Are Electric Cars going to be worth it?

Electric cars will be practical for people who only drive locally during warm weather. People who want to drive further than a single charge will find electric cars extremely frustrating, even if there are charging stations on every corner. I can pump 400 miles of fuel into my truck in a few minutes. The best electric cars need hours of charge time for a fraction of the range. I can foresee a time when a lot of multi car households have an electric car but they will have at least one petroleum powered vehicle for the times when they need to drive a long distance.

Electric cars are only good for no more than 100 miles. This is the big drawback for people and why it has been such a hard sell. Plus electric cars are not as great as you might think. You still have to get energy for it and if that energy is from a power plant that emits CO2 then you are still in the same boat. If everyone had an electric car and was plugging it in, the the power plant is going to emit just as much CO2 because there generators would be working over time in a big way. Most environmentalists don't want to face this inconvenient fact, or try to down play it and say it would still take less energy or try to look at it through rose colored glasses some how. The co2 has to come out of a pipe somewhere. Be that on a car or on a big building.

first of all, coal fired power plants put out far less emissions then the thousands of cars it takes to make the same amount of energy. This is because of efficiency.

Number two the electricity for electric cars does not have to come from coal fired power plants. The electric grid and electric cars can open up the energy market, allowing smaller companies to chip in with wind, water, solar or geo thermal energy and that would be good for the economy. How is it good for so much money to be concentrated at the few people at the top of the energy companies, when hundreds of millions of people are struggling?

Number three, electricity is cheaper then gas. One gallon of gas contains about 36 KWH of energy, of which 9KWH can be utilized by an extremely efficient car if it is in perfect condition. at three dollars per gallon, that's 33 cents per KWH, the electric company charges you 12 cents per KWH. That means you will be spending 1/3 as much on your fuel with electric. Over the life of the vehicle, that's a lot of money and it will pay for itself several times over in savings. How is that not worth it?

Number four, the price of electricity will remain stable because of competition. No huge company can form a monopoly on electrical energy because anyone can produce it. The cost of gas is extremely unstable and depends largely on extremely rich people in the middle east that we are giving our hard earned money to, that we might otherwise think of as terrorists.

I just don't understand why there is so much resistance from a certain group of americans, to making things better for everyone.

Just what are you measuring?

In the first instance you are wrong about the Chevy Volt. It is not, nor was it ever intended to be a purely electric car. It is to be a series hybrid. It runs solely on electricity that is intended to be made with a gasoline engine. You also have the option of plugging it in.

A purely electric vehicle is not for everyone. It is not the best fit in situations where it is difficult to plug the vehicle in at any time. It may also not be the best fit where longer distances and heavier loads need to be carried. But in fairness consider that the ICE car is also not appropriate for some situations. It is so bad in close spaces that people have used it to kill themselves. It is not used inside of buildings and we wonder about the enclosed spaces of tunnels especially when traffic comes to a standstill. Even on open roads the air quality is noticeably worse with heavy traffic. In such places even the masonry of nearby structures is eaten away over time. What is happening to our lungs? About the only place that an ICE car makes some sense is in the countryside.

So an ICE vehicle is not a good universal solution either. I am not looking very far upstream here but I don't think such a view is favorable to the ICE vehicle if we fairly look at what is required to get its fuel into the vehicle. I don't think we need to complicate the issue. (see my negative answer here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ArmLP... )

If we are honest and realistic we will recognize that we don't generally have the clean air that existed when the gasoline engine first became popular. The world has changed and a smart, observant individual will adapt to those changes. At the same time we have some standards of comfort and performance that we would like to maintain. The new solutions will not be the same as the old ones. The old ones were not that great if you ponder it long enough. We can do better.

About 49% of US power stations are run on Coal. They cannot be easily scaled back at night and therefore waste power. This off peak power can be used by electric vehicles with no increase in capacity required because battery electric vehicles are by virtue of their storage capacity demand shifting vehicles.

If you live in a cold environment it is possible to also pre heat a vehicle and store the heat in a thermal mass. If this is made with phase change materials, it would be like the heat packs that you put in the microwaves. Another solution is to precharge materials that have an exothermic reaction. This would essentially be a heat battery. Some batteries produce heat in their reactions that could be tapped for heating the vehicle. A solution that is currently being adapted for electric vehicles is air based heat pumps. The last solution that should be tried would be electric resistance heating because it makes little sense to use battery life for heat.

Let me go back to your series hybrid vehicle for a moment. Electric motors are very efficient and have torque from 0 RPM and so are a better way to power a vehicle. From here we can go in many different directions. There is an outline here to suggest some of the options: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aob1S... Putting a gasoline engine onboard solves a problem with range and would allow the ICE operate at its most efficient RPM. But such engines are heavy. If it were not always going to be used it might be better shifted to a trailer where it could be detached if it were not necessary: http://www.zoomilife.com/2009/01/22/genset-trailer... In this way you would not have to be lugging around weight that you do not always need. A series hybrid makes a lot of sense for delivery trucks that must operate in and out of cities. Within city limits the vehicle could run on pure electric power and outside it would charge it's batteries. In this case additional weight would be less of an issue.

What about going to grandma's house in a pure electric vehicle? If this group could cross the country in a pure electric Tesla Roadster it is possible: http://ecobrand.ning.com/forum/topics/renew-americ... It will take a different thinking to deal with new technology. It is coming and we will be wiser to embrace what is possible and be careful not to wine about what is different or we might be left with only buggy whips in our hands and no buggies.

I think it is going to be a hard sell. The democrates think the can pull it off (going green), and maybe they can, but one thing, they can't make people buy them. This is were goverment intervention has a big problem. It would probably be great for the environment to use those wash boards again, they require no electircity. But if the government said wal mart had to sell them they would just sit on the shelf.

Like the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water . . .

i think they will be ok for little old ladies who only drive to church on sunday we will never be able to supply all the electricl grid to keep america moving.everyones electrical bill will go sky rocketing if you

think gas is high now wait to all of these electrical cars get on the road

instead of gas station we will have electrical stations were you can stop and plug in for a outragous price.and if your battery goes bad it will cost you a arm and a leg to replace it.

Personally I think it could be practical if at least 60% of motorists purchase them in a short enough of time. The major oil companies like OPEC and Standard Oil would find ways to either capitalize or kill the idea immediately.

Having a marjor - up to scratch idea

In terms of worth it as a personal vehicle? The low maintenance and operating costs make it attractive as well as the fact that you leave the garage every morning with a full charge so you'll never have to go to a gas station again. The overnight charging is actually useful because peak load is during the day and many gas turbine power plants are turned off at night with only the slow to start coal power plants and wind power providing the baseline power, adding electric cars charging overnight would first be compensated by simply running the natural gas power plants more and later by building more of the comparatively economical coal or wind power plants, natural gas is pretty much the most expensive way to generate electricity but is the one that responds to load demands quickly. The emphasis on electric cars would make government funds available to upgrade the transmission grid to help prevent future blackouts like the northeaster blackouts. Issues of battery range could be dealt with by burying major transmission lines under specific tolled "charging" lanes on the Interstates so that you're not on battery power when driving long distances effectively giving you unlimited range instantaneously, a somewhat difficult feat with gasoline or diesel no matter how fast you can pump the gas. If these lanes also use automated guidance, and collision avoidance, safety on the Interstate would be improved by several orders of magnitude. Owning and operating an electric vehicle is expected to cost about 5 cents per mile while it costs about 14 cents per mile to own and operate a gasoline powered car which is why the IRS allows a 14 cents per mile deduction for charitable use of vehicles, a 24 cents per mile for medical or moving use and 55 cents a mile for business use of personal vehicles.

Is it worth it for auto manufacturers to build? The automobile industry has been based on artficially inflated demand through marketing for many decades. They're the ones that came up with designed obsolescence, model years and tail fins. In truth, SUV's, minivans and station wagons served the same demographics and each was just introduced to invigorate sales. Likewise, technologies such as hybrids, flex fuel, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells are just for creating a market niche for new vehicles through marketing. If the purpose of auto manufacturing was just for convenient door to door on demand transportation, we would have PRT's not cars, essentially a horizontal elevator concept similar to Star Trek's Turbolift or Stargate Atlantis's teleportation closets.

Is it worth it for the environment? The advantage of electric vehicles aside from greater efficiency, quiet and more powerful motors is the flexibility of energy sources. Fuels are all just storage mechanisms and methods to convey energy to the vehicle not sources in themselves. With gasoline, the energy source is solar stored chemically via photosynthesis and collected over millions of years as fossil reserves, what's bad about gasoline is that the hydrocarbons from the fossil reserves are carbon and hydrogen sequestered from our environment for millions of years so using such fuels liberates the carbon and hydrogen atoms, combines them with oxygen from our environment resulting in a net cumulative increase of CO2 and H2O in our environment and a net decrease in O2 in our environment thereby making our environment less hospitable to us. With batteries, the energy stored chemically is from the power grid and we are already producing electricity for the grid from a myriad of sources both clean and dirty but all of them very centralized so if vehicles were electric, the source of the energy could be transitioned to clean sources simply by focusing on the power plant. There is a flaw in this concept, our vehicles are not electric, they are gas powered so there would first have to be a conversion to electric vehicles thereby negating the advantage of not having to address the problem on a vehicle to vehicle basis. There is a solution and that is to synthesize gasoline from clean energy sources, Sandia Labs has done so by using solar power to produce carbon monoxide from CO2 and hydrogen gas from H2O, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas is known as "syngas" or "synthesis gas" because you can synthesize any linear hydrocarbon you want from it through the Fischer Tropsch reactions. Consequently, the main advantage of electric vehicles, that of allowing us to switch to clean energy sources instead of fossil reserves can be achieved with gasoline vehicles and synthetic gasoline. Indeed synthetic fuels can be carbon negative if the syngas is produced by the gasification/pyrolysis of biomass like trash and dried sewage with the charcoal byproduct used as biochar so unlike electric vehicles, keeping the majority of the vehicles on the road powered by gasoline for the time being is our best opportunity to undo some of the damage to our environment.

So electric vehicles are worth it to us as individuals, they are worth it to corporations to build and market but they are not worth it for the environment, at least not in the short run. The environment can only be saved if profit isn't our only motivation.

Personally, I'd rather see the effort into synthetic fuels through gasification/pyrolysis and ventures such as the sunlight to petro project at Sandia Labs. But I would also like to have my own plugin CNG hybrid for the low maintenance, operating costs and the convenience of leaving the garage with a "full tank" each morning instead of going to a gas station once a week.

RONALDO