h/t to Dave G
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Replace the presidential limousine with a slightly used Volt
“We can break our dependence on oil…and become the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” President Obama January 2011 State of the Union address.
If one million of these vehicles were electric instead of gasoline-fueled, 4.5 million metric tons less carbon dioxide would be emitted at the tailpipe, or 0.08 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions forecast to be emitted from energy combustion in 2015. Of course tailpipe emissions are not life cycle emissions, and hence the carbon dioxide emissions to generate the electricity must also be taken into account. Since two-thirds of our electricity in 2015 is expected to be generated from fossil fuels, the carbon dioxide emissions mitigated are 1.5 million metric tons or 0.03 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions forecast to be released by energy combustion in 2015.
Deloitte Consulting interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers and found that only “young, very high income individuals,” making more than $200,000 a year, would consider purchasing an electric car sometime during the next 10 years.
A 2011 Chevy Volt sold for $40,280; the same year a Mercedes-Benz C350 sold for $39,990. And that is after taxpayer subsidies.
The U.S. government wants to choose future automobile technology for consumers by using taxpayer money to subsidize the electric car market. According to David Littman at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “I have never seen an industry that receives subsidies for any period of time like this that didn’t fail and then cost taxpayers even more.”
Institute for Energy Research – http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2011/03/10/obama-administration-pushes-electric-vehicles/
Innovation usually takes time to take hold. Electric cars is a good idea, especially when more coal fired plants change over to natural gas. Maybe it won’t be long before one can charge up their cars with the solar panels on the roof of their house. Survivalist should love being off the grid that way. Also, did you see where the government sold more of its GM stock, at a profit. I think they said the government now owns a mere 7 percent. You won’t be able to call the Volt the Obama car for much longer.
Electric cars were first commercially available in 1897. How much more time are they going to need?
The Volt is a hybrid with a larger battery and a built in plug-in capability. The modern hybrid has been around for about 30 years, and is actually selling in much greater quantities for a much lower price in the form of the Prius and other competing models. The Volt was a solution looking for a problem. No one was clamoring for a $10,000 to $15,000 higher priced car just so they could run off battery for a little longer.
Also taxpayers are still out billions of dollars on the GM “bailout”. The reason the government owned the stock at all is because the government put $50 billion or so into the old GM, which then went bankrupt in a matter of months. Had that money not been thrown in, the company would have still gone bankrupt, just maybe a month or two earlier.
To call the stock sale a real profit, the taxpayers need to have gotten all their money back, plus the interest owed. Yet there are still maybe tens of billions that would need to be returned from sale of any remaining GM stock, and from Ally Financial which used to be the financing side of GM.
“Electric cars is a good idea”
They are extremely expensive, are good for short range trips only, and have to be plugged in. And UNPLUGGED! don’t forget that!
Just what exactly is the good idea?
Electric car nonsense
An electric vehicle will produce more carbon dioxide emissions and use more energy than its gasoline counterpart of the same size and weight. For example, let’s use our Hollywood activists impressing his friends with his overpriced electric vehicle powered by an electrical power plant burning coal on a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona. For comparison purposes there are 115,000 Btu’s in a gallon of gasoline that will take a car of comparable size to the electric around 40 miles. Therefore a gasoline car will use 2875 Btu’s per mile. Meanwhile burning 115,000 btu’s of coal loses around 70% of its energy content in the conversion from coal to heat to steam to mechanical energy(generator) to electricity. (There’s a little problem called entropy where energy that does work creates losses in the form of lost heat, noise, friction, etc.) So of the original energy content we get 34,500 Btu’s of electricity. We’re not through yet because we lose another 5% warming bird’s feet in the power line going 1500 miles to Los Angeles. Then we convert the electrical energy to chemical energy (charging a battery) another 40% to 60% loss. Then we convert back to electricity to drive the wheel train another 10% minimum until we finally show up at the Oscars. So from the original 115,000 Btu’s of coal burned we probably get to utilize less than 15,000 Btu’s to actually move the vehicle. Assuming that the electric car also gets 40 miles to 115,000 btu’s we would have to burn about 900,000 Btu’s of coal to generate enough electricity to go the same distance as 1 gallon of gasoline. In short, the only accomplishment of the electric car is to move its emissions to Arizona rather than down town Los Angeles make a Hollywood moron feel good and increase fossil fuel demand.
Tascar just opened a recharge station at Frisco CO. A volt owner can now drive all the way to Vail before the car dies.
Nice to be optimistic, but choose a warm day, given this Volt review:
“When the weather was in the mid-30s, the predicted and actual ranges averaged around 30 miles, with smaller errors than we saw when it was less than 30 degrees.”
Wow that means that on Friday I might not be able to go downtown and back in a Volt.
Yes you can. Once the electric range is exceeded, the Volt switches to gasoline powerfro locomotion and to charge the battery.
Meanwhile Ernest hails the DOE green loans scam a ‘terrific success’ ! http://washingtonexaminer.com/energy-department-chief-hails-solyndra-as-a-terrific-success/article/2536594?utm_campaign=Fox%20News&utm_source=foxnews.com&utm_medium=feed
One presumes that the government shutdown means no Volt subsidies?
David Mackay in his famous analysis “Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air” (SEWTHA) makes a convincing case for electric cars, but seems to agree with Jeremy Clarkson that the hybrid Prius is a bucket of bolts.
Here’s a much better idea:
As city transport, they’d be OK – if they weren’t insanely expensive, but outside a city, hopeless.
Prius & its kin are a reasonable alternative, electric for pootling about town, without any polutants (ie particulate emissions) and a proper engine if you want to go further/faster/when you’re out of electricity.
The Volt DOES have a ‘proper’ engine for longer trips.
Fuck the particles BS.
Modern combustion engines are cleaner than ever.
Air quality in modern cities cleaner than ever.
Prius and kin in terms of fuel efficience are beaten by the first BWM 5 series with a diesel engine.
It you drive a car, your 1 priority is safety in case of a crash.
Better take a Beamer than a fucking Prius
The entire shackling of the car industry is a disaster in the making.
It is total madness to replace a plastic fuel tank by a 250 kg battery.
If win mills are the symbol of men’s stupidity, electric cars are the symbol of men’s madness.
The real idea behind the introduction of electric cars is to reduce mobility, further the control state and use the plugged inns to stabilize the grid.
However, a battery pack has a limited number of cycles.
How much more government control do we accept?
In the Netherlands a 2005 diesel car is no longer aloud to enter green zones.
At the same time the Netherlands imports millions of tons of garbage from Napels Italy and dozens of other cities. This garbage is burned and nobody talks about the particulate emissions this is causing. All these measures directed at the public are nothing more but the imposing a doctrine on the people limiting their freedoms. This is Green Fascism.
Nothing more, nothing less.
In the end they want us to have a cradle to cradle economy which is total SB too.
They will import prestine forests from Gerogia to fire their coal plants and the population will be playing with their own shit to drive a methane fueld generator and energy prices will go through the roof.
We have to kick out the bastards before they kill us all.
You bring up several important points, but let me highlight your point about the limit number of recharge cycles battery packs have. Well before the end of the car’s life, those very expensive and proprietary battery packs will have to be replaced. Forgetting for a moment the environmental impact, the replacement cost will eat up all of the gas saved up to that point. Electric vehicles are not yet an economically viable technology. If you want to save fuel, get a diesel.
Right.
I do not know if the problem has been solved. But a couple of years ago, Chevy Volts were death traps. If you got into even a small collision, the car became an extreme fire hazard. Why? The damaged lithium batteries could generate sufficient hydrogen gas, such that a small spark could torch the car itself, the garage that it was parked in, and the house attached to that garage — thanks to Green technology.
High capacity, high performance battery packs are a hazard.
I am still flabbergasted by the Dreamliner Project replacing the APU by a battery pack.
This is going to destroy Boeing if they don’t scrap this technology.
That was more of a problem a while after the accident. The fix was that if Onstar gave alert of an accident, GM sent a team to come and drain the batteries. Not sure if that is still the case as they later made physical changes to the battery compartment or maybe the batteries.
All electric cars are potential fire hazards including the new Green Cult Feel Good, Good for Nothing Tesla BS: Watch it burn here and see the stocks tumble: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-02/tesla-plunges-potential-dilution-speculation-car-fire
Sanity and realism from Ron Paul: Country is Bankrupt, People are being Bamboozled: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-02/ron-paul-country-bankrupt-people-are-being-bamboozled
“Electric cars is a good idea”
– By what criteria? The market has spoken, and the result is EV’s suck.
“Maybe it won’t be long before one can charge up their cars with the solar panels on the roof of their house.”
– Actually it will be a long time, and probably a cold day in hell. Since EV owners would be expected to typically charge up their vehicles at night how is it that solar panels would be charging vehicles? How many watt-hrs do you think it takes to charge an EV battery pack? How much power do you think these weakling solar panels can make? Do you ever look at any leftard/”green” idea with even a modicum of discernment?
It’s not really a problem, Justa.
When you drive to work, you charge your second EV. Alternate driving days. See, an extra $40,000 car makes it easy. Oh, you’ll need a third car, say a $17,000 Civic, to drive when the sun don’t shine.
/sarc
The reality is that Government wants the battery of your car in the grid at night stabilize the grid due to the lack of solar. I think they have completely lost it.
When wind mills didn’t deliver, they decided to built bigger wind mills.
The same mentality has caught in with government Motors.
If you don’t sell the Volt, make a new car that comes at twice the price to compete the Tesla. The story from september but the content still up to date: http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/GM-Hopes-New-Battery-Tech-will-Steal-EV-Market-from-Tesla.html
I already though of a name for the new GM electric car: THE MORONIC
“steal EV market” ROTFLMFAO – I can’t even hit the link. These websites like oilprice.com & gas2.0 are so idiotic I can’t even take it right now.
Tesla’s couple thousand cars is a matket that GM wants to “STEAL” ? GM has canceled cars with 10X the volume of sales of any Tesla. Heck, Hummer’s worst sales period was probably better than Tesla’s best.
I have solar panels on my roof and my electric usage bill for last month, with significant air conditioning, was 15 bucks. I got the system last year and it will have paid for itself in another 3 or 4 years. When battery technology evolves to where it needs to be, renewable energy will fully come into its own.
Yes, and when we get fusion reactors making electricity, you’ll just pay a hookup fee and no rate charge.
Until then, it’s gross speculation.
And has nothing more to do with GM’s Volt failure than the solar panels on your roof.