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 ...
Damm bubba, You will have to post a pic of this monster when you’re done.
I’ll try to send a pic from my cellphone of the progress so far later on, I have all four tires mounted, I had to make ring adapters for the rims to fit to the 6 hole rims, and here is what I also came up with on my own, you see I am head mechanic for a concrete batch plant, I have tons of parts available. I took all four whell hubs which are identical front or rear, you can even turn them around to change the offset, I punched out all the 3/4” wheel studs and using a three step drill process I drilled up to the size to set in 1 and 1/8th inch steering axle wheel studs using Budd left and right hand wheel nuts.
Every place I can I have beefed up everything, the buggy is being built to access a remote gold mining camp out in the bush. We don’t want it to break down period.
Awesome, good thinking making the tires compatible in any config.. interested to see the end result.
Thats a weak link using the stock 3/4” wheel studs, and we decided to keep it singled out in the rear so I took the rear hub which ran duals before and simply turned it around, the drum bolts up, and so does the axle flange, good old US military redundancy! The outside wheel width is now about 8 feet 2 inches front and rear, legal to haul on a trailer in Alaska without permits. The tires are about 55” high, I’m working on an idea of using a wheelchair lift for the owner so he can get up into the cab.
You cannot charge a Prius wth electricity. The alternate is gasoline. They get great gas mileage, and you can get a lot better mileage by turning off the A/C or heater. It’s not something you would do all the time, but it would help in an emergency.
My husband did a test to see how far he could go on one 11 gallon tank. He went over 700 miles!
Your comment makes no sense. Do you think that a Prius would be disabled by a failed electric power grid? Really? Can you explain how that would happen?
Perhaps not the Prius exactly, but the name stands in as shorthand for other similar devices be they EV, electric go cart, horseless carriage... whatever you want to call them.
Electricity dependent motor vehicle, does that make it easier to comprehend? When grid down, car no go.
That’s the basis of my earlier statement. I didn’t realize this thread would serve as catnip for the pedantic.
You seem to be unaware that the Prius is a "hybrid". Its fuel source is gasoline, and its prime mover is a small internal combustion engine. It has a large electric battery and a complicated electro-mechanical drive train, but as a far as fueling it is concerned, it's no different from my Corolla. To the point, it is no more and no less vulnerable to electric power grid failure than my Corolla.
When grid down, car no go.
That, FRiend, does not apply to the Prius. Sorry. It just doesn't. Using the Prius (in a snarky way, no less) as an example in your earlier statement is wrong, it discredits you, and it discredits the point you're trying to make.
And I agree with the point you're trying to make. A true, pure, plug-in only electric vehicle is extremely vulnerable to power-grid failure. Storing electricity is much more difficult than storing gasoline. When TSHTF, a gas car (whether pure gas or hybrid) is much more functional than a pure electric.
You can now:
http://www.toyota.com/prius-plug-in/
As I recall, a little over 700 miles was about what I could squeeze out of my CRX 1.3. And with good tires on it, it was truly a fun car to drive. With 2012 engine technology in it, it’d probably be a killer.
Good review here:
http://www.automobilemag.com/green/reviews/0907_1985_honda_crx_hf_2010_honda_insight/
I did not know about the plug-in Prius
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