62 MPG by the Year 2025

Duh.

Giving up motorized transportation altogether means civilization shuts down and massive starvation.

Well, that is certainly true, but necessity is the mother of invention.

I take you've never seen a movie of the WWII era with a car with a gas generator on top of it.

So, you think we'll be selling bikes to the Chinese?? :)

Selling bikes to the Chinese? The Rickshaw was invented in America. cuhulin

What Merle Haggard sang in the Six Pack movie,,, We will all be drinking that Green Bubble Up and eating that Rainbow Stew. cuhulin

And we all won't have any teeff! YeeHaw!

teeff? A woman in a Baton Rouge chatroom, about eight years ago she said, My toofs hurt.I told her, At least you have some toofs, I put mine in a cup of that fizzy stuff every night before I go to bed. cuhulin

m6onz5a wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@i21g2000yqg.googlegroups.com:

Converting a car to run on natural gas is and has been dead simple for over 20 years now. Even more so with direct injection. The problem is the horrible smell coming out of the tailpipe and lack of performance. Hydrogen combustion is something that seems to bave been forgotten when fuel cells started to become popular. I can see no valid reason for it.

Feul cells *run* on Hydrogen, so both of what you mention are currently already used.

I saw a client that's a retired auto worker the other day and brought up the question of electric cars. He told me that the industry could convert to electricity in 18 months if it wanted to. This was a startling statement to me.

He said they're not going to do this because it would cause major lay-offs and disruptions in how we do things. Auto repair shops and parts stores would have to rethink their areas of focus in a world without transmissions, piston engines, all the fluids and oils and snake oils we've come to love - no more Marvel Mystery Oil! OTOH, Tire Warehouse et al. can probably rest easy until the flying car comes online in 2030. :-)

The guy figures it's going to take quite a while. "You and I probably won't live to see it happen." is the way he put it. He estimates that it'll take 15 years for the changeover. This was a startling statement to me. I was hoping to live slightly longer than that but it gives me comfort that there are at least one other cuckoo in this nest.

Of course, the guy could be just another crackpot however, I did trust him enough to let him walk out of my office with a thousand or so bucks worth of equipment with zero security deposit.

Utter nonsense.

If by some feat of magic there were to be an electric car that has the same capability and price as a conventional car and production of new conventional cars were outlawed, it would still take around a decade or two before a significant percentage of conventional cars were replaced.

In 2009 the median age of passenger cars in operation was 9.4 years.

This sort of has a tiny grain of truth to it, but a lot of it depends on how you define "electric cars."

For example, GM made a few EV-1 cars. They were kind of neat, and if they sold them today, they'd probably have a small but dedicated group of buyers and they'd lose their teeth in the process.

The thing is, it's one thing to make a small electric car with a limited range, and it's another thing altogether to get people to actually buy it.

It wouldn't be phenomenally difficult for GM to change all their plants over to making EV-1-type cars. It would be phenomenally difficult for GM to actually sell more than a handful of those cars because they are of limited utility for people living outside of a city.

So, yes the industry _could_ convert to making electric cars in 18 months if it wanted to, and the end result would be total collapse and a huge spike in the prices for used gasoline-burners. Even GM executives aren't quite that stupid.

--scott

I was kidding about the flying cars but deadly serious about the Marvel Mystery Oil.

Thanks for the stats. What we're predicting is that most of the new cars produced will be total electric. I'm guessing there'll still be some internal combustion piston engines around - mostly for riding lawn mowers. :-)

And if there are power outages which last days, weeks, months,,, what then? I don't know, but I believe gasoline/diesel powered vehicles will still be popular for many years to come.And don't forget, ''Big Oil''. cuhulin

Since the electric car is basically a flop in the market place with trivial numbers sold world wide, what miracle are you expecting to occur that will cause most cars produced to be total electric?

The dark forces of Big Oil will do everything it can to preserve the machinery in place to service this legacy of the age of the steam locomotive but in the end, the forces of truth and light will squash them as surely as a rolling watermelon flattens fleeing ants.

Are you or have you ever been a member of "Big Oil?"

Then we are in big trouble because the gas pumps won't work. When I was a kid and gas pumps had mechanical counters, you could open up the front cover of the pump and there was a hand crank in there that you could use to pump gas out during a power outage. I don't think those have been in place on pumps since the seventies.

The one thing I have learned is not to make predictions of any sort because too many of the ones I made turned out all wrong.

--scott

This is true, the fully electric car ain't ready for prime time although it would work out great for me. A hybrid would be wasted on me but I'm hopeful that these cars will catch on.

I see your point.

Have you ever had any grasp of reality whatsoever?

Future generations will scarcely believe that we ran our cars with gasoline fueled, internal combustion, reciprocating piston engines. We sure had our fun with them so who cares? :-)