If $4/gallon gas is bad, just wait

"Judging from the futures markets, shock at the gas pump is bound to get worse. Maybe much worse.

"Since the beginning of the year, benchmark oil and gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange both have increased by more than a third, but the average retail price of gasoline in the U.S. has risen by 22%. That bodes ill for consumers..."

Wall Street Journal:

formatting link

Reply to
Ed
Loading thread data ...

thank ed... not!!

----------------------------------------------------------------

formatting link

Reply to
ds549

Unless our congress comes to its' senses and develops an energy plan instead of simply fighting our oil development, I not only see huge price increases, but shortages, rationing, many businesses going under, and the economy in recession.

Reply to
Jerry

Many energy plans have been developed. The problem is that actual consumers of gas and oil have not bought off on any of them by changing their buying habits.

Recent studies have shown that fueling a passenger car costs around 30% of the total cost of owning it, and furthermore that fueling the same vehicle with electricity (if it were an electric car) would cost about 1/3 of what fueling it with gasoline costs. And 50% of the US electric power is coal-generated, and we have another century of coal left, long enough to get a large number of wind and solar projects online. Even the battery problem has been solved with the development of large Li-Ion batteries. It's pretty clear that if the nation's passenger car fleet was switched over to electric, the remaining part of the fleet that drives long-haul (interstate trucking, etc.) would be sustainable with biodiesel.

Hwever, the customers have yet to materialize for electric vehicles. It was thought that once it was cheaper to fuel cars with electricity that this would happen, but that time was passed years ago and it still has not happened.

Your dealing with a large amount of social inertia. And stupidity.

The other problem is that sooner or later we will pull out of Iraq and when we do, and that money drain ceases and the budget finally gets balanced, the dollar will begin rising in relation to other countries currencies, and the cost of oil and gas will fall again - not to the levels it was, but maybe from $5 a gallon back to $3.50 a gallon - and the gasoline proponents will then immediately run around telling people that high gas prices were just a blip, there's still plenty of oil, yadda yadda yadda, and it is going to take another 10 years for people to finally see through that as well.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

I can't see the public not wanting a "good" electric car or a nat gas one. The GM volt, I believe targeted for something like 2010 is to go 40 miles with an overnight charge and then use gas. However, the current batteries have a habit of catching fire. Anyway, if there exists good alternatives to gasoline passenger cars, IMO these should be mandated and presented to the public as ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil - IMO if the plans were good, the mandate would be accepted. Currently, it's getting difficult to find a hybrid.

Reply to
Jerry

"Ed" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@msgid.frell.theremailer.net...

I'm not shocked yet and neither is most of America as holiday driving is only expected to be reduced by 1%. Call me when it gets to $6/gal, then I will be more concerned. But that is where it needs to go to effectively reduce consumption.

Fred

Reply to
FrediFizzx

It's not "social" inertia or stupidity. Your figures do not take into account the most expensive drawback to a mass changeover to electric vehicles; the cost of purchasing those vehicles. That's more of an economic inertia.

Reply to
Tim J.

I tend to agree and maybe even higher. I personally will use all I want unless there is a shortage. Businesses will eventually pass these costs on to the consumer or go out of business. This could result in the worst of situations - failing economy and inflation. Meanwhile we are selling the country to OPEC.

Reply to
Jerry

It's interesting to see that only a couple years ago, the oil companies were on television, in newspapers, and in courts demanded to explain themselves and thier profits. this year, the focus is on the consumer, and thier explanation of what else they are going to cut back so that they will still be able to spend the same amount in the car during the traveling season. that being said we have to ask a couple questions: - why are oil companies out of the media? - can we really see consumers stop using thier cars? - when oil/gas could find its price equilibrium?

Reply to
Chris.Burg

Actually from what I read over 50% of the crude we import comes from the western hemisphere, not OPEC. A large portion of the balance, come from the Brits

Reply to
Mike hunt

It doesn't matter where we get our oil from as OPEC still influences global prices. If OPEC wasn't supplying other countries, then those other countries would be buying from the sources the US buys from. Countries tend to buy oil from closest sources to reduce shipping costs. The US buys a lot of oil from Canada and Mexico. Mexican production is declining.

Fred

Reply to
FrediFizzx

It is not stupidity...our head would tell us to do better, but our head in analized.

It is, to some extent, social inertia.

Every great trip starts with a single step.. My point is that there has been no significant movement toward a liveable energy policy. As all of us have pretty much agreed, people in the USA buy gas guzzlers because that is what they want to buy, the expensives of owning such a beast have not been perceived as being too great, and we really have no leadership toward, nor feeling for, conservation.

It may take an whop up 'side the head to make Americans aware of the bad side of energy dependence upon foreign nations.

Reply to
HLS

Very little comes from the Brits. About 10 times as much petroleum comes from Canada (from whom we import them most) than the UK. Our biggest source of imports are Canada (2451 thousand barrels of petroleum per day through march) ), Saudi Arabia (1556), Mexico (1329) Nigeria (1126) and Venezuela (1146), UK (197). These countries account for most of our imports.

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

Reply to
Mike hunt

Where did I say anything about any of the countries being located in or outside of the Western hemisphere? I was quantifying where the oil comes from.

Do you need to act like a jerk all the time (and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt when I use the verb "act")?

However, only a small portion of the amount that does not come from the Western Hemisphere (less than 10%) comes from the UK, which, despite what you said, I don't consider a large portion of balance. Percentages are not your strength.

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

formatting link
"...According to GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, the worst decision of his tenure at GM was "axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. It didn't affect profitability, but it did affect image."[43] According to the March 13, 2007, issue of Newsweek, "GM R&D chief Larry Burns . . . now wishes GM hadn't killed the plug-in hybrid EV1 prototype his engineers had on the road a decade ago: 'If we could turn back the hands of time,' says Burns, 'we could have had the Chevy Volt 10 years earlier.'"[44]..."

"...The car was very popular with its lessees, but it was not known if anyone would have purchased a new electric vehicle at the time had it been offered for sale even at a "break even" price of US$35,000-40,000. (People will now, as is shown by the Tesla Roadster preorders.) A..."

Where I live in the Pacific NW, properly maintained cars that do not get in accidents will easily last 40 years. But, I rarely see a vehicle on the road that is older than 10 years old.

If GM had pushed electric cars the same way they pushed SUV's, there would be a very large percentage of them on the road today. The first EV1 was leased out 10 years ago.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

They are out of the media because none of the presidential candidates are willing to tackle the difficult issues since all of them are scared to death of what bringing in controversial issues might do to the election.

All of the candidates have basically agreed to avoid hot buttons like Abortion, Taxing, and suchlike, and talk about a specific set of generic issues. After all they know that the last 2 presidential elections ended in a tie based largely on party lines. Each of them knows that out of the gate they already have nearly 50% of the vote and all they really need is a few percent to win. Well, that few percent is going to come from the independent voters, and research shows that independent voters do not like controversy and will not turn out to vote if they sense it. So, even though the truth is that both parties have radically different approaches to problems, both candidates will play the Kumbiya card heavily, then once elected they will ignore what the independents want and serve their own parties.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

You might more accurately have said "if the American people had wanted the EV-1 as much as they wanted SUV's...". Car manufacturers can't push things on a buying public and see the kind of market success that the SUV craze saw. The only thing that can drive market success is desire on the part of the buying public.

Reply to
Mike Marlow

It is basically a question of the cost of maintaining the car. All kinds of parts can break and it costs to repair. Parts cost and if you do not do it yourself then a person doing the repair costs. Very often you see very large and expensive cars last very long. Eventually the repair costs get so high that it becomes a question of dumping it. Even if great many things in the car are good. People do the estimate all the time when the car breaks down. Is it worth the effort to get it fixed? It is pretty much the same with everything else. In the past repairmen came to peoples houses to fix machines. Not very many machines are fixed that way anymore.

Reply to
Gosi

And that's a "Chicken or Egg" problem - Whether there are enough people out there who will pay a premium for a Hybrid or All-Electric car to make the engineering and production worth it. But if you never develop the product they will never line up to buy it.

Problem is there are too many people who want one and do not have the resources to build their own. Look at all the Eco-Nuts in Hollywood being driven to the Oscars and Emmy's in a chauffeured Prius or Insight to show their Eco Cred...

Many of the EV1 lessees offered to buy the cars form GM, but that meant that GM would have to provide spare parts and technical support for at least 12 years - and like dummies they wanted to cut and run.

G.M. learned, but it was the wrong lesson. If the market moves and you don't, your company is soon left by the wayside. Outside of the few Pennsylvania and Iowa areas with large Amish and Mennonite populations, it's really hard to sell buggy whips and horse-collars.

The smart thing would have been to sell off the EV1's and continue gathering long-term reliability data - re-engineer the components, get them out in use and see what lasts and what doesn't in the real world. The kind of people who would buy them would talk the engineers' ears off with useful feedback if they had the cars. The parts supply cost would have been nothing, most of the chassis parts are standard parts-bin pieces.

Then come out with the next generation car, build a pilot production line and make a few thousand, and get them out there to start racking up real world test miles too. By the time you get to a Mark IV or V they would have had a viable Full Hybrid with all the bugs out and be ready to crank up the line...

-->--

Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.