I am saving for one of these beauties.
http://www.aptera.com
Posted on 06/30/2008 10:23:46 AM PDT by Red Badger
It could travel 150 miles without using a drop of gasoline, accelerate from zero to sixty mph in about eight seconds, and handled crisply. Total cost? Below $40,000, in monthly lease payments sometimes as low as $299. In a world of $4 gas, it sounds like the car that could save General Motors.
There's only one problem.
Every single one of these cars was sent to the crusher in 2003.
The EV1, GM's short-lived electric car experiment, was cancelled when gas was selling for slightly more than one dollar per gallon. Now, with gas four times as expensive, consumers demanding fuel-efficient small cars, and the General peering back at dealer lots filled with unsold SUVs and pondering mergers and perhaps even bankruptcy, some are wondering…why not bring it back?
Veteran automotive journalist John McElroy of Autoline Detroit writes on Autoblog, "The car is already designed, engineered and developed. Why not milk more money out of your intellectual property? All they would have to do is dust off the CAD data." Production couldn't begin tomorrow. Suppliers would have to be lined up, contracts negotiated, factories retrofitted. But that's true of any new car design. "GM could bring the EV1 back into production far faster than a typical new program would take." McElroy remembers the EV1 as "a terrific little car, fast off the line, with crisp handling and a driving experience unlike anything else on the road."
GM product development czar Bob Lutz, however, says the option isn't on the table. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lutz was asked about bringing back the EV1 in a recent email exchange. His reply: "The EV will not meet any current safety laws. Putting a version into production that meets regulations would put us out to ’11 or ’12. They cost us well over $80,000 to produce, and, being a two-seater, we could only sell 800 in four years. We lost over one billion dollars on that experiment."
The EV1 is also a sore spot for GM executives because of the publicity surrounding the program's failure. The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? sparked conspiracy theories about the death of the EV1 that made the vehicle a public relations problem for GM years after the last EV1 was pulled off the road.
The Chicago Sun-Times' Jim Mateja says, however, that the experiment of the EV1 lives on -- in the 2010 Chevy Volt. "Unlike EV1, which went up to 80 miles before an 8-hour recharge with lead-acid batteries or up to 120 miles before a 4-hour recharge with the improved nickel-metal-hydride batteries, Volt can go up to 40 miles before a 1 to 2 hour, if that, recharge," he writes. "And after the 40 battery miles, Volt will go up to 600 more miles because a small engine powered by E85, biodiesel, gas or a fuel cell will run a generator to recharge" the batteries.
Reviving the EV1 may not save GM. But the lessons learned from the vehicle very well may, in the form of the Volt.
Yeah, but does that 0.06/mil factor in the cost of replacement batteries, or motor brush replacement, etc. ( most batteries used in these older cars were only good for 400-5— cycles before they needed replacement.
What obstacles stand in the way of Western nations, particularly the United States, reducing their dependency on foreign oil?
James Woolsey
If you remember, we got interested in alternative fuel firms like the Synfuels Corporation in the late seventies and then in 1985, the Saudi’s dropped the oil down to $5 a barrel and bankrupted the Synfuels Corporation. The good news is that they bankrupted the Soviet Union, too, but they certainly undercut alternative fuel efforts. People got interested in alternative fuels again in the early nineties, then in the late nineties, oil dropped down to $10 a barrel and people lost interest, again. One of the things that we have to do is make sure that this rollercoaster effect can’t happen again.
Some people think it will be much more difficult in the future because the Saudi Arabian oil fields could be peaking, if not now then soon. We will also have huge demand, not only from the West but from India and China as they start to produce middle classes that drive cars. So the Saudis might not be able to drop the price to five or ten dollars a barrel by turning on their excess capacity, but they might be able to drop it to $20 per barrel. Most of the better of these alternative fuels are only really viable, (as far as we can see) if oil is say $35 per barrel or more. The one that’s viable even below that is electricity, because off peak, overnight electricity in many parts of the United States sells for between two to four cents per kilowatt hour. That is the equivalent to about a penny a mile driving where as gasoline is in the range of ten to 20 cents a mile at today’s price. However much the Saudis might be able to drop the price of oil by turning on excess capacity, I doubt if they would be able to undercut off peak electricity in price.
But one way to ensure that is to make sure some of these other fuels, such as diesel from waste and cellulosic ethanol or butanol, have a chance to develop without the Saudis bankrupting them. We also need a different structure for subsidies. Today, ethanol is being subsidized even though it doesn’t need to be with oil that’s $60-$70 per barrel. What we might do is say, no subsidies unless oil drops to say $40 dollars a barrel. You start with small subsidies and then the subsidies get larger as the price of oil goes down. Now, most people are not forecasting oil to go below $40 a barrel now, so this might be an easier thing to implement. It would essentially be an insurance policy against the Saudis doing what they did in ‘85 and what happened again in the late 1990s.
Let me return to the potential for hybrid technology in cars, particularly plug-in hybrids. There’s nothing to keep a car from being both a hybrid and a flexible-fuel vehicle, sometimes it’s driving all electric, sometimes it’s driving as a hybrid, and it may be that instead of the liquid fuel part of its energy being supplied by gasoline, it might be supplied by e-85 ethanol whether it’s butanol or renewable diesel. My Prius today gets just under 50 miles per gallon, but if that were to become a plug-in Prius, with six times the capacity battery, and I could drive it about twenty miles before it goes into its regular hybrid mode, then I could get a little over 100 miles per gallon.
Now, if the liquid fuel that I’m using were e-85, because the hybrid is also a flexible fuel vehicle, I would getting over 500 miles per gallon of petroleum product. That is not all that far off because we know how to make e-85. It’s on sale at several hundred stations in the United States. We know how to make flexible fuel vehicles; we’ve got millions on the road. We know how to make hybrids, and, at least in California, people are already upgrading hybrids to be plug-in hybrids, so none of this requires a Manhattan project to invent something entirely new; it’s a matter of getting things into production that we already essentially understand how to do.
We stored about 200 of these at our facility...there actually was a program to swap out the original batteries and re lease them, but then the charger fires started happening. It was after the second one, a model in Florida whose carport burned, that the whole program came down.
Last I heard they still hadnt disposed of those batteries, as it was forbidden in CA...that is why the cars went to AZ.
I am saving for one of these beauties.
http://www.aptera.com
From Wikipedia (a source I do not normally cite, and do not personally trust):
Of particular concern to the company was the likelihood that each leased car's battery packs would require replacement at 25-35,000 mile intervals...
GM believes that... the EV1 was doomed when the expected breakthrough in battery technology did not take place. In fact, the NiMH battery packs (or Ovonic Battery) that were expected to dramatically improve range came with their own set of problems; GM had to use a less-efficient charging algorithm (lengthening charge times) and waste power on air conditioning to prevent the battery packs from overheating...
The Gen 1 cars got 55 to 75 miles (90 to 120 km) per charge with the Delco-manufactured lead-acid batteries, 75 to 100 miles (120-to-160 km) with the Gen 2 Panasonic lead-acid batteries, and 75 to 150 miles (120 to 240 km) per charge with Gen 2 Ovonic nickel-metal hydride batteries. Recharging took as much as eight hours for a full charge (although one could get an 80% charge in two to three hours). The battery pack consisted of 26 of 12 V, 60 Ah lead-acid batteries holding 67.4 MJ (18.7 kWh) of energy or 26 13.2-volt, 77 Ah nickel-metal hydride batteries which held 95.1 MJ (26.4 kWh) of energy.
[Just throwing some numbers around, but Sears lists automotive batteries at costs from $60 to $190. An electric car would probably require a quality battery, but let's assume that volume production (every EV1 would require new batteries every 30K miles) would reduce costs, so let's split the difference - that's $125 per replacement battery. 26 x $125 = $3,250 (plus labor & tax). And that's every 25K-35K miles (not to mention the fact that the nickel-metal hydride batteries would without a doubt be even more expensive - and GM swapped over to the NiMH batteries for a reason). Know anyone who wants a required $3,700 (or much higher) automotive maintenance bill every two years, or their car becomes a lawn ornament? Heck, a lot of folks would have to take out a loan just for the maintenance...]
Ardent supporters of electric vehicles have been very vocal about the EV1 program's demise. Of particular interest is the leasing program which formally required the vehicles to be returned to GM at lease expiry. General Motors stated reason for the lease-only option was that, as the modern era's first ground-up electric vehicle, the EV1 could not be expected to maintain its performance level (or affordability in regard to maintenance) over the long run... While many lessees and prospective owners have complained about the lease-only availability of the EV1, it is important to note that each leased vehicle was in effect heavily subsidized by General Motors. The car was very popular with its lessees, but it was not known if anyone would have purchased a new electric vehicle at the time had it been offered for sale even at a "break even" price of US$35,000-40,000 [in then current dollars].
FWIW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EV1
LOL...
Just over a dollar IIRC for a full charge in the GM Volt.
Set aside some money for medical expenses.
There's more to the scam, of course, but it's a good start.
You want to recommend a few Michael Moore 'documentaries' while you're at it?
That's sounding pretty good.
that’s $125 per replacement battery
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Lead is currently $0.81/lb. ,, your typical car battery weighs about 50 lbs. so $40.00 just for the materials (am just ballparking the total weight of the battery and assuming that the plastic and acid cost less per pound than the lead) .. figure $60 for a quality battery in pallet quantity at near wholesale pricing,, battery group would not affect price appreciably ,, your 25,000 mile expense would be about $1700 or $0.0675/mile ..
What we need is easing of regulations/laws that would allow immediate re-importation of the GEO Metro/Suzuki Swift twins ,, the Mazda 121/Ford Festiva/KIA Pride triplets and so many of the quality Japanese micro cars ... simply easing emission regs to the (still very stringent) mid 1990’s levels would allow re-flashing of the engine mapping and get us an easy 15-20% higher fuel economy ..
And while we’re at it kill the boutique fuel blends ,, all we need is winter and summer...
Figure anything you want - most folks wouldn't buy a car that sold for $40K and needed a $1700 minimum (plus tax & labor) battery replacement every couple of years. Which is probably why GM didn't build the thing by the millions.
Plus there's probably a good reason GM swapped to NiMH batteries (and a hopefully a good reason McCaine is offering $300 million for a decent electric car battery ;>)...
What we need is easing of regulations/laws that would allow immediate re-importation of the GEO Metro/Suzuki Swift twins ,, the Mazda 121/Ford Festiva/KIA Pride triplets and so many of the quality Japanese micro cars ...
I would have to find the book where it's referenced (still packed in a box, after a recent move), but there was an American engineer who built a VW/Porsche-based car 20+ years ago (IIRC), that did 0-60 faster than you you could choke on your jalapeno milkshake, and got 60+ mpg. Didn't cost much to put together, but I'm sure it would be completely illegal now due to various safety/air pollution/misc-idiotic-fed regulations...
Figure anything you want - most folks wouldn't buy a car that sold for $40K and needed a $1700 minimum (plus tax & labor) battery replacement every couple of years. Which is probably why GM didn't build the thing by the millions.
Plus there's probably a good reason GM swapped to NiMH batteries (and a hopefully a good reason McCaine is offering $300 million for a decent electric car battery ;>)...
What we need is easing of regulations/laws that would allow immediate re-importation of the GEO Metro/Suzuki Swift twins ,, the Mazda 121/Ford Festiva/KIA Pride triplets and so many of the quality Japanese micro cars ...
I would have to find the book where it's referenced (still packed in a box, after a recent move), but there was an American engineer who built a VW/Porsche-based car 20+ years ago (IIRC), that did 0-60 faster than you you could choke on your jalapeno milkshake, and got 60+ mpg. Didn't cost much to put together, but I'm sure it would be completely illegal now due to various safety/air pollution/misc-idiotic-fed regulations...
Crap - my first double post in 10 years. My sincere apologies...
I wanted to steer the boring same ol' same ol' in a deeper direction.
These "problems" have been solved so long ago, the penetration to market is the subrosa Juggernaut.
My apologies - you're essentially right on every fact you stated, and I definitely blew it when it came to the wording of my post.
As you suggested, we could have hi-mpg automobiles anytime we want them - but apparently there are other 'priorities' involved.
And while we’re at it kill the boutique fuel blends, all we need is winter and summer...
Most folks don't know it, but (speaking from memory) the 'blend' required by the Exalted State of Kalifornia costs ~10% more than your 'garden-variety' unleaded, and then delivers ~10% fewer miles per gallon (because it has ~10% fewer BTUs per gallon). Double whammy! That does not help anyone (except 'environmental masochists')...
His passing mention of butanol (and was “cellulostic” intended to apply to it?) makes me wonder why he seems to like ethanol better than I do. Ethanol has much lower energy content than gasoline, and is much more difficult to handle because it is so hygroscopic. Butanol has about 95% of the energy content of gasoline, is an effective oxygenate, and can be used in an unmodified gasoline engine in ANY proportion up to 100%.
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