Electric cars, unclean at any speed

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Occasionally6

The thing is it would take time and resources to build that capacity.

Well duh again :-)

If doing so doesn't solve in an effective way any of the problems that shifting to BEV's is meant to solve, then why do it?

The problem there is the word IF that you start with. I mean, IF the world was flat, we'd have to worry about falling off the edge, no? But the world is not flat, and BEVs do solve a lot of the problems, or are a necessary part of a full solution.

[TheEnemy]

Part of the problem is people have gotten used to traveling long distances convieniently.

1000 years ago people traveled on foot, at best you might get 20-30 miles in a day, 50 if you really pushed it.

200 years ago people traveled by horse, waggon, etc... the distance per day was still in the 50-60 mile range.

The later Steam locomotives were capable of going about 100 miles before having to refill the water tanks.

Now we think nothing of traveling 400-500 miles before stopping for 5-10 minutes to refuel, and that is the main reason most don't want to adopt an electric car is the range, and the time it takes to recharge compaired to an IC engine.

[TheEnemy]

Given time we will have cleaner energy. One of the things I have been advocating is waste to energy. We can use food waste from restaurants, crocery stores etc and brew ethanol. We can use waste vegetable oil from restaurants and make biodiesel. We can use human waste that is already treated at waste treatment plants and have it digested into methane.

We can use these fuels to augment PV solar and wind power.

[oil pan 4]

What is so wrong with taking the typical electric vehicle that has well under 100 miles of range and pulling a liquid fuelled generator trailer behind it?

You could supply say up to 10 to 12kw (the smallest 3-phase generators I commonly see) with a small engine fuelled with any fuel you want.
The cheap versions would burn regular old gasoline. Higher end ones could burn biodiesel, SVO mixes, alcohol or LPG.

Service stations, equipment rental places and U-Haul would be good places to rent them from if you didn't want to buy one.

[P-hack]

A gas powered pusher trailer would make much better use of the gas, the generator->charger setup would be very inefficient.

A guy named sharkey did make a gas pusher to push his EV long distances, used an automatic trans to keep it simple to control from the cockpit (still would beat a generator->charger by a wide margin probably), basically parallel through the road and if his car has regen he can do some emergency charging with it while driving.

[Kenny]

Originally Posted by Ryland

I knew right off tho that the author was jaded, he started out talking about $100,000+ cars owned by people who want to push a look, you don't buy a $100,000 car to save anything.

Indeed.

The hybrid shown below was created almost entirely from used or discarded components - yes, even the pair of li-ion cordless drill batteries strapped under the seat. The other half of this picture, is the 186w Sanyo bifocal PV that serves as a home-based 'filling station'.

Reality is, I didn't do it to be "green".... I did it because I got sick'n tired of being perpetually strapped to OPEC's greed... with no alternatives.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by P-hack

A gas powered pusher trailer would make much better use of the gas, the generator->charger setup would be very inefficient.

A guy named sharkey did make a gas pusher to push his EV long distances, used an automatic trans to keep it simple to control from the cockpit (still would beat a generator->charger by a wide margin probably), basically parallel through the road and if his car has regen he can do some emergency charging with it while driving.

I already said the gas generator would be the cheap option, cheap options tend to be inefficient.
A diesel generator putting out 1KwH for 0.2 gallons of fuel could hit 30mpg easy with a regular sized car assuming the car only needs 10kw to maintain 60mph. 0.2gal per KwH is not a high goal for a diesel generator so the vehicle/trailer combo and the driving speed have final say in what the true fuel economy will be.
30 diesel MPGs isn't amazing but it will do the job.
Plus if you only need it once or twice a year who cares what the fuel economy is. Now you could use say between 10 and 50 gallons of gas per years as opposed to 400 gallons (12,000 miles/year with a 30mpg car).

Has anyone even tried pushing a production EV?

[P-hack]

I did the math, 10kw @60mph? really? The pusher above gets 25-30mpg on b100 for reference, but it is an auto and lotsa weight in batteries and trailer

[Occasionally6]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

The problem there is the word IF that you start with. I mean, IF the world was flat, we'd have to worry about falling off the edge, no? But the world is not flat, and BEVs do solve a lot of the problems, or are a necessary part of a full solution.

Too many people are operating under the assumption that substituting batteries and an electric motor into the type of vehicles that comprise the current vehicle fleet will be a solution. Unfortunately, it will no longer be enough. 20 years ago, maybe that would have been a reasonable thing to aim for. There is no longer time for that to work. If we try, we still end up with an unsustainable transport system, indeed society, in 20 years time.

Put a body on it, mass produce it and Kenny's vehicle is closer to what is needed. That makes building the battery manufacturing capacity about 2 orders of magnitude easier as well.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by P-hack

A gas powered pusher trailer would make much better use of the gas, the generator->charger setup would be very inefficient.

I'm not sure a generator would be much worse for efficiency. It could be sized to produce just a little over the amount of electricity needed to maintain a given cruise speed. The small excess capacity could be used to charge the battery after having expended large amounts of energy going up hill, or accelerating from a stop. The generator would be run at peak efficiency at all times, and be less complicated/expensive/dangerous than a pusher parallel hybrid.

All that said, I would choose to drive a conventional car long distances instead of an EV. In multi-car families, only one of the vehicles needs to have long range capability, while all the others can be EV.