Cool documentary I thought most car people would be interested in so I hosted it:
Trailer can be found here:
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
Post your thoughts after you watch it!
//edit// sorry forgot about the password part.
PM me for the password to this! We shouldn’t have it in the public eye.
The archive has a password :squintnono:
that 2 min clip…
Just a nice little editted piece of generally usless info, for the purposes for a teaser, maybe to just get people thinking.
“electric cars aren’t for everybody, they can only satisfy 90% of the market”
^nice quote…
big oil killed the electric car.
there was an EG civic model that got 52mpg without hybrid technology and the oil pigs prevented it from being sold in the US after the model change in 95.
GM already produced a few hundred fully functional electric cars that could only be loaned, not bought, in the mid-late 90’s and took them all back.
i bet all that info is in the video though
Don’t know if this is the full documentary, but I’ve seen it. Was really interesting.
Andrew.
Baller speed as always sir 
I’ll watch it when I get home.
yep 
oh snap, i havent even seen teh video yet either…lol
You know what drives me insane, and I have yet to actually hear an answer for?
WHERE DO THEY THINK WE’RE GOING TO GET THE ELECTRICITY FOR OUR CARS?
If everyone in North America runs their airconditioners at the same time, the whole continent gets rolling black outs.
Now imagine a couple million people are trying to plug in their cars at the same time …
The grid cannot handle it.
Oh yeah, and BTW where do we get most of our electricity from?
Burning fossil fuels.
So technically, an electric car is WORSE because creating the electricity for it is dirtier than actually powering an efficient internal-combustion engine.
It’s a convenient oversight. We’ve known for years that cars are in fact one of the smallest producers of pollution. Notice how cars are getting cleaner and cleaner, yet the air and the weather are getting worse and worse?
It’s not the SUVs. Sorry.
It’s a quick distraction. If they fessed up to just how bad coal-fired power plants are, and how every Tom Dick and Harry is responsible for our air every second they run their computer, TV, refrigerator, we might notice how the lack of innovation in electrical production is killing us all. Without sounding like some ranting guy on the streetcorner, there are tons of friendly power generation options (no, not wind power or solar power, both are terribly inefficient) but until people turn off their computers, shut off their TVs, and think globally for one fraction of a second, nothing is going to change.
Don’t even get me started on Al Gore.
^^^ if we all make excuses for why we shouldn’t have electric cars, there will be no step into the right direction. Electric cars are very feasible, and the infastructure to support them can be built. Cars are a major emissions problem as are coal burning plants. Both need work, and both are related.
Also, nuclear power is friendly and extremely safe. Just expensive to build and people are generally afraid of it. France and Japan have perfected nuclear power and the storage of waste products.
Andrew.
They address this in the video, just watch it!
AECL is already working on projects to expand our canadian power sources. Keep and eye on Stirling engine power plants as well. Several have already been deploid in the US deserts and several companies are working to further develop the technology. Only problem is that it only generates during the day, however that is when the peak consumption so it will releive fossil fuel plants.
Example: http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2004/renew-energy-batt/Stirling.html
Hydrogen powered cars. Regular gasoline engines can be converted, just like to propane. What’s your byproduct? Water… Onoz.
Sorry all, since gonad is a prick bastard I had to take the video offline, sorry
I’ll get it back up when I have time.
Wow, you made that sound like an easy task. Have you investigated all that is involved in this daunting task?
Yes the byproduct is water, but it’s been shown to also be on the acidic side, another issue the oem’s have addressed, not to mention all the engine controls required.
It’s much easier to accomplish the transition on a test stand motor than an actual motor vehicle, hence my support for plug-in hybrids.
but hydrogen needs electricicty to hydrolyze the hydrogen out of the water… so it uses power too, the only way electric or hydrogen or fuel cell cars can operate "purely "is if the electricity used to create their power source was clean burning and efficient, and much of the power in the states is coal unfortunately, with very little chance of building more hydroelectric dams
ethanol from corn is also a huge swindle, about all it’s good for is govt handouts and tax writeoffs… the only way ethanol will be an alternative is if like brazil (and most of south america) production is handled almost entirely by people and the source plants are things like switch grasses and sugar cane which produce a far higher yield per quantity… of course step two requires an industry geared towards localizing and distributing the stuff with production and refining available regionally, the last thing you’d want is to waste yet more fuel trucking the stuff around the country
in the end we will need a huge pump crisis again before the govt gets really serious about alternatives… big oil money is just too deeply rooted in their heads
mr200, you’re forgetting that not all of us care about clean air. I could give a fuck less if I’m still polluting if I get to save money by running an electric car. If running a car on puppies and kittens was cheaper, I’d run it on puppies and kittens.
^ agree’d
I’m a selfish prick bastard though. I litter too, 1 man can’t make a difference.
The REAL reason the oil companies backed Hydrogen power and not Electric power is that you don’t actually make industrial quantities of Hydrogen through electrolysis. You actually make it from OIL and COAL. Thus ensuring our dependance on oil for generations to come. They of course would also control the distribution so even if we started making it from water is mass quantities they’d still have a finger in the pie. Going pure electric means that we could cut oil out almost 100% through nuclear and other means.
Also hydrogen is VERY INEFFICIENT, the process to make the hydrogen uses a lot more energy than you’ll EVER get back out of it.
E85 is Bull Shit as well, we’re still raping resources in the environment, it takes nutrients in the soil to grow the corn to make the E85, once those nutrients are used up we have to dump tons of chemicals on the soil to make anything grow again… this also has HUGE impacts on the environment. Again the oil companies support this because they already have the infrastructure in place for distribution.
Electric cars you plug in at home and don’t need to go to a ‘station’. E85 you still have to go ‘get’ it from a supplier…
mr200… your logic is flawed.
Cars are ‘cleaner’ but CO2 emissions are the same… the NoX and sulpher compounds are what have been cleaned up… if you burn 1L of gas in a 1956 dodge and 1L of gas in a 2006 Honda you’ve still put the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere, also to say it doesn’t matter because it’s not the biggest polluter isn’t a good idea either… every bit helps.
Look up ‘global dimming’ they proved that the pollution in the atmosphere was cooling the earth and in someways was reducing the effect of global warming. All the smog reduction that we’ve made has simply sped up the effects of global warming…
Otherwise I agree with the rest, burning coal to make power for cars is not going to help us a lot, we need to reduce power usage and build more nuclear plants.
awesome documentary. I saw it a while ago and it did make me think.
But just like with everything else, money will decide what we’ll get and what we won’t… honestly though, the environment isn’t something that most corporations are concerned with.