Posted on 04/03/2013 10:39:46 AM PDT by jazusamo
A point hounded on by liberals is that people would by efficient technology if only companies would build it. Forget that there are dozens of 30 mpg cars available that nobody will buy right now. One of my car magazines reported that GM took a successful vehicle out of production to modify a plant to build 100,000 Volts per year. They had never sold more than a few thousand in any month, but the government instructed them to tool for 100,000.
Also, one of the magazines reported an internal GM memo that said up to 12% of the Volts might catch fire over their useful life. The memo went on to recommend no further investment.
Well, Chevy used to make a car called the "Citation", which is either an award, or what the cop gives you after he pulls you over.
LOL! Good one, not the Citation but your post. It seems they never learn. :-)
I understand they are going to get a flat panel display, from a Kindle...
If there was a Moore's Law for battery technology it would be measured in centuries not months. It's the slowest moving technology on the planet.
That’s the issue that needs to be pounded home by people who want to end this silliness: The leap in battery technology needed to make these vehicles pencil out just isn’t on the horizon. It isn’t over the horizon, either. It’s not available, period, until we come up with a radically new chemistry or physics in batteries.
This is the point I keep hammering home to these dreamers of electric cars: The leap forward in battery technology required here means that some blue-sky scientists need to get going on the problem of “how to store energy?” and a subset of that “How to store energy as electric power?” There’s no battery technology extant that will make the leap required. No matter how good the battery engineering is, the salient point is that the fundamental chemical processes happening in batteries simply do not permit a dense enough energy storage for the application, the chemistry extant won’t take a charge fast enough so that you can “fill up” the battery in the time it could take a person to fill a conventional fuel tank - no matter the money available to throw at the problem.
It’s sort of like dreaming about a “warp drive” when all we have are sub-lightspeed propulsion for spacecraft. We would need to work on the physics of faster-than-light *anything* before we could worry about making a drive which, when commanded by a shameless over-actor and lovingly pampered by a Scottish engineer, will allow humans to zip through space at “warp 7.”
Thing is the Tesla car has outsold both the VOLT and the LEAF and it costs almost twice as much.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Thing is the Tesla car has outsold both the VOLT and the LEAF and it costs almost twice as much.
Ah. I knew there had to be a good reason the company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
The surge in Tesla is a real testimony to the number of “one percenters” America really has. It’s astounding to me.
It’s a good thing too! With all of the “first responders” (Firemen, policemen and teachers) being laid off or furloughed due to Barry’s sequestation. LOL!
“A mechanical system to drive that many wheels is not practical/economical.”
When cornering, a CPU could easily drive each motor at the exact speed to provide equal drive to each wheel as all 4 wheels need to move at different speeds.
Same with traction control. Rather than applying braking, again each wheel would be given the appropriate speed command to eliminate slip.
An electric drive using a gas/diesel engine->generator->battery is superior to an electric motor physically coupled to the same drive train as the gas/diesel engine. Much less weight and fewer parts.
Like others have said, batteries, batteries, batteries, are the main problem and the enviro-wackos need to be bitched slapped to remind them all this electricity needs to come from somewhere and their solar panels and windmills cannot possibly provide even a small percentage of what we need.
ORRRRRRR, how about designing an electric pick up like a trolley car/electric train for the highway and only use battery power on the secondary roads? That would be a nice public works project which I am sure the union slugs would love to get into. Now that is something which could be constructed while we started to bring electric cars on line.
I don’t know if any of you have ever driven a well equipped electric but boy can they accelerate. However, we need the will and that is seriously lacking.
Close, I'd say that the problem is with electric delivery, not storage. Though storage has issues, too.
Unless someone comes up with some sort of a battery swap-out....pull into a "Swap station", yank the old battery out of the car, and put in a new charged one ...
Otherwise, the conductors required to deliver a full charge of electricity to the battery in a "reasonable" (say <10 min) will be as thick as your thigh, and about as flexible. To say nothing of the variable load it would throw on the existing (overtaxed, underpowered) infrastructure.
Heck, places like California already deal with rolling blackouts due to lack of generation infrastructure. What happens when 20 million cars' worth of daily demand gets dumped on the grid? And increased demand drives up cost, which lowers ROI, and so on and so on.
Pure electric, isn't the answer. Not now, and for the forseeable (20-ish years?) future.
Believe me when I tell you that GM never admitted a mistake even before it became Obama Motors. For decades, GM has considered a car “sold” when they were able to convince a dealer to order one. What is liked by the public was rarely a principle GM consideration.
It’s oddly nice to see that the lying ways of GM have not changed.
Excellent points all around. Both Storage AND Delivery problems go hand in hand, as improvement in either lessens the impact on the other.
For example, let’s say with current lead-acid batteries, I have some car that has a meager 75 mile range (meager by gasoline standards). If improvements in DELIVERY let me somehow charge the batteries in 10 minutes, I am less concerned. I could drive 1 and 1/2 hours at nominal freeway speeds, stop for charge, a stretch and a chance to take a leak.
Conversely, if I have “super” batteries that let me go 400 miles on a charge, but they take 8 hours to refill, I am less concerned, as for most of my use, 400 miles in a day is fine, and I can let the thing charge overnight.
Electric infrastructure to support this is a whole ‘nuther ball of wax...
I drove my buddy’s daughter’s Tesla, and it is a ripper.
Not 70 grand worth in my view, but I’m the guy that buys lightly used estate Caddys at pennies on the original dollar.
I’d like to see continued monies poured into green battery technology like there’s no tomorrow. Just get government out of it and let all the investors be billionaire liberals.
If they waste their fortunes on green boondoggles we can spend ours on regaining our liberties. No?
Here’s the thing that I fear most people don’t understand about “new battery technology:”
It’s HARD, fundamental science research we’re talking about here. This is on par with fundamental chemistry/physics research into high-temp superconductors. We’re talking about very, very fundamental stuff here that has to be researched. The required leap of technology isn’t in the realm of engineering. It is literally like asking engineers to make a modern CPU when the physicists haven’t worked out how we get charge carriers to flow through semiconductor materials yet. Imagine this conversation taking place in 1946:
Marketing guy to engineer: “I want you to develop ‘green’ CPU technology based on low-power semiconductor technology and smart use of shutting down areas of the CPU when they’re not being used to maximize battery life.”
Engineer: “OK, I understand battery. What’s this ‘CPU’ you’re talking of, much less ‘semiconductor technology’? What the heck is a ‘semi’-conductor? Is that like a resistor?”
Marketing guy: “You know! Semiconductors! Integrated circuits! Chips! And ‘CPU’ is “central processing unit’ - you know, the brains of a computer!”
Engineer: “OK, listen. I have this selection of vacuum tubes. I have octal-based tubes, I have mini-tubes, I even have Nuvistor tubes to make stuff really small. I’ve got maybe ‘solid state’ diodes and rectifiers - like a selenium stack rectifier. That’s it. Computers made with these things fill whole rooms and have heat output like a forest fire. Now, what do you want me to make with these?”
Marketing guy: “You engineers! You never understand us visionaries!”
Engineer: “You dreamers and creamers never understand that my job is to turn proven science into products, and without science to start with, there will be no products. You need to talk to some scientists and quit bothering us engineers.”
Marketing guy: “Scientists, engineers... you’re all the same.”
Engineer: “Shove it where the sun don’t shine. Better yet, I’ll shove this slide rule where the sun don’t shine on you...”
The point I’m getting at is that there is no “green battery technology.” There’s just “current battery technology” and then there’s a whole lot of very damp dreams by electric car advocates.... who know far less about science and engineering than they think they do. NONE of our existing known battery chemistries will store the required amount of energy in the space and weight of the application. NONE of them. I don’t care how well engineered the batteries are, the fundamental known science of energy storage in chemical reactions just isn’t going to produce a battery to fit the requirements of an electric car.
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