A car like the Volt would work well for my wife. She could charge it once a week or every other week and still not use gasoline. Yet, it would be effective for visitng anyone in the Baltimore/DC metropolitan area. Our daughter is moving about 40 miles away in a couple of weeks and a Volt would work for visits, while that would be pushing it for a Leaf. The price is a bit steep, even after tax breaks. But not buying gasoline at the same rate you would with a Cruze would save about $5300 per year according the the EPA and DoE. In a couple-a-three years, the price difference vanishes. I’m seriously considering a Volt for her next car.
I can think of numerous solutions, but there no point . you seem dead set against any thing that does not include ICE.
FYI, I rebuild electric motors for a living, why should I be a ICE fanboy? It’s just that I also understand how much ICE powered cars don’t suck.
The only thing “wrong” with the Volt approach to a practical EV capable of long trips is that it offends the EV purists.
Also, I do recall saying that EVs are ideal urban commuting vehicles. In the Volt, you have that but you don’t have to own, insure, license, or rent a second car for that once a month trip out of EV range.
So how would an oil company thwart them?
By buying patents for large NiMH batteries so that no one but the oil company can legally make them, and then not making them for starters…
The Volt is more eficcient and less polluting than the Leaf, Tesla, or any pure-EV could ever be. Let me explain.
Any EV out there is somewhat range-limited. This means that you need a separate, ICE-car for every time you might possibly exceed you car’s range, whatever range that might be.
Now, I’d draw a line in the sand at about 10-15 days a year, beyond which it’s simply too much of a PITA to keep renting a second car…you just BUY a second car. Realistically, this makes an EV 1/2 of a “two-car transportation strategy”: you buy a Leaf, you also keep a Malibu on standby.
So, owning an EV means you need TWO cars; room to park them; TWO annual inspections, registrations, etc. This is less “green” in many ways than one newer plug-in hybrid…including the sort of “green” that you fold in half and put back in your pocket!
With the risk of getting closed down for going off topic, the Pohlad family was accused of eliminating the Minneapolis/St. Paul street cars to sell the buses. Truth is though that the utility of the street cars by that time was already on the wane and really not a cause-effect issue. Its a fantasy to think that we would be a nation of street car lines with few cars and buses if it weren’t for GM destroying the street cars. People were moving out of the central cities and cars provided the means to do it. Street cars were just too inflexible and expensive in comparison. Just the facts maam. No need to re-write history. Anyone riding on a street car back then new they were not the end all to transportation.
I have no dog in the race as far as Tesla is concerned. I question the business model, but great if they can pull it off. I do believe that a pure all electric car though that requires charging off the grid every couple hundred miles, is not as practical in the US as one that can be driven continuously with a combination of ICE and electric. Especially now since people are tending to drive the 3-600 mile trips instead of putting up with air transport, and once again we do not have the spare grid capacity at this point in time.
thwart
THwôrt/
verb
- prevent (someone) from accomplishing something.
So you can’t buy NiMH batteries?
@shadowfax - that patents out of date now, so if it was a barrier (which I doubt) it isn’t any more, yet I’m not aware of anyone using that technology - are you?
Battery efficiency is largely determined by chemistry, not battery size.
GM bus lawsuit…
Street cars are not dead in this country. Every drive in Boston. The green line is under and above ground. The BC line from Coply out to BC is all above ground.
@texases The technology is out of date now - but sitting on it stifled electric car penetration into the market place for 20 years. As we know, more people buying a given car leads to more innovation surrounding that car. We’re 20 years behind where we should be because of that stall tactic.
From the Wiki article cited: “More recently Guy Span, a noted writer on the subject has suggested that Snell and others fell into simplistic conspiracy theory thinking, bordering on paranoid delusions[n 1] saying “Clearly, GM waged a war on electric traction. It was indeed an all out assault, but by no means the single reason for the failure of rapid transit. Also, it is just as clear that actions and inactions by government contributed significantly to the elimination of electric traction.”[n 2]”
I didn’t say street cars were dead, but they were on their way out as the main form of transportation back then and of course GM and others were there to take advantage of it and maybe haseten it. In no city that I know of where there are street cars, light rail, heavy rail, free bikes and so on, are they able to provide the majority of transportation needs in the extended metropolitan area. The heavy cost of laying and maintaining rail and the inflexibility once the rail is laid makes it a limited system for ALL population mobility needs.
Back when many cities had only a few main corridors and businesses and homes were within blocks of these main corridors, street cars made sense. Back then even the advent of bicycles provided mobility to strain the street car system. In Minneapolis they were great for riding up and down lake street or Hennepin avenue or University Ave, and even to Lake Minnetonka, but when things sprawled, it no longer made sense as a total solution. People wanted cars and flexibility even in the cities. Thats why in the old days, development was along rivers and railroad lines, but auto transportation made this unnecessary.
Still say for the mass market and not just the niche, you have to have a vehicle that can be continuously operated non-stop. Otherwise its just a sport vehicle. Makes no matter to me though but while the design is attractive now, in a couple years without updating, it’ll just be old hat.
@BLE,kinda like an airplane,a airplane(especially a jet fighter) is a flying fuel tank and all the fuel they use per person is rather shameful in my estimation,when I watch a jet flying overhead(pumping out copious amounts of NOX,CO2,etc.I just have to think of the amount of homes one jet flight would heat for a winter.I know somebody is going to say how efficient it is in people miles,bunk! people are spoiled and need to stay home more,I cant get over how many people get stranded in Airports on the cold weather Holidays,anyrate back to the subject if I had an electric pickup with an 80 mile range I could do over 85% of my driving and if I had a relatively long trip I could possibly have a used civic or something on demand
Do it Tesla!,I applaud your honesty-Kevin
The heavy cost of laying and maintaining rail and the inflexibility once the rail is laid makes it a limited system for ALL population mobility needs.
But it doesn’t mean it has to be eliminated. Boston has buses - just like other cities…and they are expanding their rail system.
“We’re 20 years behind where we should be because of that stall tactic.”
If you haven’t bought an EV, you’re just blowing smoke. The basic problem has always been insufficient demand.
kinda like an airplane,a airplane(especially a jet fighter) is a flying fuel tank and all the fuel they use per person is rather shameful
???
A jet fighter’s “efficiency” is in how many troop lives are saved, how many strategic enemy assets are destroyed, etc…per dollar/life/gallon/whatever. Measuring a fighter’s “efficiency” in “fuel use per pilot” has to be the least relevant metric I’ve ever heard of.
…and a transcontinental trip in a jet is MUCH MORE fuel-efficient than the same trip, solo, in a car. (Boeing shows 91 passenger MPG in a B747-400, at 100% load capacity.) Pretty damn efficient, if you ask me, especially seeing all the time you save for (fuel-wise) nothing.
"and a transcontinental trip in a jet is MUCH MORE fuel-efficient than the same trip, solo, in a car."
And faster. And you get those free peanuts. Of course, you have to tolerate the TSA.
Hey missileman, this isn’t car related but I’m taking the liberty…
20/20 just did a special on out missile defense system. They went seeking evidence of an out of control command… they failed to find any more than a broken door awaiting a part. Your guys in SAC did a great job. They showed SAC’s Missile Command to be a highly professional and dedicated group. You should be proud.
Getting extreme range from a battery powered car is sort of like a long supply line for an invading army. The longer the supply line is, the greater the percentage of supplies the supply line itself consumes until you reach a theoretical limit where all the supplies are consumed by the supply line itself.
The more batteries you pile on the car, the greater the amount of energy consumed by moving the batteries themselves becomes. I.E. doubling the amount of batteries does not double the range of the car and you approach a range limit when you have what amounts to a battery on wheels and adding more batteries only gives you a bigger battery on wheels.
This same principle applies to fuel powered vehicle like jet airplanes. Lindberg’s plane was essentially a flying gas tank, with over 600 gallons of fuel aboard. He was so dangerously overloaded that he almost didn’t clear the obstacles at the end of the runway.
My wife flew back from Poland to the US a few years ago. Shortly after takeoff, there was an engine out due to a bird strike and the flight was aborted, but not before the plane circled in the sky for nearly 8 hours to burn off the fuel needed for the cross Atlantic trip in order to get the plane’s weight down to a safe landing weight.
I’m pretty sure that the real reason the SR-71 took off with only a minimum amount of fuel and then filled up while in flight was because the landing gear was only designed to carry the plane without a fuel load. Every pound the landing gear does not weigh is another pound of fuel the plane can carry and a landing gear strong enough to support a fully fueled up SR-71 would have been so heavy that the fuel it displaced would have seriously shortened the plane’s range.
At 4600+ pounds curb weight, I think the Tesla is very close to being a “battery on wheels” and I believe it would be a greener car if it weighed 1000 pounds less with a shorter electric range and used some sort of low emission high efficiency gas power plant to extend the range for that occasional trip beyond its battery powered range. Maybe a lightweight micro-turbine only big enough to provide the normal cruising power and thus running at full efficiency all the time when it’s needed.
The biggest thing keeping the Tesla from gaining more market share is the car’s price tag, not government meddling and rules. Tesla is going to have to get the price down to what a Prius costs if it wants for the brand to be more than a status symbol for the trendy rich.
An EV is defined by its electric motor and batteries, both of which have under constant development for over 100 years. If there was a stupendously economic and attractive EV that could be made today, it would be. Fact is, batteries are heavy and very expensive. Nothing that was done 20 years ago affects that reality.
@BLE
The attempt at making the Volt what it is while calling it something else is the deception I refer to. You might call it elegant, I call it just another step that the auto company grudging takes to keep their fleet mileage in line with regulations. Put in a bit more powerful battery and voila, you have a more in town functional hybrid but with the overweight chassis compared to a more dedicated Prius plug in, and it’s not as efficient for trips; quite a bit less. Car makers are very reluctant to compete head to head. They each truth find their own nitch. One thing is for sure. You need to pay big time to play. Elegant to me means…inexpensive to buy and run. GM made a real EV decades ago with 100 mile range. They approach that now with the Spark. Years later, I am not impressed and think it’s no big deal that after 40 miles, the Volt does little better then a new Corolla on the highway. That’s not elegant when cars they made decades ago were better. That’s just better marketing, trying to convince people their new cars are better then their old ones. True for gas, not for electric cars.
Oh wait, they have touch screens and blue tooth standard. That in reality are the only things that make them better then EVs of old.
Check “real” mileage comparisons.
As you can see, after the break even point. The Volt drops as low as 37 mpg on trips. Good, but worse the a Corolla. You had better fall into that nitch to enjoy that so called elegant solution. A real solution IMHO, works all the time.
@texases
Plenty has been done. Check out the history of the decades old RAV4 EV. They are beautifully functional cars but their development is stalled by the reluctance of makers to produce those old heavy but cheap NIMH batteries that actually work better then the overly expensive lithium they are using today. It’s called marketing that has little to do with engineering. It’s profiteering that has little to do with making the best EV. It has forced Teslar into an approach that only makes sense for esoteric and expensive EVs for the wealthy when in reality, they have been ready for the masses for years. No conspiracy…just good bean counting and efficient use of campaign contributions and lobbying.
I agree 100% with @dagosa on both of his last 2 postings
Go get 'em!
Hit 'em hard and keep hitting 'em!