Random Thoughts... [Automotive Edition]

NooDle said:
I wouldn't say step back, just a massive rethink.
We've had fuel for about 100 years now, and as a technology it's nearly perfected.
Give electric cars another 100 years, or even 20 and see where we are then....


You are a slave to the rangemonster now too, because your big V8 eats fuel too. The infrastructure is just there for you to use. Quick charge filling stations in every petrol station solves this. Again, this is a new technology, and all things aren't adapted to it.... the first cars had huge bottles of gasoline strapped to them because there were nearly no filling stations...



Incorrect. Standing still, an electric car uses nearly no charge at all, maybe a bit for the radio and the lights. Petrol/diesel cars still burn fuel even standing still. You can have a 70 km commute (like me) and stand still for 2 days, the electric car would still have a theorethical 30 kms to go, while an engine burns x l/ hour just idling.


If this is the case, you can't use an electric car for now. And I get the "short notice thing" too, you do need a "real" car for emergencies. And yes, 30k is insane for such a car, but technology will improve, making the range better and dropping the price. If you could get one of these for 20k, with a range of 200- 300 kms instead of a Golf or Focus, then maybe people would consider it?


In time, this will be possible for electric cars, I'm quite sure.
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Very small personal note :my range now is 1600km.....If I'm not able to find a petrolstation in that I must have wondered into the North pole....
*end personal note*

Your entire post is pretty much based on 'yes but in the future', while I agree things will improve for BEV in the future, and the cars themselves no doubt will to, sure in 20 years time things could be alot better for those who want to participate in the nonesence, but why the hell would you buy one now? You will not be saving money, you will not make life easier on yourself, and you will not be helping the planet.....

As for the trafficjams, it's not so much the standing still, it's the constant accellerating/stopping again.....It's like citydriving only heavier on the stop and go's, I doubt that will help the range....+in summer cars in trafficjams heat up like an oven, (especialy tiny cars with alot of glass and minimal insulation, aka the current electrical car) The AC will drain the battery even more.

Now listen, I think we have established your lifestyle is very different from mine despite living only miles from eachother, but quite personaly? I think everybody contemplating giving up so much freedom to save a few quid on petrol (only to spend it on the extra purchasecost and skyrocketing electricityprices) aren't realising just what they are giving up.....if you and me and this place are still around in 30 years (wich I somehow doubt :p) you will see what I mean.
 
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Cowboy said:
As for the trafficjams, it's not so much the standing still, it's the constant accellerating/stopping again.....It's like citydriving only heavier on the stop and go's, I doubt that will help the range....
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Regenerative braking, it's not like you'll do an emergency stop every time in the jam and need to use the disks. For ICE cars the stop and go is horrible because braking just makes heat setting off is highly inefficient and being stationary simply is 0mpg.
In fact, having slow moving traffic / sort-of jams always makes my highway consumption go down / makes my mileage go up. Going slowly saves me fuel per distance, I'm just wasting lots of time doing that.

Concerning the cost, BEVs will never be as cheap as ICE cars are now. However, ICE cars may become much more expensive to run one day, tipping the scales in favor of something else. Oil reserves are finite, and 100% renewable petrol/diesel without any fossil drop is still far away.
 
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BEV accelerating still use more electricity the when they are driving at a constant speed, I doubt regenerative braking regains as much electricity in each 'stop' as accelerating again uses in each 'go', so you still end up with a negative result.
An hour in a jam (deadnormal here) will still cost you alot of spark, while not getting you many miles....I don't see it ending well.
 
Cowboy said:
BEV accelerating still use more electricity the when they are driving at a constant speed, I doubt regenerative braking regains as much electricity in each 'stop' as accelerating again uses in each 'go', so you still end up with a negative result.
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You have to end up with a negative result, because thermodynamics. My point was with regenerative braking stop&go traffic is much less bad on the economy than our burnt-in image from ICE cars may suggest.
 
narf said:
You have to end up with a negative result, because thermodynamics. My point was with regenerative braking stop&go traffic is much less bad on the economy than our burnt-in image from ICE cars may suggest.
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Maybee.....it's still a factor you have to consider when you are dealing with the very limited range current BEV's offer, 30k to spare (in this particular case) isen't much, especialy in a jam/detour prone country like ours.
 
Concerning the cost, BEVs will never be as cheap as ICE cars are now. However, ICE cars may become much more expensive to run one day, tipping the scales in favor of something else. Oil reserves are finite, and 100% renewable petrol/diesel without any fossil drop is still far away.
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The biggest problem is the used car market. The Leaf costs what around 37,000? You can get a used car for 10 easily enough, 27,000 buys quite a bit of fuel.
 
After watching all the video of flooding from Irene, I really want to finish building the XTerra and get a snorkel installed.
 
No, on my model XTerra the nut that connects the steering wheel to the seat isn't faulty.

Although, who knows how much flood water they got through before the snorkel finally dipped too low. The X doesn't have the same system to protect the intake as our old Land Cruiser, so a snorkel adds an extra bit of comfort for even moderate fordings. Plus it gets the intake up out of the dust and acts as a cold-air (and clean-air) intake.
 
prizrak said:
The biggest problem is the used car market. The Leaf costs what around 37,000? You can get a used car for 10 easily enough, 27,000 buys quite a bit of fuel.
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Yeah, it's about $38K for the SL version, the one you'd actually want to buy in terms of features (the SV does NOT have a rapid charging port!), before potential tax incentives.

But you can go buy a (relatively) low-miles X300 for $3-8K, like this one:
http://dallas.craigslist.org/ndf/cto/2566473421.html

Even at a nominal and rather conservative 18mpg combined per the US government, assuming a fuel price of $5 per gallon and 15,000 miles per year, the annual fuel cost is going to be $4187. Assuming neither needs maintenance (we don't know what's going to break on the Leaf yet, so I'm just tossing that out of the math here to make it simpler) and that you started with a pile of cash and no car, it is going to take more than seven years to break even with the initial purchase price alone of the Leaf. Meanwhile, assuming the projected upper limit of increases in electricity cost taking it to $0.25/kwH, it's going to cost you $1275 per year to run the Leaf if you have a no-cost-to-own charger somewhere, which means it will actually take you even longer to break even.

Not being stuck with a stupid ecobox with a fixed range and a not-too-impressive climate control system: Priceless.

Blind_Io said:
No, on my model XTerra the nut that connects the steering wheel to the seat isn't faulty.

Although, who knows how much flood water they got through before the snorkel finally dipped too low. The X doesn't have the same system to protect the intake as our old Land Cruiser, so a snorkel adds an extra bit of comfort for even moderate fordings. Plus it gets the intake up out of the dust and acts as a cold-air (and clean-air) intake.
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Also if you design it right, a snorkel can do ram-air.
 
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^^^They overdid it and made an idiot of themselves, but on the vehicles part it's pretty impressive that they got this far.....anyone know what they were?
 
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prizrak said:
My current cellphone needs to be charged every day :p
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That may be, but 5 years ago a phone was a phone and had texting.
Now you have blue teeth, internet, video and all sorts of stuff on your phone, sucking the battery dry

Cowboy said:
Your entire post is pretty much based on 'yes but in the future', while I agree things will improve for BEV in the future, and the cars themselves no doubt will to, sure in 20 years time things could be alot better for those who want to participate in the nonesence, but why the hell would you buy one now? You will not be saving money, you will not make life easier on yourself, and you will not be helping the planet.....
Click to expand...

I see no *real* reason to buy one today, I was just remarking that despite what everyone (including me, before this weekend) thinks, these cars DO work, and they DO do what it says on the tin.
I never imagined that these kind of cars could work "in the real world", but depending on what you drive and how you use your car today, it IS an alternative.

Yes it's overpriced and it has it flaws, but it does work!

(personal note, if I take it easy, my shitty too small diesel hatchback has 1000 km range....not bad considering it only has 50l worth of diesel in it...)

As for the trafficjams, it's not so much the standing still, it's the constant accellerating/stopping again.....It's like citydriving only heavier on the stop and go's, I doubt that will help the range....+in summer cars in trafficjams heat up like an oven, (especialy tiny cars with alot of glass and minimal insulation, aka the current electrical car) The AC will drain the battery even more.

Now listen, I think we have established your lifestyle is very different from mine despite living only miles from eachother, but quite personaly? I think everybody contemplating giving up so much freedom to save a few quid on petrol (only to spend it on the extra purchasecost and skyrocketing electricityprices) aren't realising just what they are giving up.....if you and me and this place are still around in 30 years (wich I somehow doubt :p) you will see what I mean.
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You do have a point with the extreme heat, aswell as the cold. According to the manual the car should work fine between 65?C and -25?C, which is an impressive range, but extreme temperatures fuck up your range, which as I found out is already iffy.... dunno if still want....

You're probably right that today it's too much of a compromise on lots of things to considered a real alternative to "a car", but it was not designed to be a real alternative in the first place.

(OMG did we just agree on something????)

narf said:
Regenerative braking, it's not like you'll do an emergency stop every time in the jam and need to use the disks. For ICE cars the stop and go is horrible because braking just makes heat setting off is highly inefficient and being stationary simply is 0mpg.
In fact, having slow moving traffic / sort-of jams always makes my highway consumption go down / makes my mileage go up. Going slowly saves me fuel per distance, I'm just wasting lots of time doing that.

Concerning the cost, BEVs will never be as cheap as ICE cars are now. However, ICE cars may become much more expensive to run one day, tipping the scales in favor of something else. Oil reserves are finite, and 100% renewable petrol/diesel without any fossil drop is still far away.
Click to expand...

Cowboy said:
BEV accelerating still use more electricity the when they are driving at a constant speed, I doubt regenerative braking regains as much electricity in each 'stop' as accelerating again uses in each 'go', so you still end up with a negative result.
An hour in a jam (deadnormal here) will still cost you alot of spark, while not getting you many miles....I don't see it ending well.
Click to expand...

Dunno how I did it (faulty range meter?) but in traffic my range went up. I just accelerate gently and ony use the regen brakes to slow down. I never touched the actual brake brakes and I think by doing this the range got a bit of a boost...
Same as coasting a "regular" engine, but when you coast like that you don't use extra petrol (fuel line is cut off), on the other hand you don't gain any fuel you're burned back, and you sort of do with an EV. (What does the B in BEV stand for anyway? :p)


(Actually surprised nobody posted to complain about our whining about electric cars yet)
 
I think we can all agree that at this point in time and development , it IS an alternative, for SOME people......but it's a crappy one. :p

I can live with that.

B stands for 'Battery' btw.
 
That may be, but 5 years ago a phone was a phone and had texting.
Now you have blue teeth, internet, video and all sorts of stuff on your phone, sucking the battery dry
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Yep but the thing is that battery capacities have hardly changed. The fact that we can do all those things is a testament to how energy efficient technology is.
 
^I think it's more a case of "woo we discovered a new way of making batteries last longer, not let's think of a way to use it at the same rate as before" :p

Similar to harddisk capacity/network speed, nobody felt the need to HD everything when all you had was 7 Gigs on your hard drive and 256 kb/s
now, because the capacity is there, we upgrade stuff, so we still end up waiting for videos to load, etc....
 
prizrak said:
Yep but the thing is that battery capacities have hardly changed. The fact that we can do all those things is a testament to how energy efficient technology is.
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Yup. The increase is in the efficiency of the device using the battery, not increase in battery capacity per se.

Five years ago, the Motorola RAZR could have a 3.7V 1100mAH battery as an 'extended capacity' option. It had Bluetooth, internet, video (crappy, but it had video), and all sorts of crap.

Today, my iPhone has a 3.7V 1200mAH battery. Not exactly a huge improvement in capacity there, but even though my iPhone lasts significantly longer before needing a charge than my RAZR did (I'm a very heavy user) it isn't because the battery technology got significantly better, since the display is larger and brighter, the processor more powerful, etc., etc.

And if you really want to get down to it, look at the AA battery replacement business. Rechargables haven't gone much of anywhere, and they still don't produce as much power as disposables.
 
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Just saying, I had a RAZR also a while back and I wasn't a heavy user. Mine would still have to be recharged every day or two. They had pretty poor battery life (or at least mine did).

Although, my LG Cosmos isn't much better, but it's still better than a RAZR. Only thing I do is text since I don't have any sort of data plan (and if I did I would have a much better phone, that is for sure).

Uh, car related... I haven't seen too many electric cars in my town. Maybe I'll find a Tesla one of these days. That would be interesting.
I did see a fellow student trying to find parking for his very nice Viper the other day. -Shrug-
 
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