Electric Cars Continue to Make Inroads

company? "

Investment brokers. If private money isn't into it there is a reason. Like Solyndra for example, the big private money was't in it because they knew t he market. They knew the Chinese had a very competitive product.

As I have stated before, there are reasons we still use gasoline. It still beats the alternatives cold. But things will change. It's just a matter of making the transition as painless as possible. For now, I would say that tw o thirds of the driving public cannot afford to up and buy a new car. Some simply do not have the money because they got McJobs, others are not done p aying off what they are driving now. Some lease which means they got zero e quity, and when EVs really take off that will get worse.

interval is reduced to the time it takes to fill your tank with gasoline AND the lifetime of the battery becomes rational"

Well, after a life of solving problems that engineers create - no offense - I see a way, but have not thought through its implementation. Not my job.

Replaceable batteries. Standardized. You back up to the machine and the bat tery is simply replaced. You pay for either the elcheapo battery which may be older and not have as much capacity if you don't drive much. If you insi st on a nice new one it costs a little more but you get more range out of i t. And there is a payback for whatever charge is left on the battery you tr ade in.

I do TOTALLY agree with you here though, it is bad enough. If a gas station advertises at 20 cents cheaper than average there will be lines out to the street. Probably to the highway exit. And people will bring every can, law nmower, snowblower, rototiller, everything that runs on gas will be on a tr ailer and they will fill it all.

Anyway, the batteries would have to have a serial number in a national data base, which we don't really like but if you want to drive then we have to p ut up with it. Plus the fact that there has to be accountability for when s omeone charges the battery at home. If you can do that it is like being abl e to make your own gasoline. Some sort of electronic monitor must be in the re to count how many cycles it has gone through because that affects the co re value.

But you are totally right, people do not want to sit at the station for ten minutes. Even if you gave them a bar to sit at and bullshit or whatever, e ven free snacks, two problems still remain. One is space. Cars would be bac ked up out into the streets because you don't have lots of acreage, and som etime people simply do not have the time. Like "S*it, I shouldn't have let the kid take the car last night, he ran it down" while you're on your way t o a meeting with an important client or whatever.

Modular, standardised batteries, that is what is needed.

I'd normally only need enough for my 15-mile round-trip commute. And there are outlets for electric cars in the garage at work.

Surely just a higher-capacity 230V single-phase line. These are not expensive to install. My house has five extra-capacity 230V breakers, two 30A for dryer & water heater (5kW at 25% derating), one 40A for a range (7kW), 60A for HVAC (10kW), and an 80A (14kW) for a secondary panel. Even up to 50 or 60A drain at night, when little else is happening, should be OK with common 200A service.

assume most people do, then you can fully charge overnight off a standard 220V outlet no problem at all. "

True, but right now you can drive from California to New York. There would be no more of that.

while he seems to fancy himself the expert on the viability of it, I think it's fairly clear to all that he knows precisely zip about it, and has never even set foot in a vehicle of the type."

Why do you have to set foot in such a vehicle to know that you don't want to spend ten minutes at a "gas" station ?

You just used the opportunity to needle a conservative, and it didn't work. Do YOU want to wait in line (and there WILL be lines if it takes ten minutes) and THEN wait ten minutes to go how far before you have to do it again ?

Typical liberal s*it.

With some charger and charging efficiency figures it may be down to

Oh, you can do math. Can't expect that from everyone, you know.

That's why liberals do not understand why the big Wall street money has not been invested in these things. They are in business to make money, not to lose money. The government is in business to lose money, our money.

Don't get me wrong, I would like to see it happen. Just get these last few hurdles out of the way and then things change. I see the battery and chargi ng it as the biggest problem. I am sure the motors will need brushes or wha tever from time to time but as long as they last a while it comes down to l ike changing the oil. (BTW, NEVER change the fluid in an automatic transmis sion, just the filter and top it off)

One thing, the torque from a DC motor starts at zero RPM, but what about th ose hybrids ? I assume they still have a transmission no ? In fact probably a more complex one due to taking drive off of the ICE and motor at will. O r am I wrong here, that they both always work ? Don't bother, I'll look it up. But it seems to me that total EV is probably the way to go.

and speaking of all the problems with range, why not just put TWO batteries in it ? One dies, flip the switch and then if changeable just have the dea d one switched out and swipe your card.

Our normal outlets are 220 (actually 230) volts. 16A is the typical fuse rating on such a circuit. Hence we need no special outlets for dryers or air conditioners. 230V/16A is over 3600W.

Higher power outlets are 3-phase 230/440V here.

You can charge at 24 amps off a 220/30 amp circuit that many homes have for washer/dryers (de-rated 20% for a continuous load)

Well, the starting assumptions are wrong, but the math is correct. The fact is that there are indeed people fully charging their Teslas overnight (~8 hrs) from unmodified 220V home service no problem at all.

The efficiency losses of the charging system are way pessimistic. My own measurements indicate that nearly 90% of the energy that comes down the pipe ends up in the battery.

Even my much-less-expensive Gen 2 Volt can charge its (smaller) battery pack, good for around 60 miles in ideal conditions, nearly to full overnight off a measly 120 volt standard wall socket current-limited by the charge controller to 8 amps.

It depends on the design. Serial vs. parallel.

You can watch a very nice animation of how the first generation Voltec system manages everything here:

The second generation of the tech doesn't require premium fuel and has several more refinements.

Weight.

Here's a video of the second generation drive system:

I disagree with the claim that it would be impossible forever, probably in 7-10 years you'll be able to buy a car with a 400 mile range that you could quick-charge at an appropriate station in 30 minutes while you get coffee and lunch at the Starbucks or whatever next door.

For the moment, it's impossible, unless you buy one of the vehicles with a range-extender engine. It's actually pretty nice owning a car that doesn't attempt to be either a pure electric vehicle or a pure gasoline car; as its "jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none" thing insulates me against spikes in the cost of either fuel or electricity. It would be nice if they made a flex-fuel version so one could run it off electricity, gasoline, E85, whiskey, or whatever one had on hand in a pinch.

For my part though I don't much understand the point of buying a product off the "promise" of doing something one is in all likelyhood never going to do, or do very rarely. Many SUVs are (or at least were, nowadays they're mostly sold on family-hauling ability/status) sold on the "promise" of offroad excitement, but my guess is 99% of SUVs sold never see a day in their lives out in the mud.

I guess I wouldn't make a good marketer.

The Voltec hybrid system is also theoretically fault-isolating, if there's a problem with the engine it will shut that subsystem down and you can run it exclusively off the battery and vice versa, so you don't get stranded, though fortunately I've not yet had a chance to "test" this feature.

Keep in mind that all the figures I've seen bandied about by people on online forums who don't actually own vehicles of the type about charger efficiency, battery capacity reduction with age, etc. are super pessimistic!

GM's own engineering data shows a theoretical efficiency of the charge controller at around 95%, for me in practice close to 90% of what comes down the wire ends up stored in the battery.

People were saying "Oh, the Li-ion battery packs are gonna have a capacity reduction of 20% at 100k miles!"

There are Volts out there with 200k+ miles on them; the data shows that _worst case_ the reduction is more like 2-3% past 100k.

Also the mileage figures are understated, the manual says the Gen 2 battery pack is good for 50 miles city/town driving, but under real world conditions on a warm day I can pull nearly 70 miles of range out of it if I keep it at 45 or under.

Massachusetts is smaller than Maricopa COUNTY AZ (county that Phoenix is centered in). Scottsdale is nearly 100 miles north-to-south. ...Jim Thompson

What if Granny breaks a leg somewhere in New Hampshire? Or you want to take a vacation in Florida?

Li'l Rexie doesn't want to invest in alternative energy. Rather, he want's to force you to subsidize his chosen transportation (read: toy).

But what about the house 500km downwind of either?

I have no idea why you think this is a liberal vs. conservative issue. This is technology. There won't be lines at gas stations because of 10 minute charging times because 80+% of the charging will be done at home or the office. In fact, it is likely that "gas" stations or "charging" stations as we know them will disappear. What will be much more common will be the convenience charging facilities where you drive your car, supermarket, mall, hotels, etc. There will be little need for the sort of gas stations we have now that constitute an *extra* stop or even a