Posted on 07/21/2008 9:49:54 AM PDT by CutePuppy
One of the Big Ideas that's gotten a boost from the recent oil price shock is the notion that the energy for transportation should come from the electric grid, not an oil well in the Middle East.
A number of big, established car makers have announced plans to produce cars that will pull from the electric grid all or part of the energy needed to make them go. They join a flock of upstart companies, such as Tesla Motors, trying to prosper by defining a new generation of mobility technology starting with a blank sheet of paper - or rather a blank video display screen.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
GM can pay the bill for battery research. The upstarts cannot.
This article is false; electric car batteries are finally starting to see some significant improvement. A California company will start selling its car capable of 200 miles on a charge, and that charge will not take too long to go back up.
Are there cars with 500-mile ranges? No, but 200 is pretty dang good assuming you also can take gas, making it a plug-in hybrid.
Even without that, the vehicle would work for virtually every trip you could possibly take except for the rare long ones. Having to buy no gas and only pay a little for charging up the car would be well worth having to rent a car for long trips and more than cover the cost.
I find this hard to believe.What company is this? Is there a web site?
How well are those ranges when driving in the northeast in the winter or the southeast in the summer. Combustion driven engines generate a lot of heat but where is that heat coming for the driver when it’s 18 out or the AC when it’s 90 with high humidity?
Just an FYI, I’m not sure our electric generation capacity is quite up to job either.
www.teslamotors.com
A bit pricey, but first-generation technology always is (remember what a DVD player cost when they first hit the market?).
don’t recall, but saw a thread here maybe 2 months ago
Don’t need a battery anymore...
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=batteries&id=20090&a=
Don’t let pie in the sky liberal promises of electric cars deter us from getting the trillion barrels of oil in oil shale in the Western United States, in ANWR and in the OCS.
The U.S. has 250 million gasoline cars. How long do you think it will take for Tesla to sell 250 million cars, 1 million cars?
Don’t let pie in the sky liberal promises of electric cars deter us from getting the trillion barrels of oil in oil shale in the Western United States, in ANWR and in the OCS.
The U.S. has 250 million gasoline cars. How long do you think it will take for Tesla to sell 250 million cars, 1 million cars?
The U.S. economy will depend on cheap abundant oil for decades.
Could you detail the shale-oil extraction process, and explain how it could possibly net oil at anything less than $150/bbl?
Not saying that opening up ANWR and off-shore drilling won’t help, but I don’t see it solving the whole problem by any means.
We will depend on it indefinitely as long as it is cheap.
The problem with electric cars isn't that they can't work; its the implicit assumption that the electricity grid can handle a shift from petroleum based transportation to electricity based transportation without significant cost. The energy needed has to come from somewhere. When you run an electric car, the fuel is burned in a central electricity generating plant. In other words, did you burn that fuel yourself or did you get someone to burn it for you?
A transition to a primarily electrically powered transportation system means, among other things, that you centralize the burning of fuel. Instead of a retail petroleum distribution system of gas stations, you distribute the energy via copper wires. Since the amount of energy used in cars is quite large, this requires a significant expansion of electric generating and distribution capacity, and a significant amount of investment.
- Is it an improvement? It depends on the answer to several questions, such as:
- Is the overall effiency of fuel to mechanical energy conversion better when it is burned centrally and distributed via electricity, or when it is burned in each car, assuming most efficient technology in each case, and equivalent vehicle performance.
- Is there an improvement in overall pollution profiles with centrally supplied electricity over distributed fuel burning?
- Are the environmental penalties associated with storage technolgies (batteries, supercapacitors, etc) significant and counted in the calculation?
- Could enough clean (i.e. nonpetroleum) energy (solar, wind, possibly nuclear) be added to the electric grid to take over the energy load now taken up by distributed petroleum burning?
Your added comments here.
I have no particular position. I am just tired of hearing people go on about how car companies are so stupid, because the technology exists for everyone to plug their new electric car in like a toaster without a consideration of what is required for a large-scale solution. The existing grid can't supply the energy, and the costs for electrcity would be higher if there were a substantial increase in electricity demand. It may eventually turn out that electric transportation is the way to go, but we won't get ther without major investments. There isn't any free lunch.
Royal Dutch Shell has announced that its in situ extraction technology in Colorado could become competitive at prices over $30 per barrel ($190/m3), while other technologies at full-scale production assert profitability at oil prices even lower than $20 per barrel"
I am just stating a fact : The world's economy is oil based and it will take at least decades to change to something else regardless what government does or doesn't do.
B. S.
I am so sick of seeing Tesla touted as manufacturing anything other than painted hollow prototypes and Press Releases.
When all the car mags start doing long term testing then I'd like to hear from them, until then, they should fire their marketing dept and focus on BUILDING SOMETHING.
Royal Dutch Shell has announced that its in situ extraction technology in Colorado could become competitive at prices over $30 per barrel ($190/m3), while other technologies at full-scale production assert profitability at oil prices even lower than $20 per barrel" link and proof
Electric cars would cost you more than the cost of gasoline, period.
Way more. And 2 hundred miles is a joke for anyone commuting more than half that let along longer commutes.
As a city car these might be feasible provided that trillions of dollars was spent to upgrade the electrical infrastructure and pay for the enormous increase in the price of electricity to come.
Rolling blackouts and brownouts will be the norm.
- if you could ever do this on a large scale, and I maintain that we can’t on anything even remotely close to the present cost structure..
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.