The same thing could be said of practical fusion power, which has always been “just around the corner” for about the past 50 years. There are serious practical limitations to electric cars which even battery improvements won’t change. To charge a battery pack in about the same time it takes to fill your tank with gas will require the use of superconducting wires, and will be an extremely hazardous operation if humans are involved.
No need to recharge . Just pull into a recharging station, and replace the battery pack, like going thru a car wash. A robotic crane lifts out your battery pack replaces it with another one, and you drive off in less time than it takes to pump gas. Renault-Nissan has already signed an agreement with the government of Israel to sell electric cars that way.
The difference between “practical fusion power” and “practical electric power” is a pretty big one. We already have electric everything else; electricity in general is a pretty mature technology. We have electric transport of all kinds already; the problem with buidling electric cars is not that we can’t do it, just that we don’t want it because we have internal combustion which we’re okay with. On the other hand, we have exactly one- okay, two- practical applications for fusion.
When you think about it, filling a car with gasoline is pretty damn hazardous, but even the very dumbest among us manage okay. Besides, plugging in your car before you go to bed isn’t that bad a scenario, is it?
Sure, you’d have to make some allowances for trips of more than, say, 500 miles - “rails” embedded in long-distance highways, allowing the vehicle to conserve its onboard battery, perhaps? - but that’s not exactly a huge hangup, since 99% of the time, people aren’t traveling 500 miles a day.
I think it’s the opposite. In places like Japan, most households have just one car. It may be a commuter car for one family member, but the car also needs to double as a family car, and/or be usable for long trips. Electric cars are not practical in that environment.
In the US, it’s very common for a household to have one car per person. It should be practical for a household to have one “family car” and several electric commuter cars. Or even one electric commuter car per person plus one or two long-range cars - a lot of suburban Americans have the garage+driveway space to do so, but few Europeans and Japanese do.
We’ve been over this a couple thousand times, that’s not a viable solution, either. There’s massive real estate demands required by this, you have to get car makers (who can’t even agree on which side of the car to put the gas door and tend to fight new regulation with the vigor of a rabid attack dog) to all agree to a standarized design, and you can expect (in the US, at least) for there to be a number of lawsuits when a robot screws up and scratches someone’s car, to name but a few problems with the system.
Really Not All That Bright, transferring several megavolts of energy in a few moments is a bit more hazardous than gas and as I said, would require the use superconducting wires, as well as batteries (or capacitors) capable of accepting that amount of juice in a short period of time. Those are pretty tough nuts to crack and lots of people are working on the problem and there’s been, at best, only incremental improvements.
Installing rails would be an expensive proposition to say the least. You’d have to work out a way for them to keep free of road debris work out a system of billing, make sure that any wildlife which crossed the road didn’t get electricuted by them, and so on.
Not as true of Europe, but certainly in Japan. If you don’t own or rent a parking space, which most Japanese don’t, you can’t buy anything bigger than a K-car - which means no displacement over 660cc, and under 64hp, and only about enough passenger space for four small frogs.
The average round-trip commute in the US is about 30-40 miles. (Cite: “On a daily basis, Americans averaged 4 trips per day, totaling on average 40 miles of travel—most of it (35 miles) in a personal vehicle.”)
You’re talking about problems which would exist pretty much solely within the American market; there are plenty of lawsuits already from tow truck operators or mechanics or whoever scratching cars; and automakers will standardize if ordered to do so. Nobody wants to be Sony, especially in an industry where new tooling costs so much.
I’d have to bow to your wisdom re: instant or near-instant recharging, but again, would it be such a big deal to plug in your car overnight?
Mass transit has already dealt with all the rail problems you describe, with the the exception of billing - and that one’s not hard to deal with at all. No reason you couldn’t use the current tollbooth system that I can see.
And how many of those trips were under conditions which are death to electric cars? The vehicle range figures they give for electrics are all under ideal conditions. In real world conditions, where people drive with the heat or AC blasting, radio/CD/DVD player going, and the headlights on, the range of electrics tends to be considerably shorter.
Heh. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. First of all, how are you going to “order” car makers to do it? It took ~20 years to get CAFE standards raised because of the opposition of car makers. Even if you did manage to force them to develop such a system, each and every one of them would come up with their own way of doing it, and insist that their method was better. No doubt a few of them would try to lobby to have it so that the only place you could do a battery swap was at a place they owned, thus forcing you to pay whatever they wanted to charge you, and leaving you SOL if your car ran out of juice in a place where they didn’t have a station.
No, but think about the folks who live in apartments. The exposed cords would be easy pickins for vandals. Not to mention in places like California, the grid groans when everyone comes home and cranks up their AC. Can you imagine the strains on the system if you added millions of people plugging their cars in at about the same time?
Mass transit is a different kettle of fish, entirely. First of all, you don’t have cars entering and exiting at all times and at any number of places. Second, there’s the matter of road debris, which is a far greater risk on highways (what with vehicles breaking down and people throwing trash out the window) than it is on a rail line. Then there’s the varying power demands that vehicles would put on the system. A compact car requires less juice than an SUV. Can you imagine how pissed people would be if they all suddenly slowed down on the highway because there wasn’t enough juice to power them? The only way the tollbooth system would be really practical, is if you had the electronic boxes which automatically bill people as they drive through the booth (and you’d have to have a standardized system for every state), otherwise the traffic congestion problems would be legion.
Not a very useful analogy. With gas prices so cheap (even now), customers don’t have much incentive to buy fuel-efficient cars, and therefore manufacturers don’t have any incentive to manufacture them. On the other hand, interchangeable batteries is a feature that some (or many) customers would want to pay for. Nobody forced digital camera manufacturers to use AA batteries, but a great number of them do because many customers are interested in that feature. Even though proprietary batteries have technical advantages.
This analogy is bogus unless you think electric cars can be made to use the lead-acid batteries gasoline and diesel cars use now. I also don’t think you’re considering the effect patents will have on this market: The first company to produce a workable system will be shut down by everyone sitting on patents for everything from the plug design to the basic chemistry.
But car makers have resisted every legally mandated change with vigor. They fought crash testing, air bags, seatbelts, side impact beams, pollution controls, and everything else that they’re now legally required to do. And if they haven’t fought it, the oil companies have. The car makers tried for years to get the oil companies to lower the amount of sulphur in their fuels because it made things difficult when it came to lowering emissions. The oil companies refused to budge on the matter, the car makers put pressure on law makers to change this (and that took a long time to get done).
Car makers operate in their own little world, unlike electronics manufacturers. About 10 years ago, car makers tried to get a law passed which would have prevented anyone who owned a car that was less than 7 years old from going to an autoparts store and buying parts for the car, even if the car was no longer under warranty.
But even as they were opposing legal mandates, I think were producing some cars that had those features because some customers wanted them.
Interchangeable batteries don’t need a government mandate to work. It will work if enough customers who want to use them. (Though I don’t know if there really is enough customer interest - I certainly can’t prove there is.)
If you mean AA’s already existed before digital cameras, point taken. Perhaps DVD and VHS are better analogies - companies cooperated to develop and adopt a standard because it’s in their best interest to do so, not because the government forced them to.
Not pollution controls, that’s for certain. Other elements (like side impact beams) appeared on cars before legally required because they were able to add them to the production lines before that date. Airbags (which first appeared as an option back in the 1960s), were never pushed strongly by carmakers, and they often hid the availability of them from customers.
Nor is DVD/VHS a good analogy, because electronics manufacturers cooperate with one another far more than car makers do. There’s no need to have “interoperability” between automotive items like there is with electronics. Few people would buy a car built by GM and then drop a Ford engine in the car, after all.
Well, that’s because swapping engines is a) prohibitively expensive, for most people, and b) prohibitively complicated, for most people. Swapping an engine is really, really difficult - you have to find one that will fit your engine bay, and hope it doesn’t have too much torque for your gearbox, apart from anything else.
Electric motors are a lot simpler, really. You don’t need the ancillaries that an internal combustion engine does, for one thing- no starter, alternator, ECM, sump, and so on. I’m envisioning a market more along the lines of the jetliner industry - pick your car, then pick the motor you want to drop into it.
You’re thinking in current-day terms. I’m thinking in terms of how the market will look when the Big Three collapse under the groaning weight of union demands and their own inefficiency/incompetence.
Again, American carmakers opposed pollution controls. The Germans and Japanese embraced them. Sure, there was pressure from Green movements in both cases, but no actual legislation requiring them to do so.
Right, which is what my point is. You can’t swap things about, so car makers, unlike electronic manufacturers don’t have the interest in working together like the electronics manufacturers do.
Again, never happen. The legal hassles would be overwhelming. Nissan would say that the reason your dome light stays on is because you’ve got a Ford motor (or vice versa).
Bwahahaha! They’ve already collapsed, and what you’re talking about hasn’t happened. Letting the Big Three die a natural death would be political suicide. They’ll be propped up with government loans and subsidies if they can’t remain financially solvent.
Not in the case of the latest CAFE standards, the only car maker to not oppose the increases was Nissan. Everyone else, GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota, etc. tried to block the standards.
And what happens to industries propped up by the government? *Massive * regulation and oversight (see airlines, mass transit, farming).
And you’d tell Nissan to go eff themselves, because you didn’t change the relay thingy that controls the dome light (mostly because you don’t know where it is).
But seriously - unlikely that the major manufacturers of electric motors will be the same people who make most I/C engines now. Honda, probably - but others will probably be forced out of the market because they don’t know how and won’t play catch-up in time (See Lucas and Magnetti Marellli).
Not so much General Motors as General Electric.
Again, you’re talking about the American market. I’m talking about the global market. Nobody wants to build cars to meet CAFE regulations because American consumers don’t give a shit about emissions. Until the last decade, they didn’t much care about fuel economy either. So, they don’t go “look how clean my exhaust is,” - except the nascent “hybrid person” that auto ads seem to be featuring more and more - they go, “why is it less powerful than last year’s model?”
Which car makers already have, if you think about it.
We’ll see. Starting up a car company is an expensive business.
But we have some of the lowest standards in the world, so it’s not a case of having to change an existing design to meet stricter standards. It’s a case of them opposing regulation because that’s what they’ve always done. It’s also not true that Americans don’t want more fuel efficient cars. If that were true, nobody would be buying hybrids. As it is now, car makers can’t build them fast enough.
Here’s something I just thought of:
Electric motors would be controlled by software. Software would be controlled by DRM and, ultimately, the Massive Slavering Beast that is global copyright law (in America the DMCA, in other countries the equivalent laws already in force or coming soon). It would be trivial to make engines refuse to work in unapproved vehicles and make all efforts to force the issue illegal circumvention of the DRM involved, just like how it’s illegal to play DVDs in unapproved players because it’s illegal to break the encryption. That, not simple physical constraints, would be the major barrier to compatible engines. If you doubt it would happen that way, look at Sony and Microsoft, two leaders in their respective industries.