What's the advantage to driving an electric car?

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by MPGranger

businesses waste government grants like all the electric companies failing under the Obama system. Sustainable? Not yet! LOL

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.

[MPGranger]

2,000 Chrysler dealerships in the 2009 Financial Crisis
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...iXbpwicPss5B3Q

Plus it's hard to find stats on our failing economy due to the Obama Propaganda machine adjusting stats to look more favorable such as taking people out of the workforce prematurely to lower the unemployment numbers. America is going to be hurting from his progressive sugar coating.

As for the EV companies going tits up, just watch a network news channel once in a while and they'll start talking about it. Or just follow the upcoming Republican campaign efforts! (FYI I'm a libertarian and voted for Bob Barr in the last election) With grants in the hundreds of million dollar range, how are they failing in less than four years? Their Business models are not sustainable. Obama threw cash at the problem, why not create a market for EVs and Hybrids by forcing government agencies, the military, and the like to use only EVs and Hybrids. The market would adjust and we'd have full sized truck Hybrids in one vehicle reset. I also perversely enjoy the thought of Generals rolling around in Prii doing official business!

I am not saying that electrics do not have advantages, but I was illuminating that they also have disadvantages. Such as a lack of dealership set up or recharging infastructure ATT.

[bennelson]

All I want to add is.....

If you have never driven an electric car, go out and test drive one. Chevy Volts, Nissan Leafs, and other cars are available nearly everywhere now.

Go to a local dealership and take one for a spin. They just plain feel different (in a good way) than traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. Try it, you'll like it!

[niky]

EV start-ups go tits up because a hundred million bucks is not a lot of money... Especially if, like Aptera, your loan never gets approved.

A hundred million for a car company that's supposed to mass produce and distribute? A drop in the bucket.

Hyundai spent a few hundred million on the Tau V8 alone... Which goes into a tiny, tiny percentage of the cars it builds. Manufacturing for 40k units a year, you need to invest in a factory worth some 300 million, give or take... Depending on where you build it and how much is done in house.

Prototyping? Crash testing? Show cars? Set aside a few million for those throwaway units.

Unless you have a technology or chassis partner willing to give you top drawer parts or bodies, as Fisker and Tesla did with the GM Ecotec and the Lotus Elise... And you need to charge a big premium given the costs of outsourcing these... You have to cut costs the way most people do... Buy from China. And you still need to redesign and re-engineer the stuff for US consumption. You could do it the way ZAP did with the Xebra and say to hell with it... Or try to meet regulations and end up with a twenty year old Chinese glider that looks like garbage compared to a Leaf and which costs just as much. The general public... and investors... aren't going to buy into that, no matter how good the electric hardware underneath is.

The EV initiative failure was something I saw coming from years away, simply given the amount of money involved and how many ways it had to split, the laughably outdated Chinese hardware being peddled and the sometimes snake oil quality of the sales pitches. Blame poor business sense and some dishonesty on the part of some proponents. And blame the fact that economies of scale will always favor major manufacturers... Hence RIP Saab, RIP Daewoo, RIP Ssangyong, etcetera... Lotus and Proton only live thanks to Malaysian oil money, but that won't last long. Is it shocking that the most convincing electric comes from manufacturing giant Nissan? Not really... Not at all.

[bennelson]

Hmmm...

So not only do we have businesses that are "Too Big to Fail", but we also have industries that are "Too Big to Start"?

Barriers to entry are a difficult thing.

[Ryland]

Yes, business that are to big to start for sure! crash testing for a single vehicle model tends to cost over a million dollars, back in the 1980's the big three auto makers pushed out the competition by pushing for "safer" cars that were a different kind of safe then what everyone else in the world was driving, there for to sell a car in the USA it had to meet USA safety standards! Commuter Vehicles Inc (made my car) were only selling 500 to 1,000 cars per year and were pushed out of the market because they could not afford the cost of the new crash test standards, not that they couldn't pass the tests, at the same time companies like MG, Triumph, Vespa, Renualt and countless other companies stopped selling in the USA, still making vehicles for every other country without the road way death rates in those countries climbing any faster then they do in the USA.
So in short, the auto makers regulated them selves out of competition, it's not hard to take a gasoline vehicles glider and make a working electric car, Ben has done it, my parents bought an electric car from a soccer mom/house wife who built it in her garage! it's a great car, quality work, she'd never done something like that before!, the vehicle is not it's self hard to build, but the rest of the hoops to that you have to bring it to a show room floor, that is the hard part and that is the costly part.

I agree 100% with Ben, go to a show room, get in an electric car and drive it, then, if those are above your price range (most people I know don't buy new cars) look at the EV classified ads in your area and start showing up to look at used electric cars that are for sale! I bought my first electric car for $180, it wasn't pretty, it didn't work and it didn't have batteries in it, but after spending about $200 and two days working on it I had it driving down the road on a used set of batteries, at that point it was a $380 car and it still looked like one, but at a price like that how can you honestly say that electric cars cost to much?

[niky]

Well... most people won't even consider a Metro-sized car... be a long time before the rest of us can go as small as you without fear of being run over by those gigantic Yarii...

I don't think the Big Three ever wanted crash testing... but when they saw that diverging standards gave them a semi-safe haven against cheap imports, they certainly didn't say no to it... be easier for everyone if there was one set of standards... won't be long before China stops being a safe haven for mediocre engineering. The ANCAP test speed was supposed to be raised to the same 40+ mph every other organization is using this year. And the ASEAN is getting its own NCAP testing facility in Malaysia, too.

[MPGranger]

Never said I didn't like electrics, I am arguing the economics of getting production EVs on the market and building recharging infastructure. I plan on EVing whitey when his ICE gives up the ghost, decades from now.

I understand that electricity is cheaper than gas, that EVs have a flat torque band that delivers linear hp, that EVs are easier to maintain than ICE.
But I like a visceral feel to my steering so electric power steering is not there yet, and I acknowledge that ICE has the advantage on the highway, and gas is store energy much lighter than a battery.

I am about to get my wife in a family way, and we are looking at cars. Since our families live a days drive away, visiting family would mean renting a car ATT. Or I could buy an ICE or hybrid and just fuel up and go.

[niky]

If you want EPS that doesn't completely suck, Mazda is getting pretty good at it... the previous MINI had it right, the new one dropped the ball a bit, unless you get a Cooper with a "Sport" button, which firms up the steering to approximate the previous model's.

About the only thing an electric doesn't do as well in terms of "feel" is give you a sense of effort. Whatever acceleration rate you dial in, the motor just does it and goes... which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Not going to argue the economics aren't there... because I don't think so, either... not unless many requirements are drastically simplified and battery swapping gets much, much easier... but I've driven many new traditional cars that are more boring to pootle around in than a Prius.

[MPGranger]

For the battery swaps to be practical the US would have to authorize a specific battery, much like there is one kind of nozzle for propane tanks.

Maybe having booster batteries like this would be a better option for swap outs. http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ium-11555.html