Oh and We won’t physically run out of oil. It will be a million dollars a barrel long before we run out so it will just sit there unused by most. Demand will stop before supply stops for one of many reasons.
Why the fuck would you wait to get your battery charged? Do you do that when your remote needs new batteries?
Interchangeable batteries that could be changed in minutes at charging stations seems the only way to make long distance electric car travel infrastructure work.
If NIF ever works things will change drastically
i say electric, but then you run into the material requirements for batteries and the toll it takes on the world to mine them
I’m picturing the volume of cars that fill up at a typical thruway service station on a busy holiday and I just can’t see how this would work without massive warehouses of batteries to swap. And the power requirements to fast charge means you wouldn’t be hooking 100’s of them up at once to fast charge.
I have never really understood why diesel electric hybrids have not hit the market yet. The way a diesel engine operates makes it far superior to a gas engine as a generator.
Electric cars are the way to go.
Hydrogen fuel cells could help, but nobody is going to put in anything even close to the infrastructure we have for other fuels.
5 years ago, I was working on what was to be a parking space sized steam methane reformer. There was/is almost zero market for
such a device. Those that exist for refelling purposes are used for PR.
We will have to solve the transportation problem long before we exhaust fissile fuels. They make the manufacturing world possible.
yep, I’ve thought about this in the past. Unless the sizes were dramatically reduced, or they charged fast enough that you only needed to keep a small amount on hand, it’s pretty unfeasible.
Yeah there would have to be hundreds of batteries charging, even if it took hours, which would probably be better for longevity, you could still have a system where cars could be in and out in minutes. This would of course require significant infrastructure. Installing tanks for gasoline is expensive, and maintaining them so you don’t get killed in EPA fines is also quite expensive.
Why is this not HERE?
Because this…
Costing around $77,000 in the U.K., the plug-in diesel is expensive but the model allows European drivers to avoid so many extra government taxes and fees, buyers are more than willing to shell out the asking price.
I must agree here. My Volt was $42500 MSRP and in 7,400 miles I have used around 40 gallons of gas (might be a little less) so despite the price I would save money even if I bought it. Not to mention if I bought it and not leased it I would have gotten a $8,000 tax credit. The cost of the vehicle has to be a factor for mass purchasing otherwise only the very wealthy who don’t care what the MSRP is will buy it and it won’t have an effect on saving the environment. We need millions of people to be driving cars that save the planet.
JayS… what are your thoughts on the environmental cost of production vs. vehicle efficiency? I firmly believe my Volt is an awesome car but how many gallons of gas do I need to save to outweigh the production and disposal of the massive battery pack I sit on every day?
I remember a guy saying his 57 Chevy is more planet friendly than the production of a Prius. Funny but maybe true. Especially for the guy who is on his third Prius. lol
Considering every ounce of that vehicle can be recycled I would bet that is true.
You still have to own the car for a somewhat extended period of time to get the savings. It costs about $2,000 a year to put gas in my civic. So it would take a considerable amount of time to get back the $15,000 difference. Now, a brand new volt probably compares more to a brand new accord in terms of features, but the volt is probably still a $10k premium, which means you’ve got to be in the Volt for 5 years to break even, and THEN you start making money back. Assuming equal resale. Those are rough numbers, but the reality is that there isn’t as much savings there as you think there is.
Of course, consumer money savings isn’t really the only factor behind the movement to ditch OIL, but it certainly matters to the people buying the cars and fueling them.
^^ Also consider that often the difference in cost is financed, further increasing the value gap / term until “break even.”
X will never =0,the cost will go up so much that no one will be able to afford it and force change as the market shifts. So saying we will run out of every last drop is false
Well “disposal” is an ugly term. The components in that battery are hard enough to come by that the majority of it will almost certainly get recycled. For the current and near future demand where electrics and hybrids will make up a small percentage it’s probably not an issue. There were horror stories of a few battery component mines being ecologic disasters but the need for electric cars to be marketed as green made car manufactures force these plants to clean up or the manufactures would go elsewhere.
I think where people are being naive is when they don’t consider the scale of the issue. The amount of energy we use every day powering motor vehicles in industrial nations is astonishing. In the US alone we use almost 7 BILLION barrels of oil a year, and almost half of that is used to make gasoline. It’s why I laugh when I see suggestions like, “Oh we’ll just stock lots of batteries at fueling stations and swap them out like the batteries in your TV remote”. Ok, but there are 240 million vehicles on the road in the US. The typical gas station will carry between 6k to 10k gallons of fuel to keep those cars zipping along. All that storage space though is underground, and 100% of it is used to store the actual energy source. Change that source to batteries and now each battery has to be accessible, and each pack is a huge waste of space by comparison because the battery is mostly packaging with only part of it’s overall volume being the actual energy source. Think giant warehouse at every gas station, except gas stations don’t have room for giant warehouses. Then there’s charging them.
“We’ll just have 100’s of them charging at once on fast chargers at every gas station so we can just swap them out faster than a gas fillup”. Really? Telsa’s fast home charger is a 70 amp beast that requires a 90 amp breaker and still takes 4 hours to charge. No gas station has the option of upgrading to 7000 amp service. You’re talking about more power consumption than most factories, except now that power is at every big gas station? Hello rolling blackouts.
JayS is right, electric-only cars are simply NEVER going to be useful for anything other than standard commuting or running errands around town. What if you want to take a vacation, and DRIVE there…I really think if they could figure out how to make hydrogen use less dangerous that’s the way to go. It’s the only other “fuel” that could be stored similar to gasoline and have filling stations besides ethanol…and with the cost of ethanol vs. it’s efficiency, I think hyrogen would be the best bang-for-buck
Bio Diesel?
I know that ecoshardcore is converting his TDi Jetta to run on boiled down Dolphin fat. I’m sure that other aquatic mammals would be a prime source of biodiesel.
You will not get anywhere burning Hydrogen for fuel.
A fuel cell will be required to make the electricity and drive or recharge as needed.
Maybe there will be some H2 rich material that can be refined and transported for profit.
Hydrogen is tricky to play with in the industrial world let alone turn it loose on the general public.
I’m sure everyone would love the NY Hydrogen inspection that would inevitably be required, where every seal and weld in the supply system will need to be tested annually.
I’m not familiar with the actual plumbing requirements of a fuel cell car, but I’m guessing the demos have air monitors to check for leaks. I use CO monitors on all my H2 systems, because they
sense the H2 long before there is a chance to sense the LEL (lower explisove limit) in an area.
Are there any special DMV test’s required for CNG cars/buses?