Posted on 12/03/2012 10:22:33 AM PST by jazusamo
Excellent post. Also it needs to be said that electrics are MANDATED in Crazyfornia. If you don’t sell some electrics, you can’t sell any cars at all.
And Crazyfornia is too large a market to spurn.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/01/environmentalists-laud-californias-electric-car-mandate-/1#.UL0RfXdkiSk
And it’s ugly to boot!
Your arguments sound logical, but you're using them to pitch government-subsidized non-competitive electric vehicular schemes.
Looks like the defunct Pontiac Aztech design team found a new home. Nothing like dusting off a failed marketing design and then slapping it onto a failed marketing propulsion system. That’s progress?
Goobermint Motors
We do it all to you!
Ingenious—another coal-powered car!
Which is good, right? American resource produced by Americans.
1. The Chevy Volt is a gas engine-electric battery hybrid so that if the trip becomes too long for the battery's state of charge, the gas engine kicks-in to recharge the batteries as one drives. The Spark is all batteries so what happens when your battery runs down on the road?
2. The Volt's battery pack is built by A123 Systems that is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. [There has been news that Johnson Controls, Inc. is negotiating to buy A123 Systems, but nothing is final.] Is (was) the Spark battery built by the same firm? What happens when the battery packs need replacing? Will spares (new or re-manufactured) be available and at what cost.
3, Why would anyone design a car that's powered by coal? Obama is closing down coal fired power plants (needed to charge your car batteries) and coal mines that provide their product to the power plant?
4. Is this whole Green Car hype a scam by people who want to impress their friens how socially “with it” they are?
So you are saying the 70,000 American lives that air pollution takes yearly are unimportant, not to mention lives in the rest of the world. Too sad.
I am not at all advocating the government force people to pay for this with tax incentives. Rather, like any other crime, people that kill people must pay a price. Bible law tells us how to handle that. If current electricity and travel costs actually factored in the cost to human lives there would be no need for incentives. The cost would be so ridiculously high from lawsuit settlements, that alternative clean energy would look really cheap. But I understand, you would rather have a little bit sheaper energy and kill people, right?
Actually the combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal can easily take care of all our needs, at very low cost.
The gov’t built a nuclear powered car back in the 1950’s, today the technology is far more advanced. We could have nuclear powered cars that are as secure as the black box on an airplane. Those can crash from 50,ooo feet at speeds a car can’t approach, and still be fine.
Electric powered vehicles charged by renewable energy also make sense.
The problem is that what is in the best interest of the population is not always in the best interest of freedom. This is a difficult situation. Most people think it is good that we have traffic laws for example. I like to know that when I go through a green light that it is very unlikely that anyone is going to be ignoring the red light going in the perpendicular direction. Personally, I prefer freedom. I would rather leave most of the “laws” as guidelines for the courts. The guy in NH recently that drove on the highway at very high speeds at 2am? in the morning to get his wife, who was in labor, to the hospital on time, committed no crime in my opinion. To me the cop who ticketed him at the hospital when he finally stopped is the criminal.
In some cases the balance between safety and freedom is clearer than others. I prefer freedom. But that is all the more reason for me to argue on a post like this to put aside the ignorance of the true costs in safety, of a recklessly polluting pattern of greedy behavior, in favor of a cleaner safer world. Because I would rather not have the government mandate it, I would rather have you embrace smart Christian stewardship.
If you are going to pull numbers out of dark places, might as well say 70,000,000 American lives are "taken" by air pollution each year...
Where did you hear that?
On the internet...
Hydrogen and stupidity; the most abundant things in the universe.
You haven't figured out yet that there is no such thing?
There are cloned A123 cells right now, although there is no problem procuring the genuine article nor is that anticipated. Unclear if future A123 cells will come from South Korea production or from the Michigan factories. If someone wanted to use cloned cells, an integrator would have to package them in drop-in form for the Volt, or replace individual cells in the battery cases. At this point it is felt that the cloned cells are not of the same quality but this may change in the future.
I don’t think the lithium-ion battery is a smart move. There are known issues [battery fires] with them in laptop computers, the Volt and, now, on the Boeing 787. The 787 has had several battery fires and the fleet has been grounded until the reason is found. I’m not an engineer, but I know trouble when I see it.
The A123 type is safe or as safe as any battery. The Lithium Cobalt Dioxide (LiCoO2) chemistry in the Dreamliner, however, is much more prone to high-temperature incidents but is higher performance as well.
OK. Why do they catch fire?
It is certainly the case that any li battery of any chemistry can catch fire if shorted internally due to physical impact, or shorted externally or severely overcharged (not easy to do that with an A123). Many, many cases of SLA automotive batteries exploding are on record as well. I personally had a Nicad battery overheat and burn insulation once; none of them are immune to problems.
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