Posted on 08/14/2009 7:36:47 PM PDT by Shellybenoit
Toyota initially sold the Prius at a loss. Was that bad ?
Amazing, Government Motors’ Volt gets the highest MPG rating on earth. Who’da thunk it.
It should be >$20 to have a timer kick in after 12 midnight.
“Then they just sell cars at a loss until they drive the others out of business.”
Gee, that has an eerily similar sound to what I’ve heard about the Universal Health Care plan.
“It may get over 200 mpg..”
Has anyone gotten the data to include the gas and electrical use and convert all this to BTU per mile? That is the significant number.
Of course, the environmental impact of producing all this additional electricity has to be considered also.
Was Toyota owned by the US government and subject to bail outs by said government? Nope, but GM is, so yes, the fact that they can sell at a loss and undermine non-government motors companies is BAD.
“If I owned one, I would not need any gasoline.
who has a problem with that?”
I have a problem with that. I use electricity. Either you’re a shill or you’re stupid if you don’t realize that the use of these cars is going to drive up the cost of electricity.
“Last year, the American power grid delivered 3 million billion KW-hr. Divide 1863 billion into 3,000,000 billion and you will see that our 300 million electric cars would have used only 1/1610th of all electricity delivered in the U.S. last year.”
Ok, thanks for clarifying that Normie. Now I know why Kalifornia can have so many users but not suffer brown outs.
I suspect the protocol to arrive at 230 mpg is: commute 46 miles a day, and plug it in at the end of every day. After 5 days, you get 200 electric miles, and 30 gasoline miles, and you’ve only used 1 gallon since the gasoline engine gets 30 mpg.
Voila: 230 mpg for the car.
Well then, drive 7 or 8 hundred miles accross country for several days, and then make the same claim that it gets “great” mileage. It will be average at best, with mountains, curves, hills, ice, snow, wind, etc.
These claims are just more Government Motors Pie-in-the-sky propaganda to get you to buy one. wait until electrical rates go through the roof after several million or so of these junk-piles get plugged into the grid every day.
Not only that, but the Government will give out loans for them like candy, no I.D., license, S.S., or no money down. The permanent Cash for Clunkers trade in for a GM car will bankrupt the treasury and all those people buying a $40 thousand dollar car who can’t afford a $400 car, fail to pay back the money, like they did Fanny May and Freddie Mack.
But hey! The Welfare will be good!
Toyota got it's start by being funded\bailed out by japan.
Japan paid for 100% of research for the Prius, according to former boss Jim Press. japan says it's a lie.
and they borrowed about 2 billion from the Bank of Japan earlier in the year...course a loan is not a bail-out.
companies and people with ‘time-of-day’ pricing might see rates
go up at nite, but for residential customers paying fixed price,
I would expect rates to go down or stay the same,
as the utilities will be making more money,
but with little effort.
everyone except, oil companies, Tirpo, and Arabs,
wins with the electric car
which one are you?
You may be off some. In 2002, the figure was 3.8 thousand billion KW-hr, or for 2007, 4.16 billion MW-hr. (A billion million, not a million billion K).
One Chevy Volt running at 45kW power for 360 hours in a year would use 16,200 KW-hr. A million Chevy Volts would use 16.2 billion KW-hr, less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the 4,000± billion generated. But ... 300 million Volts would need 120% of all the power currently generated in the US.
Seems like another case of utopian dreamers pushing an agenda that the infrastructure isn't prepared for (like more healthcare without more doctors).
BTW, the cost for 16,200 KW-hr of electricity: $1,620 or so (it takes a big load of coal to fire up those generators). That would buy 540 gallons of gas at $3.00 per gallon, and get you 13,500 down the road in a 25mpg car.
Oh, but, now you have a choice: burn the coal in somebody else's back yard, at 35% energy efficiency, to deliver the electricity to your garage, to power your Volt at 85% efficiency (net efficiency of 30%), or just burn the gasoline at 30% efficiency. It doesn't really make a lot of difference operationally; it just costs the taxpayers buku bucks to pay for the GM/UAW subsidy.
However, you might want the additional horsepower you'll get with the typical 3 liter gasoline engine going up a long grade. The Volt is in a class with Yugos after very much time on the hill and it's backup engine is only 1 liter. I bet GM/UAW's test cars are frequently frying their electric motors or shutting down due to overload when they try to make it over any respectable grade.
I guess the pressure to get it out was more then they could handle. They really don't own themselves anymore, and this car will be a failure without huge subsidies.
If I was going to get an over-priced electric car, it would not be a Volt. It would be a Tesla.
But neither is a practical choice.
>>everyone except, oil companies, Tirpo, and Arabs,
wins with the electric car<<
Baloney. Some “yet to be invented” electric car may meet that statement, but other than the Tesla, I ain’t seeing it yet in the current offering.
Give me good solar cell recharge and I’ll look at it differently. And then there is current battery technology. It is getting there but not there yet.
I see it as the “386” thing. It wasn’t until the “386” based computers came out with Windows 3.1 that the public, en-mass started buying home computers - to the point that they are now officially a commodity like toasters.
The electric and even the hybrid have not yet reached their “386” moment, though the Priuth came close.
I don’t really care about CO2 hippie stuff but what I do care about is that I would rather give my money to an American coal fired plant than a Muslim Oil producing country any day.
something else to keep in mind is that gasoline is 16 times
as expensive as coal, per unit of energy.
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