Global Warming on Free Republic
Posted on 12/03/2012 1:55:45 AM PST by neverdem
And at least 75% of the Volt sales are government fleet sales.
So those should be chopped out of the counting as those aren’t in consumer hands on the roads being used but sitting in a government fleet park collecting pigeon poo.
Then you have the cars “sold” from one dealership to another to boost numbers.
Anyone know the solid numbers on either of the above?
***we will see a re-emergence of steam vehicles even if they burn cord wood before we will se an all electric utopia.***
Kind of like the old Stanley Steamer?
I remember seeing a made-for-tv movie on the life of Howard Hughes.
In one scene he has his engineers build a car run on steam, but they don’t have enough space for the pressurized steam so they place pressurized containers in the door panels.
Hughes is not happy with the design. He takes a long pipe wrench and says to the engineer,
“Think of this wrench as a Chevy heading straight for your car!”
He then throws the wrench at the steam auto door and pow! scalding steam everywhere! The occupants would have been boiled alive.
Why not just build a car that runs on “Producer gas”? The Russians used them back in WWII.
It is a wood stove, using a smothered fire that burns carbon monoxide and smoke.
Light the stove, suck off the gas, run it into the engine and it runs the piston engine.
I looked into this back when CARTER the INCOMPETENT was occupying the WH. Don’t know how it would work with today’s non-carburated autos.
***Back in the 60s & 70s, I knew several farmers who converted their pick ups to N.G.,***
Back in the 1960s and early 70s, where I worked the company ran it’s fleet of trucks on propane. It worked well, slow on the acceleration, but then the company also operated it’s own propane company for farmers so it got it’s propane at wholesale prices.
I haven’t seen a propane truck in years!
The laws of physics keep interfering with the dreams of government officials and story-book liberals.
Reading these figures of how many “Volts” have been sold, I keep wondering how many of those were bought by our goverment, whether state or federal. I recall some fed announcement of huge numbers being bought by the US, my recollection is on the order of 20,000, but that may not be accurate. I also recall that NYState announced it was purchasing some huge number, I believe in the thousand range. There is also a niggle in my brain about some cities joining the waste of taxpayer dollars...
All in all, I bet that at least half of the small number sold were bought by various governments. I have never seen one of these on the road.
“If you own an electric car, what do you do? You can’t walk somewhere and get a can of electricity to bring back to your vehicle.”
-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—
Put the battery in a wheel barrow and take it over to the electricity generating plant, wait ten hours and start back with the wheelbarrow?
“And at least 75% of the Volt sales are government fleet sales.” ... that is what I thought, too, and just wrote a comment to that effect above. I sure would love to know how many of them were bought by fed,state,and local governments...
Or shuffled from dealership to dealership and listed as a ‘sale’.
Consider automobiles using electric propulsion:
Strengths Include:
Weaknesses Include:
As the article states, the real drawback to electric vehicle acceptance in the marketplace IS THE BATTERY. Currently (no pun intended) there are some promising avenues of investigation (non-hyped ones, solid) that might get conventional lead-acid batteries to the point where a car could have a 250-300 mile range. An electric vehicle with that sort of range would largely erase the complaints of most folks, unless you were a travelling salesman. Upping the storage capacity for conventional batteries using advanced manufacturing techniques only increases the cost of the batteries in a way the manufacturer can control, as long the the batteries are not themselves made from exotic and expensive materials.
Another avenue rarely mentioned is the standardization of automobile battery packs, and a rapid way to swap them. You no doubt have many battery powered devices in your homes, using AAA, AA, C, D or other standardized sizes. You probably have electric drills and saws too. When such devices exhaust their batteries, you generally simply swap the battery quickly and continue working, while the spent batteries are either recharged or disposed of. No one caterwauls about how long it takes to recharge their electric drill (unless they fail to have a couple of packs to swap). The same thing could be done with cars, just imagine something like a "Quick Oil Change" station, where you drive your car over a pit to have your oil changed. Instead, your standard auto battery pack is removed from the bottom of the car, and a new one snapped in place, probably in about 5 minutes. This would be a comparable amount of time to filling your tank, and would be similar to swapping propane tanks, with deposits and such.
I have no problem with a free and open market working out possible solutions to these and other weaknesses to electric cars. I am not interested in the Fed Govt subsidizing them on my dime. If I wish to experiment, I will do it with my own money, and if you wish to, you should do it with yours.
The Volt is actually a very fine piece of machinery, it is just very expensive, and suitable for a narrow range of deployment. I would not buy one unless it was about 20K cheaper, and that is not about to happen any time soon.
Someone earlier commented that the Sandy victims would not be considering electric cars now. I'll play devil's advocate here and offer a counter argument:
If I were to be living in some sort of "post apocalyptic disaster" world, I might very well consider an electric vehicle, in that it would be FAR EASIER for me to rig up something to produce ELECTRICITY, then it would would be for me to try to REFINE GASOLINE. If my transportation runs on gas, I would have to find a supply of it ready made, as I could not concoct it on my own. I can however, imagine several ways to "McGuyver" a simple generator to charge my car periodically, even if slowly, so I could use it from time to time.
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Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
Chevy Volt....a 20K car attached to a 20K 500lbs 1-gallon “gas” tank...
Full disclosure; I offer this with no opinion; it just looks cool.
Has anyone pointed out what happened to Volt sales in November?
Global Warming on Free Republic
The nickel cadmium (NiCd) battery has memory effect, but the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery, used in such things as cordless drills, does not suffer from this effect. The lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery also does not suffer from the memory effect. It does suffer from the effects of age. Many manufacturers remain silent about this issue. After one year, whether these batteries are used or not, they will suffer a deterioration in capacity due to the development of internal resistance due to the chemical composition of the battery.
I lived in Fairbanks in the middle 70s. We had natural gas taxis and city buses back then. All of them had big colorful stickers on them to remind the driver NOT to put gasoline or diesel into them.
Why waste energy with the conversion to electric?
Just put a suitable transmission behind the turbine.
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