"Oh yeah. That's how it starts at first. Then the crowd gathers, and everyone wants gas free, and someone pulls the hose out of your car, and someone throws down a lit cigarette and...
Posted on 11/05/2012 6:20:53 PM PST by AmonAmarth
The debate about the value of electric cars just got another jolt.
In the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, unprepared electic vehicle owners in the Northeast were out of luck. With power grids and public charging stations down there was, and in some places still is no way to get energy into their cars.
According to automotive analyst Thilo Koslowski, the storm has revealed the one major vulnerability with electric cars: that a backup infrastructure is almost non-existent.
“If the outages continue, this will negatively impact consumer interest,” he told FoxNews.com. “We will need to address the issue of electricity shortages if we want to have a growing share of EVs.”
Technology analyst Rob Enderle agrees that the infrastructure problem with EVs is being called into question in the wake of the storm. Early funding for the EV infrastructure has focused on building charging stations at malls and offices, not on disaster-proofing them. If the grid goes dark, he says, there’s no back-up battery storage to keep your EV running.
ChargePoint, which runs one of the largest public charge station networks in the area affected by Sandy did not respond to requests from FoxNews.com to discuss it's contingency plans.
“EVs need infrastructure and low cost batteries to survive -- and they have neither,” he says. “We need some strong advancements in energy storage or generation to truly make electric competitive.”
The automakers themselves are looking for answers, as well.
“As more pure EVs hit the market, consumers will demand solutions to these types of dilemmas and the industry will have to respond,” says Jana Hartline, an environmental manager at Toyota.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
70’s muscle cars, love them all, my personal favorite was the 76 Grand Torino
NG is probably the most abundant fuel right now and cheap, worth considering. Your swamp buggy sounds like a fun project!
Heck, all you need is one of these.... and lots of time.
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Can’t open but would you be referring to what we ‘lovingly’ called a West Virginia credit card?
A couple long hoses and some good ‘lungs’ would solve a lot of problems....Though I would imagine the new intakes are pretty secured inre putting anything other than measuring stick and hose bibs....
It started out as a mid 60’s GM 2 ton cabover truck with a 6 cylinder 4 stroke diesel, I removed the cab, the axles and basically everything but the engine and tranny.
Fitted a pair of military Rockwells with 12” inches of lift, a NP 205 transfer case and I’m about to get a 1994 Ford F-350 quad cab on it soon, and I fabricated rims for 55” tractor tires that work just right with the 6.72 gear ratio top loaders.
maybe next year I’ll build another but running solely on steam over a hydrostatic drive. Think running gear from a Bobcat mated to eather a high pressure steam turban or a standard steam piston engine evolved from a large industrial air compressor I have lying around.
And if I do get it running I’ll make sure the world knows about it, belching smoke from clear cutting old growth trees, should explode a couple hundred thousand liberal heads at the least.
http://www.kmart.com/shc/s/p_10151_10104_004W069542211002P?sid=KSx20070515x00001d&psid=43x395695... not years away they are kids toys
Considering that the Backer Electric was motoring around New York back in the gaslight era (late 1800's) that been one hell of a long wait for a practical package. Some things were never meant to be.
Regards,
GtG
About the only application where driving range and duty cycle make sense for electric propulsion. Maybe an electric lawn mower could find a market to keep peace in the suburbs.
Regards,
GtG
We’re on our 2nd Prius. When we go slow, we call it stealth mode because you can’t hear it. My husband used to scare people and sneak up behind them in stealth mode.
I don’t know how far you can drive in stealth mode before the battery dies.
Get a gas powered generator to charge it!
The last several hurricanes (and hurricane scares) in my area made me consider diesel too.
The trucking industry won’t go electric.
"Oh yeah. That's how it starts at first. Then the crowd gathers, and everyone wants gas free, and someone pulls the hose out of your car, and someone throws down a lit cigarette and...
There’s always rubber bands.
Yes, but energy is lost in the process, energy is expended against wind and rolling resistance... Ultimately, if a charging station is not available, a chargeable hybrid is just a high mpg vehicle with a very high cost for what you get. Compared to a Prius, I'd rather find a restored Honda CRX 1.3 with a 5-speed tranny, and stash a couple 5 gal cans of gas in the garage, if trouble is on the way. (Granted, that last won't work for hi-rise dwellers. But a CRX 1.3 or HF will go a LONG way on a tank of gas.)
You can also drive them under 20 miles per hour and not use any gasoline.
At that point, a bicycle might be a better alternative!
Yep, I was just going to mention those old pumps, I am old enough to remember them. They used either an electric pump or the hand lever shown in your picture, many of them were built in areas where there was no electricity and they worked quite well. Fill the glass dome with how many galleons you wanted and then let gravity feed it into your tank.
No, I’m not a MENSA member, never pretended to be. Just like you, I’m a guy with a keyboard and apparently an attitude problem.
So take this in the spirit in which is it intended. =-P~~~~~
Maybe outages in a place like NYC are rare enough that gas station owners don’t figure the investment, occaisional maintenance, etc., in a generator, are worthwhile. Plus you gotta have someone on hand who can handle the thing (refuel it safely, for example). That probably rules out 75% of “MinitMart” type employees.
Still, outages must happen occaisionally, and even if all gas stations had generators, it wouldn’t take long to save in equal cost what business would otherwise be lost...
I’m in a mostly rural area, so storm related outage are more common, and even here, when we had a major ice storm in ‘09, most stations were caught without any way to power their pumps. That one just “does not compute”.
I like my paint job so no....
I like my paint job so no....
After my post I was thinking how much more efficient steam cars could be now after the advent of the steam turbine.
I’m also looking into a diesel generator.
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