The shocking truth about electric cars

I read the 'article' Like everything else on liberty post its right wing hogwash. Not a bit of truth in it.

hehe,,,,, cuhulin

ben91932 wrote in news:6167a73e-07e8-4689-bd47- snipped-for-privacy@u6g2000prc.googlegroups.com:

Then it must be full of errors or lies.

Please tell us what statements in that article are erroneous or false.

We were ready for electric cars in the 1920s. They were quite popular for a while.... then cheap internal combustion mostly put them out of business and stopped development.

--scott

I briefly read the "article" again. It's one mans opinion, nothing factual, and poor reporting at that. I hear the same fear about powerplant capacity from a number of sources and it's just not true, at least not until EV's number in the

10s of millions nationwide. (most ev's charge at night when powerplants are virtually idling anyway)

What parts of the 'article' did you agree with?

Ben

It takes a bit of commitment to dig in to these. All the HV stuff is clearly labeled. No different than working on any other car.. buy a good manual and have at it. You do need a pair of good quality insulated gloves and an accurate meter however. Ben

what about the color blind - is it "clearly labeled" for them? they comprise up to 10% of the male population.

Indeed. The decline of electric cars began with the invention of the self starter by Kettering and Cadillac in 1912. Ben

Color blindness isn't much considered from what I've seen. You've got + and - on most batteries. GM uses unique electrical connectors a lot, so you can't misplug. I flunked the color test when I went into the Navy, so they kept me away from rates that worked with wires, and aviation. I can easily see red/green/blue etc, but the striped wires can trip me up. Schematics work for me, but I don't do much beyond simple wiring.

--Vic

it's not at all unusual. for caucasians, it's up to 10%. something like 6% global males, depending on heritage. [it's a disadvantage for the individual, but a benefit overall for hunters in groups, hence it is a genetically stable trait.]

how are you with orange? that's the hybrid h.v. color iirc.

Why not something like that? I reckon a lot more Hydrogen fuel stations would need to be built, or added to already existing gas stations.Top Gear once did a test on a Honda Clarity hydrogen fuel car. cuhulin

No problem that I can tell. It's probably "mild" color blindness. Only found out when I took the Navy dot test, forgot the name. So I wasn't color blind my first 17 years (-: Navy is unbending on the dot test. When I got my Coast Guard merchant marine license they used a yarn test. A small box with different colored yarns. The guy doing the test asked me to pull different colored yarns out of the box, and I did so without hesitation. When he finished he asked me if I ever failed a color test and I said yes, why do you ask. Said I went for some greens farther away than the one he would have grabbed. Still passed me though. Different standards. Only thing I notice is I don't pick up greens at longer distances. So I can come up on a traffic light at high speed and get surprised by the yellow. Of course the women in my life have always wanted to set my clothes out for me when I tell them my color is off. But that's a good thing.

--Vic

there was a time when the navy used to screen /for/ color blindness - ww2, before radar and friend or foe recognition systems.

the reason it's a genetically stable trait is because it's better for seeing through camouflage, and thus advantages the hunting pack that is able to have an individual identify prey or a predator better. but it's a disadvantage to the individual that might pick the wrong colored [toxic] berry if they're not with the pack.

ben91932 wrote in news:97ff4159-dc85-472d-b5c4- snipped-for-privacy@g32g2000pri.googlegroups.com:

This has nothing to do with "agree", it has to do with truth and factual accuracy.

You alleged, and I quote verbatim: "Like everything else on liberty post its right wing hogwash. Not a bit of truth in it."

So, I ask again: Where are the lies and/or errors in that article?

I may have over-spoken... The quotes about powerplant capacity are bogus... *absolutely* Range goes down with A/C not completely away.. The one that pisses me off the most is the claim about increased CO2, which is a flragrant lie.. IMHO it's nothing more than a hack piece by an under-informed EV skeptic.

What is your opinion? I'd really like to know so I can tell if you are truly interested in the subject or just yanking my chain. Ben

ben91932 wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@dp9g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:

So you know more about power generation than the head of an electric utility?

How far does it go down? Enough to make the A/C impractical to use? If so, then what the article says is substantially true.

"...if the extra electricity isnt generated by renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide emissions will go up, not down".

That sounds pretty plausible to me.

I think you're a greenie who's upset that somebody disagrees with his religion.

the thermodynamic efficiency of the power plant is decent. but the combined losses after transmission aren't so. and by the time you've charged a battery, with all the heat losses charging creates, and again on discharge, you're starting to slip down to diesel levels. we should drop all this electric car nonsense and go to diesel like they have in europe.

[and don't buy this b.s. about "there's only so much diesel in a barrel of crude". modern catalysis is so good, you can make almost all of that barrel into diesel if you wanted.]

electric only makes sense if you're using non-fossil energy like hydro or geothermal. or nuclear.

I can't speak for him, but I know more about power generation than the head of an electric utility.

In fact, looking at the board of directors of Dominion Resources (parent company of Dominion Virginia Power), there's only one person with any actual background in electricity. Everyone else has a background in banking, accounting, or law.

This is why power companies get sucked into stupid ideas like BPL; they really don't have anyone at the top tier who really have any clue about electrical power.

Before the government takeover, the board of directors of GM was just as bad. Nobody there who had ever worked on a car. In fact, half the people on the board didn't even drive, they had chauffeurs to drive them. What the hell did they know about cars?

This, in short, is what killed GM and is killing US industry on the whole, I believe.

Personally, I am in favor of electric vehicles because they allow us to put the noise and pollution someplace very distant from the car that is being driven; that alone is worth something. They certainly aren't a panacea but I think there's a valid use for them in more densely-populated areas.

But I don't think that anything practical is going to come of it until we have more car companies that are run by people who know about cars and who are willing to invest in research and development.

Ford is maybe an exception to the rule, but even Ford has an awful lot of accountants and lawyers up there.

--scott

absolutely. amen. look at german industry, and it's all run by engineering phd's. and that used to be strongly so in japan too.

after i was done with my engineering and materials ed, i went looking for jobs in industry, and when interviewing with big name firms, always asked about management progression pathways. without exception, the response was always that they didn't promote engineers and research people to management, they hired accounting, economics, business and law grads instead.

the first time i heard this, naively and incredulously, i asked: "so no one running the [insert operations] division actually knows about how the product's made, what drives production efficiencies, or what your customers actually need it to do?" the silence that followed lasted about a minute. the interviewers, [one h.r. and one manager] looked at each other. you could see the unspoken speech bubbles: "um, yes, but we can't say that. and we can't hire anyone who might embarrass us either". so i ended up back-dooring into management via the accounting route. f*ck 'em.

[oh, and accounting math vs engineering math??? the fact that those guys think accounting math is /hard/ tells you pretty much all you need to know!!!]

there are exceptions to the above of course, and historically, there have been many fine firms that have been started and run by engineers, chemists, technologists, and people that actually "do" stuff. but by and large, the modern "mba" culture has so infected the board room, anyone who doesn't want to sit and listen to narrow-minded myopia just steps down and leaves them to it. again, f*ck 'em. and the results we see splashed across the business sections our newspapers every day.