Ed Begley Jr.?
Posted on 05/24/2006 12:29:25 AM PDT by BlueSky194
In 1996 a number of EV-1 electric cars began appearing on California's highways. The General Motors-produced vehicle was fast, ran quietly, produced no polluting exhaust and it ran without gasoline and then, suddenly, it was gone.
The documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, from producer Dean Devlin and filmmaker Chris Paine, chronicles the life and mysterious death of the groundbreaking vehicle, examining its cultural and economic ripple effects and how they reverberated through the halls of government and big business. Filmmakers make the case that the death of the EV-1 was, in fact, a murder. They claim to show that production of the revolutionary car was halted due to pressure from industries that would be harmed by the proliferation of electric car technology.
Who Killed the Electric Car?, a 2006 selection at the Tribeca and Sundance film festivals, interviews and investigates automakers, legislators, engineers, consumers and car enthusiasts from Los Angeles to Detroit, to work through motives and alibis, and to solve the complex mystery.
Who Killed the Electric Car?, from Sony Pictures Classics, opens in New York and L.A. on June 28 and will further expand this summer. It's been rated PG for "brief mild language."
Mainly because external combustion is not as efficient as internal combustion, but picture this scenario:
You get up in the morning to go to work. You light the fire in your boiler (now of course you're using coal because you're doing this to avoid the high price of oil based products) and wait half an hour or so until you have adequate pressure. then you drive to work. Shut off the boiler which then cools down while you're at work thus wasting all of the heat used to heat the water. Then you go to lunch. Start heating the boiler which only takes 20 minutes because it hasn't cooled to ambient just yet. You drive around, but notice although you have plenty of coal, you're getting a little low on water so you stop to add about 50 gal (400 lb) of water. On the way back you notice that the ashes are building up, so you have to stop and dump off your ashes at a government approved ecologically friendly ash dumping station. You shut off the boiler and go to work. When you quit for the day you start heating it again, and in about 20 minutes you're ready to drive. On the way home you discover that your usual route home is blocked because an accident between two steam cars caused the boilers to blow on both with catastrophic results to the occupants of the vehicles. You get home shut off the boiler, top off your on board coal supply from your bunker top off your water, and wait for the boiler to cool down so you can do your daily cleaning of the boiler tubes.
"Weeee did!"
Now lets play ping pong.
Zambonis are going electric also because of the CO2 levels in hockey rinks.
How sweet would that be to drive to work everyday on a zamboni.
Ed Begley Jr.?
I've driven a gas-powered golf cart before.
SD
Yes indeed, especially at food warehouses (no gas fumes)...but those huge honkin' batteries need a charge nightly of course, and as I recall from my 10 years in the cold storage biz, get replaced every few years - at a cost of some big bucks.
About three years ago, out here in the low desert, there was a guy with an EV-1 doing some testing work to see how the battery held up in our extreme summers....I stopped seeing him and the car after about a year, so I can't comment on the results.
Out of curiosity, did you ever work out the energy costs per mile for electrics? I believe that with even our current high gasoline prices, the average for IC engines around 12 cents per mile.
I used to know those numbers but can't remember any more. Sorry.
Everybody likes to say Beta was the better technology, but from a consumer perspective it actually wasn't. It had one major drawback from the consumer side: tape length. Beta's max length was inconveniently short, causing it to be not really useful for the commercial video market. Also the fact that Sony kept it closed where-as VHS was open to multiple manufacturers seriously crippled the market.
It seems to me that you have just stumbled onto a brilliant idea for a new NASCAR class.
Something that nobody's mentioned up to this point: You have to carry at least twice as much water as you do fuel in order not to run out of water.
And what's more, your return trip is free! Fast too!
ROFLMAO! Just caught on to what you said.
Polluter! Who turns greens brown!
5 min is still too long. What if you're in an emergency? You can't just turn on your steamer; or you'd have to leave it running all day!
My hope is that someone would actually find a way to make these things viable. So far, they haven't. I'm not confident of it, either, even if hopeful.
Unlike politicians and the fool sheep they herd, who think "beaming up" is a technology just around the corner!
We clear cut all the virgin forests, hadn't you heard?
Problem is, it would cost more than 5 bucks and kill precious hours of my time to find out, and that right there would be an example of poor economics.
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