be compared to the vehicular efficiency of EVs. Again, I don't have a figure. The conversion of electrical energy to kinetic energy is around 80% efficient in current electric motors.
A third pair of efficiencies must also be measured which represent the cost of transporting a tank of fuel which is (probably) on average 1/3 full, contrasted with the cost of transporting the dead weight of a battery. I don't measure things like this, so again, you're S.O.L., chum. At least they'll be similar.
The thing is, even in the absence of firm figures, you can tell that for both methods, the losses in one area are balanced by the gains in another. In other words, the two technologies are broadly similar in their current state.
What's quite revealing here is that, despite not getting as much funding for R&D, and despite active dissuasion from pursuing such technologies, EVs are presently about as efficient, overall as IC-powered vehicles. Given a level playing field, EVs could be far more efficient.
The real advantage here is that vehicular pollution is harder to control than infrastructural pollution.
Plus, the implications of pursuing EVs are enormous, for example: biofuels can be grown from algae on coal power plant exhaust. I'm sure it could be done in the outfall of nuclear power plants, too. After all, who cares if the algae is irradiated? It may mean that the fuel they produce will be less prone to decomposition, (as with your plastic apples and oranges you buy from Safeway).
So um, next time, eh, try not to just grab a couple of numbers and start comparing them as if they somehow relate to one another; alright? It really annoys me.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it does help a little. Pollution can be better controlled at a single point than at many thousands of points. Economies of scale can also be implemented.
There are a myriad of other problems that arise, 10 years down the line you'll need a new set of batteries and what do you do with the old ones?
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it does help a little. Pollution can be better controlled at a single point than at many thousands of points. Economies of scale can also be implemented.
And just as importantly, that single point doesn't have to move, and thus doesn't pay an efficiency cost due to having to move the extra mass of any emissions controls.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Informative)
There are a myriad of other problems that arise, 10 years down the line you'll need a new set of batteries and what do you do with the old ones?
Recycle them [wikipedia.org]. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the most successful recycling programs in the US - 97% according to the Wiki article. Further, I have seen statements (no reference, sorry) that recycled lead is cheaper/cleaner than mined lead.
I can't comment on other battery technologies, but I don't see why similar results couldn't be achieved.
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Coal is better. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would posit that electrical power from coal to drive electric cars would ultimately be cheaper for consumers, better for the environment, and would place on a better path to national energy independence.
It is far more efficient to have a single big plant burning electricity and sending electrons to people rather than having everyone around with their own little tiny power plants. A single giant coal plant has a generator that runs at a fixed rate, maximizing power output for fuel burned, whereas an internal combustion engine car operates over a wide range of RPMs, offering more of a compromise than a fuel solution.
The single giant plant is only one physical distribution point for many cars. Instead of having fleets of tanker trucks with hundreds of people hauling fuel around to dozens of gas stations, you instead have a single train run by one or two people hauling up to a month's supply of coal for a big coal unit and in one single trip.
If we did switch to electric cars, even if they did come from coal plants, you would also eliminate the environment problem of gasoline spills. There's nothing to "spill" in an electric car that is really bad. Yes, you will wind up with either lead acid batteries that are environment nightmare, or, lithium polymer batteries that periodically explode and kill everyone in the car, but ultimately, the birds will sing and trees will wave their branches in joy, if that's the sort of stuff you like.
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The Solectria Sunrise was getting 370 miles (Score:4, Informative)
On Ni-MH batteries in 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solectria_Sunrise [wikipedia.org]
That's close to twice the range of my petrol car.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:4, Interesting)
It does get arround the immediate problem of rising gasoline prices. Fact is coal is much cheaper per unit energy than oil and afaict the US mines most of it's own coal supply whereas they are having to import ever increasing ammounts of oil. It also moves polloution out of cities and iirc big power plants have much tighter emmisions controls than motor vehircles and those controls are much easier to enforce.
It won't help with global warming though :(
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:4, Interesting)
But not all power generated in the US is from coal and fossil fuels. My power is generated via Hydroelectric. There are Windmills popping up left and right. Except for trying to say no to all fossil fuels the trick is to reduce the need for it. fossil fuels are easy to transport and offer a lot of energy. Nuclear has to many left wing hippies who think of it as a bomb waiting to happen stopping it from popping up next door (Aka a field 10 miles away from you) Solar isn't ready neither are others. But even a dirty coal power plant is probably more efficient then a gas power car.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it improves the situation greatly. Your view is far too simplistic.
A big power station is a lot more efficient than a small car engine. A typical gasoline engine is perhaps 15% efficient. The combined cycle gas power station they recently built here makes use of about 80% of the thermal energy of the gas. The gas turbines are the first stage, then waste heat from the gas turbines drive a steam turbine, then any heat that is still left is used to heat the NSC sports centre swimming pool and the sports centre itself. Those efficiencies are simply impossible for a small internal combustion engine on a car.
An electric car is a lot more efficient than a gasoline one - for a start, it doesn't idle, and you can have regenerative braking.
If you change the power generation (say, from coal to nuclear) you don't have to also change the fleet of vehicles. Automatically, overnight, they are suddenly nuclear powered.
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Re:Still doesnt solve jack (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people want to eliminate petroleum imports, and consider environmental protection a lesser priority or no priority at all.
I know plenty of conservatives that scoff at the idea of environmental protection and global warming but who still have a strong interest in electric cars, alternative fuel vehicles, and hybrids as a means of cutting the trade deficit and reducing the leverage that OPEC has over our foreign policy.
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Re:If the demand for electricity increases (Score:5, Informative)
Batteries can be recycled. Today, you pay more for your new lead acid car battery unless you turn in your old one. You get a pretty considerable discount when turning in an old one, which gets recycled into more car batteries. I think there's something like a 90% recycling rate for car batteries as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_battery#Environmental_concerns [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Cost Effective? (Score:5, Informative)
Read more carefully, the $12,000 included the truck itself.
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Re:Cost Effective? (Score:5, Interesting)
you assume that gas prices stay the same for the next 7 years.
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Re:$12k?! (Score:5, Informative)
Umm...RTFA!
The $12,000 INCLUDED the truck. The truck probably ran around $7,000. So $5000 saved $700 in 6 months. At $1400 a year we are looking at 3.6 years. in addition EV's typcially cost 50% to run outside of the cost of fuel. Since he would probably spend around $1000 a year for repairs on the truck, the actual savings are $1900 a year for about 2.5 years.
Electic Vehicles are about break-even for city driving/daily commutes. In the next 2 years the power storage will increase and become cheaper pushing EV's into the financial smart move category.
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Re:2010 is just too long to wait (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:2010 is just too long to wait (Score:5, Informative)
Holy cognitive dissonance.
Yes, efficiency, as measured by MPG would go up without a cat. However, it's quite a leap of (il)logic to conclude that they'd have better emissions without. Are you really saying that a cat INCREASES emissions? If it were physically possible to get reasonable power and stop the increased NOx formation that happens in lean situations, we'd be doing it. Cats are expensive, and cat's aren't actually required per se, its just that there are no known superior processes for reducing NOx emissions.
Also the bit about the cat not getting hot enough is nonsense. My car has three cats - which is a bit crazy - but the first cat is really only works during start-up until it gets too hot.
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Re:Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they really want to do something they're better off protesting.
Personally I have much more respect for the man that takes matters into his own hands, than the one who just yells and whines.
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