Posted on 04/06/2005 8:13:35 AM PDT by finnman69
Yeah, but say bye-bye to your warranty.
The same mileage as a conventional Toyota Echo, which costs thousands less. Hybrids are a bad investment.
It is expected that most cars would be charged OVERNIGHT, where there is much less demand for electricity and there is generating capacity simply being wasted. Thats why the Electric companies would LOVE for us to have electric cars. More money for them with a minimum investment on their part.
My question for these "180mpg Prius" owners is, how many kilowatt-hours worth of energy are they using to charge their cars? I pay 7 cents per KW-hour, so I wonder how much this is costing them overall. I am curious, not neccessarily sceptical.
I guess it depends if the power generated by power plant is cheaper per unit than power produced by gasoline in a car engine.
I suspect that it is, just because power plants more much more electricity, so you get savings from bulk sales/purchases.
I thought of that too. I wonder what it does to your electricity bill. I do see a future with expanded nuclear power generating electricity to power up electric cars and/or hybrid/hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
What the pressure on scumbags like Harry Reid to open up the Nevada Yucca Flats site to store nuclear waste.
Time to check out that electric car.
Maybe they are now? But do you really want to drive around in an Echo?
The article is a bit unclear on it, but if he's plugging his Prius into an outlet each night, the numbers he cites as "gasoline mileage" are absolutely pointless.
You have got to love the Times staff. All their reporters have masters degrees in Deconstructionism, Queer Theory, or Suffering Ethnic Victim studies -- and a third grade grasp of science and engineering.
Poor Danny Hakim probably thinks flywheels are a novel concept. They're actually incorporated in all cars for the last hundred years, and have a very important role in hybrids.
Changing the subject, this kind of modification, I believe, is why GM only leased, and then destroyed, the EV-1 -- which is the principal reason the EV-1 was a disaster. GM lost six figures per unit produced. That's what happens when you let the lawyers run the company.
And.. .electricity is free if someone else pays for it for you. That would describe most of the Times's political party.
In the long run, of course, the only answer is nuclear power. The left will have an epiphany when it starts actually costing them something, which considering that they are mostly insulated from the market by dint of being welfare leeches, university drones, or bureaucratic payroll patriots, means that the rest of us will hurt more, first.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Notice that the author identifies everyone but left leaning organizations as having an agenda.
In all seriousness, I wouldn't mind having a hybrid car.
But that's only if it had the same styling, speed and options of my current car.
"Agenda" Translation: "Evil" Corporations in business to make a profit.
You're missing the point. These autos would be charged at night when electric consumption is at its lowest and the utilities produce power at some plants just to keep the grid going. With implementation of time of day billing, which already exists in some states, the cost could go as low as 1.5 to 2 cents per kwhour, which will make the cost much less than gasoline or at least competitive.
I would asusme they have been in major accidents already and I have read fire crews/responders have been trained about high voltage cables in hybrid cars.
"If we need to build new plants they will probably be nuclear, something I'm not looking forward to."
All power plants, other than hydro, should be nuclear!
The wind blew and the Kilowatts flew.
Plus a lot of the energy is wasted through heat from steam pipes, lossy generators, lossy transformers, lossy transmission lines, more lossy transformers, lossy rectifiers, ...
Solar panels?
Free?
You dare write "solar panel" and "free" in the same paragraph?
Last price I saw was what... About 250.00 per 40 watts.
40 watts peak power that is, IF you're in the complete 100% exposed sunlight, for a period of at most 4 hours (10:00 to 2:00 local apparent time) with 80% (or so) efficiency from 8:00 to 10:00 and a little more from 2:00 4:00 local apparent sun time.
That not a lot of power for a LOT of money. And heat load.
If I could retrofit my 3-ton '79 Lincoln......
Dang!
You'd have to have a battery system the size of an 18-wheeler to make that thing roll! :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.