Posted on 12/29/2014 10:14:10 AM PST by Red Badger
Last time I went up north I filled up before leaving far southern Michigan, drove first to Whitefish point and then on to Munising before stopping for gas. That was in a used minivan.
LOL!....................
Lithium Ion batteries. Wow. Seems like only yesterday that the military started using this technology.
Was it in the 70s or the early 80s?
As soon as you add heat or Air conditioning to one of these things then your range will probably drop to 10 miles...LOL And you sure don’t want to get stuck in traffic with the heater running.
It does impress me; the combustion engine appeared in the 17th century and has had a lot of R&D put into the technology, the battery appeared in 1700 and has had relatively little R&D put into it until the push for development [in terms of power:weight] really came with (a) the space program, (b) mobile phones, and (c) mobile computational devices.
If/when we get them down to essentially super-capacitors that can be [almost] instantly charged (and at a reasonable price) a lot of new applications will open up, to include electric cars.
Don’t really remember. I just want a battery that will keep a cell phone or tablet running for more than a few hours............
...and is rated under optimum charging and usage conditions of a brand new battery, resulting in a more realistic effective distance of 75 miles, or just over 30 miles round trip.
So this new battery MAY extend the roundtrip range to 60 or 70 miles. Whoopppeee.
That would have been fun to follow.
I still think that the most early logical use for electric vehicles is in local delivery service. FedEx, UPS, USPS, taxis, buses, school buses, repair service vehicles, etc. Ones that will go into the fleet yard off-duty and have company mechanics to attend to them.
Depends in the time of year. Winter will zap the battery faster with the heater on and summmer will kill it with the air conditioner on. So, in a real world it is really a 100-125 mile battery, maybe.
My commute was 25 miles each way and a couple years ago I bought both an electric hub motor for a bicycle and a small gasoline engine. My plan was to put them both on the same bicycle, and have a super commuting hybrid bicycle with three forms of power.
The hub motor was mostly legal although by itself it could get the bike up to 25mph on the flat. The gasoline engine was 80cc’s and put out 8hp in it’s “power band”. It was not street legal without jumping through a whole bunch of hoops. My plan was to use the gas engine on the rural portions of my route; use the gas engine, the hub motor and people power when climbing a couple of steep hills on my route; and use the hub motor and my legs in town.
I installed the hub motor first and was fairly impressed with the speed on the flat, but it had almost no torque and wouldn’t climb a hill worth a darn. I opted for lead acid gel cells because they were far cheaper than lithium ion and less trouble to charge, but they weighed a lot. Then it turned out that the gas engine wouldn’t fit quite right in the bicycle frame, without some serious modifications.
So I put the gas engine on an old mountain bike and tried that out. It was an eye opening comparison. Despite not having a transmission as we generally think of them; the mountain bike was turned into a sort of super light dirt bike and man would it go! Because of the way it was geared it topped out at around 35 mph, and you had to give it a little assistance when you hit a steep hill to keep it from dropping out of its power band. But 8hp on a bike that weighed only around 60 pounds was quite amazing. I have a regular motorcycle, but that bike was incredibly fun.
The electric bike was kind of neat for getting around, but compared to the gas powered bike it wasn’t any fun at all. The gas engine was louder but it was faster more powerful, and basically had unlimited range. The only problem is that it ran afoul of the law.
I needed the money for other projects and have too much of a mess. I ended up selling them both for more money than I had into them. But it did give me an interesting perspective.
What you said.
A lot of these threads about batteries/electric cars are full of embarrassing comments.
Reading those threads one would think Freepers are troglodytes, totally devoid of an understanding of history and science.
Brawndo should market to the electric cars drivers that still believe the global warming scam.
Batteries also have shortened life in hot weather and lack of efficiency (less charge) in cold weather.
Soon, the electric car range may eclipse the range of an electric car from 1915!
“Anderson had previously been known as the Anderson Carriage Company (until 1911), producing carriages and buggies since 1884. Production of the electric automobile, powered by a rechargeable lead acid battery, began in 1907. For an additional US$600, an Edison nickel-iron battery was available from 1911 to 1916. The cars were advertised as reliably getting 80 miles (130 km) between battery recharging, although in one test a Detroit Electric ran 211.3 miles (340.1 km) on a single charge.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric
How long do they take to recharge? Imagine taking a family vacation in your electric car and having to stop every few hundred miles to recharge for likely several hours. Also imagine having to wait in line for hours while other electric car owners are charging theirs.
Isn’t this Gruber’s alma mater?
Big whoop.
“Reading those threads one would think Freepers are troglodytes, totally devoid of an understanding of history and science.”
Actually, we understand science. Many of us are engineers and scientists. Those touting electric cars are not. They operate at the same religious level as liberals spouting global warming.
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