I know. It was a joke. But if you consider the vast amounts of wasted energy in a hundred people (or ten thousand) all driving to the same job site, every work day, year after year, it is sort of ridiculous the waste of energy involved.
You’re right. If only we could force them at gunpoint to all live in the same aprtment building. And then never move or never change jobs. Think of how much energy that would save!
Well as far as cost goes it seems they are allowing about $500/kWh (roughly) which is keeping with the $450/kWh generally reported as current costs currently (see this DeutscheBank pdf pg 19 for example*).
BTW, that 12/10 DB pdf is an interesting read, albeit out of date given current oil prices. (They calculated payback times of 5 years to consumers with a $4500 subsidy by 2015 using $3.25/g as the cost of gas.) Of note they see a spike to $125 per barrel as the next peak oil price point sometime before 2015 that will motivate massive and rapid shift in public behaviors (pg 52).
Erm, no. People use planes for trips that are too long to be easily completed via car.
Have you ever read any of the plans for train-advocates “city of tomorrow?” Essentially it is a city with lots of train depots, such that the city is divided up into hard coded sections each one guaranteeing no more than a moderate walk from a train depot. Travel from relatively close cities would be by train, travel across a continent would be done by plane.
Travel across oceans of course would always be done by plane, no one is advocating a trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic railway.
In smaller countries like those in Europe or Japan, high speed rail is a holistic solution for travel within a small region, because of the infrastructure, density and et cetera. For a country with coasts 3,000 miles apart and huge swathes in the middle that would have few passengers, even a 500 mph train going from East Coast to West would make less sense than air plane.
Why do you have to poop on the possibility of ballistic passenger rocket transoceanic flight?
Moving from GQ to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
More than 80 percent of the people drive less than 40 miles a day. They would never have to use the gas motor, but it is there and gives about 32 MPG. It is good for about 350 miles so it serves fine on a trip.
The car expert in the Detroit Free Press drove a Volt for a week in his regular life and never bought gas.
For God’s sake, it’s “lose” and “losing”: one “o”. “Loosing” is not just spelled wrong, it’s a different word.
Chevy Volt: $40000
Chevy Aveo: $12000
Savings: $28000
Gallons of gas assuning $4/gal across the life of the car (admitedly expensive): 7000
Miles on 7000 gallons @ 30 mpg: 210000
The break even point on gas consumption is 210,000 miles.
Assuming $40K vs $20K with gas @ $3.50/gal and 30 mpg the breakeven point is just over 170,000 miles. To have electric cars replace ICE cars, you need an electric Model T, cheap yet practical.
Add to that a purely electric car can’t travel long distances so it can’t serve as a primary car.
I don’t think GM did it’s homework on the Volt. The people who buy it will be in a more upscale grouping and as such will live in more isolated areas. The average distance to work is going to be higher. It is a fail in this regard and I stand by my earlier argument that this car is a cake that is not finished baking. It is a reworked Prius without enough batteries to serve it’s target audience. GM will lose money on it just as all hybrids have done which is no surprise. But the company was bailed out of bankruptcy and this car represents a failure of fiduciary responsibility.
Chrysler was right in their decision to abandon hybrids entirely and focus on cars that are affordable, get good gas mileage and are profitable. They can easily transition to electric cars when they meet this criteria.
Did you factor in the middle eastern potentates and their political and financial power? What cost do you add in for gas and oil pollution? The middle east is in upheaval, Are you certain we can count on getting oil as easily as we have in the past?:
Simple math like that fail in the long run. There are a lot more factors driving us away from fossil fuel.
To compare the Volt to the Aveo is silly. The Aveo is a cheap subcompact, slow with no torque to speak of. The Volt OTOH has “has nearly the same torque right off the line that a 315 horsepower V6 Camaro engine has at 5100 RPM.” The Aveo produces 105 pound-feet of torque; the Volt, 273. Less unfair to compare it to the Chevy Malibu LTZ although even that only gets 160 pound-feet of torque, unless you go with the V6 which gets 251 pound-feet. You’d have to compare to the Camero LS with its 278 pound-feet to have better off the line performance.
That V6 Malibu gets 17c/26h mpg which would come to at least 500 gallons a year at $2000 at $4/gallon. It runs about $30K. Ignoring both the cost of electricity and the lesser costs of maintenance and the intangible benefits to energy independence and the environment, we are still looking at a five year payback without the tax credit, but only a year and a half with it.
Indeed the people who will buy these first Volts are upscale … but how does that translate to living in isolated areas? And so what if they do also use some gas each day? They’ve still saved the roughly 40 miles worth of driving gas free each commute.
Let’s try this exercise with the Leaf. Compare to the Sentra. The Leaf has 207 pound feet of torque, the Sentra SE-R only 175, but otherwise the cars are not too dissimilar. The Sentra SE-R runs about $20K; the Leaf $32,780K before tax credit and $25,280 after. The Sentra SE-R gets 24/30 mpg. Maybe 460 gallons a year so $1800 or so.
Depending on how long you own your cars its not so big a differential. And they’ve made the lease option pretty cheap.
On the issue of “primary car” … my primary car is my eight year old Civic hybrid which is driven to and from work every day. We actually have two other cars in my driveway - my wife’s primary car, a three year old Camry hybrid, and my eldest son’s ten year old Volvo wagon, bought used, parked there while he lives out of country a few years, that we use for driving the next youngest to and from college. My primary car does not need to do road trips and the road trip we take needs a wagon.
Lots of people don’t take road trips. Lots of people have more than one car in a family. Enough together to maintain any reasonable initial adoption phase of EVs.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
More than 80 percent of the people drive less than 40 miles a day. They would never have to use the gas motor, but it is there and gives about 32 MPG. It is good for about 350 miles so it serves fine on a trip.
The car expert in the Detroit Free Press drove a Volt for a week in his regular life and never bought gas.
[/QUOTE]
Why do you suppose, if that’s the case, that they aren’t already making serious inroads in the US? Or, afaik, in Europe or Japan either? Shouldn’t they be taking over the market, given your assertions? Shouldn’t the market for ICE vehicles be waning at this point? Why isn’t it? Conspiracy?
CAN electric cars replace gasoline cars, presumably today? I think they can…in very vertically oriented markets. Rich suburbanites, for instance could purchase one for driving to and from their $50k/year membership golf course. Fleet vehicles where the ranges aren’t great, and the need for quick recharge isn’t perhaps necessary. But today, for the average person as their primary vehicle? No…I don’t think so.
-XT
OK then compare it to my SRT-4 which was $24,500 and easily outperforms it. Breakeven point is 130K miles.
The point I made was that the Volt is extremely expensive and in addressing the OP, to have electric cars replace ICE cars you have to have a significant number of Americans willing to pay $10K to $20K extra to do so. And that doesn’t even account for the cost of new batteries after 5 years OR the cost of disposing of the batteries. If you want to go with electric today your two choices are expensive with performance or cheap with no performance and with those choices they will never replace the cheap performance of cars today.
For electric cars to take off more mass consumption, they need to be cheap and perform well like the Model T was which launched the ICE market.
You can spank a Camaro all day long on a tank of gas and it will still run hard. Not a good comparison
xtisme, several reasons:
-
Cost.
a. Initial outlay. EVs cost more on day one. That restricts their sale to people who have the ability to make that sort of outlay. Just out of a recession many new car buyers are can’t afford that. You are not going see an EV that can compete in cost with an Aveo for example. If someone wants the cheapest way to get to work, an EV won’t win out over that.
b. Over the life of vehicle. At $4/gal it may indeed come close over the five years that the average consumer owns a new car, but it is iffy, and depends on what alternate vehicle is being considered. As gas gets a bit higher and battery prices get a bit lower, that calculus becomes more compelling. See the DB pdf cited above. -
Reluctance to adopt brand new technology. Oh there are the early adopters, but there are more who would rather let a new technology have a year or two on the road working any bugs out and will let others pay for the status of going first.
-
The mythological place cars and the open road has in the American psyche. Even though relatively few of us actually use our cars for anything more than commuting and have another vehicle to use for those times we do, we hold onto that open road fantasy. Giving that up will take some time.
-
The lack of monetizing the external cost associated with oil use: the pollution, the geopolitical dependence on Arab oil producers, the more broad based environmental effects.
-
Availability. Few are yet made.
Saint Cad,
Yes, the Volt is expensive. And I am not enamored of it. But the consumer will not need to pay to replace a battery after 5 years - warranty is 8 years or 100K - and to be safe GM factored in a replacement per vehicle into the price even though they expect them to last beyond that time frame. Also, the batteries also are not expected to have a disposal cost, they are expected to have significant residual value - remember that a battery that has lost 30% of its capacity is no longer any good for a vehicle, but it still can be used for stationary power applications, even tied together into a utility scale battery.
Don’t be silly. the technology is obviously in its beginning stage. In the future ,it is very likely going to make inroads into the ICE market. No conspiracy. Do you see those everywhere?
The auto writer for the Freep said he drove it for a week and did not have to buy gas once. Is that a bad thing?
Most people will not have to purchase gas at all. That is if they drive less than 40 miles a day. Yet the Volt also will drive off with a ICE , if the batteries run out. The writer who deliberately ran the battery down, said it was seamless. A blue light came on notifying him he was not on gas.