I know everyone wants to make fun of electric cars but doesn’t everything have problems when they first start. I don’t remember the first airplane being able to go as far as they do today. The first car you had to use a hand crank and probably had to stop every 100 feet. They definitely weren’t able to travel for miles and miles like today. I am not sure I understand why FREEPERS are making fun of automobiles that may one day be a great thing. I bet the first computer was this big hunky thing that was only able to be turned on for five minutes and could not be held in your hand.
Electric cars have been around for over a hundred years......................and they still have the same problems they had a hundred years ago....................
uh because our gov’t is spending our grandkids money on this stuff. Let the private economy handle the invention of an electric car.
BTW: electric cars aren’t even really “green”. They run off of coal and nuclear fuel. So even if they do work the enviro-wackos will still say this is worse than gas powered cars.
Your taxes were used to build the car,that nobody wants..Let the free market invent a electric car..
Everything else you cite airplanes,computers all invented by private enterprises...
You kinda remind me of the Buddhist Monk who self immolated with your posts. :-)
Just kiddin’
You’re right. If I recall, the first telephones frequently caught fire. And when Ben Franklin invented the wood stove, it only burned wood until the room temperature got up to about 50F, then you had to use coal or whale oil. And when microwave ovens first came out, they cost like $50,000 - even with a $5,000 government subsidy.
It might have to do with the fact that we're involuntary investors in the manufacturer.
The problem, as EE’s have tried to explain to the “I love unicorns!” crowd for decades, is that batteries are a very inefficient energy storage device.
There is no battery technology that can compress energy into a density remotely near that of chemical fuels (eg, gasoline, much less diesel fuel). None. There’s nothing REMOTELY close to those energy densities on the horizon in battery technology.
Now, in addition to the energy density problems of batteries, there’s the additional problem that you can remove or replace energy into batteries only so fast without compromising them. If you want to see what I mean, just go get a 100 amp 12 charger (they’re used to rapidly recharge truck and tractor batteries) and put that puppy on a common car battery. You’ll find after you do this several times that the battery simply won’t hold as much power on each successive recharge. Batteries don’t like to have power rammed into them - they have definite maximum sustainable recharge rates, which when exceeded, cost you battery life.
Oh, BTW - be very careful because a car battery might explode if you try to dump 100 amps/hour into it. Want to recharge that battery safely? Recharge it overnight at 2 amps/hour - or maybe for a full day if it was really dead.
Then there’s the discharge rate issues. Batteries store energy in a chemical reaction, and as everyone knows, chemical reactions slow down in the cold. So cars like the Volt end up spending some of their energy to heat the battery in cold weather so they can get power out of it faster than natural rates would allow. Yea, that makes for really long ranges: Using battery power to heat the battery so we can discharge it faster... um, what problem were we trying to solve again?
The problems here are multiple. The electric auto advocates haven’t come close to solving even ONE of the multiple issues of: power density, discharge rates in cold weather, recharge rates, weight, etc. They’re still peddling the same ideas from 100 years ago (literally, no exaggeration) and they’ve made very scant progress in the meantime.
Now, compare that to the progress made in diesel autos, and the electric car advocates look like they’re backing the sloths in a three way race of progress between rabbits (diesels), turtles (gasoline engines) and sloths (electric vehicles).
You’re right that technology gets better over time, but the truth is that electric auto technology isn’t really getting all that much better. Sure, they’re more comfy, more stylin’, with sexier dashboards, etc. That’s true for all cars. The ONE thing that has to get better for the electric car to become viable is the battery technology, and it can’t get just a little bit better around the edges. It has to become “order-of-magnitude” better.
That simply hasn’t happened in the last 100 years. And from what I know as a EE, it ain’t on the horizon, either. If we had even one-tenth the rate of progress in battery technology we’ve had in sold state electronics (transistors and chips) in the last 50 years, you’d be able to power your car for 50 miles with a battery that is about the size of a wristwatch.
Look at it another way: Consider how much music you can now store on an iPad Nano. A huge leap forward in personal entertainment since the first portable transistor radios, right?
Batteries, relatively speaking, have progressed from a 12” LP vinyl record to the 45RPM single in the last 100 years.
Step away from the Kool Aid, lest ye be zotted.
Just what is the problem with a 19th technology that must be subsidized to the tune of $250,000 for Dolt by the taxpayer and then it’s still a piece of crap? No...no problem there. Why don’t you take a train...another inefficient subsidized crummy technology.
Give me a hybrid that packs 5,000 horsepower, weighs 8,000 tons, carries 5,000 gallons of diesel with an unlimited top end that I can drive on the street and I’ll bite.
>> I am not sure I understand why FREEPERS are making fun of automobiles that may one day be a great thing.
I think regulating your diet and energy consumption may one day be a great thing.
You know what it’s about, naps.