Posted on 06/13/2006 1:23:56 PM PDT by freemarket_kenshepherd
The June 9 “Now with David Brancaccio” could well have been titled PBS’s “Tin-Foil Conspiracy Theatre” as the newsmagazine looked at death of the electric car from the Michael Moore-like lens of a left-wing filmmaker.
Rather than entertaining the notion that a lack of market demand doomed the vehicles, “Now” instead pushed filmmaker Chris Paine’s arguments that the “clean” car’s demise was the result of a sinister plot by GM and Big Oil. That film, “Who Killed the Electric Car,” is scheduled for a June 28 release in New York and Los Angeles.
Looking into the demise of the electric car, Paine said, he began “to realize that something really had happened. That it was foul play.”
“Foul play implicated in the death of these cars,” Brancaccio asked. But the real “foul play” here, or what Paine called “spin,” was what amounted to a 30-minute PBS promo for the latest left-wing film coming out of Hollywood.
Paine explained, “The idea of the film is why is it so hard for us to get off of oil,” adding, “whenever you have big change, there's big forces that say, ‘No, no, no, we don't want the change.’
But those big forces aren’t shady executives in a back room. They’re consumers who never warmed to a vehicle that was inconvenient to recharge, despite tax credits offered for electric vehicles.
[for more, see article at businessandmedia.org]
(Excerpt) Read more at businessandmedia.org ...
Because it is politically correct to say so. Truth, sound business plans and economics are unimportant. PC reigns.
That's easy: A Pious.
Electric vehicles just do not have the soul-stirring, spine-tingling appeal of a big rumbling V-8 ticking over at 400 rpm, and with a blip of the throttle, opening up to 6000 rpm and emitting an exhaust note of about 150 decibels, enough to rattle window panes three blocks away and drown out all conversation within a hundred-yard radius. Followed by a burn-out start down the drag strip, with an elapsed time of maybe 6.5 seconds and achieving a velocity of 140+ mph in a standing quarter.
When electric vehicles can be tuned to do THAT, they shall be a serious challenge to the internal-combustion engine. Until then, they are applicances.
" == Gasoline, delivered to your car, costs about $3.00 per 125,000 BTU. Electricity, delivered to your house, costs about $5.00 per 125,000 BTU. Tell me why plug-in hybrids make sense. == "
However, electric propulsion is more thermodynamically efficient, even with the charge/discharge losses. And central generation is both more efficient and more flexible in terms of source fuel. Now if we could just figure out a power transfer system (like a trolley) that these cars could use on major intercity routes, we could transfer a very large share of our energy consumption from petroleum to homegrown coal and nuclear - and tell the middle east to learn to eat sand.
"Plug in hybrids...make a lot of sense."
Gasoline, delivered to your car, costs about $3.00 per 125,000 BTU. Electricity, delivered to your house, costs about $5.00 per 125,000 BTU. Tell me why plug-in hybrids make sense.""
Doesn't make sense to me---
But then, none of these "vehicles" will pull my horse trailer loaded.
I have my own theory. It wasn't Big Oil and GM that killed the electric car- it was Ed Begley, Jr. Once the pictures of him in that silly car hit the press (not the Saturn-based fiasco- the earlier one from the 80s), it was all over for me. Follow that up with the video of Alicia Silverstone in her even sillier looking "electric car" and you've got most normal people clamoring for the continued use of fossil fuels. Those vehicles made Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the AMC Pacer, Big Foot, and the Pope-Mobile look like more sensible choices...
Of course. If you aren't using a diesel prime mover, you aren't trying to control fuel costs. A lot of the trouble with diesels is their drivability (available HP proportional to RPM), so diesels are helped most by the drivability advantages of hybrid. If they've got the odor problem under control, a hybrid diesel should make sense. Especially for a city taxi . . .
His film may be mostly garbage but he's right about tax advantages for business SUV owners. If you're self employed and buying a vehicle for business use you're a fool if you don't buy a big (over 6000 lb. gross vehicle wieght rating) SUV, truck, or van because of the much larger Section 179 accelerated depreciation deduction that you get in the deal. Fortunately, if you really want a smaller, more efficient SUV, you can trade the big one for a small one and because they're in the same class for like-kind exchange purposes, thereby transfer the depreciation benefits of a large SUV to a smaller one.
You can look at this as a tax subsidy for SUV buyers, but I would call it tax relief for the shrewd business owners.
In an automobile, weight is a bad thing. In a locomotive, weight is a good thing. Probably explains why motor/generator transmissions have been used for decades in locomotives, but not in automobiles.
You've got it all backwards. If you follow the liberal solution, you would pull your vehicle with your horse, not vise versa. (Never mind the chest deep horse sh....)
because we can make electricity from many other things, except oil.
the ideal car:
- runs on electricity all the time, it can be initially charged at your home, giving a "zero gasoline" range of 80-100 miles. that range is sufficient to accomodate the daily driving distance of alot of people.
- it also has a small engine, that runs on gasoline, or ethanaol or diesel. the engine charges the batteries only (even while parked, if selected), it does not power the car. the engine is zero emissions. the engine allows the car to have the range that people need for longer trips, or when they are away from a charging source.
Don't think that is right. My brother in law has a Prius. It uses gasoline motor to charge its electric motor. It can move with either engine separately.
yitbos, what's the difference between a motor and an engine?
From what I've read, when energy from the gasoline engine is used immediately to power the wheels, it is conveyed via mechanical transmission rather than a motor/generator. Further, even if hybrids were to start using motor/generator transmissions today, the fact would remain that motor-generators have for decades been the primary form of transmission for locomotives but not for cars.
yitbos
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