all electric vehicles are making big strides NOW!

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=742312030&channel=212469179

well if you can buy a mini cooper and have an extra 25,000 dollars to throw at it and live near this place that does the conversion you can have one.
And if you have 100.000 dollars to buy a Tesla Roadster then you can have one.
So I would hardly say that electric vehicles are making strides.
when I can go to the Ford, Chevy, GM, Toyota, (fill in the blank) dealer and buy a car that cost the same as other cars, that is fully electric and can go highway speeds and over 100 miles per charge THEN electric cars will be making big strides.
I want to knw why I cant have one now? What is taking so long this is not new technology.
GM had the EV1 Ford had the Rav  electric suv. Then they stopped making them and you cant buy one unless you are lucky enough to pick up a used rav GM took them all back and crushed them.
They dont want you to have a fully electric car.

How about taking your existing car and converting it to electric for $10,000?  I've heard there are several places that do it.

Here is a link that is almost 10 years old:  http://www.renewables.com/ElectricVehicles.htm

Tesla has plans for a $30,000 vehicle. There are several others coming out in that price range. 

The thing is that with a few thousand teslas on the road, the price for parts will drop.  And the infrastructure will start to fall into place. 

I agree they are coming but its awful slow.
Unfortunately in less you know how to do it yourself there are no companies near me that do conversions maybe in the big city's but not around here where I live.
California seems to be a pioneer in that department.
I hope that one day we will all be driving electric cars that are powered from solar charging systems. But I am sure that will be a long time into the future before we see anything close to that.

Is the car you drive now built in your neighborhood?

Have it done a few hundred miles away.  When it's ready, take a bus over and drive it back.

Here is a quickie web site:  http://www.electroauto.com/

What about these new bicycles with electric backup.  It seems that the problem with a lot of bicycles (at least for me) as that country roads are narrow and curvy and if you are going slow you stand a good chance of getting squished.  So if you could go uphill a little faster it seems to move you into a much safer space ...

http://gas2.org/2008/04/23/affordable-electric-cars-coming-to-us-in-2009/

http://gas2.org/2008/05/27/an-electric-car-you-can-buy-today-the-20k-triac-ev/

I just now saw something about nissan coming out with an all electric car called "the nissan leaf".  100 mile range and 90mph.

I've thought about getting an electric assist motor for my bicycle (an electric car is WAY out of my budget!).  We live twelve miles from town, and while it's mostly fairly level there is one big hill.  The problem I have is that for about half the distance, there are no shoulders at all, so I'd have to ride in the road.  That's just not safe, although I have seen people doing it.  I guess I'm a bit of a coward, but I'd much rather have a good wide shoulder to ride on, or a bike path separate from the road.  If our roads were better designed for safe bicycling, I would use my bike more, and I've talked to other people who say the same thing. 

Kathleen

The problem with electric cars are the batteries. They don't last all that long and when they die, you have a lot of highly toxic material that needs to get dealt with. Oh, and they're very expensive to replace. Until we come up with a better energy storage technology, alternative vehicles like this won't make sense financially or ecologically. Thought I suppose if you look at a typical three to five year lease batteries make some amount of sense... ish...

I, for one, really want to see the MDI Air Car come to full production here in the states. It used some sort of power (I'd love to see solar or biodiesel for the compression) to compress air, and then ran on that. Much cleaner/better all around.

I think the fuel cell might be one of our transportation fuel answers, in a distributed fashion.  However, now, I think the MoU (Masters of the Universe) see petrochemicals as the hydrogen feedstock, hence the Bush admin's subsidy for this particular technology.

However, Prof Nocera, MIT, has apparently found cheap, common catalysts that make hydrolyzing (using solar, wind, etc.) oxygen and hydrogen from water, of any quality, at ambient temperature, without pH extremes, and cheap, a reality.  (First models were made from pvc pipes.)  This provides a way to store the inconsistent solar and wind energy without batteries.

His goal is distributed (residential) hydrogen production and storage, that will feed the fuel cell to generate electricity for home, car, etc.  He has formed a company, Suncatalytix, to get the $$ to commercialize the units.

BTW, this is a kind of imitation of photosynthesis

And I understand there is work being done now to make fuel cells more economical, i.e, using something other that platinum membranes.

Here he is at PopTech - http://poptech.org/danielnocera/

And as of 4/2011

http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/nocera-takes-solar-energy-for-the-masses-one-step-further


I hope the great scientific and engineering minds in this forum can check it out and explain it better than I have    And that this is not off topic or should be in another thread.

nancy sutton wrote:

And as of 4/2011

http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/nocera-takes-solar-energy-for-the-masses-one-step-further

I hope the great scientific and engineering minds in this forum can check it out and explain it better than I have    And that this is not off topic or should be in another thread.

This is definitely one of the most interesting developments in renewable energy.  On the surface, it appears to address the 3 big problems: cost, efficiency and storage.  But without any real numbers we cannot assess cost or efficiency.  Cost, who knows, but the premise is that these are made from cheap, abundant materials.  Efficiency, in theory, it would seem that using solar energy to convert water to H & 02 on spot would be much more efficient than converting solar radiation to electricity and then producing H from that, no?  As for storage, hydrogen is a storage medium, though it is not a very energy dense storage medium.

Got one last year and love it; a used '22 Chevy Bolt. Relatively slow to charge and don't have enough power at home to do it (my whole house runs on 3 solar panels) but my local gas station has free coffee and a charger so periodically I head out early in the morning, plug in, grab a coffee and spend an hour & a half catching up on news & email.

It's actually a nice change to my routine, although at some point I'll expand my system enough to cover my charging including car for 9 months of the year.  (If I increase my system to cover a 100% electrical house in winter in cloudy BC, I will have excess power 9 months of the year.)

Even charging at a station I save tons of money, plus virtually no maintenance costs.  Although I did ding it in an accident last month and find they are pricey to cosmetically fix but I think that's all cars these days.

I have taken long trips of several hundred miles, and medium trips of <200km frequently. Only issues I have are with many brands of charging stations (7-11 and BC Hydro among them) not reliably maintained. Flo is great.

paul wheaton wrote:I just now saw something about nissan coming out with an all electric car called "the nissan leaf".   100 mile range and 90mph.

Interesting to see what was discussed more than a decade ago on this thread.

A year and a half ago we bought a used Nissan Leaf that was three years old- it cost us a total of $10,999 (total!! no taxes either!). It was to replace our twenty year old hybrid Toyota Prius when it was totaled in an accident (RIP 😢).

I LOVE my new(er) car. We don't have any fancy charging stuff at our house. We just trickle charge it all night using a 120v exterior outlet and if someone does a ton of driving during the day and feels nervous, there's a fast charging station that's compatible about five minutes from my husband's job (that is free).  I can comfortably travel about 120 miles which is about what it takes to get to my parents' house. They have a Leaf too and can charge our car for the return trip in a couple of hours on their faster charger.

The only annoying thing about it is that the dealership keeps sending me automatic texts telling me it's time for an oil change. I finally called them and asked, You realize you sold me an electric car, right? I thought it didn't need oil changes?" The employee replied, "Well, um, no, it doesn't but we could, um, maybe look at other, um, stuff?" 🤦‍♀️ Needless to say, we haven't needed to bring it to the service shop at all.

Jenny Wright wrote: .... We just trickle charge it all night using a 120v exterior outlet and if someone does a ton of driving during the day and feels nervous, there's a fast charging station that's compatible about five minutes from my husband's job (that is free).

I was keeping my eye on used Leafs sometime back on FB Marketplace but have not seen any there recently in our region.  Especially as a commuter car, it seemed very sensible.  Is the battery-swap business on these still up and running?  And how far back did they incorporate fast charging in addition to home 120/240V charging?

John Weiland wrote:

Jenny Wright wrote: .... We just trickle charge it all night using a 120v exterior outlet and if someone does a ton of driving during the day and feels nervous, there's a fast charging station that's compatible about five minutes from my husband's job (that is free).

I was keeping my eye on used Leafs sometime back on FB Marketplace but have not seen any there recently in our region.  Especially as a commuter car, it seemed very sensible.  Is the battery-swap business on these still up and running?  And how far back did they incorporate fast charging in addition to home 120/240V charging?

Hmmm... I just looked up about the battery and it looks like recently there were supply issues for replacement batteries. I was not aware of that. Ours is still under warranty and we live in a moderate climate so hopefully we won't have to deal with that for a while. With our Prius, we had to replace the battery twice- once at 10 years and again at 20 years (yeah, about two months before the accident that totaled it 🙄). I was expecting that kind of time frame for the Leaf but I guess we will see.

As for the the fast chargers, the dealership had them when we bought it but I remember the chargers going in by my husband's job about 4-5 years ago.

    My big concern about electric vehicles is not whether they are more or less sustainable than gas-powered vehicles; it's roads.

    When two nations are at war, the real winner isn't this nation or that nation; it's war. When smartphone manufacturers are competing to dominate their market sectors, they are merely competitors; the real victor is the smartphone itself, with all the shifts that implies in existing power dynamics and human society.
    Likewise, the current race to make long-distance, high-speed transport more sustainable (electric! hybrid! high mpg! biofuels! trains!), regardless of who wins in terms of market dominance, will serve, ultimately, to sustain long-distance, high-speed transport. If Amazon can no longer outcompete local manufacture and ditribution because long-distance, high-speed transportation (using fossil fuels) gets too expensive, then maybe that can mark the end of something destructive. Roads are all about access, for better and for worse; and, generally, the ones with greater (exploitative) power have leveraged them to their unequal advantage.
    Maybe, if we'd used electric vehicles all this time instead of fossil fuels, less damage would have been done. Maybe. But that's not the discussion here; we're at the point where we've already made the choice in favor of fossil fuels, that damage has largely been done, and the big push for alternatives appears to be coming, in large part, from the desire to keep this same machine running on different fuels. Is long-distance, high-speed transport something worth sustaining?

Derek Brewer wrote:The problem with electric cars are the batteries. They don't last all that long and when they die, you have a lot of highly toxic material that needs to get dealt with. Oh, and they're very expensive to replace. Until we come up with a better energy storage technology, alternative vehicles like this won't make sense financially or ecologically. Thought I suppose if you look at a typical three to five year lease batteries make some amount of sense... ish...

I, for one, really want to see the MDI Air Car come to full production here in the states. It used some sort of power (I'd love to see solar or biodiesel for the compression) to compress air, and then ran on that. Much cleaner/better all around.

Ragged Chutes is a fascinating story. It produces DRY compressed air that was used to
run locomotives. Paris used to pipe compressed air to houses. IMAGINE THAT. It blew
my mind to discover such history.

The key word is DRY because your compressor squeezes humid air that when released in
an air motor ices and that might jam the mechanisms.

The best rotary car air engine is located in west Melbourne. Unfortunately the inventor
only wants to license the engine instead of making it.
Angelo Di Pietro
Engineair Pty Ltd
399 Sayers Rd, Hoppers Crossing VIC 3029, Australia



[Robert has unalived. Loss of wife and failing health.]





I have been tracking progress on this engine and a Ragged Chutes return.
There is no good news so far.

A compressed air engined car brings cooling and fresh air into a city.
What's not to like?

All investments and your tax dollars are going into war machines instead
of a brighter future.  Whether you vote or not or which party doesn't
budge this needle one iota.

Mason Berry wrote:   Is long-distance, high-speed transport something worth sustaining?

It's an interesting argument, though it seems very hypothetical to me. From a practical perspective I think that boat sailed a century or two ago. If people and goods can be mobile, they will be.

Business supply chains and economic systems are now rooted in long-distance transport. Love them or hate them, I can't see those going away any time soon.

For private individuals in a free society, what mechanisms would prevent them from being as mobile as they please? Nuisance taxes of many types, I suppose; declining road maintenance or very low speed limits or bottlenecking the system for private vehicles to increase the annoyance factor. I don't think internal checkpoints and travel passes/quotas would be accepted by democratic societies as a permanent norm. My 2c.

If we look to replace conventional cars with electric, we have to tackle the price issue and the range issue. those are the 2 big components that put the brakes on EVs.
BYD  ( a chinese electric car) has done that, and in Australia and Great Britain, they are quite popular:
Better performance than Tesla and lower prices. For the short version;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhOqbSJ208o
Our friends the Brits have already switched to BYD for their double decker busses, at this time, it appears that the only reason for not having them available here is more of a political choice which, here, has 3 components:
1-China is an enemy (Commercially speaking)
2- As long as we can rely on gasoline engines, BYD may be banned from the US market.
3- I should add that Detroit and the Unions there may also feel threatened because most of their cars would become fossils that no one wants.
For the actual numbers;
https://www.bydaccessories.store/blogs/news/byd-vs-tesla-range-comparison?srsltid=AYCX9vI3U8pgnDGkLspSNNUO0tgp2oCcgAbRrtVM35V2RtROBuSgRnGH
It bears remembering that 2 allies of ours have opened their doors to BYD and are doing brisk business. Detroit?

We learned about this split volt gadget recently. You plug in your electric car and dryer to it and you switch back and forth depending on which one you’re using.

They don’t use their dryer very much, or at all, so it’s a no brainer for them. You get the 240 volt plug without having to install a new one.

We haven’t switched to electric yet, since our 2 Prius (2007 and 2013 C ) are still running fine and we don’t travel much. But when we get to that point (soon),
this will be the way to go for us.

My 2026 Tesla model Y, a SUV, cost roughly the same as a Rav 4 hybrid, which I previously owned. My electric car gets 300 miles on a charge, handles well and has a lot of power. It has optional self driving, which I find is very useful at age 74. It has 8 cameras, which is 6 more eyes than I have! It is all wheel drive and great in the snow. It is courteous to others on the road and wildlife crossing. I can choose the speed it drives at. Tires and brakes are the only maintenance an electric car needs. They are definately the future.