We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars

19 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars”

1. Everybody who buys an electric car should be required to charge it from wind power alone.

2. Owning one is punishment enough.
   All of this is screamingly ridiculous. Most forklift trucks are electrically powered. And a commentator to this blog said recently that the largest earthmoving equipment uses hybrid power. So the Age of Electricity will come when people start driving their forklift trucks on highways, or buying them instead of All-Terrain Vehicles; or demand scaled-down ultraheavy equipment instead of F250s

3. What a revolting comment that is. Shocking even. My current conductive thinking is that they should stay ohm until the resistance against the electric car is lowered. Alternately, their reluctance to use oil should be conducted through some other path until the electric car movement has been amped up. Inductance reasoning indeed!

4. John Lewis, heavy earth moving machinery and train engines use a hybrid diesel electric system. The reason for this is -drive shafts-. If you have to run off the engine directly, you end up using very large and complex shafts and hydraulic clutches to drive your machine. Weight, complexity, waste heat and breakage are the issues to be avoided.
   By driving a generator and putting an electric motor at each wheel, you simplify and lighten the machine, thereby increasing the payload. No batteries either, direct drive generator, output controlled by engine throttle. Also works awesome for multi-wheel off-road vehicles like Mars rovers and moon buggies, and super heavy-duty over-the-road trucks that pull crazy shaped things like iron ingots, airplane wings, or the Space Shuttle.
   Not worth a d@mn for road cars and trucks because the generation/storage loss and battery weight is -much- larger than the friction losses and weight of drive shafts in the car application. That’s why the Golf TDI beats the Golf hybrid for mileage in everything but stop-and-go traffic.
   Now, electric cars are just stupid. Unless the purpose is for inside a building or for something like a golf cart, batteries don’t carry enough energy. And contrary the the putz who tried to tell me how awesome the Tesla is in Arizona, its not a low-pollution vehicle. In fact it produces -much- more pollution than a regular car of the same size and performance due to electrical grid loss from the generating station and the inefficiency of the battery in the car. Its just that the pollution gets made at the generating station instead of at the car.
   What’s the government pushing? Electrics and hybrids. What are we learning?

5. Conservatives.
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TtGQnyPZ6g
   Don’t worry about those sparky cars. They mostly won’t become dominant until you guys push off from your heart attacks. But the point here is that we need to develop these technologies. Yes, they might currently rely on fossil fuels, but that won’t always be the case. Solar, is going to become an affordable and reasonable source of energy as we improve efficiency and affordability. Thorium nuclear could become a thing and who knows what else?
   This is just another example of conservatives desperate to stop any sort of progression, be it social or technological. If people had listened to you guys, we’d never have come down from the trees. (Those would be the prehistoric trees that you guys are statistically unlikely to believe that we were ever in, in the first place due to your archaic beliefs as to our origins as a species).
   Fortunately, conservatives always lose eventually. It’s just unfortunate that so much energy has to be spent brow beating you guys, rather than channelled into how to best handle progress.

6. Odd to get a comment of this sort from a, presumably, “progressive” — the same “progressives” who oppose the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas formations which has been going on safely for decades, the same “progressives” who oppose genetic modification of food despite its proven ability to increase crop yields, the same “progressives” who fight tooth and nail against the expansion of nuclear energy use, the same “progressives” who oppose the use of pesticides to control vector-borne diseases such as malaria, the same “progressives” who label as “new” technologies used by the Romans (windmills) or technologies such as electric cars — check it out: http://www.blackdiamondnow.org/2011/01/electric-automobiles-a-return-to-our-past.html. Conservatives are opposed to stupidity and technologies pushed by governments in order to pander to pseudo-scientific fads.

7. DrD
   U stolt ma thunder, I think john (toilet) may just bee another incarnation of L-ass:-)))

8. John The Idiot said: “Solar, is going to become an affordable and reasonable source of energy as we improve efficiency and affordability.”
   Tell me, John buddy, do you know the difference between a lead/acid battery and a lithium battery? Do you even know where lithium comes from, or if its animal, vegetable or mineral? Do you know what parasitic drag is? How about transmission line loss? Do you have any idea how many watts per square meter we get from sunlight in this country?
   From your abjectly stupid comment above, I’ll guess its “no” on all of the above.
   Wake me up when somebody designs a high temperature superconducting battery and a solar panel that’s better than 50% efficient, I’ll run out and buy a sparky car.

9. Everybody who buys an electric car should be required to charge it from wind power alone. Posted by: MarkP
   or solar or hydro…
   ie, it must be an off-grid renewable source or no subsidy whatsoever.

10. direct drive generator, output controlled by engine throttle.
    Posted by: The Phantom
    In most hybrid electric drive systems like trains and earth-movers the vehicle speed is controlled by manually adjusting the power to the electric motors and the generator throttle adjusts automatically to provide the electricity required.

11. Regardless of what the ghost in the machine might opine, PV solar is already competitive with fossil fueled grid power in many locations where the sun shines a lot.
    Most extremists can’t grasp the simple concept of appropriate technology. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Smart people use what is most appropriate for the resources and requirements at hand. A sliderule is a poor hammer, and the computing capabilities of a hammer are severely limited.
    It’s amusingly hypocritical how some people who claim to champion the cause of personal freedom of choice, don’t want anyone to have the option of an electric car if that’s their choice.
    Stop playing control freak.
    Let the marketplace decide.

12. Oh so well said. It was a pleasure to read it.
    Progressives also think one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic (so said an infamous progressive in the 1930s). Progressives also think that there are 6 billion too many people on earth.
    The Phantom, haven’t railroad locomotives been a similar diesel electric system for about sixty years, and were not submarines powered by diesel electric propulsion during WW II?

13. north of 90
    yes, let the market place decide, butt that isn’t what Obumbles and the lefties want, they want to dicktate and they throw hard earned tax dollars at this stupidity. Once U discover that fact maybe you’ll start to sound informed

14. Correct, North_of_60, wrt appropriate technology. If I were living in an area where it would cost me over $10 K to get power run to my place, I’d definitely be looking into my own generator, solar power and a large battery storage system. Best thing of all I’d learn a lot about power electronics and get to instrument everything which would allow me to fine tune the system. Where I live now, I’m planning on buying a generator but it’s definitely not worth it for me to go off the grid.
    As I’ve said multiple times before, when an EV comes with a power source that has a better energy density than gasoline, I’m interested. The reality, seemingly unpalatable to watermelons, is that short chain hydrocarbons are the most versatile and compact fuel source that we’ve come up with thus far. Next in line are liquid H2 and O2 but there’s a few bugs to be worked out and refuelling can be problematic. Regenerative braking was one of the reasons I almost bought a hybrid vehicle but then when I started looking deeper into battery life, maximum charging currents and costs, I might save a few pennies on gasoline going downhill but I’d be spending far more money overall on a vehicle that wouldn’t last very long. The problem of being unable to handle the huge charging currents one gets when using a generator as a brake while descending a steep hill means that one is throwing away this energy. Ultracapacitors were touted as the solution to this problem but haven’t heard much about them in the last few years — likely a problem with how much charge a practical ultracapacitor could store.
    When it comes to obsolete technology, there’s good reasons why it stopped being used. The energy density of moving water is about 800x that of air. Also, dams across rivers provide a buffer for large rainfalls and irrigation water during droughts. Hydroelectric installations are also one of the most reliable forms of power around except the moronic moonbats in BC have decided we’re not building any more hydroelectric power installations; instead we go with obsolete and erratic wind which, I suppose, will reduce the eagle population and allow more salmon to end up in native Indian nets. The people who are engaged in making decisions about types of transportation they are attempting to inflict on the population are watermelon ideologues who believe that only they are right. There’s only one way to deal with such idiots and it doesn’t involve debate.

15. Your last paragraph is spot-on. Hybrid or battery operated vehicles might be fine for short-distance or enclosed spaces but not for anything meant to meet today’s needs. One might as well buy a horse and live in the nineteenth century.
    Is John (the troll) still talking?

16. Agree with the sane commenters here, but the video contains a glaring error. Morano (who should know better) mentioned that charging requirements for EVs could run to “9000 watts per hour”, and Fox posted a graphic with the same clanger.
    “Watts per hour” is essentially a meaningless expression. A Watt is, by definition, a rate of energy consumption/production. An EV plugged into the grid may use power at the rate of 9000 Watts, full stop. No “per hour” is needed. “Watts per hour” is actually a second derivative, a rate of change of a rate. If you want a meaningful use of “Watts per hour”, imagine one of John’s mythical 50% efficient solar panels in a sandstorm, with its capacity being degraded at the rate of 500 watts per hour.
    North of 60 mentioned using solely “green” power to charge electric cars. That’s actually a sensible idea. Dedicate the output of the giant bird blenders to charging the batteries of EVs. Require that EV charging points be supplied with interruptible power controlled in real-time by the utility. If, at a given time, 2.06 mW of wind power is on-line, then the utility could turn on 2.06 mW worth of charging points, and exactly balance the wild power of the wind turbines with switchable load. If the available wind power changed up or down, load could be switched on or off to maintain balance. In effect, you would be crowd-sourcing a battery bank. Conventional sources would need to maintain less “spinning reserves”, because the erratic wind energy would not be going to baseline loads. Of course, the best way to implement such a scheme would be to have your EVs to use standardized, swappable batteries, and apply the real-time load control at centralized charging stations. With such a scheme, the wind power for EV charging would piggy-back upon the grid, without actually being of the grid.

17. yes, let the market place decide, butt that isn’t what Obumbles and the lefties want, they want to dicktate and they throw hard earned tax dollars at this stupidity. Once U discover that fact maybe you’ll start to sound informed
    Posted by: NME666
    Nothing I stated disagrees with that, which questions how well you can read. Trying to read your agenda into others comments always looks stupid. But you obviously know that, eh?

18. If I were living in an area where it would cost me over $10 K to get power run to my place, I’d definitely be looking into my own generator, solar power and a large battery storage system…Where I live now, I’m planning on buying a generator but it’s definitely not worth it for me to go off the grid.
    Same situation here. Our local grid is 98% small hydro, and the sun shines when it’s mostly not needed for electricity. I’m working to convert my back-up genny to run on propane.

19. what gordinkneehill says is spot on. Include PV solar with wind in that mix. With intelligent controls the EV charging stations could charge one rate for the wind and solar power and much-much more for the ‘nasty’ fossil fuel power when there’s not enough wind and sun for all the EVs.