Re: Electric cars head toward another dead end

My main ride for the last 5 months has been a Volt. Too many longer drives lately have made my EV portion less than 50%, which equates to about 60mpg. When my driving habits settle down it should be more like

90mpg. It will never be fully EV for me but it is for many other owners though.

Take a Volt for a spin. It's no racecar but I love that silent electric torque launch and it still surprises me sometimes when passing at highway speeds. My last car was a V6 Camry which did have about 100 more hp which I thought I'd miss. But I don't because the smooth torquey nature of electric drive makes up for it. I've surprised a few asswipes at stop lights which pisses off my wife. My excuse is oh sorry I didn't mean to take off quite so fast, it's a sensitive pedal. That story is still working although I may be chalking up a higher number of eye rolls from her than usual.

The Volt is about 3500. About 400 of that is the battery. It's a nice car to drive and the weight is part of what prevents it feeling cheap. I love the electric smoothness and the low CG and flat cornering.

Apples and oranges. Bugs are absolute POS compared to a Volt or even a Prius. But if you want small and can do without features then take that bug logic all the way to its natural conclusion.

So what? When the Volt runs out of battery you just keep going and usually don't notice the changeover to ICE.

Pure electrics should be great for many as commuter vehicles or second vehicles.

The Volt will be a long payoff for me. But at least it has a payoff, unlike a boat or a quad or a million other things. Besides I already have lots of toys and I'm enjoying that for a change I did something about fuel costs other than whining. My next project is making my home (including the car) net-zero. Many of my friends could afford to do similar but the simple fact is that to a man they'd rather spend their money on truly useless crap. I don't eat out much but recently we had dinner with some friends who do. About $75 per couple which isn't hard to do these days. During dinner my friend says he can't justify buying LED light bulbs. Yeah a $20 entree makes perfect sense to him but a $20 lightbulb, forget it. Let's face it, the tech and the cost of electrics can already fill the bill for many people like me and most of my middle class friends. The real problem is that most of us prefer to use our disposable income on baubles while putting the cost of doing anything about the environment onto future generations. That's never going to change and tech can't fix it.

Well, definitely not the chair bound, that's for sure. Add electric cars to the endless list of things that the pimpletons, gunners, bonkers, etc will never be able to afford. But my qawd they will never run out of hours to bless the world with their tunnel vision about every stupid f****ng notion that comes into their heads. Maybe they're practising for the day when they'll get paid for every post. Which will be the day AFTER the great cull I guess.

60 mpg is not shabby.

When my driving habits settle down it should be more like

On full ICE mode, no electric contribution whatsoever, what do you think your mpg's would be?

The point was, the insistence on triple-digit hp is not doing the "energy cause" any favors. Nor is the bloated poundage of vehicles.

Bleeve me, ahm not argering in favor of our species. I do wonder about the Tesla tho. That car seems to have broken thru some mileage barriers, but it's tough to separate hype from price from reality.

All-electrics can't get much market share until there's a battery swap infrastructure. Lots of hurdles there. So that market is limited to second-car short commuters. I don't think the Leaf or Tesla will do well. Main reason is something I think they call "range fear." Probably similar to a caver who has "lantern fear." Which is, "If these batteries die, I'm f***ed." The Volt is a real elegant solution. Most of those who knock it don't know much about its practical or technical aspects. It's quite an American achievement. They just don't like GM, Obama. unions, government "handouts," etc. Fuck them. Nobody's forcing them to buy it, and for all the rest they can go vote to change the government, or put on their skirts and go protest like the Code Pinkers. Big problem is unsubsidized price. But with the gov rebate they only run about $32.5. Still too rich for me. But you can get a lot less new car for more money. Leasing isn't a bad way to put your toe in the water with the Volt, and GM is pushing that. From what I've seen from reading the Volt forum, buyers are what I'll just call yuppies. They have money and like technology. Throw in whatever percentage of them that don't like gasoline purveyors.

I for one don't give a rat's ass about "the environment." I still use incandescent light bulbs and drive a vehicle that gets about 14 mpg on a good day. And loving it.

Especially considering that it's NOT a flyweight gutless econobox. It's a really nice car and it's a pleasure to drive. But 60 is nothing for a Volt. Check out the site below to see people getting 5000 or better.

It's a shame that more of the people who can afford it, don't step up and support the tech.

It's about 40. Unless it's in "mountain mode", where it can be increasing battery state of charge while driving on ICE power. That's inefficient but I've used it a couple times on extended trips to ensure that the battery is sufficiently charged at the destination to allow friends to drive the car on battery alone.

At that website you can view mileage stats from hundreds of Volt owners. Click on the top of the columns to resort by category. A Volt shopper can estimate his projected EV percentage, sort by percentage, and then see the stats of current owners with a similar EV percentage.

Try the BMW Active E. I got to drive one briefly a while ago and it was a very, very fun car by any standard.

Range is too limited for folks out here in the sticks, and charging is still a problem, but that's what you get with a new technology competing with one that already has an extensive and active infrastructure.

I agree, but then I'm still driving a carbureted car to work every day, because it still keeps running fine and remains fun to drive. That's a little part of the adoption problem right there: people don't replace their cars as often as they used to.

--scott

Because nobody has a fuel cell that will work on road gasoline yet without being poisoned.

No, the fuel cell requires a flammable fuel. It oxidizes the fuel using oxygen from air, and develops current directly from that oxidation.

The fuel cell can be designed to work on a variety of fuels. If you want to create water as your only byproduct, you have to use hydrogen which is a flammable gas (and a pain to work with even by flammable gas standards).

You can build a fuel cell that will run off methanol or ethanol, or off of propane. Since these fuels have carbon in them, your exhaust is now full of carbon compounds (hopefully carbon dioxide if you did it right). In general these designs also have a limited lifespan because they become clogged up with combustion by-products.

The holy grail right now is to build a fuel cell that can operate off of gasoline without becoming hopelessly clogged up after a short running time. The fuel cell gives you more efficient use of the fuel than an internal combustion engine, especially when you are not requiring peak output.

You can't run a fuel cell on nitrogen.... nitrogen combines with itself and it doesn't like to let go or combine with other things. If you ever see a compound that contains nitrogen, like nitromethane or nitrocellulose or trinotrotoluene, it's a compound that took a lot of energy to make and is apt to want to release that energy fast.

This is true, and it would seem that retrofitting a commercial fuel cell into a current hybrid vehicle would not be a huge job. The hard part would mostly be software.

In spite of the fact that fuel cells have been with us since NASA developed them for the Gemini program, we still don't have any that will run off a convenient fuel that we can already distribute.

--scott

Having helped build some I have an interest in electric vehicles. So Thursday when I picked up an ordered part at the Honda dealer I checked their showroom.

Every car in there was gas-only.

I pretended to be interested in a hybrid and the salesman tried to talk me out of them based on the extremely long payback period and our relatively short stretches of stop-and-go traffic. The gasoline 2013 Civic is rated at 39MPG, the hybrid only 5 MPG better for another $6000.

I had a 1978 Accord that routinely gave me 36 - 38 MPG so I know they can do it. I logged every drop of gas and oil that went into that car as well as all the maintenance.

Do you really want to provoke the EPA into making generators meet car emission standards?

The F-150 isn't economically viable for the majority of Americans. They sell a lot of F-150's. The Volt isn't an "electric car." It's a plug-in hybrid.

The Volt is an amazing technical achievement and should be far more popular than it is. One reason it isn't is that society is trending towards what I'll politely call the short attention span mentality. The afflicted prefer things that don't require any effort to understand. The Volt is the opposite. I was explaining to someone that it only has a 10 gallon gas tank and he said that was obviously too small, his car has 16, yada yada. GM's main mistake may turn out to be overestimating the intelligence of the market.

Nitrogen as a fuel for a fuel cell would be quite the trick. Liquid nitrogen as an energy stoage medium for a thewrmal expasion engine is a totally different system

You're nuts. If they're economically viable, then why don't the majority of Americans own them? Because they want no part of a pick-up truck. The majority of Americans aren't '"cargo haulers." And pick-ups aren't that "popular" either. Very small part of vehicle sales, though they sell well because businesses, farmers and tradesmen find them useful or essential. I've had pick-ups and full size vans. Hauled stuff with them too. But whenever I moved I rented a 20' box truck. Made the pick-up look like a tinker toy. I've had a lot of stuff hauled since I had pick-ups and vans. Free delivery or a 10-50 buck charge. Most of that can be avoided by loading into the back seat of mid-size sedan or tying it on the roof. Doesn't add up to a hill of beans compared to +$30k for a decent new pick-up. But if you want a pick-up, go for it.

This is a car tech group. I stick mostly to that. You're a political monkey. Here's my last words to you. Go f*ck yourself.

Around here the majority of suburban homeowners DO have pickup trucks parked out front and use them to haul the construction, lawn and garden supplies that would mess up the wife's SUV. Do you live in a neighborhood where no one dirties their hands with their own maintenance?

Actually, most do use lawn services, and I'm an exception. Hardly any pick-ups around this suburb, except tradesmen. Plenty of SUV's. But I have no problem putting 500 lbs of topsoil in my car trunk. Done it more than once. Same with pavers, concrete blocks, etc. Also tied plenty of stuff to the roof, including 4x8's. Never hurt the car, or dirtied it that a vacuum wouldn't fix. But that's all pretty infrequent. Every time I've had appliances or furniture delivered it was free. I paid HD to deliver a pallet of pavers once, and paid them to deliver a couple 24' 2x10's once. A half ton pick-up wouldn't have handled the pallet, and no pick-up the 24's any better than my car. Think the HD delivery charge was 50 bucks each time. Just don't need a pick-up. Doesn't make financial sense. Other may see it differently.

Your choice of gutter language does not support your claim to be a professional anything.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

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And I'm a Professional Engineer. Bikes are fun to ride and to mess with in the garage.