Why Not Revive the EV1?

A dollar is good for about 7 horsepower hours of energy. Not a bad price but how fast for how long can you go on 7 horsepower hours?

You’ll pay much more in battery replacements. Used cars will be valued by the life left in their batteries and not much else.

Electric cars will cost about a dollar per mile to drive, I’ll stick with my 20 cents.

Something I rarely see in all these true elec car stories is the cost of electricity to charge them. All the green proponents of elec cars want you to believe the juice is somehow free or cleaner or both.

Something I've never seen is anyone taking into account the amount of energy lost by the car batteries discharging, even when not in use.

A battery has ONLY two states--charge and discharge. If the battery is not being charged, then it IS DISCHARGING, even when not performing it's intended function. Even the most sophisticated and efficient batteries discharge when not in use. And, as batteries age, they will discharge MORE when not in use.

Consider millions of electric car batteries, just sitting between uses, discharging. Gasoline does not simply evaporate out of a car's gas tank. This is one inefficiency that electric cars can never overcome, even with the best technology. The only mitigating factor would be if the cost of the lost electrical energy is ultimately less than the cost of the gasoline.

What you’re claiming (1$/mile) is dated info. Golf cart power? You realize that GM had a vehicle that used 90s technology to do interstate speeds. Horsepower hours isn’t a good way to measure electric motors either. The Volt is the best blend of electric and gas. You keep a good SOC and batteries can last you a really long time. Just ask Ma Bell who’ll keep batteries for 20 years on float voltages before they swap them out for safety concerns.

“They cost us well over $80,000 to produce, and, being a two-seater, we could only sell 800 in four years. We lost over one billion dollars on that experiment.””

Yet right now, new car companies are working on their electric cars.

The Tesla, scheduled to cost over $80,000. Fisker “Karma” scheduled to cost $80,000.

http://www.teslamotors.com/

http://www.fiskerautomotive.com/

GM continues to be run by old industry hacks, in Michigan. GM tells what they can’t do. GM has been and continues to be run by accountants.

Tesla and Fisker are in California. The new companies are based on doing something.

“Given GM’s present state, methinks all the true engineers have bolted, leaving only the MBAs that got GM in to it’s present mess.”

Lutz is supposed to be their car guy, but he sounds like their accountant.

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