Whitey, allow me to suggest that with more sensitive equipment you would have found some residual charge. But not current. Once the potential becomes too weak to overcome the resistance, the current flow stops. That’s whay the residual charge remains.
So, it would be like public transportation? You know, buses, trains, monorails, trolleys, etc? If you really DON’T LIKE TO DRIVE your car, please use these options and save the fuel etc. for those of us who do!
Capacitors that store energy in charged plates as opposed to batteries that store energy in chemical form are on somebodies radar. To be specific GE and some railroads are experimenting with capacitor banks on locomotives to rapidly store excess energy from the onboard diesel generators or the dynamic brake systems so that it can be used when a surge of power is needed such as overcoming the inertia of a long string of cars or pulling a grade. The advantages of a capacitor in this situation is its ability to store large amounts of energy very rapidly and without the heat that is generated in the chemical reactions taking place in a battery.
Several universities are also studying the use of capacitors for vehicular operations. I believe Texas A&M, for one, either has or has had a government funded research project on the subject.
Capacitors offer several advantages over batteries including the possibility of being quickly recharged at a “filling station” not unlike we do today with gasoline stations. The downsides are at the present level of technology capacitors, like batteries, are heavy and the capacity/weight ratio stinks. Weight can be an advantage on a locomotive by helping increase rail adhesion and effective traction. On a car it means you end up spending an inordinate amount of the stored energy just to haul the energy storage units around. Not to mention capacitors are not noted for retaining stored energy over long periods of time.
Pure electric vehicles may work out well in the densely populated regions of our country that are within say 50 miles of either the Atlantic or Pacific coast that that will cover over 50% of the U.S. population. For the rest of the country I think other alternatives will have to be considered. My personal favorite is hydrogen either in the form of fuel cells or as fuel for adapted reciprocating engines. IMO we are at least 30 years and tens of trillions of dollars from any all purpose solution.
I wish I knew more. I just can’t help you. This is the discussion I was hoping
we could have had! Thanks to all that tried to discuss this! The best reasons
and logic came from my posting "Maybe more research is in order!!! " around the top of page two.
Google “The theoretical limits of different battery types”
Read 
The subject may be a clue to his possible achievement.
All battery types (either primary or secondary) have internal resistant, that why it will keep it, from ever reaching 0 volts and 0 amps.
Williamsanders, allow me to respectfully point out that this thread is from 2009, 7+ years ago. Since that time, Tesla has dramatically rewritten everything we thought we knew about what electric vehicles would be and totally changed our perception of electric vehicles. The entire discussion now is about when (no longer “if”) they’ll become ubiquitous and a major portion of all new car sales. Affordability has become a non-argument with the $35,000 Tesla 3. Soon I suspect there’ll be economy EVs.
Dredging up very old threads carries the risk of the threads having become obsolete. s an excellent probability that the original poster has long since moved on.
Not just an excellent probability, it’s a certainty
OP has not been active on this website since September 2009
If only. It turns out that no $35,000 ones will be made for months, $43,000 is more like the base price, and they are easily optioned over $50.000. The Chevy Bolt appears to be the affordability/range champ.
A good argument for setting a time period to have threads get automatically locked except for the OP. I personally would think 5 years would be a sufficient length of time.
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Sounds like a good solution to me.
Carolyn?
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Allow me to respectfully point out.
A hypothesis!
A supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
A theory!
A coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation.
If Star Trek taught us one thing, it is that “ye cannae change the laws of physics”. That is certainly how scientists regard their various laws and constants (for good reasons).
I hope she reads this someday?
See things change with time, to answer our questions!
This has never been a formal discussion about Physics.
Question: so what law of physics did she violate.
Williamsanders, what the heck are you smokin’?
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@cdaquila Carolyn, would you please close this thing. 113 posts and going nowhere.
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+1
…
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Hello. I am here. Discourse doesn’t give us the ability to close old threads en masse, and it’s a feature, not a bug: when it was designed this was a specific choice. I see what you’re saying about obsolescence of the information, but I think in many instances we’ve had conversations that have been had in the past…but they are in new threads. I could go on at greater length, but there’s no sense in arguing the point because we can’t batch-close threads.
As for OPs having left the building…I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there were situations where these old threads’ OPs have come back because our system sends a notification of a new post. The n is now large enough in this sample size that I am not surprised when people come back to respond…even years later.
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