I’m a Chevrolet dealer… we have a Chevy Volt on the lot, it’s been there now for four weeks. We’ve had one person come in to look at it, just to see what it actually looks like… Here’s a car that costs $45,763. I can stock that car for probably a year and then have to sell it at some ridiculous price. By the way, I just received some additional information from Chevrolet: in addition to the $7,500 [federal] tax credit, Pennsylvania is going to throw another $3,500 to anybody foolish enough to buy one of these cars, somehow giving them $11,000 of taxpayer money to buy this Volt.
When you look at this, it makes absolutely no sense. I can stock a Chevy Cruze, which is about a $17,500 car and turns every 30 to 40 days out of inventory… or I can have a Volt, which never turns and creates nothing for me on the lot except interest costs… So a lot of these things that we’re seeing going on have a tremendous economic impact on people who are being asked to stock them and sell them. There is no market for this car. I do have some friends who have sold them, and they’re mostly to people who have an academic interest in it, or municipalities who are asking to buy these cars.
h/t
Related! You’ll get a charge out of this.
You all missed the entire point of the post!
Does that price include the undercoating?
Geez…
Trollex said: “Imagine that! It’s almost as if there was something significant about that 40-mile figure …”
Dear trollex, the problem with the electric car 115 years ago was the battery. Lead/acid batteries are heavy and have limited storage. Fast forward to today, most electric cars are using the same battery as 115 years ago. The super duper electric cars use a lithium ion battery… which is lighter but stores only a little more energy. So, same range. To wit:
“The electric van, a Ford 2011 Transit Connect Electric, has a targeted range of up to 100 klometres on a full charge. It uses an advanced lithium-ion battery that takes up to 8 hours to charge at 240 volts. The vehicle is best suited for short-range travel routes in urban and suburban environments. ”
People like you, trollex, are the reason why MORONS at the City of Edmonton think it would be a good idea to buy a van that gets 60 miles on a charge that takes 8 hours to complete, because its “green”. Except that its not green, because all you did is move the exhaust pipe from the car to the generating station and trade for -less- efficiency.
So really the source of the problem is not batteries, its not even city government morons following the path of least resistance. The -true- source of this bone-hard stupid is people like trollex.
Alex – You did not address the prompt. Unless you can demonstrate a fallacy in the analogy, it stands.
Sorry Spike 1 @3:11, I stand by the Hindenberg having watched more than a couple of documentries on it. Agreed that propane vehicles are not allowed in underground parkades as the fuel is heavier than air. I worked for a telco for 34 years with batteries the size of a Chevy volt. In all the power rooms the purging vents for removing the hydrogen produced in charging cells were always at the ceiling.
Back to the Hindenberg, the car was beneath the balloon so the hydrogen would have gone up not settle into the car as did the diesel. But we’re getting off topic, just giving an alternative to straight EVs.
Phantom nails it. Politicians make deals to gain the support ( or, more importantly, the silence ) of potential enemies – the organized environmental pressure groups -then deliver the goods promised to the same, once they gain office.
The Edmonton city councillors do not buy electric vehicles by accident, or out of conviction they would help the environment, or improve the delivery of city services to the people of Edmonton; they do it to settle political debts, and maintain the enviros support into their next election.
The City’s Way We Green 3 year and 10 year strategic plans, their Expert Panel, etc. were all put there to maintain the Councillors’ political viability. The only Edmontonians consulted for it were the greens they saw as a potential threat to their political future.
The solution to this misuse of taxpayer money is to organize and inform the homeowners of the misuse, with the aim of defeating at least one ” green ” councillor in the next election.
@ Minuteman October 14, 2011 8:18 PM “Does anyone here remember the big push to get propane made into a motor fuel. The government got involved then and decided that a certain percentage of the fed govs fleet had to be propane. That resulted in the army having a large fleet of completely useless vehicles that could never be used “in the field”, and didn’t work on base for very long either’.
I remember them well and they were great vehicles especially when the Ford and Dodge cars were factory converted and supplied. They didn’t work in the field because of a lack of refueling capacity. On the main highways was another story.
Many taxis still use them, unfortunately hotels don’t like them in underground parking as years of poor maintenance don’t make them safe.
The Phantom @ 9:13, exactly and well said.
Thanks all. Just trying to point at the rhinoceros head on the table and laugh at the retards pretending it ain’t there.
LS from SK said: “Many taxis still use them, unfortunately hotels don’t like them in underground parking as years of poor maintenance don’t make them safe.”
I remember seeing the site of a propane tank explosion in Toronto a long time ago. Propane taxi was in a garage overnight for repairs, tank leaked out, something sparked it. The garage was -gone-, there wasn’t one stone standing on another. Just a concrete pad with rubble around it.
Propane + leaky tank + parking garage = fuel/air bomb. Its kind of like a grain elevator dust explosion looking for a place to happen, because unlike liquid fuels, propane and LNG tanks are -pressurized-.
If gasoline powered cars ran pressurized fuel tanks they’d blow up too. That’s why we have FUEL PUMPS instead of an air pump to pressurize the tank like a camp stove. Pressurizing the tank is easy and cheap, except for when it blows up and kills your lazy skinflint @$$.
Propane and LNG are unfortunately pressurized by nature, so there’s no way around it. And THAT my friends is the -real- reason why LNG is not a good fuel for an over-the-road vehicle. Pressurized fuel tank, lots of BOOM!!! if something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong eventually.
Did anyone catch the rave review of the Fisker Karma on The Car Show? Now that’s an electric car people want. Alas, $100,000 but still
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ0dkhbUQiM
Can you say (BLEVE) yes you can.
Dalton McGuinty likes electric cars, he also like wind turbines.
That is one useless form of electricity generation, charging another useless form of transportation.
The fact that the 2 ideas are inconsistant hasn’t occurred to him yet. Huge numbers of electric vehicles would be a drain on electricity supply.
We should be trying to use less electricity not more. But then, green ideology is a religion, not a science.
I want to start an electric car dealership in the Upper Town of Quebec City. I’d call it “Upper Volta”..
Cool! Edmonton just got themselves a coal-powered van.
Now, if we could just find a practical way to use coal directly in an internal-combustion engine, we could do away with all those nasty batteries and electric motors.
my wife and I each have our own vehicles but we don’t need two vehicles that have the range to drive from Vancouver to Kelowna non stop. One of those is enough, the other would be the around Vancouver vehicle, shopping, theatre, friends, doctor visits, and the bridge club.
An all electric vehicle, no more tune ups or oil changes, sounds environmentally friendly to me.
“Alex – You did not address the prompt.”
Huh? Ok. And you didn’t polarize the ion matrix.
“Unless you can demonstrate a fallacy in the analogy, it stands. ”
You didn’t make an analogy.
Idiots like phantom clearly don’t know the first thing about battery technology (or about people, for that matter), but I’m betting that you do. So go ahead – try and figure out why a vehicle from 100+ years ago would get roughly the same range as one today. If you can put in an honest effort, I might even start taking you seriously.