sniper Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 So what are your opinions on electric and hybrid cars? I've done some research and come to the conclusion that they have a future, but right are inefficient for their high starting cost and will actually add to pollution in the future since many of them produce SO2 (a major component of acid rain) Since I had been looking into it already, I just figured I'd see what everybody else thought about the subject Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrypticQuery Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 I personally enjoy the concept of electric cars and their actual designs over the years, though the main problem is infrastructure; we'll need charging systems for them in a variety of places to make them practical. That, and they're currently not as energy-efficient as our current internal combustion engine vehicles, and although they don't directly pollute, the power-plants that create the electricity more than likely do. (Favorite Electric Car: General Motors EV1 Favorite Gasoline Powered Car: Ford Crown Victoria Big difference there ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prince Elite Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 It depends on how they get the electricity to the cars, if it takes more to produce the electricity than it is just to use fuel, why bother, it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Therefore you need to make the transfer and production of the power, less than that to get the fuel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sniper Posted April 21, 2011 Author Share Posted April 21, 2011 exactly, and at this point (since electric cars haven't really reached the point where they pay off), giving the car manufacturers tons of subsidies to build electric cars is actually wasting money instead of eventually saving money from decreased fossil fuels. I think they have great potential, but the idea has come before the technology needed to pull it off Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sabre Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 Not viable and won't be until we start running out of oil. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asper Sarnoff Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 Sabre's right. Purely electric cars are for the moment not viable apart from in very specific situations due to their low range and extremely long recharge time. Renault is trying out a new concept with its Fluence Z, E, with a network of "quickdrop" charging stations scattered around, for now only in France and Israel, where you drive into a station, a mechanical arm comes up underneath the car, removes the battery pack and put it to charging, and reinstall a freshly recharged one, using only 3 minutes to do so. The obvious problem with that solution is the enourmeus costs involved setting up an infrastructure like that over large areas. And in countries where the mayority of the electric productions doesn't come from clean energy sources... As for hybrids, the range problems ain't that big of an issue. But they still suffer from one fundamental flaw which it shares with the purely electric vehicles. The battery pack. Believe it or not, extracting the resources required to make a NiMH-battery, refining them, shipping them, installing them, driving them for their full life-cycle, and then recycling them afterwards, produces more nasty greenhouse-gasses than running the average petroleum combustion car trough the same lifecycle. Untill a revolution comes along in how we store electric energy, electric and hybrid cars will remain a gimmick, their prime purpose to give those who drive them a cleaner conscience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YJH1995 Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 Electric car: some electricity still come from fossil fuel in such which means if people switch to electric car they are still giving out carbon dioxide but how much electricity needed to charge and how much the capacity of the battery is another things, but for what i know electric car are slow I saw some of them in a mall and they are very slow. but I think the electric car can go a few hundred times further than oil running on car. Also electric car might not have enough power to carry heavy load. I think there are some electric car i've seen like the one in the airport which cleans the floor. That's my option Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matrilwood Posted May 18, 2011 Share Posted May 18, 2011 "Electrical cars are the way of the future man, 'cause they don't burn coal and are really clean man... Can I have a dollar?" My response to that is "Guess what they use to make the electricity, genius!" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DZComposer Posted May 18, 2011 Share Posted May 18, 2011 I love the idea of electric cars. I want my next car to be a Chevy Volt. Not a 100% electric car, but I can go distance if I need to due to the vehicle using a gasoline engine to generate electricity. BTW, this tech has existed for decades in the Railroad industry. Ironically, GM's Electro-Motive Division was a pioneer in diesel-electric technology. GM has since spun EMD off, and last year Caterpillar acquired it. There is a bit of a fallacy in assuming that electric cars pollute because we currently use coal to generate electricity. An electric car will run just as fine on electricity generated from, say, hydroelectric dams, as it will on electricity generated from coal. Electricity production emissions and vehicle emissions are separate issues. Also, there is energy consumption cost (all of these numbers are subject to rounding error). In my area, residential electricity costs $0.02/kWh. The Nissan Leaf requires 34 kWh to charge enough to go 100 miles. That's $0.68. That's a cost-per-mile of less than one cent. Gasoline in my area is $4.00/Gal. Let's take a vehicle that get's 30 Mi/Gal. That's about 13 cents per mile. Take an advanced 60 mi/gal vehicle. That's about 7 cents per mile. Let's take that same 60 mi/gal vehicle at a cost of $2/gal. A price that is unlikely to ever be seen again. That's about 3 cents per mile. Even the holy-grail 100mi/gal vehicle has a 2 cent per mile cost. Now, this doesn't account for the increased production costs, but at current rates, it is far cheaper to drive an electric car than to drive a gasoline car. To buy a Nissan Leaf, a midsize car, is ~$33,000. The Chevy Malibu, a popular midsize car, starts at ~$22,000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarita Posted May 18, 2011 Share Posted May 18, 2011 I can't wait until BMW completes their electric car. Currently the battery is entirely too large (it takes up the whole back seat and trunk), but it can go for a little less than 100 miles, if I recall correctly, on a single charge. I've heard they don't plan to put the MINI model in to production, I hope that changes. I can't wait until they perfect the tech. <3 Getting rid of our dependence on foreign oil is a huge deal and this is a step in the right direction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Monroe Posted May 19, 2011 Share Posted May 19, 2011 I support electric and hybrid cars simply to wean us off of the 100% dependency we have on oil fuels. Just because we aren't out of oils YET doesn't mean we should put off looking for alternative energy sources. They didn't wait for a horse epidemic before researching into industrial power after all, and the entire mentality of "its not a problem right now" is extremely arrogant and plain stupid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thu'um Posted May 19, 2011 Share Posted May 19, 2011 not to mention, i think ato compainess make a poor profet off of it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sniper Posted May 20, 2011 Author Share Posted May 20, 2011 the other component to consider is how expensive it is to make and dispose of the batteries themselves. The cost of making the batteries is the key to the increased cost of hybrids and electric cars. Also, the way they dispose of these batteries (correct me if I'm wrong) has many problems with harmful chemicals and pollution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThePointingMan Posted May 20, 2011 Share Posted May 20, 2011 We need to make Geothermal powered cars, I dunno how the heck you'd do it, but it'd be pretty sweet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asper Sarnoff Posted May 20, 2011 Share Posted May 20, 2011 the other component to consider is how expensive it is to make and dispose of the batteries themselves. The cost of making the batteries is the key to the increased cost of hybrids and electric cars. Also, the way they dispose of these batteries (correct me if I'm wrong) has many problems with harmful chemicals and pollution. No, you are very much correct. We're currently at the point that when looked as whole, a hybrid/electric car does more damage to the enviroment than a comparable combustion-powered car. If it's to become a viable alternative, more money needs spending on "enviromentalising" the production and disposal process to an acceptable level, instead of using it to make advertising campaigns saying the finished product is SO green. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matrilwood Posted May 20, 2011 Share Posted May 20, 2011 There is a bit of a fallacy in assuming that electric cars pollute because we currently use coal to generate electricity. Thank you for being a good example of the RIGHT way to point out the flaws in someone's arguments *Hint Hint, Nudge Nudge* ------ It will only be a matter of time before they work out the bugs. Like nuclear power for example, in the old days the by-product was extremely harmful to the environment, but then they found a way to convert it into a safe solid. As for the advertising, you'll never be able to fix that without scrapping democracy. (Mass bragging = votes) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThePointingMan Posted May 20, 2011 Share Posted May 20, 2011 Over where I live, electricity is hydro powered. Pretty sure That's not very harmful to the environment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Monroe Posted May 21, 2011 Share Posted May 21, 2011 Over where I live, electricity is hydro powered. Pretty sure That's not very harmful to the environment. Electricity isn't harmful to the environment, its how its produced is. Most places have their electricity powered by oils or coals. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sniper Posted May 21, 2011 Author Share Posted May 21, 2011 Assuming this is a credible source, Electric Power Monthly shows that a huge portion of electricity is generated by coal plants (scroll down to the pie chart). While I agree that (problems with building and disposing of car batteries aside) hydroelectric plants (and for that matter nuclear plants) make electric cars a great choice, the sheer amount of energy created by coal burning electric plants will create a problem if there are many electric car users. Electric cars may not use too terribly much electricity, but if a lot of people have them, Coal plant pollution becomes a much bigger problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thu'um Posted May 30, 2011 Share Posted May 30, 2011 ya the us has a problem with producing electricty greenly, i mean when we tried to put solar panles in the dessert, and the enviomentlists said it was a bad location. aronolds repsonse was " if we can't put them in the desert, i don't know where the hell we can" but if we did produce elctrictly greenly we could use alot more hybrids and we could also just use a rechargable battery Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nexus Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 My opinion on hybrid cars; Hybrid and electric cars are pretty smart in design, having the ability to run on the car battery in case of gas running out. It may be convenient, but it drains the battery. I would rather pay for gas every few weeks than get a new car battery of few months. Replacing a car battery costs too much for the battery and the labor. -My 2 cents Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sabre Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Such a future would have batteries that are easy to swap out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psygonis Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Huh... That's not how it works! Hybrid cars use their battery for low-speed operation, inside cities for instance, and switch on gas engine when more power is needed (or when the battery runs out of juice). Using the gas propelling recharge the battery though! Overall, the design's brilliant, but it reduces only one aspect of the transportation pollution problem. The energy used to recharge batteries has to be produced in a cleaner way too, or it is useless! :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Monroe Posted August 5, 2011 Share Posted August 5, 2011 Everyone who is saying electric cars aren't viable and just a gimmick: remember that petroleum fuel cars were once a gimmick too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psygonis Posted August 5, 2011 Share Posted August 5, 2011 The thing is the ratio energy spent/generated isn't better with electric cars than petroleum cars. So in any case, the energy has to come from somewhere, and if it comes from petroleum-based powerplants, well... it's useless! Find some clean energy source to feed these cars and we'll have a problem solved! (And may no one call hydrogen cells, the increase of produced water steam in the air would aggravate the plant-house effect more than carbon gaz!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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