Electric cars

Charlie E. wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

how do you charge by solar at NIGHT? The vehicles will be at work during the day.

To replace lost gas tax revenue, right? People are driving less, which is good, so let's tax 'em more.

However much Oregon charges, it won't be enough--as soon as people start getting their bills, they'll quit driving.

Good for green GPS jobs though.

Clinton promised a BTU tax, which I actually liked--energy conservation is in the national interest. He backed off though once elected--the idea was VERY unpopular.

Cheers, James Arthur

Not dense enough, you'd need something like diamond with the molecular weight of gold, hard and dense somewhat like the rock their skulls are made of.

Kuurus

Tim Wescott wrote in news:X8ydnQD6Ra6K1uLUnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@web-ster.com:

WHO wants to have to replace and PAY for a MAJOR expensive component(battery pack) on a **2 yr old** auto? It sure isn't going to be a warranty replacement.

That's a deal-breaker right there.There'd be NO savings in having an electric auto.

And that "global warming" hooey IS hooey.

James Arthur wrote in news:gZIfl.71$ snipped-for-privacy@nwrddc01.gnilink.net:

Essentially,enclosed electric scooters.

Or electric Smart4Two.(I read they're making them now...)

Hey, are we engineers, or what?

simple, you make the battery 'pack' out of smaller modules, each with the intelligence to monitor their own charge/discharge cycles, temperature, performance, etc. Then, when you have a cell go bad, you raplace a $100 module instead of a $8000 battery pack.

Charlie

Obama will require you to work at night, and sleep during the day ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Hooey or no, conservation's still in the national interest. It doesn't make economic sense to send boatloads of cash out of country for something we could live equally well using a lot less of.

Conservation's really bad for oil exporters like Canada and Mexico, but good for us.

Cheers, James Arthur

Brilliant. Replacing eighty modules every two years, at $100 each, is much more economical then replacing one battery every two years for $8K.

John

No!! There's a load on Amory Lovin's Rocky Mountain Institute website, but the gist is you can make a same-size car a bunch lighter with lightweight materials. Then, it needs less power plant to propel it, so you can use a smaller engine for equal performance, which makes it lighter still. Both measures save gas. It's a virtuous circle.

He also addresses making such a car _safer_ than current cars with simple, energy-absorbing cones placed inside.

Propulsion technology is a separate, independent issue: the improved body design equally benefits gas, hybrids, and electrics.

There's an _excellent_ video on the site, but it takes an hour to watch. .PDF notes of the presentation too. (hard to interpret without watching the video)

Good stuff. Really.

Cheers, James Arthur

I palled around with Amory Lovins for a few days at the National Science Fair in Baltimore, ca 1963. He was fun and smart but a bit priggish and judgemental. He got it into his head that one of the other contestants was cheating (which he was) and made it a personal crusade to get him disqualified. It didn't work, the cheater got a minor award, and AL didn't. I didn't either.

John

He still comes off that way, and I did catch him stretching a few points in his Stanford lecture videos.

But he's obviously right when he says that cutting 'm' in half saves half of (1/2) m * v^2, and doubles a = F/m.

For the same acceleration, a half-weight car needs half the gas. Rather than go smaller, Lovins does it by lightweight materials and design.

His preferred material is a carbon-fiber composite. That's not currently cheap, but he argues that it easily could be.

James

Almost everyone has access to more than one vehicle; it's called "rental".

It would be good if people would take this into account before buying a minibus for their daily commute on the grounds that it "needs" to cope with the annual family holiday.

Happened to me at the regional science fair in WV in 1958. Cheater got rewarded for his _purchased_ project and I walked away with my

...Jim Thompson

The REAL problem is, how do we get this information through the thick skulls of the paranoid public that crap themselves at any mention of the word "nuclear"?

Maybe we should take every possible opportunity to point out that smoke detectors rely upon a RADIOACTIVE!!! source and let house fires get rid of the nucleophobes.

Mentioning the amount of thorium released by burning coal doesn't seem to work; they just assume it's another anti-coal greenie lie.

In article , To-Email- snipped-for-privacy@My-Web-Site.com says...>

The mess was caused by REGULATION. No 'DE-' about it. F&F weren't deregulated into existence, nor were they deregulated into backing bad loans. See: California + Power

It took LBJ to make a bigger mess than FDR. Obama bin Biden is about to make them look like punk kids.

There are a lot of thigns that should have been done.

Not dead, just bankrupt. Let them rise from the ashes, without the UAW. ...or not. UAW's choice.

Pretty much.

"Protection" is cheaper.

Why did the war finally end the depression??? Massive federal spending causing full employment, that's why. Week spending, tax cuts and other gimmicks will NOT do it.

Zipcars seem to be popular around here among the single/no car urbanites:

Of course it won't fly in the 'burbs where you need a car to get the convenience store.

Also Home Despot has what looks like a low hassle 'local only' truck rental for a reasonable price.

If you have a couple of kids who play hockey and/or baseball it fills up a moderately large vehicle pretty quickly. Even faster if one or more of them is a goalie or catcher.

How is he going to expect people to work after he bankrupts all the businesses?