mheslep said:
Not so fast with the dagger, there are two fundamental reasons why E cars are theoretically far superior to current vehicles. (1)The electric motor is a very good method of producing mechanical energy, 90 -95% efficient, plus you can recapture braking energy once you've introduced a means of storing energy (batteries). The best any heat based engine can ever do is ~40%. Yes the energy has to come from somewhere but that's also the case w/ existing cars. The point is you get far more miles per unit of energy w/ the E car, aka miles per gallon for existing cars. (2) The pure electric car has zero emissions to the atmosphere. Again, there will be emissions at the central power plant if its fossil, but those can be made much more efficient than cars and can have ellaborate means to capture the emissions, or the fossil plant may eventually become a renewables based or nuclear plant thus zero emissions. All of the solid parts any car, batteries whatever, have to eventually be recycled regardless of the car type so that's really a wash.
Problems: the battery technology is not quite there yet, and neither is the electric power generation and distribution required to run all E cars. Thus hybrids will be the way to go for sometime to come.
Turbo disels are competative with hybrids in gas milage. I imagine this is true with or without all the many other tweeks used to hybrid manufactures improve milage. Regenerative braking is nearly useless. In designing an electric vehicle, I've found I can recapture about 5%--maybe. In my application it isn't worth the extra luggage. And all this tweaking comes at a cost. The market forces would be a much better indicator of overall usefullness after subtracting the legislative bias.
Electric power distributed to your automobile by high tension wires from elsewhere is not as efficient as imagined. Great amounts of energy are lost in transmission and conversion. If cost is any indicator --and it should be if the environment of your friends, family, and community are included in your definition of "the environment", upon reciept it is less efficient than combustion. Ask anyone who has had the privilege of paying for an electric heating bill one winter and a gas bill the next in similar years.
Let's talk about the "carbon foot print" the "environmental impact", and the fuel efficiency of automobile storage batteries. Maybe you can answer some key questions. What's their lifetime? What's their enviromental impact on mining, producing, and displosal or recycling? What's their 'carbon footpring' in fossile fuel to produce them from the mine to the consumer? How much of their true value is hidden by governmental interference?
About the lifetime of these batteries. The auto dealers won't tell you what it is, or fewer would buy their cars. Sometime in the next couple of years, we will start getting these answers as they begin to fail. These things will cost a good chunk of change to replace. When the cost of replacement becomes better known the market, the resale value of the vehicle will plumet driving it's value toward scrap prices. What's the enviromental-impact-and-carbon-footprint on early retirement scrap?
That's just the batteries. For all the gadgetry to make a hybrid vehicle fuel efficient, one can ask the same questions.
Many of these question will apply to purely electric vehicles. As I've stated before, contemporarily it's really not important to the advocates that the answers to these questions wash-out in favor of electric powered vehicles or against, or the answers would be much more widely known. But what we find is the proponents don't really know the questions, let alone the answers. It seems more important to appear devout than be devout.
-deCraig, student of contempory anthropology
