eCar = Toy
These are not All Electric vehicles. They are coal/oil/etc. powered vehicles.
I’ve thought about this very thin. Every time I see a Prius I see a liberal who bought the global warming hook line and sinker.
Something the greenies and mindless politicians can't figure out.
No nuclear! It could melt down and produce mutant children!
Replace nuclear with bio-power - turn every available acre into producing biomass to power electric cars. We can always import the remaining percentage of food we don’t import now. Make those farmers produce something useful for a change instead of living on tax-payer subsidies!
Also hydropower produced in the PacNW kills salmon and must be torn out. Its for the fish!
And for Pete’s sake, stop winning about rising food and electric costs! If we cannot afford electricity and food we can always live in ditches like poor Turks and eat bark and grass like North Koreans - they do just fine, we we can also! We’re green and proud of it.
“Then the 220-volt electricity travels along power lines to a transformer which converts the power to 110 volts before going to your meter and finally going from your meter to your home charging station.”
Bull $hit!
We all have 220 in our homes, NOT 110.
We use only 1 of the two 110 legs for normal 110 AC power.
I have a 285 foot well pump which operates on 220, and a 220 dryer.
I can’t stand electric cars, but wrong is wrong.
BTW in my small town of Bozeman, MT we have four Tesla ‘pumps’ and we see a fair amount of Tesla’s here.
Actually that’s not an accurate analysis. Wind and solar also don’t burn fossil fuels. Having solar or wind power in combination with an electric vehicle is the way to go. It is an especially good combination if solar recharging stations were available at work places, where the car could be recharged while you worked.
Until charging stations become more widespread, the best solution would be something like a Volt that uses both gas and electricity, thus avoiding range anxiety.
Good article.
“The better idea is to continue along the lines of hybrid vehicles which can exploit the “sweet spot” of an engine and achieve significantly higher fuel efficiency and lower emissions than either the conventional internal combustion vehicle or the all-electric vehicle.”
I have no major objection to hybrids. It seems like clever engineering. As I understand it, you brake by turning a turbine that generates electricity to be stored in a battery for later use. But I read once that producing those batteries has adverse environmental impacts. I don’t agree with the EPA that CO2 is a pollutant. So, all in all, I’m not sure that hybrids are so “green.”
“There is an additional little fact that Mr. Musk et al hope is not discovered; that is that most of the nuclear power stations in the U.S. will be shut down in the coming decades.”
Typical of Obama.
In a lot of places, moving pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack is a very good thing indeed. There are millions of tailpipes within immediate proximity to my lungs and those of my children and other loved ones. Don’t know where the nearest smokestack is, but I understand that we get a lot of our electricity from coal-fired power plants in the Arizona desert. Bad for tortoises, good for me!
The high-voltage AC power distribution system is fairly efficient, that’s why we use it, I really doubt 66% losses.
“there is a stepdown station where the 440 voltage in the transmission lines is converted to 220 volts.”
Say what? Typically distribution is 4800 to 13,200 volts then is stepped down to 220/240 volts single phase and routed into your meter along with a “neutral” wire from the tub on the pole. Transmission can run as high as 480,000 volts or higher for transmission over long distances.
Old news...Rush has mentioned these same things for years. Electric cars are for limited niche markets.
Explain to me how a nuclear plant has no footprint?...spent fuel rods emitting radiation if not kept cool is less dangerous than an element we get from our amazing planet and we then burn it in some manner to propel or heat and cool ourselves?...The batteries are made and shipped around the world until finally installed into one of the (worthless to me) so called “green” vehicles....Do a little research into the composition of the matal’s needed for the batteries and the trip from mining to final finished product and tell me how efficient they are!,.....THEN tell me what they will do with them when they no longer take a charge?...Another whole toxic pool of coal tar (which used to be used for roofing and it was great as a bitumen...these morons who a scamming billions in this “green” energy scam are so smart that they are stupid,can’t see the forest through the trees!...Oh ya I heard we reached peak Oil yesterday at 3:16 PM EST...
When shopping for a new car, I look at a Prius. After contemplating, I told the salesman that it was about $5,000 to much money for the worth of the car. He agreed and said it is the dealer consensus that it is a niche car for people who hate oil companies and would rather give the money (saved in gas) to the dealer and the car maker. I bought an Impala and spent the money I saved on gas.
How about those batteries? How long do they last and what is a replacement cost? Anyone know?
I’ve never seen so much HATE in an article.
Electricity from natural gas is a lot cleaner than coal. The article has merit, but fairly broad assertions.
Isn’t this an apples and oranges comparison? What’s the efficiency of an oil refinery used to produce automotive grade gasoline? Not saying they’re wrong on the larger point, but it seems supremely silly to pretend that no energy is lost between the well and the gas pump.
Also the 2/3 transmission line loss is way too high. Other sources I read state it at 5-7%. Don't think a step down from 440 volts to 110 volts is a 75% loss. You have a lower voltage but a 4 times higher current for the same power minus a small amout of loss heating the transformer.
