Electric car solution.

senojekips said:
Who was it who said, "if the same effort had been expended improving the internal combustion engine, as has been put into the development of the desktop computer over the last 30 years, you could drive your vehicle to the moon and back on half a pint of peanut oil"

I might not have it exact, but the gist of it is right.
Click to expand...

An alternative view is here

http://soli.inav.net/~catalyst/Humor/gm.htm

Of course one can only use as much energy contained in the fuel and thermodynamic and economic limitations dictate that this is much less. As the best Diesels are around 50% energy efficient in ideal conditions there is not as much potential as one might imagine without making the car highly complex (to actually get this 50% in practice), reducing their size, or convincing people to share.
 
perseus said:
Of course one can only use as much energy contained in the fuel and thermodynamic and economic limitations dictate that this is much less. As the best Diesels are around 50% energy efficient in ideal conditions there is not as much potential as one might imagine without making the car highly complex (to actually get this 50% in practice), reducing their size, or convincing people to share.
Click to expand...

Damn and blast you Perseus, you've allowed your facts to spoil a bloody good story.:-D.

The above notwithstanding, I still think that the internal combustion engine is barely out of the stone age in the development stakes.
 
perseus said:
An alternative view is here

http://soli.inav.net/~catalyst/Humor/gm.htm

Of course one can only use as much energy contained in the fuel and thermodynamic and economic limitations dictate that this is much less. As the best Diesels are around 50% energy efficient in ideal conditions there is not as much potential as one might imagine without making the car highly complex (to actually get this 50% in practice), reducing their size, or convincing people to share.
Click to expand...


Hey - that alternative view describes my car.:-(


Perseus is talking of yesterday, of now. Dyson will be looking toward tomorrow, already aware of the hurdles. Of course the car industry has always resisted. As for the oil industry.................
 
All motive power is measured by efficiency. Gain versus loss. Try to imagine something that can supply 100% efficiency, what's that you say, can't be done? Well, accepting what can and can't be done doesn't mean to stop trying, it simply means knowing where the stopping place is and trying to get as close as possible to that place.

I like to think of the analogy used to describe the exponential curve of a capacitor charging, a grasshopper hops one half the distance to the wall with each hop. Theoretically, he'll never reach the end of his trip. The term t= RC is used to measure the full charge on a capacitor where (t) is time in seconds and (R) is the resistance in ohms to current flow to the capacitance (C) in farads.

We accept 4 time constants as a practical full charge, even though a small amount of current is still flowing. All that to say this, whatever the approach to moving us from one place to another, there will never be a 100% efficient answer.
 
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The sort of reasoning I provided isn't a dead end in terms of a solution. By identifying what is and isn't possible helps to avoid investigating dead ends such as perpetual motion machines. There are also many 'tricks' you can play to 'seemingly' get more out than you put in. Take a heat pump for example, you can put 1 unit of electric energy in, and get 4 units of useful heat energy out, however it does mean inputing 3 units of useless low temperature heat from somewhere else. What goes in must come out, 1st law of thermodynamics.
 
I am happy that ideas are being exercised. Trial and error will bring about a economically sound alternative technology. Economics is the key to selling something to the public. Plug in electric cars save on gas but add onto the monthly electric bill. Hybrids are not worth it even with gas at $4 a gallon. Since they cost $8,000-10,000 more than their conventional models, they must save you that much in gas. Yes I am that loser who ran some equations. Even at $10 a gallon, only one of the current hybrids became economically sound after 6.5 years of ownership. I believe I assumed 15,000 miles of driving per a year. Since newer models are out since I did my number crunching, I may reexamine the hybrids.

Remember, the market is driving these changes, not the government.

I like the environment but I love my wallet more. Give me an alternative fuel technology that saves me money and I, along with millions of others, will go down that road.
 
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Both, alternative and drill here drill now is the way to go. We should not be relying on terrorist states/nations to supply us our energy for obvious reasons.
 
The key suppliers are not controlled by terrorists. In fact, they fear terrorists... big time. However, their countries do contain these elements to a degree.
Cutting off any reliance on them would be a huge step towards making the world a quieter place.
Plus, it's easy for terrorists to recruit etc. when they actually have US forces nearby. Put the US forces farther away and with no reason to come back and they've got a harder case to sell against America. The dictatorships that have served us well will be another issue, however.
 
Electric cars can be very handy for short distances, especially people living in the Suburbs. The ones designed by Ford and GM in the 1990s could get 70 mph with a range of 250 -and that was 10 years ago technology.

If GM and Ford (with alittle help from the oil industry) hadnt killed off the EV1 in the 1990s we would have been much further along.

Fortunately, where major American automobile makers continually fumble the ball there are others ready to recover it.

Take a look at the Lighting GT sportscar which was expoed last month at the British Auto show

http://www.autoblog.com/tag/electric+car/

90 Mile range on a ten minute charge!

And Toyota has a new commercial EV for sale next year.
 
I have to enter George Bush tollway then North Central Expressway at an average speed of 50mph and accelerate to 70mph just to keep up with the traffic. Saving gas/money and preserving the environment is a noble undertaking but it is of no use if I'm dead.
 
Quite, and of little use if authoritarian rules and regulations take advantage of the situation by making life unbearable.:roll:
 
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