Quote:
Originally Posted by MetroMPG
Welcome to the forum. That's two new Sentras in the last week...
Large format batteries are among the most recycled consumer products. They contain valuable raw materials even after they've reached the end of their useful life. No need to worry about landfills overflowing with electric car batteries; it's not going to happen.
Toyota even has a bounty on its expired hybrid batteries/batteries from wrecks.
Not everyone's power comes from dirty power generation. Depends on where you live, and you may also have the option of choosing clean power generation by choosing your provider.
If you do some digging, you'll find evidence that even if an EV is powered 100% by coal, the inherent efficiencies of electric drive mean it's likely to produce fewer emissions than a comparable fossil fuel powered vehicle.
In addition, it's probably fair to say that the grid will get cleaner in the future. And so will anything plugged into it.
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Thanks for welcome, MetroMPG. What can I say? The Sentra is a pretty cool car. Don't tell my "car guy" friends this, but I've always yearned for a blue or yellow convertible Metro three-door. That would be an interesting project car.
Anyway, if you read what I said about gasoline engines, (I presume you know this) by design they can be taken apart and rebuilt because of the several components that they comprise of, unlike a battery, which lacks such versatility. So while they may be recycled, they're not reusable. You didn't mention the process of recycling them, which is probably very wasteful in and of itself. Doesn't sound like much of an improvement to me. If a fuel injector fails on my Sentra, I'll buy a refurbished one and mine can be shelved for the next person who may need it. In the event of a more dramatic failure, like a blown headgasket, if I'm lucky not to have damaged the head, a new one get's my car back onto the road, otherwise, the engine from the block up, can be replaced or serviced. Tell me what you propose my friend's friend should do with his 05' Civic hybrid, (Reading 50k on the odometer) which suffered a battery-related failure instead of spending the quoted $5K on a replacement unit. I'll tell you what I recommended: for him to buy a fully gasoline-powered automobile. Had his Civic been of the traditional kind, it could've lasted four-times as much, even if he wasn't very car-savvy or responsible.
Is that so? Well, I'm not really too mindful of Toyota, because they rely on this "green" movement to hype their hybrid and electric cars. What motivates every automaker, other than conforming to government enactments, is diversity in their line-up. A mural of a Prius resting on a pasture with butterflies dancing their way outside of its tail-pipe is convincing to the green-head, as is the Tundra a section away, with it's hefty
5.7L V8 to my Texan next-door-neighbor, who has Magnaflow on speed-dial. That's just business to me. Power to them for using the shell of an energy source to drive future cars. (No pun intended)
Lemme guess... Nuclear energy, unless we can harness the power of tornadoes in the mid-west. Chances are, my choices are probably very limited, because TX hasn't exactly taken advantage of its alternative sources, like wind energy, for example. It's probably going to come from the smokestack 10 miles away; I wasn't exaggurating for the sake of analogizing.
There's literally one next my house. So guess what, while you may have a more progressive outlook on the matter in choosing a less environmentally taxing option to support you, chances are that the majority will get their electrons from whatever that plug on the wall goes to. Maybe their motivation is different and they see their car as a future investment, hoping to break even with it, as opposed to what's best for Earth. Regardless of their situation, the reality is that when the wind blows my way, I'm making up for the lack of the 1.8L exhaust I have now just by stepping outside to get the mail. Look at the bigger picture.
Uh-huh, in what quantities are we talkin' here? Let's say, for the sake of the matter, that the battery powered personal transport will be so "effecient" that it'll replace all of our CO2-pumping machines that we're driving now. How many plants will it take to power all of our cars then? Don't tell give me a small number, unless you want to dedicate entire areas akin to the size of a modern-day city for unrealistically massive sites to be constructed on it. Being as environmentally aware as I presume most people on this board are, raping and pillaging more land as means to source our energy from is the same thing we've always done, only now were doing it a different way. Enough land has been destroyed.
As have gas-cars, yet they don't get the same credit for it. Instead of enhancing the engines, as advanced as they are, of today, someone thought it'd be more rational to overhaul the system of transportation as a whole instead. Cars have a noisy presence because of their harmonics under the hood. Have you read about the risk posed to the blind? Battery-powered cars make virtually no noise, making them a silent hazard to nearly everyone around them. They have no sound presence. Realistically speaking, if mankind wanted to be ecologically-friendly, (The true description of the many distortions I hear and read of "eco-friendly") then cars should never have been mass produced; the same could be said for many modern necessities, like homes, with their many amnenities and occupation of land. I'm in favor of making a transition into a renewable resource by other means. The battery powered idea is feasible for short-term rentals. Not everybody
needs to own a car. How about running gasoline-powered engines a biased mixture of gas and another renewable fuel, at the very least? (E85 being the perfect example.)
I haven't gone into changing people's driving habits because the site advocates it. You guys are the pros at attaining such high MPG numbers and for that, I salute you. If only everybody tried driving slower and aiming for fuel-effeciency, instead of dissolving quarts of gas at a time making irrational maneuvers. (Some manners would help too.) Maybe then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Crude oil would last a long time. Responsibility for our actions and moderation goes a long way in this case.