Just one other point I’d make. I know right now increasing our usage of coal isn’t a very popular position, but:
There are benefits, both direct and indirect, to using an energy source that we are sitting on huge reserves of. It seems like the whole idea of “energy security” has sort of fallen by the wayside in favor of climate change concerns, but switching to a coal-based transportation network would get us away from foreign oil and the price volitility and foreign policy messes that entails. Most analyses show the carbon impact of a fleet of electric cars running on coal-derived electricity is still slightly better than that of conventional petroleum-powered cars. Even if it’s only a wash, carbon-emissions wise, I’d say it’s still worth doing.
Especially since the potential for “greening” our power network is where the real “easy” efficiency improvements are, not in tuning cars. The inescapable fact is that even if you can improve cars’ efficiency, say, 10% a decade, that improvement will be more than eaten up by there being more cars on the road and I strongly believe we’re approaching the end of what we can do with the internal combustion engine-- ever since electronic fuel injection, improvements to cars have gotten ever more complex and the returns have been ever more minute. (IOW, a car from the late-80’s/early-90’s gets only marginally worse mileage than a comparable contemporary car, and yet is far simplier under the hood). There’s only so much you can do with reciprocating pistons (or wankel rotors) and electrics are the only other viable option we have right now.
The issues with making a “green” power network are mostly political and infrastructural challenges, not technological challenges that deal with unknown quantities. Over the longer term, wind and solar (and maybe nuclear) will only form a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Plus there are some of those unknown quantities on the horizon that might pay off-- for example if one or more of the “clean coal” technologies ends up being workable that could be the holy grail of US energy policy. To me there’s very little potential downside to building the foundation for an electric car infrastructure.
The crown Vic would get 27 mpg on the highway with a 4.6L V8. The 2011 Mustang V6 gets 31 on the highway now. I would expect efficiencies to go well into the 30 mpg range for large cars with a small diesel.
When talking about displacement on-demand you’re quoting systems for performance v8 engines. If you apply it to a smaller turbo-diesel you have the ability to alter the effective size of the engine with both cylinder deactivation and variable pressure turbine technology.
To answer your question, better a million cars on the road with the full utility of a diesel than to heavily subsidize a low production car that is severely compromised by distance and temperature. If GM can make money on the car without subsidies then I have no objection beyond the loss of highway tax revenue. But I want my tax money to go as far as possible which means promoting cars that are affordable to start with.
Well, for one, it’s totally counterintuitive that displacement-on-demand would be more beneficial to a smaller displacement engine. The whole idea of DoD is that you can use the extra displacement when you need it but not have to deal with the extra pumping losses when you don’t. Since a small turbocharged engine has a lot less pumping losses than a big displacement V8, I would expect LESS savings on a small turbo motor (though I suppose more pumping losses on a higher compression diesel might counteract that). Of course the other thing I didn’t mention up above is that the Crown Vic’s V8 beats the pants off the turbodiesel 6 in the E320 performance wise. Your hypothetical 5-cylinder Crown Vic, while not 1970’s 300D (or… shudder… 240D) slow, would still be pretty slow. If you’re willing to deal with that kind of performance, a smaller gas engine won’t do much worse and is a lot cheaper.
The other thing is you’re pretending like diesels don’t cost anything either. For example on VW Jettas the TDI engine is about a $5,000 option. Presumably a diesel with added bells & whistles like DoD and start-stop would be even more. A VW TDI gets about 27% better mileage than a base 2.5L model. Now even your own very pessimistic figuring placed the Volt at getting a de-facto 60 MPG, which is 55% better than the 27 MPG Cruze. With a diesel Jetta, you’re paying $185 extra per 1% increased efficiency. Since we decided upthread that the premium of the Volt is about $10k, that means you pay $181 per 1% increased efficiency. Basically the same, and if the price of gas goes up (near certainty) it gets even better wheras diesel pretty much follows gasoline.
Missed the edit, but to flesh out my previous post a little, my point is that the same return on investment issues that apply to hybrids also apply to diesels. I’ve often said that the problem with selling efficient cars in general is that the cost of fuel is such a tiny fraction of the cost of operating a new car (depreciation and financing are the huge ones). The gadget/green/stickin’ it to big oil factor has always been the only thing that sells fuel efficient cars (unless you’re a fleet or something). For whatever reason, in this country diesels haven’t captured most peoples’ imagination, whereas clearly gasoline-electric hybrids have. And I think there’s a huge appeal to not being able to use ANY gas on most trips with the Volt.
“Never”? I can agree with your objections to today’s technology, but how can you be so sure that it will NEVER be any different? Isn’t the trend towards better electric storage technology, and if it improves a few hundred percent, wouldn’t that remove ALL of your objections to an electric car?
Admittedly, it’s not improving as fast as we would like, but it doesn’t seem smart to predict that the best and cheapest storage technology 100 years from now will be a heavy lead-acid battery just like I have in my garage now.
So, not to put words in your mouth,but I think with your line of reasoning the taxpayer’s money might be better spent subsidizing economy cars. This sounds vaguely Eastern-bloc-ish, but if they built a little 1-liter economy car crap can (think Geo Metro) and then had government subsidies make the sticker price less than $5k, I think that would probably save more fuel over the short term than any R&D investment. With current technology (and maybe easing of some safety standards), I’m sure you could make a perfectly straightforward 100+ MPG car that wasn’t a whole lot worse than some of the 80’s econoboxes some of us are still driving around.
I don’t know why you think a turbo diesel will be a performance slug. The Ford truck V8 makes 400 hp and 800 lbs of torque. I drove a turbo 4 cyl T-bird that was fairly peppy and that was old technology (granted not a diesel). The big thing now is variable ratio turbines so you can greatly increase response time out of a turbo.
And according to this site the difference between gas and diesel engines in Europe is a 60% increase in fuel economy.
You have a point about the cost difference on diesels but checking a UK Ford site the cost difference appears to be $350 for a Focus.
More importantly, these batteries are not your standard car battery. They’re lithium ion batteries that, while they have their own problems, are continuously being improved. Not for cars, really, but for all sorts of consumer electronics. Practically everything I have in the house these days that has a rechargeable battery is lithium. The laptop, the iPod, the controllers for the PS3, the digital camera. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next cordless phone I buy has a lithium battery.
As I stated before, I think the slow charging battery pack will be replaced in the near future with faster charging units. And depending on the cost of gas and electricity the Volt has the potential to be a 100 mpg equivalent car (although still pricey).
Lithium Ion batteries are not as durable as lesser batteries. I wonder how they will hold up in extreme cold. It’s not a park-and-forget car if it’s away from electrical hookup.
Yeah, that E320 certainly isn’t slow by the standards of any car I’ve ever owned, but “performance” in terms of fun things happen when you push the right pedal is simply more expensive in a diesel (in terms of boat and RV haulage… that’s a different story). What it comes down to is you’re paying a V8 price for V6 performance, which is a hard thing to talk a new car buyer into, even if it does mean 4-cylinder economy. That “V6 performance” these days is better than V8 power was 10 or 15 years ago isn’t really relevant-- people are almost always going to either choose power or purchase price savings, never economy.
As for the Focus price difference/economy difference, that’s probably because in Europe with differences in taxation and fuel costs, it doesn’t make sense to offer an “economy” petrol motor. So you’ve got the petrol motor that’s probably a peppy turbo and then you’ve got the diesel which is the “economy” trim despite costing a tad more (though maybe not after HP taxes). I’ll concede that the $5k premium for the TDI Jetta is probably more than it has to be (it might be less for the Golf), but the fact is that the cost you pay for a diesel, be it in purchase price or performance, isn’t insignificant.
Lithium Ion batts are certainly an improvement, but not as good as we need for a practical car. And I just bought a new cordless phone, and what kind of battery does it use? NiCad. :rolleyes:
Originally Posted by Susanann View Post
Luckily, electric cars are so inferior (in every way) to the simple time tested trusted gas powered car that todays elecric cars will be the same disaster that the electric cars built in 1905 were.
Ummm… electric cars were a complete and total failure…is that disaster enough?
Electric cars cost more and did less.
Everyone stopped buying, and stopped driving electric cars, and the electric car companies all went out of business because nobody wanted them. Electric cars are too limited in what they can do, and electric cars more than gas cars.
As long as gas cars are cheaper and can do so much more, impractical electric cars will continue to be a waste of money failure.
Why “luckily”. I can understand if you think the technology is inferiour at this point, but why be happy about it? Off my head I can mention a number of points, just one of which should be enough to wish for the success of electric cars.
*) Release less micro particles. Which annually causes hundred of thousands to have asthma or die of various respiratory diseases. I had to move out of my previous apartment, which I really liked, because the pollution from the cars caused me to have asthma.
*) Reduce CO2, reducing global warming.
*) Reduce the pollution problems relating to oil drilling, transportation and storage.
*) Remove a lot of the noise from the city and from people living close to larger thoroughfares. Imagine a city without all the noise and pollution from cars.
*) Reduce deficit of countries relying on importing oil, e.g. the USA.
*) Reduce the unhealthy US dependency on oil from various unstable or unfriendly countries.
*) Reduce the billions pouring into the coffers of various islamist regimes, being recycled into promoting wahabist doctrines in the West and other places.
*) Reduce the corruption and war that follows some third world countries finding oil.
But that’s like saying the steam engine was a complete and total failure. Even though we also don’t use those any more, it’d be laughably absurd to call them a failure. Electric cars worked stupendously well compared to the gasoline cars of their era. We only stopped using them because the economics of gasoline vs. batteries vs. electricity was no longer in their favor. But right now the balance is tilting back towards electrics. Especially since when electrics went out of style, second cars were very rare and so the range limitation was a serious drawback. These days two or three cars is the norm, and so having one range-limited isn’t a big deal.
Furthermore, gasoline cars are really poorly suited for the kind of short-hop driving most people do. For the first 10 minutes after you start that car, especially if you live somewhere with cold weather, the engine runs at a fraction of its peak efficiency and wears many times faster than when it’s warm. For a lot of people, 50% or more of their driving is in these conditions, and it’s terrible for their cars and their fuel economy. But electrics work perfectly at peak efficiency the second you turn them on.
I really don’t understand your virulent hatred for the electric car. Just because you think it’s an affront to whatever you imagine the automobile to be or represent does not mean everyone shares those ideas, and your grandiose claims of the absolute superiority of the internal combustion vehicle aren’t really correct now and are only likely to become less so in the future. If you don’t like the idea of an electric car, just don’t buy one-- there’s no need to bombastically try to scuttle the whole idea.
Where the heck do you think electricity comes from?
Electricity generating power plants, and the means to find, dig out, and then get the fuel to the power plants, give off emissions and cause pollution.
Chevy Volt Cold Weather Testing Update | GM Volt Forum GM has vigorously tested the Volt in extremely cold conditions. They don’t find the problems SUSANANN is making up. Does she really think GM would send a car out that can not operate in cold weather?