Quote:
Originally Posted by MPGranger
businesses waste government grants like all the electric companies failing under the Obama system. Sustainable? Not yet! LOL
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What percentage of them are failing and how much money is being lost compared to how much we are loosing and have been loosing every day for the last 50+ years of subsidizing big oil? while I agree that we shouldn't be giving handouts to anyone, the amount of money that has been spent to push forward electric vehicles is tiny when compared to the amount of my money that is spent making sure that big oil is kept happy and has enough free public land to drill on and has the right of ways to pump it around and low priced electricity to refine it, makes me almost want to go back to using the cheap gasoline, after all I'm already paying for it.
Sorry to get off topic there, this thread is about the advantages of electric cars! yes, they have draw backs, you are much better off flying or taking a train if you want to do a cross country trip then driving an electric car, your cost per mile is less flying or on a train, you get there quicker and you can read a book while someone else drives, but electric cars work great for getting to the air port and train station!
If you only drive a gasoline car on short trips the the owners manual says to change the oil twice as often and do pretty much all of your regular service twice as often! in an electric car that is not the case, there is no warm up time, the electric motor doesn't care if you are crawling along in traffic either! if you sit in traffic you are only using as much energy as it takes to move the vehicle for the distance that you are traveling, while you are sitting stopped you are only using as much energy as it takes to power the radio and lights, you could sit in that state listening to the radio for a week or more before the battery went dead, care to try that in a gasoline powered car? and because it takes more energy to travel faster, sitting in traffic can give you a boost in range because there is very little air drag at 10mph.
Plugging in is easy, some people freak out at the idea of "16 hours for a full recharge" but that kind of recharge time is from a standard wall outlet and would be recharging from a fully drained battery, I figure for every hour I plug in I add 6-8 miles on to my range, when I drive 4 miles to work I have a full battery and my full range after half an hour of being plugged in! I don't have to wait 16 hours, that would just be silly! and if I plug in to the higher voltage charging plug at work I could have a full battery in 15-20 minutes! average person drives 20-25 miles per day, plugging in to a standard wall outlet for 3-4 hours per day (or over night and forget about it) and you have a full charge! have a fancy higher voltage (220v) charging station installed at your house and you charge twice as fast at a cost of around 2-3 cents per mile driven if you charge from regular day time electrical rates and are like my self, paying extra for "wind source" electricity from my utility, or my parents charging from solar and wind, figuring that their new PV panels are going to hit the gasoline brake even point in about 5 years, after that they have paid for them selves and will produce "free" electricity for the next 50+ years, their oldest panels are 28 years old, have been moved twice and still produce above their rated output, they also only had a 15 year warranty unlike the new ones with a 25 year warranty.