About the different size battery idea…great if all the sizes are the size of a camcorder battery. Not so good if they are 1.6 tons that need to be installed with a forklift. “Honey, can I use the forklift this morning? I need to put in the short-range battery to go to the store.”
And…
The hybrid car concept, while it seems to work pretty well in practice, always bothered me, because…TWO engines which share almost no components (cylinders don’t share motor windings) seems like a lot of duplication in space and cost. If gas were cheaper or batteries more compact, we could remove one of the engines and save a lot.
I think that a onboard gas generator that could supply the average load of the car while keeping the batteries at 20% fully charged would make electric cars practical.
It would run on electric mode for daily commutes and be plugged in at night.
For longer trips it would run fully electric and when the batteries run down to 20% remaining it would give you the option to start the generator - this would allow longer trips.
Not true at all. You can quite easily convert most cars over to alternative fuels such as propane, LNG, alcohol, or hydrogen (diesels can switch to bio-diesel with no modifications in most cases). Admittedly, supply would be a bit of a problem for a while, and you’d not get the same range, or fuel economy, but we wouldn’t be dead in the water.
But it’s not only the market that controls these things. There are environmental activists who, as Una has pointed out, actively work to block the construction of new plants (and folks like Ted Kennedy who block windfarms). And without a significant decrease in the price of solar cells, most people won’t be able to afford to buy their own power generating array. Mind you, I think that we should seek to diversify our energy systems, not only in terms of supply, but also distribution, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
No, it’s not, but getting them to realize that it’s needed can be. Hell, we can’t even get the US car makers to agree that we need to increase CAFE standards (since we have some of the lowest fuel economy ratings in the world).
Look at how long it took them to put all of that on cars? Here’s Cecil’s column on why headlights don’t turn off with the ignition. As you can see from the column, it’s not like it’s a terribly complicated problem to solve, and it could have been done from the momement electric lights were first installed on cars. Then there’s the whole issue of how hard it is to repair a car. Tucker had it worked out so that the engine could be removed in half an hour nearly sixty years ago, but no automaker has adopted the concept. Yes, car engine’s are more complex these days, but the principle of quick release connectors would still work on them just fine. Most of the items in your list were available as options as far back as the 60s, but few consumers wanted them (or even knew about them in some cases), so they fell out of favor until they were mandated by Federal law, or car makers decided to make a big advertising push to promote them.
An excellent OP. But why here in the PIT, rather than GD?
I like the idea behind hydrids and also those super golf carts that are only for in-town driving. A lot os trips in cars are very short, and those super golf carts co take the places of most of those little errand runner trips. Sure, so could bicycles, but older dudes have problems with them, and it’s hard to bring back 4 bags of groceries on a bike.
What’s nice is that those super-golf carts charge on an ordinary household plug, whearas those stupid electric cars required “charging stations” and there weren’t enough of them, making the poor range even more of a problem
I live in Edmonton Alberta. During the winter it is quite comon to find extention cord in the middle of the street form people whoforgot to unplug there cars in the morning.
We built are own cord to ensure the the car will unplug from the cord before it unplugs from the wall.
Why would I want to pay extra for my car to have quick disconnects on the fuel lines etc, so that the engine can be pulled in 30 minutes? How many cars out there have their engine pulled during their service life?
I can’t say for sure, but my company replaces about 1 complete engine a month under warranty. Obvisouly I work for a very small car company, but this is not something that looks like it would pay off to me.
Except for the fact that they are not needed. Tuck I hate to break it to you, but Sam Stone got it right, it is a trivial engineering problem. One micro switch or hall sensor to detect the presence of the plug. If the plug is still in, transmission will not engage, a warning message in the instrument cluster, and if you want to go for overkill a warning chime.
Ya know your all modern car companies are either evil or stuipd sthick is getting just a little old, IMHO.
The “yeah but they don’t build in interlocks to keep idiots from driving off with the gas pump nozzle in place” argument doesn’t fly, either. A gas-nozzle interlock would require installing a special mechanical (i.e. relatively failure-prone) sensor and an electrical wire to an area where no electrical wire would normally be required; a plug-in interlock could piggyback on a voltage sensor and wiring that would need to be there anyway.
Yes, the mythos about preston Tucker’s abortive car was very relevant. However, a few facts:
-the Tucker car had some interesting features (like safety padding), but was not sunstantially better than competing models. in any case, nobody crash-teste cars back then.
-Tucker’s design used a humongous helicopter engine that guzzled gas.
-the company was never properly financed; these is considerable doubt that the company could have survived.
-Tucker went to jail for stock fraud.
So what is keeping entreprenuers from making and selling electric cars? Nothing…except the public won’t buy them. SOLECTRIA (Wilmington, MA0 used to make electric cars 9the converted GEO METRO cars from gas to lectric). After making perhaps 200, they dropped the effort, becuase the cars had inadequate rane and capacity. Electric cars will come when better battries or fuel cells are developed; not until.
So you don’t think that the idea of someone bringing their car to your shop with an engine problem, and you saying to them, “We can have your engine fixed in two days. In the meantime, would you like a rental engine to use, so that you can keep your car while we fixe the engine?” wouldn’t pay off? How often do you have customers complain that it’s taking too long to fix their car?
Neither are heated seats, self adjusting mirrors, cup holders, etc., etc., etc., but people like 'em.
Never said that it wasn’t a simple engineering problem. I don’t think that modern car companies are stupid or evil. I think they’re lazy.
Horseshit. Having crawled around the inside of a Tucker and other cars from that era, I can say that there’s a significant difference between Tuckers and other cars of that era. Read the thread in my sig.
Again, horseshit. The engine was a flat 6, 335 cubic engines unit, which is smaller than the largest engines available during that era. The car also got 20 MPG, which is what the average car gets today. The Tucker was also 20 feet long, which most cars today aren’t. I own a 1969 Chrysler Newport, which has roughly the same dimensions and weight of the Tucker, it is equipped with a 383 engine and gets a whopping 16 MPG on average.
The company’s financing was adequate for it to begin operations, and it could have gone on to manufacture automobiles had it not been for the negative publicity surrounding the repeated investigations of the SEC. The Tucker Corporation survived into the 1960s building helicopter engines. Kaiser-Frazer (who produced cars starting in 1946) and built cars that were dogs in comparison to every other car on the road at the time, managed to survive up until almost 1970. If a crappy, ugly car building company like Kaiser, could make it that long, then Tucker, who built better cars, surely could have made it that long had he been allowed to go into production.
No, he didn’t He was acquitted on all charges.
It’s going to take more than better batteries to make electric cars practical. You can’t have rapid recharge cycles without superconducting wires. At present, the only way we can use them is by immersing them in supercooled liquid. That’s expensive, difficult to handle in something flexible, and dangerous for the average schmuck to handle.
I’m a tree-hugging liberal, but even I realized that it’s not the car companies that killed the electric car. It’s the shortcomings of the car itself. Sure, the majority of Americans’ driving is short distances, but this country was built on its wide-open spaces and the freedom to travel them. Cars that have a range of less than 300-350 miles before refueling/recharging just aren’t going to sell, period, be they gas or electric. And how many people are going to be able to afford to buy/rent a second conventional car when they want to make long trips? Ain’t gonna happen.
Americans are a lot of things, and American car manufacturers are a lot of things, but I doubt they’re electric car killers. The inherent shortcomings in the car are responsible for a lot.
The one thing I don’t understand is why the car companies wanted their electric cars back from the lessees. That they wanted to stop making them, sure: sometimes there just isn’t enough of a market. But the cars that were already out there - why not just sell them to the lessees, who obviously wanted to keep them? How is the manufacturer better off by reclaiming the cars and turning them into scrap? I’m mystified.
Una, I generally respect your expertise in power-plant-related issues, but my Googling didn’t turn up much with respect to either regions faced with rolling blackouts (Texas had a spike of unusual heat this April where sudden A/C use caused rolling blackouts, but other than that, the only American references I could find were to the Enron-induced problems in California in 2000-01) or to power plant construction protests (found a couple on Indian reservations, but other than that, it was all overseas or ancient history).
If my research has been insufficient, I’m sure you can correct me here.
About a year back, I started getting really, really pissed off whenever I had to refill my tank. It made me furious to think about 1. Gas prices 2. Terrorists presumably being funded by oil dollars and 3. Certain politicians who also benefit from oil profits. I finally decided to find a way to reduce my oil use to an absolute minimum. After researching all the available alternatives, including hybrids and electrics, as well as biodiesel, I came upon the only vehicle in the bunch that used a fraction of the gas my old buick required, while producing low emissions. I can also go into any filled parking lot and still find available parking.
Because the most logical vehicle out there for low gas use and low emissions is a motorcycle. I was very anti-motorcycle my whole life, now I ride every day to work. I used to need 10 gallons of gas a week, now I need 1.
Motorcycles are risky and I would have gotten a car if I could find one that made sense. None of the EVs, hybrids or anything else out there makes sense when you look at it in the big picture.
I’m waiting for biodiesel to mature. Then I’ll convert the engine of my Suzuki
What I’m waiting for is a car that isn’t much more than an enclosed motorcycle with some airbags. Maybe something along the lines of this.
Another advantage of motorcycles (and cars that don’t seat two people side by side, if they should ever be mass-produced) besides fuel economy is that they can ride side by side in what is now a single lane of traffic. After a certain point, you can’t cram more lanes of asphalt into our cities, so why not make the vehicles half as wide so you can have twice the lanes?
My issue with cars like that is that I can’t fit into them. At 6’7’‘, I found I was limited even in the motorcycles I could ride. Most of the ones I test rode felt like riding my neices’ trike. There’s no way I could squish myself into that VW, even though it does look pretty cool.
To bring this hijack back to the topic, there’s another big problem with the current generation of EVs and other efficient cars. Effecient has a distrubing tendency to mean “Smaller”. A lot of us simply can’t drive smaller cars because we’re not small.
It also means that while someone a foot shorter than me might be able to coax 120 miles out of an EV before it ran out of batteries, put my 250 pound carcass behind the wheel and you’d probably cut it down to 95 miles.
That thing is quite small, but it was designed to go 100km on 1 liter of gas (diesel, actually). That’s something like 235 mpg. If they ever mass-produced something like that, I have no idea whether they’d make it big enough for folks of your size, but they’d certainly sacrifice a bit of gas mileage to make it big enough so most Americans could fit in one. Even if it ‘only’ got 100 mpg, it would be a huge gas-saver.
Because some people would try to finagle service for their unsupported vehicle anyway, and when it’s not forthcoming at nearly any price due to lack of technicians they will tell all their friends spinning it as a lack of support by the companies, thereby harming their reputation (as a producer of poor quality vehicles and/or bad customer service)? At least that might be the thought process behind that.
I just get the feeling that you are doing Americans a disservice by insinuating that they are lazy, cheap and stupid because they can’t be convinced to go for electric cars?!
I think that maybe the US has had it too good for too long in terms of petrol prices and hence car prices, so yes there will probably be people who’ll resist some poxy electric car that has to be labour intensive to make it go. Basically, as I see it, there are few other options available and we are running out of oil.
In my city we have been recycling for years - plastics, paper and glass. Yes, it can be a pain in the butt, but otherwise the landfill issue will come back to bite us. I see major correlations between attitudes towards recycling and attitudes towards changing to sustainable car “fuels” - it will take more time and planning and technical development but basically, embrace it!
Parts of Europe are way ahead of the US and NZ in how they recycle, use small electric cars and look after the planet.
