SamSpade
Well-Known Member
London to Edinburgh by electric car: it was quicker by stagecoach - Telegraph
I swear, this made me laugh out loud.
I swear, this made me laugh out loud.
4. It has to be cheap enough that it can actually compete with other vehicles without huge subsidies. If, for example, electric cars cost half what a regular car did, people would be willing to try them. Right now, with the huge subsidies and the large upfront costs, the government is actually paying rich people to buy them, since there's no one else able to pay that much for them.
I wonder how that would sound as a campaign point - "paying rich people to buy a car".
We're too much into size and distance to let the small electric cars take off here.
2. You have an existing infrastructure to support the widespread use of electric vehicles (charging stations, etc.)
Along these lines...I wonder if the electrical grid could handle the load if a bunch of people had plug-in cars.
You just need a compelling reason to adopt a new idea, and they haven't done it yet.
Personally, I'm hoping that this isn't a scam:
Cella Energy says its hydrogen microbeads could fuel your car, cost $1.50 per gallon -- Engadget
Let look at a budding community in Fla for a good example of electric travel.
It's called "The Village's" The Community is fairly small , but it has everything right there in the community. Shopping Malls Hospitals Golf Courses, and best of all pathways built especially for Golf Carts.
Everyone has a Golf Cart there and they are pretty free from accidents because they don't intermingle with automobiles that often, and they don't have far to go to get what they need.
Of course 90% of them are retired and don't have to drive to work either.
Put a top on a Golf cart and basically you have the electric car.
Placing a Golf Cart in its basic form , Light, small, slow moving , sorry acceleration on the beltway and you have disaster.Small cars should be separated completely from larger vehicles. We have all seen the smart car, It's a death trap.
You can buy a good used Golf cart for about $2,000 dollars, Most have 6 Batteries to proplel them. at $110 dollars apiece, that means almost half the cost of the cart is just for the batteries.
Yes the battery in your electric car will someday need replacement.
While it is true that energy cannot be created, it can only be transformed or converted from one form to another, the electric motor is nearly 100% efficient and an internal combustion engine is around 50%.
Personally, I'm hoping that this isn't a scam:
Cella Energy says its hydrogen microbeads could fuel your car, cost $1.50 per gallon -- Engadget
Not totally accurate. High power electrical motors - hundreds of watts - are nearly that efficient, but you miss some of the big picture. The creation of electrical energy is inefficient; the transmission of electrical energy is inefficient; and during storage, a significant amount of electrical energy is discharged while doing nothing. So from the source of electricity - usually coal - to its appearance as kinetic energy on the road - a significant loss of energy ensues.
So while it's accurate to say that it is efficient in converting battery power to kinetic energy at drive time, you could conceivably lose ALL of that power just sitting in the garage doing nothing, while the gas in your tank loses none of it.
How high power do you want? One horsepower alone is over 1,400 watts. The generation and grid will be there whether we talk cars or lightbulbs or microwave ovens so that doesn't matter. Batteries have always been the hold-back on electric anything so don't buy any car electric or fossil fuel if you don't plan on driving it.
How high power do you want? One horsepower alone is over 1,400 watts. The generation and grid will be there whether we talk cars or lightbulbs or microwave ovens so that doesn't matter. Batteries have always been the hold-back on electric anything so don't buy any car electric or fossil fuel if you don't plan on driving it.