If you can’t sell stupid to Californians, well….
“We were early supporters of electric cars, going back as far as 15 years. But nobody ever uses them,” said Dennis Hoover, the general manager for Costco in northern California, in a telephone interview. “At our Folsom store, the manager said he hadn’t seen anybody using the E.V. charging in a full year. At our store in Vacaville, where we had six chargers, one person plugged in once a week.”
They can’t pay them to keep the things.
The Costco outlets are also outdated by current standards, but a state-supported program stands ready to upgrade them at no cost to Costco.
That was one impetus for a $2.3 million program supported by the California Energy Commission and overseen by the charging companies Clipper Creek and EV Connect, which would have 600 to 650 so-called legacy E.V. chargers upgraded. According to Will Barrett, a Clipper Creek program manager, 30 new chargers have been installed since the program began operations in July. Mr. Barrett said that Costco decided not to participate in the state program last March.
Mr. Hoover said the company was aware of the state-funded upgrade program, but did not see a compelling reason to take advantage of it.
“Why should we have anybody spend money on a program that nobody’s thought through?” he said.
Related – Throughout July, a whopping 125 Chevy Volts were sold, making the seemingly low 281 units sold in February a groundbreaking month.
I just can’t wait to see the size of the “booster” vehicle for when an electric car runs out of sparks and needs to be re-fueled on the road. Or is it call a tow truck every time the temperature drops 20 degrees and the delivered power drops 30%?
Obama’s Job plan…apply for unemployment & green Stamps and get a Toaster. That’s a Toaster in the form of a Clown Car…Van Jones, (self described Communist & the Jobs guy) needs a promotion
Electric vehicles have always been little more than a technological curiosity, as the technology itself is a dead end. It doesn’t matter what you do to performance, range, or cost, the fact that it takes a day to recharge the things means that you will need a fuel-based car as a back-up, whether that be petrol, diesel, hydrogen, or whatever else the genius of man devises.
It’s just a shame that our politicians have gotten into the auto business.
The answer to making electric card more popular is the development of the wireless extension cord with a range of 450 KM. I’ll bet that could be Bambam’s next job creation plan.
The simple answer for electric cars would be to make them part-time hybrids. How? Simple, equip then all to tow a little trailer with a small self-contained Diesel generator and charger. Hitch up, plug it in, and go.
EV owners could own their own charging trailer for long-haul trips, or rent one. EV owners who get stranded on the road could call their auto club, and get a loaner unit to get them to their destination.
It’s perfectly doable. Thing is, there’s no damn reason to do it. If we had a vast surplus of cheap electric power, and a big shortage of petroleum fuel, we could do it very easily. But we have neither, so why bother?
Why bother buying an electric car along with all it’s problems,when you elected a president who will save the planet?
Enviromentalists may not be as stupid as they appear to be. (:-)
“Costco is making a mistake by removing these chargers and not installing the new standard charge stations. We have thousands of new EVs on the road today and next year there will tens of thousands. This technology is vastly superior to internal combustion and is good for our country. The businesses that support these forward-thinking people with charging infrastructure will gain loyal customers. Those that don’t, won’t.”
From the comments at the link, the first comment,actually.
So,there will be “tens of thousands” of EV’s on the road in California next year.
This is great news for the EV auto makers.I’m sure GM will be ecstatic when their “Volt” sales skyrocket.
I wonder where the fellow that made that comment got his information about the massive increase in electrically powered vehicles by next year.
electric cars were set up to fail.
watch the documentary ‘who killed the electric car?’
for example, why why why did the receptacles for charging the things have to be a brand new design? wtf is wrong with making them the same and use the same voltage as 240 VAC?
a DELIBERATE attempt to discredit electric cars by the manufacturers. also, when first marketed, you could ONLY get a lease from GM and the leases were NOT renewed under any circumstances.
the leftover units were hauled into the desert and crushed.
why is that?
This isn’t stopping the green activist type architects, whose primary goal are to design politically correct rather than practical/economical, from specifying charging stations everywhere they can these days.
This spring did some work at the site of a community centre renovation in Winnipeg’s North End. Several charging stations and electric vehicle parking were specified.
“electric cars were set up to fail.”
No, they are quite capable of doing that on their own, as long as they are purported to be a complete replacement of internal-combustion cars. Market them to a niche market of short-range commuters as second cars, and you may do OK.
“watch the documentary ‘who killed the electric car?’ ”
Activist nonsense and conspiracy theories. Troofer territory.
“for example, why why why did the receptacles for charging the things have to be a brand new design? wtf is wrong with making them the same and use the same voltage as 240 VAC?”
So, that the power for electric cars could be metered at a different rate, and measured separately.
“a DELIBERATE attempt to discredit electric cars by the manufacturers. also, when first marketed, you could ONLY get a lease from GM and the leases were NOT renewed under any circumstances.
the leftover units were hauled into the desert and crushed.”
The GM EV-1, to which you allude was never sold. It was test-marketed as a lease to hand-picked users, who were essentially unpaid testers for GM. They were recalled and crushed at the end of the program, as the users knew from the outset, because they were practically hand-built using components sourced from outside GM. GM never had, nor intended to have, the capacity to provide parts and service for those cars for years after the test period expired, as they would have had to do, by law, if they had actually sold them.
People forget, but Chrysler did pretty much the same thing with the handful of gas turbine cars they built in the 1960s.
You know what really killed the electric car?
REALITY.
Google that one hippie.
As England goes further down the path of greenie economic suicide . . .
http://tinyurl.com/3n4rm59
C’mon Ontario . . . another Dulton term in office and you too can get a Gold Star in Eco-Stupidity.
Electric cars? There’s no point. At the rate that the elected governments in the West are disassembling our economy and culture, we’ll be discussing the Big Three donkey breeders while we huddle around our windmill-driven electric campfires.
Or am I putting the cart before the donkey?
Here abouts especially Woodstock, On I have observed a flury of these electric scooters. They require no drivers licence, insurance and only a bicycle helmet….and only have to abide by bicycle road rules……
They have only a top speed of about 40K. Range???
An associate has one to commute to work across town. He will discover that it rains more often than he expects and for about 4 months of the year…..
Meanwhile his fuel/energy costs are slight.
A Hilarious related bit of fiction here.
casualobserver said: “electric cars were set up to fail.”
Uh huh. So who killed the bicycle Mr. toocasualtousetheshiftkey? There’s bike lanes EVERY frickin’ where in Silicon Valley, perfect weather, and NO BIKES. Like, count them on the fingers of one hand at rush hour.
Super greenie weenie cloud-cuckoo land California, ground zero of the Green Nation… no bikes.
G’head, explain it to me. I can wait.
There are lots of Priuses in Silicon Valley. You know why? Because there’s a TAX BREAK of several thousand dollars when you buy one, and because you can use the carpool by yourself. California gives you a special carpool lane sticker for the Prius. So one can see five or six Priuses in a row clogging the carpool lane at 55mph, because they are too wheezy to get up to speed.
But no tax break/sticker for the Volkswagen Jetta TDI, which gets -better- gas mileage and produces -less- air pollution than the Prius. How come, casualdude?
Where does Obama think people with electric cars will plug in, when he’s shutting down the American power grid in a green frenzy?
The disconnect is beyonfd stupid. Its madness squared.
As for the Volt, its a play car made for a man child to preen about.
I wonder how long this winter will be when the power shuts off?
Hey casual observer maybe you should drop by the Chevy Volt forum and check out how GM is falling over themselves looking after people with battery problems… if anything GM doesn’t want egg on their face.
Dear Leader Dalton is going to pour 80 million dollars of taxpayers money down the black hole of green for EV charging stations:
http://autos.sympatico.ca/auto-news/9484/ontario-invests-80-million-in-ev-recharging
The basic problems with EV is
A. Range
B Charge time.
The additional issue is size of battery.
Even if the range were a sad 100km, if you could charge one in a few minutes, they’d work “ok” in semi-urban areas. Especially if you gave one a little limp-along generator, if you missed your “gas station”
Battery size is another thing. A common medium car has what, 15 gallons of gas, in rough numbers that’s 60kg ( 4 litre/gallon, 1 lg per litre, close enough for this example.)
A Prius’s battery pack, which is 240-300kg as far as I can tell. (A volt has about 200kg\) And that’s not an electric car, that’s a hybrid which for all intends and purposes uses the battery electric to do load-leveling, allowing a smaller & efficient gas motor. I understand they do not go very far on battery only.
That’s a LOT of weight. Oh and batteries re dangerous and require armor and protective gear to product users in case of accident. A lot of weight translates directly in to poor fuel economy, heavier structure, etc.. etc…
(Not saying that electric cars or the Prius are dad “fuel economy” just if batteries were lighter,and weren’t hauling around all that crap they’d be a LOT better. )
That being said the hybrid load leveling technology is cool, if expensive for what you get. I’d love to see a Prius with a power OUTLET though. Two 120V, 20AMP circuits that you could use as a home generator equivalent That’d be sweet in power failures.
EVs tend to BE real poor in our Winters. Heat, defrost and…you know the drill.
But where can I plug in my EV (Combine)?
The greatest problem with electric cars is that all we are trying to do is replace the power source in an existing technology rather than rethink the entire technology. Making cars electric is akin to converting a conestoga wagon from being horse/mule drawn to hummingbird drawn.
Why of all places to put electric vehicle chargers was Costco chosen? The whole point of stores like Costco is to buy a couple of months of groceries and save by buying in bulk. The most common vehicle at the local Costco is a pickup and I’ve seen people fill the cargo area to overflowing with their purchases. Electric vehicles aren’t exactly known for their cargo carrying capacity.
We actually have a huge number of electric vehicles on the road; “golf carts”. They seem to be the transportation mode of choice for retired people in Florida and I suspect they also are utilized in other southern states with lots of elderly people.
When one buys something new, one expects an improvement. Let’s look at computers as an example. Now the average gamers machine is a 3 GHz quad core CPU with the graphics card having a 64 bit GPU with a gigabyte or so of its own RAM. Say some inventor has come out with a “green” organically based computer that runs on ethanol and has the power of the original 8 MHz IBM XT – how many of these do you think would be sold? The answer is pretty obvious; close to 0 – it would be a great machine in areas with no electric power and would serve as a datalogger but people have gotten used to a certain level of performance and when something “new” comes along, it had better be at the very least equal in performance to what already exists.
Current battery technology is a dead end – except in golf carts. Batteries have absolutely dismal energy density and, until high temperature superconductor batteries come one line, they haven’t a hope of competing with the energy density of gasoline. Also, batteries are limited by the small number of deep discharge cycles they have. A conventional gasoline tank can be refilled several orders of magnitude times more than a complex battery costing hundreds of times more than the gasoline tank.
If an electric vehicle with a battery having an energy density greater than that of gasoline as well as no limitation on number of charge/discharge cycles came along, I’d buy one if it was priced the same as a regular vehicle. I live in an area with lots of hills and I’d love to be able to convert the gravitational potential energy that currently just goes to heat my brakes into battery power. The reason that the battery would need excess capacity over a gasoline powered vehicle is because it gets damn cold in the winter where I live and it takes a lot of power to heat the inside of a vehicle – power now available for free as the waste heat of an internal combustion engine.
“There’s bike lanes EVERY frickin’ where in Silicon Valley, perfect weather, and NO BIKES. Like, count them on the fingers of one hand at rush hour.”
There are THOUSANDS of bikes on the roads. Just look at Foothill Expressway on a weekend afternoon.
There are thousands of recreational riders, but no one commutes to work by bicycle. Commuting by bicycle is faster than public transportation, but you are all sweaty when you arrive at work.
Related….and funny too,on many levels.
The link tips you off as to the nature of the story.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/operation-silent-snowmobile-canadian-forces-plan-new-vehicle-for-covert-arctic-ops.html
I wonder what the battery life expectancy is and what it would cost to replace batteries on Volt or Leaf. Anyone know ?
Rich@6:21
The silent snowmobile described in your link is a perfect example of the niche market I mentioned in an earlier post. If silent operation is a necessary requirement, only an electric motor fills the bill.
There’s another class of military vehicle that has routinely used electric power for close to a century: submarines. Submarines aren’t cheap to build, either, but if you want one, you are going to have to use electric motors and batteries.
Mike said:”There are THOUSANDS of bikes on the roads.”
Mike, not to doubt your word or anything, but I didn’t see ’em. For a week. Anywhere in San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. etc.
I think you’ll find that THOUSANDS of bikes in a state with 30 MILLION people adds up to less than 1%. Which is about what I saw.
But all the bike lanes and special signals and whatnot sure looked like it cost more than 1% of the highway budget. Certainly took up more than 1% of the road surface.
Just sayin’.
To add to the silent snowmobile story, I ask…. why?
On whom (who?) are we sneaking up?
Re: the electric snowmobile, how do they plan on making it run silent on squeaky snow? It squeaks when it gets cold, right? Going to hear that squeaky scrushing sound for miles at night.
You can hear skiers at night around here, and this ain’t the Arctic.
The question waiting to be voiced is: ‘Is that big black bus, made in Montreal, electric? If not, why not?’
gordinkneehill – oooo, I just visualized a nuclear snowmobile/camper… where can I buy one? On the down side, how could I re-fuel it without having UN forces dispatched to take me down?
I ride a bicycle to work, when I choose. Sweaty? Use a fan to cool down.
The Banff Tunnel Mtn campground nazis use Prius to sneek up on “rule breaking” campers. The huge crows are louder!
$40k for an electric car is just stupid.
$24K gets a 2011 4×4 Silverado, if you wanted one.
Electric cars are meant to be commuter vehicles for round trips of under 50 miles. They are not meant to replace I/C powered vehicles for all driving conditions.
There is a place in Calgary that sells electric bikes. But I don’t think I have ever seen one out on the paths I occasionally ride. Don’t know what range they have or if they make sense at all.
“Electric cars are meant to be commuter vehicles for round trips of under 50 miles. They are not meant to replace I/C powered vehicles for all driving conditions.
Posted by: lberia at August 21, 2011 11:19 PM ”
Alright, who are you, and what did you do with the real lberia?
I’m not an enviro-whacko, but EVs can work as long as you have a grid that can handle them. Tesla is coming out with a sedan next year that seats up to 7 passengers and will have the option of up to 300 mile range. Now granted, I don’t think it’s being heavily tested in 40 below Saskatchewan, but one of the big features is that the batteries can be replaced as fast as a normal vehicle can be fueled.
I’m not saying that the idea is ready for prime time, but it wouldn’t be hard to set up the infrastructure to piggy back on top of existing fuel station infrastructure, and the benefit is that nobody changes their habits and nobody has to spend thousands to setup charging stations in their home. You also circumvent the need to buy new batteries because you’re constantly cycling new batteries through the system. It can work.
Oxygentax said: “You also circumvent the need to buy new batteries because you’re constantly cycling new batteries through the system. It can work.”
Yeah, except that all the “filling” stations have to maintain an inventory of batteries, right? Who’s paying for that? I bet you that if you dig down through the nested sets of obfuscation and disinformation, you’ll find the tax payer forking over again.
Somehow “Battery Brides” by XTC seem apropos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3ArWo0SlY