Might be fun to watch. It will be especially fun to watch all the arguments when it is released.
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I’ve got one: haha, the director doesn’t drive an electric car, so his whole premise is preposterous.
Driving range, or lack thereof.
And each charge takes several hours.
And charging stations are few and far between.
Also, people tend to forget that the electricity with which you charge up the batteries has to come from somewhere – namely, generators that are powered by the same polluting and greenhouse gas producing substances as conventional cars. Correction, slighly worse – most cars burn gasoline, while generators burn dirtier diesel fuel, and much much dirtier coal.
I would guess that it was a single state requiring zero-emission vehicles – whether there was enough customer demand to offset development costs or not – was the main problem.
Charging stations popped-up in urban areas, with places like Costco allowing people to get a partial charge while shopping.
Enough mileage for normal commute, with overnight charging at home.
Didn’t Ed Begley make some “show” drives up/down the Left Coast in his GM – just to show it was possible to drive for long distances?
I don’t know about Begley.
How many stops did he have to make to charge his vehicle, and how many hours was he delayed because of that?
As I’ve said previously, electric cars as they are now, are NOT “zero emission vehicles”. They simply shift the source of the emissions from the car itself to the power plant.
Let me make sure I understand this correctly – “the conspiracy against the electric car” is that only one state MANDATED it?
This movie is just another in a long string of goofy hollyweird conspiracy films…
Quite simply, the electric car sucked. That’s why it’s gone. It was difficult to drive anywhere because there are like two charging stations in all of the world, it was slow, and it was expensive to maintain if anything went wrong. It’s range was also never the projected 130 miles on a single charge and if you ran the air conditioner your range was cut in half. To make matters worse, GM lost billions on this project – they HAD to quit it.
I don’t think the electric car has been “killed” — it was only postponed. Recent advances in battery technology have probably already provided the foundation to make a very viable electric car. Maybe this film will help drive demand for it..
As for the pollution shifting issue Frank raised, I’d be willing to bet that a coal-fired plant that could supply the energy for 100,000 electric cars would put out considerably less pollution than 100,000 cars with internal combustion engines. My local utility brags about how clean their coal-fired generation plant is. Maybe this is the time they’re not lying to the consumers.
Prove me wrong, and I’ll say a “Hail Mary” for betting đ
Frank IBC – the theory with electric cars is that the power plants centralize the pollution and it can more efficiently contained and/or dealt with. However, with gasoline burning engines, you cannot control the emissions of all of the cars on the road, thus allowing more pollution that escapes into the atmosphere.
As for the range of the electric car, most people drive their car less than 50 miles a day. If the car had, in the previous examples, 130 miles (or 65 if you run the air conditioning), you should not have a problem. Yes, if you wanted to take a road trip, you would have a problem. However, you could always rent a car when and if that need arose.
And out of curiosity, why are you so against other people buying and using electric cars? They may not be appropriate for you, but you are not being forced to part with your current automobile(s). You may run a Windows machine, but the fact that there are many people happily running a Macintosh or Linux machine doesn’t rob you of your enjoyment… or does it?
I’m not against electric cars at all, I’m just saying that at present, they are far from being a viable transportation alternative for most people. And I’m absolutely certain that will change sometime in the future.
I would like to have one myself, some day.
All I’m saying is that there has been no conspiracy to keep them away from people who want to buy them.
I have a vision of a “hands free” charging station. A car would drop a boom with a male plug, into a slot in the ground with a female plug. I realize the image will make most giggle, but I think it would work quite well, and end the “full service” vs. “self service” issue.
If anyone could show the pollution statistics for a typical power plant, compared to that of a typical car, I would be very interested to see that.
Of course, I’d really like to see an electric car powered by nuclear-generated electricity.
Interesting that on Today’s MARKETPLACE on NPR (marketplace.org), they not only mentioned this, but also the Tesla electric car from yesterday’s blog.
J/P=?
>but you are not being forced to part with your current automobile(s)
Sure people are being forced. If you put in mandates that a certain percentage of cars have to be electric, then you are making buyers of other cars subsidize those cars. If you raise the fuel mileage requirements, you reduce the available choices, in some cases causing the car companies to discontinue models that don’t meet other people’s tastes. If they get rid of all the mandates, then you’d have a point.
The only problem with the Ev1 was it’s tremendously crappy lead acid batteries. Why didn’t they throw some lithium ion batteries or at least some nimh batteries in it?
Why did they make it so ugly?
Why can I charge my Energizer AAs on the 15 minute quick charger but this thing took overnight?
5 Let me make sure I understand this correctly – âthe conspiracy against the electric carâ is that only one state MANDATED it?
Well if you skipped-over the “…whether there was enough customer demand to offset development costs or not…” part of #3 it might seem that way.
electric cars weren’t “ready for prime time” because of the batteries – but only one state made “zero emissions” mandatory.
All Iâm saying is that there has been no conspiracy to keep them away from people who want to buy them.
You have obviously not seen the movie. Everyone who drove the EV1 was FORCED to give it back to GM. All cars were leased and none of the leases were renewed. All the cars were taken to the desert and crushed. Did not matter if you liked your car or not, GM did not want any of these cars on the road. Maybe the EV1 is not for you, but why would they not let those who loved them keep them?
#16…Kathleen….because they were proto types. All of the people who got the cars were told ahead of time that they could not buy the cars outright and would at some point have to give them up. Once GE came to the conclusion that they weren’t ready for prime time and recalled the cars, there was no longer any way to maintain the cars as well.
The electric car is like something you know well: the Laptop
uses batteries to store energy and thus suffers from all of the things a laptop does:
Always balance performance vs. durability. Longer charging times than use times. Loses storing capacity over time. Batteries are very environment unfriendly and are not very good for storing energy when compared to chemical stores (gasoline, hidrogen…).
Also the car can’t plug to a 220/110 V plain wall socket, so charging becomes an issue when there’s no infrastructure…
Somehow, modern hybrid cars are the best in-between solution.
Anyone taken a look at methanol powered cars? There is a huge supply of methane that could be used, and very little required in changing gas stations. Doesn’t ahve the problems of hydrogen, or the huge subsidies and energy use of ethanol production.
Science Friday interviewed the director of this movie on June 30th – it’s worth a listen if you are interested in this topic:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2006/Jun/hour2_063006.html
Dvorak, you whine about the environment on about a daily basis. Why not just make your own environmental bitching site so we can avoid this?
One thing I don’t get – if the electric car is as good as the conspiracy theorists claim, then why would it be in GMs interest to get rid of it?
etnin –
Sorry if I’m a bit confused, but if you don’t like John’s blog, then why would you prefer that he have two blogs instead of just one?
#21, etnin
I think you have it backwards. You want blogger.com, it’s that way –>
Ya, the Ev1 was a real stinker. Ugly has hell, slow, expensive (both for GM and the people who participated in the experiment). Every aspect of it sucked.
I’m sure it felt good to drive it around, in a masturbatory sense, but thats about all it was good for.
Nukes and Electric.. We need them both for a cleaner world.
I’d love to get a gasoline powered laptop.
Dunno if they are gasoline powered but I’ve heard about chemical fuel cells to power laptops. They use catalisys to “burn” fuel with oxygen, producing electricity. The only problem is that you wouldn’t use it in a lap… and the exploding DELL would seem as kiddy stuff compared with one of those devices gone wrong…
It’s crazy to suggest big corporations have a conspiracy to kill the electricv car. Enron was pushing the Kyoto Treaty. OIl companies must know that these cars increase oil usage. The car companies usually don’t care about laws that make their cars more expensive, as long as everyone else has to do the same thing. It helps the higher cost companies shut out the low cost foreign makes. The only problem might come from unions worried about their jobs, and maybe independent gas stations.
And how is a company that can’t even meet its pension obligations going to be able to force other companies not to sell electric cars?