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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right

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kwschumm
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2009-08-12          164868

This pretty much sums up my opinion of hybrid technology.

From Popular Science:

The battery that will power the Chevrolet Volt weighs approximately 400 pounds and, stood on end, reaches a height of six feet. The $10,000 plus, T-shaped monolith contains 300 individual three-volt lithium-ion cells, bundled together in groups of three, then wired in series and kept from overheating by an elaborate liquid cooling mechanism. A computerized monitoring system inside the battery pack conducts this electrical orchestra, balancing voltage, watching, above all, for any indication that a cell might be failing, shorting out, or otherwise threatening the stability of the system. This battery, one of the most advanced pieces of electrical storage ever engineered, can propel the 3500-pound Volt 40 miles before it runs out of energy. And so can a gallon of gas.
--Nick Koloterakis, "Power Struggle", _Popular Science_, November 2008


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hardwood
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2009-08-12          164871

Well now KW you don't believe ever word of advertisment put out by the big corparate liars association????
If the Volt has no gasoline or diesel engine then what does it get 230 MPG of????
The only source of energy we have is the sun. It just depends if the sun grew the plants and animals that turned into oil or if the sun makes the wind blow to turn a turbine making the electricity to power the Volt.
Energy made into electricity from wind, solar panels, hydro electric dams powwering the Volt is a true replacable source of energy. Problem is of course i8f every car truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, locomotive, etc, etc. were battery powered from the grid we would brown out every light bulb in the country.
The only real advantage a hybrid has is capturing the energy created by the braking of the car. I have a hard time believeing that is enough to justify all the contraptions to save it.
I have a friend who claims he buys a new Prius every year thru some tax savings on his federal return? Is this real or is he just blowing smoke? If this is true then here we go again spending our tax dollars to fund an off shore owned car producer.
Now we have Obama trying to ram a health care packager down our throats before anyone has a chance to understand what is in it.
Wow, I'm steamin today. ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-12          164873

I suspect that government ownership of GM had something to do with that ridiculous mpg rating.

C'mon, mpg means nothing to an electric car. What they need is a yellow sticker like they place on appliances, you know the ones - this Chevy Volt will cost $5000/year to charge if you drive 12000 miles/year and your energy costs 15 cents/kwh. Gasoline is extra. This cost should include the cost to replace the $10k battery since batteries are consumables, unlike gas tanks, and also the costs to dispose of the toxic batteries without polluting the groundwater.

....

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kthompson
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2009-08-12          164874

Ken, you are probably too young to remeber the wind up toy cars. But don't worry, the Fred Flintstone powered car is next.
I do agree, who is the nuckle head who thinks of a MPG with electric but since Cap and Trade and the cost of electricty is expected to about triple it might be gas will cost less for the up to 40 mile per day drive.
Wonder how the cabin is heated? ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-12          164875

I'm all for electric cars but we need to build the infrastructure first.

A few months ago in Popular Mechanics there was an article about small, sealed, self-contained and inherently safe nuclear plants that could be trucked in to a community, buried, hooked up to the local grid and power tens of thousands of homes for twenty years. At the end of its life it was to designed to get dug up, replaced with a new one, and trucked to a reprocessing facility to be refueled and shipped out again. This makes all kinds of sense - freedom from interstate grids eliminates the single point of failure and communities could easily add units as growth demands.

We'd need this type of infrastructure to support electric cars for all. Until then, drill, drill, drill. ....

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kthompson
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2009-08-12          164884

Wonder if there is a way to produce energy from radio signals of sufficient amount to power anything? ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-12          164889

Quote:
Originally Posted by kthompson | view 164884
Wonder if there is a way to produce energy from radio signals of sufficient amount to power anything?


Warning, I'm not a EE so what follows is semi-educated conjecture.

In fact it is possible but not practical for a bunch of reasons. You wouldn't get much power (think micro, nano or pico watts) unless you were right next to the transmitter. Then there is the fact that if you were to produce power from the radio waves it would cause a parasitic signal loss that would weaken the signal for everyone else, so the power would need to be boosted, then more people would produce power, requiring more power input, etc, etc.

There are systems that do produce power from radio waves though, like those microchips they inject into pets or some "smart cards" that are used to control access into buildings. And those systems use special readers that transmit for the purpose of power generation so they can communicate with the device.

They are working on wireless power distribution though... I wonder how cooked we'll be when it's all working. ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-12          164890

My brother spent a big part of his career working on the electric vehicle program for a utility company. He said that one advantage of the Volt is that every time it runs on batteries it is using domestically produced energy instead of imported oil. Nearly all domestic energy production is coal, nuclear, hydro, or natural gas, all produced domestically. So that's a bonus. Apparently the energy cost of the volt would be 1-2 cents/mile (before cap-and-tax) when running on batteries, but of course that doesn't factor in the initial cost premium, replacement battery cost or charging station cost .. not to mention that we don't have enough domestic energy production to charge a whole bunch of cars anyway. Much of the charging would be off-peak but I'd bet 25-30% would be done on-peak.
....

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Murf
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2009-08-13          164905

There was a big fuss in the media up here a while back, all because an electric car made near here is a success, but you can't take one for a test drive out the door of the factory it's made in, That's because it's not legal to drive them on the road here in Canada yet.

We don't have an equivalent to the NEV that exists south of the border.

In a strange twist of fate though, it's legal to operate a moped, or an electric bicycle on the public streets though.

When it was in the news we were discussing it over coffee one morning, myself (an engineer) and a retired electrical engineer from the electrical utility in our area were crunching the numbers.

We figured that in the end, all the inefficiencies lumped together meant that it actually polluted more than several diesel cars did.

The other issue is that they are already threatening rolling brown-outs and black-outs on hot days because there isn't enough electricity to go around now.

The manufacturers also have two big obstacles to overcome in order to gain consumer acceptance of these purely electric-powered vehicles.

The first is that a purely electric vehicle has no adequate means of producing cabin heat. They can make some heat, but I suspect it's nowhere near enough to overcome the cold the north sees for a good part of the year.

Secondly, and another biggy, if they make marginal power just to move the vehicle, there is no allowance for 'wasted' power to run things like A/C either.

I just couldn't imagine driving in most urban environments and being stuck in a traffic jam in an e-Car with no A/C on a sweltering hot day and not having any A/C.

My two cents worth.

Best of luck. ....

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auerbach
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2009-08-13          164908

Murf, I somehow had the idea that the ZENN was approved in Quebec and BC. ....

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AnnBrush
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2009-08-13          164909

It's 2030, 21 years from now - are some of us / most of us driving vehicles powered by electricity - I can see it.

This kind of thinking with our reluctance to move from fossil fuel will ensure the Europeans figure it all out and we are left to purchase either their technology or Arab oil. WE have to get going on this. ....

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Murf
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2009-08-13          164910

It may have changed, I know they are 'pending' approval in BC, and in Quebec I think there is a pilot project allowing them to be used in 'select urban areas' and (I think) only on streets with a 50 km/h (35mph) or less speed limit.

The vehicle itself is electronically limited to a maximum of 40 km/h (25 mph) anyways.

The reality of it is, vehicles like the diesel Smart have an overall cost per mile of travel that is lower than the electrics. The batteries are the stumbling block as Ken pointed out.

Personally, I think you will see CNG (compressed natural gas) as a common fuel long before electric.


Best of luck. ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-13          164912

Quote:
Originally Posted by AnnBrush | view 164909
It's 2030, 21 years from now - are some of us / most of us driving vehicles powered by electricity - I can see it.This kind of thinking with our reluctance to move from fossil fuel will ensure the Europeans figure it all out and we are left to purchase either their technology or Arab oil. WE have to get going on this.


Hey, I like the idea of electric cars, they can be very fast :)

But for those to work in any quantity we need to vastly increase generating capacity and the environmentalists pretty much have us hamstrung in that regard. California hasn't built any generating capacity in decades and instead steals it from the Pacific NW via the BPA and an effective beltway lobbying machine. Even socialist France gets most of their power from nukes and we can't even reprocess the fuel here. Then there is the problem that battery technology is nowhere near good enough to replace the internal combustion engine.

Since we can't seem to get those things fixed it seems that biodiesel is the most realistic alternative.

Instead of realistic solutions we throw money at stupid projects as political payola. Here they are building a $20 million solar generating facility that is expected to produce $5 million of electricity over its entire life. Yeah, that makes sense in a governmental sort of way.
....

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Murf
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2009-08-13          164914

IMHO biodiesel will be the same boondoggle that Ethanol is today.

Instead of using common-sense sources the Goober-mint will buckle to political lobby pressure and continue to allow the use (and domination of the industry) of Soybean oil.

Just like as has happened with corn and Ethanol, so too will the soybean / biodiesel situation cause global price spikes and waste of valuable crops and land.

Oh well.

Best of luck. ....

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hardwood
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2009-08-13          164917

OK Murf, you and your engineer buddys have overlooked one of the most basic ways to power anything."Rubber Bands". Any of you Geezers or Geezerets my age remember buying the model airplane kit at the five and dime for fifty cents that were powwered by a rubber band. Easy to recycle, could be rewound by a squirrel in a cage running all night to wind it up for you. Get with it guy. ....

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kwschumm
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2009-08-13          164918

Quote:
Originally Posted by hardwood | view 164917
OK Murf, you and your engineer buddys have overlooked one of the most basic ways to power anything."Rubber Bands". Any of you Geezers or Geezerets my age remember buying the model airplane kit at the five and dime for fifty cents that were powwered by a rubber band. Easy to recycle, could be rewound by a squirrel in a cage running all night to wind it up for you. Get with it guy.


The modern incarnation of rubber bands is flywheels. There are prototype cars running on flywheels which can store surprising amounts of energy. ....

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earthwrks
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2009-08-13          164919

Kenny there is work under way to use microwaves beamed from space. How it gets turned into power I'm not sure--steam, possibly.

No one in the posts that I saw has mentioned regenerative braking--I hear but know if that's part of the factors of the Volt getting great MPG.

In another life, back in '93 the company I worked for was engineering and building battery trays for experimental electric Ford Rangers. These trays were massive--made to fit between the frame rails and about 8-10 feet long and 1 foot deep. I believe they were made of a carbon fiber composite and seemed like they were about a 1/2" thick. Ford nixed the project early on. ....

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Murf
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2009-08-13          164920

Frank, you made my day buddy!!! LOL

Actually UPS (the people with the brown trucks ;)) have spent a bunch of money to develop a very high tech 'rubber band'.

When the driver steps on the 'brakes' a hydraulic pump/motor connected to the drive line creates load by charging what is basically a huge pair of scuba tanks beneath the truck. Then when the driver needs to pull away from a stop, the charged tank then creates pressure that spins the pump/motor making the truck pull away and start rolling.

UPS feels that between the savings in brakes and fuel (the new trucks will have much smaller engines since they will be needed for 'cruise' only, not acceleration) on a fleet of their size it's worth the money in R & D.

Best of luck. ....

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kthompson
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2009-08-13          164929

And then there is the ROAD TAX issue in all this conversation. So with the electric car there is no way to tax it's fuel so they now must have the system some in the current Fed Admin want to track all driving for each vechile. So how do you say big brother is watching you more and more and well what does it matter, he will be living with us by then.

I believe we need to just go back to horses and mules. They generate heat (will leave it to greater minds to heat the cabin with it), they can mow your yard so no energy wasted to do that. Oh, they produce pollution also!! But look one of those is fertlizer to grow the grass to power them to produce more fertlier to grow more grass. Puts a new twist on one of my favorite TV shows..."Ice Road Mule Skinners". ....

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hardwood
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2009-08-13          164932

I'm betting the number crunchers are already at work figuring out a way to tax the Volt and the air powered UPS trucks. So in the real world even if the UPS trucks pay less road tax they will pass on to the consumer the cost of however the tax people decide to ream it out of them to make up the difference?
Now road tax on a horse, say 50 cents a bushel for their oats? Their has to be some government official in charge of this issue. ....

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kthompson
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2009-08-13          164934

Frank, how many pages do you think it will take the Government to state the tax code on that 50 cents per bushel? ....

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bvance
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2009-08-14          164938


Now that we have Government Motors making a car that gets 230 MPG and trying to convince everyone we will save energy, we will get Government Medical to provide medical care for everyone and we will all save money as soon as everyone has health care.

As my grandpa told me as an eight year old boy, "As soon as Man will fly to the moon." If he only knew...

Brian ....

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gatormaki
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2009-08-14          164949

Mass producing lithium-ion batteries in the quantity needed for autos is currently only possible for a very short period before the price of Lithium carbonate sky rockets making the batteries unaffordable. Bolivia controls 50% of the world's Lithium deposits and is none to keen on mining it all for capitalist autos. Plus the mining generates much sulpher dioxide. Unless their politics change forget lithium-ion batteries in cars. Burning more coal to generate electricity to charge cars seems a little nuts too.

A better bet is fuel cells using natural gas to reform into hydrogen. Nat gas is plentiful. Japan appears to be making a big investment in this for auto technology. As usual their ahead again. ....

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earthwrks
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2009-08-14          164950

As far as batteries go, GM announced this past week that they are installing a battery assembly plant just a few miles from here in a half-million sq ft building. It's suppose to be the world's largest with 600 employees. The batteries will be made in Korea and assembled here. They're already talking about the next generation of batteries.

Curiously, I noticed the other day in Detroit right next to the region's largest salt mine someone is building a huge hydrogen manufacturing facility. The massively thick (think: nuclear reactor thick), skeletonized stucture is made of reinforced concrete and rises about 20 stories but not straight up; the face of one side is slanted--almost as if some took a vertical slice of the Hoover Dam. I'm thinking that maybe the sloped face could be a cooling surface for water to run down. I'm also curious of its proximity to a. the salt mines and b. the many oil refineries just south of it. ....

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auerbach
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2009-08-23          165180

The background on that mileage figure was just released. And I can tell you yes, in fact it WILL get 230 mpg. Under certain conditions.

It can go up to 40 miles on the battery alone. So if you pussyfoot for around 40 miles and then go another, say, three miles, the gas consumed for the TOTAL 43 miles would work out to the astonishing figure.

But if you then can't plug it in, and just burn gas thereafter, your mileage would be nothing to brag about. On the other hand, if you recharge before the battery runs down (regardless of driving technique), your gas consumption would be zero, making your mpg, um, infinite?

It's like saying the Hummer gets 100 mpg. Under certain driving conditions. Coasting downhill. ....

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