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Electric car owners?

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AngliaGT said:
Where do you plug in your Smartphone?
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Actually since I installed electronic ignition I can install a usb receptacle for my smartphone if I want to.
 
NutmegCT said:
Or ... of course we could ... just maybe ...

drive less?
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I'd love to!! Regrettably, telling my employer that I'd only be in 3 days a week instead of 5 would result in my driving much more because I'd be living in my car under a freeway overpass instead of just driving to work. Public transportation isn't available in my area, and hiking it would mean never actually making it home because I'd have to turn around and start hiking back to the office before I actually reached the house.
 
For most urban and some rural dwellers, an electric car makes good sense - better sense than a gas engined car. But - they have to get the price way down. The first company that can make a decent electric car that sells for $20K or less will sell all they can make. Who will be that company?
 
One thing nobody has mentioned:
1) where does the power to charge these come from (coal, hydro-electric, nuclear, ???)
2) what is the large "cost" of manufacturing and recycling batteries.
 
It's the biggest green fakery there is.The damage to the environment to mine and build the batteries alone...the environmental damage from disposing of dead batteries....and the cost and impact to the network of charging.Several years ago, read a treatise on it that (forget the exact amount) but if, say, 20% of all vehicles became fully electric, at night on charge they would overload and shut down the national electric grid.Once those lithiums light off, all you can do is run.
 
This is turning into a very useful discussion! We're not pointing fingers and blaming ... we're talking about details and experiences.

I could actually switch to electric, but today's range limits would prevent my weekly commute to the air museum. And the fuzzy info on re-charging costs adds another layer of doubt. Also, the human costs of manufacturing, charging, and disposing of the batteries.

(I can't help wondering about EMTs arriving at a battery-powered car accident. You can see and smell leaking gasoline - but you can't see and smell electricity.)
 
I always thought the hydrogen vehicle concept was more effective. Range is limited by energy density and batteries that can deliver adequate energy in a small enough space are painfully expensive and require exotic materials. Hydrogen can give more energy storage in the physical space.

The point which most people I talk to miss is that hydrogen is not an energy SOURCE, it is merely a storage mechanism much like a battery. It takes energy to extract the hydrogen from water, and then when it is burned it releases back some (but not all) the energy - so there is a net loss (batteries have efficiency loss too). Hydrogen can be dangerous as can any flammable gas or liquid (I can't imagine that being burned by hydrogen would have hurt any more or less than being in a gasoline fire did). Advantages (other than the energy density) is that hydrogen can be stored and transported in bulk, using infrastructure similar to what already exists for fossil fuels like natural gas and hydrogen doesn't require mining rare metals and releasing toxic manufacturing byproducts.

An ideal (although not yet tested that I know of) senario would involve using solar power and/or wind energy to extract hydrogen from water at sea - ships could move around to collect the most favorable wind/sun conditions and then return the hydrogen to shore where it could be distributed as fuel.
 
I could probably switch to electric and be mostly okay, but I drive a minimum of 50 miles a day and often take weekend trips which would put a big strain on the 150 mile limits of most batteries. If I bought electric I would look at one that used a series hybrid set up like the Chevy Volt, partly because range is not limited to the charge of the batteries and partly because it would be cool to drive a mini locomotive.
I fully concur that the process of building and disposing of batteries is incredibly bad for the environment and won't be completely on board going all electric until cleaner technologies can be developed for mining the heavy metals needed and recycling the old batteries.
 
YakkoWarner said:
An ideal (although not yet tested that I know of) senario would involve using solar power and/or wind energy to extract hydrogen from water at sea - ships could move around to collect the most favorable wind/sun conditions and then return the hydrogen to shore where it could be distributed as fuel.
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Not at sea, but on site so no ships involved. There are 5 fueling stations around the world showcasing this technology.
https://www.protononsite.com/hydrogen-fueling
 
I use less than 13 gal. of gas a month. (More like 5-6). I'll stick to my gas powered VW or my Spitfire, thank you.
 
YakkoWarner said:
I always thought the hydrogen vehicle concept was more effective. An ideal (although not yet tested that I know of) scenario would involve using solar power and/or wind energy to extract hydrogen from water at sea - ships could move around to collect the most favorable wind/sun conditions and then return the hydrogen to shore where it could be distributed as fuel.
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I know a bit first hand of that. Had two separate systems on the boat to do that, altho the prime objective was 0xygen, the Hydrogen being pumped overboard to recombine (with zero bubbles?) with sea water.Explained to me in the generating and maintenance arenas, first you bring in salt water, then you distill it (still). Then you take the pure water, run electricity through the base of the column, Hydrogen generated up one column, oxygen up the other.So, you need POWER to pump in salt water, POWER to distill the water (and discharge the brine with another pump requiring POWER), then run through the process to split out the oxygen and hydrogen, requiring more POWER, then pumps to compress the gasses required into a vessel, more POWER....and the net gain/loss is?......
 
YakkoWarner said:
I always thought the hydrogen vehicle concept was more effective. Range is limited by energy density and batteries that can deliver adequate energy in a small enough space are painfully expensive and require exotic materials. Hydrogen can give more energy storage in the physical space.
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I did get to drive a hydrogen Chevy Equinox a few years back. A friend who worked at the nearby Air Products and Chemicals had the opportunity to take home the car for a night, and he picked me up and let me drive it for a while. Of course the torque was amazing, and it was so quiet. But there are few fueling stations around the mid-Atlantic states, making the use of the vehicle on a road trip a lot more problematic. The cost of a hydrogen fueling station back then started at $1M, and there are not enough fuel cell cars out there to make them viable. But it is cool that if you spilled some while putting more hydrogen in the car, the gas went up, not running down the sheet metal. And the fuel is less explosive than gasoline.

I too have problems with the rare metals being mined for batteries for electric cars, and the recycling of spent batteries. I would like to see a mix of internal combustion, electric, and fuel cell (hydrogen) vehicles on the road. Then a problem with supply like we had in the early 70's with OPEC would not mess up the whole transportation system.

Now, back to the basement to play with my slot cars...
 
Why hasn't this technology caught on?

 
Nothing new in compressed air vehicles. Very limited range - and you still need energy to compress the air!

(Reminds me of a line from the old Our Miss Brooks TV show. Osgood Conklin is proud of his new central heating system. He announces that every room he enters is immediately full of hot air.)
 
NutmegCT said:
Nothing new in compressed air vehicles. Very limited range - and you still need energy to compress the air!
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Limited range? According to the video the hybrid model goes 600 miles. And you still need ā€œenergyā€ to recharge batteries.
 
OK. So first things I wondered with compressing air are, how does it handlr the heating/cooling of the air as it is compressed/decompressed?? And, particularly in summer, how do they handle the moisture in said air?? The engine uses pistons and a crankshaft which implies oil in the crankcase to lubricate bearings so water contamination would be a no no.
Air when the pressure is let off allows the moisture to condense so I'd think the cylinders would collect water which would to some extent find it's way down to the crankcase.

Not saying what they've developed won't work over a longer lifespan, just curious about th details
 
Still stuck on hydrogen as the most reasonable of the "alternative fuels" for wheeled vehicles. Only by-product from internal combustion engines burning hydrogen would be water, and the stuff is nearly infinitely available. Most contemporary engines can be modified to use it, as well.

The issues with electric power are too ugly to contemplate; battery manufacture, lifetime and ultimately their disposal are untenable environmentally. But those concerns seem to be overlooked.

We've had propane powered vehicles for decades, the move to hydrogen would seem to be a matter of adaptation from one gas to another. As I posted in other threads, the transfer issue is what makes it problematic. Maybe there is an argument for "gas attendants" again, as the folk trained to NOT blow up the transfer stations?

And as hydrogen tends to go UP instead of fall to the ground like gasoline, an inadvertent 'spill' would be much less dangerous.
 
Ah, yes, propane. Used to get trucks in the shop with propane. The damage to the valves was interesting. You haven't experienced damage until you pull an FE series big block apart and find the exhaust valves are shaped like tulips.

CNG...cops around here had dual-fuel (deul fual?) cop cars....ran on CNG until they got into a pursuit or emergency run...hit the switch, goes to gasoline....except often it wouldn't switch. I know one of the guys....he says you ain't lived until you get into a pursuit and top speed is 35.....
 
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