Who killed the electric car?

Ice_Box

"Who killed the electric car?" is the title of a new movie coming out. Sounds interesting.

It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

Link to trailer...
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/whokilledtheelectriccar/

Ice_Box

Here's another trailer with Al Gore. In Sundance it recieved THREE standing ovations.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/aninconvenienttruth/

Omnipresence

I worked in Colorado in america in a communications lab (im a software engineer)...

Lots of the guys I worked with had done previous work in the area which is mostly military based but some had crazy stories about working on cool green tech (like battery powered cars / fuel cells / etc) only to see them get bought out / practically shut down by ..... 'outside interests'

What a place..

-A

silverharp

I believe electric cars will make a comeback, the fuel cell car will be a failure as there are too many energy conversion steps. An indian company will have new models out in a few years and one of the Japanese companies are introducing a model in 09/10 from memory

road_high

The electric car was a non-runner imo.I would imagine that hooking a car up to run on electricity generated from primarily fossil fuels would be even more environmentally unsound than simply burning the fuel in the car as we do presently.
This is surely why the electric car failed.Hopefully cars running on hydrogen and biofuels are a much better answer to the future fuel crisis.

silverharp

mfitzy wrote:

Hopefully cars running on hydrogen and biofuels are a much better answer to the future fuel crisis.

Where does the Hydrogen come from ?????

Capt'n Midnight

mfitzy wrote:

The electric car was a non-runner imo.I would imagine that hooking a car up to run on electricity generated from primarily fossil fuels would be even more environmentally unsound than simply burning the fuel in the car as we do presently.
This is surely why the electric car failed.Hopefully cars running on hydrogen and biofuels are a much better answer to the future fuel crisis.

Converting fuel oil in to electricity and then charing batteries with the electiricity is very roughly the same efficiency as using petrol in an engine. So no it's not a non-runner from that point.

However at present it's a non-runner for the same reason hydrogen cars are, storage of the "fuel" is difficult.

Electric motors from the 19th are efficient enough for electric cars. But a big improvement is in the electronics optimising the power transfer to the motors.

At present only Lithium and super capacitors offer high enough energy density to be alternatives . At present both are expensive.

Regenerative braking isn't very efficient , too many steps each loosing energy.
Motion --> Electricity --> Electronics --> Chemical energy --> electricity --> electronics --> motion.

A nice crossover would be hybrids, and I don't mean those "PR" petrols, which are worse than diesels when you take into account the resources used to make them.
A hybrid should have a diesel engine. Starting won't be a problem with big batteries. And diesels are not only more fuel efficient but they and the generators work best at constant load.

telecaster

I saw a feature on cars running on rapeseed oil before. The oil was being produced and sold in Ireland - what are the flaws with this does anyone know?

Also I heard about aeroplanes running on a sugar cane derivative in Brazil. Not passenger planes, but small single man planes for use in agriculture etc.

Are there holes in either of these solutions?

road_high

telecaster wrote:

I saw a feature on cars running on rapeseed oil before. The oil was being produced and sold in Ireland - what are the flaws with this does anyone know?

Also I heard about aeroplanes running on a sugar cane derivative in Brazil. Not passenger planes, but small single man planes for use in agriculture etc.

Are there holes in either of these solutions?

Very few in fact, they just saw little investment in this side of the world (again vested interests in oil companies etc- why would they be bothered with these alternatives when it woudnt be as profitable as oil).
Biofuels are ideal for ireland- I know several people running cars and jeeps on rape seed oil.Apparently you can mix with diesel to run in cars, and don't even have to convert engine. If you want to run fully on it, conversion is neccessary (1500euro).Its a bit more viscious than diesel so needs to be heated before injecting into engine.
Brazil have been running cars on ethanol (bi product) of sugar cane I think for years and imo is very successful.

Omnipresence

mfitzy wrote:

Very few in fact, they just saw little investment in this side of the world (again vested interests in oil companies etc- why would they be bothered with these alternatives when it woudnt be as profitable as oil).
Biofuels are ideal for ireland- I know several people running cars and jeeps on rape seed oil.Apparently you can mix with diesel to run in cars, and don't even have to convert engine. If you want to run fully on it, conversion is neccessary (1500euro).Its a bit more viscious than diesel so needs to be heated before injecting into engine.
Brazil have been running cars on ethanol (bi product) of sugar cane I think for years and imo is very successful.

Friend of mine is an electrician down in cork/kerry region .... so does a lot of driving .. he purchased the converter kit and runs on used veg oil he gets from a couple of chippies he has an agreement with... saving him a fortune...

He was saying you can do this very easily if you have good quality injectors 'bosch' apparently (vw golf diesels have these etc)

I dont know the finer details but can put people in touch with him if interested in knowing more info... but apparently there is loads online...

Yes the exhaust smells a little like a chip shop ;-) but hey... free fuel ... not many people can say that...

-Alan

Takeshi_Kovacs

Yup, i know a few people who are burning veggie oil as well, (and saving a nice few euro too, so long as customs doesn't catch them..;) ) While most diesels need to be converted to heat the oil before it is combusted, i have read that old mercs with the precombustion chamber, like the 190D will burn the veggie oil straight, no need to convert, as the Merc engines are extremely tough and reliable.
I wouldn't try this on newer, more intelligent diesel engines though, as they are very refined now to burn dino diesel, (although with the right conversion, and a bit of know how, you could use veggie.. just make sure the warranty is up on your shiny HDi...)

sceptre

Ice_Box wrote:

It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

I rather hope the movie mentions somewhere that they leased out about 800, crushed only about 80, that the cars were leased out rather than sold at least partly due to non-compliance with crash-safety regulations by the time they were available (GM was granted a temporary exemption but was required to remove the cars from the road permanently after the program) and that the battery advancements they were hoping for didn't come about during the program, limiting the range of the cars to about 120 miles on a full charge (which took eight hours) which would have made the project rather less successful than hoped for. And Al Gore's personal interest as he headed the project that funded the thing. As for the "fastest production car ever built" tagline, sure it set a landspeed record of nearly 300kph, using a modified prototype, not the same car that could be picked up at a GM showroom at all, which was limited to about 120kph. Probably reads well on the poster though, even if it's sort of an outright lie.

Not that I'm entirely cynical about conspiracies, just most of them. It's at least theoretically possible that some guy invented a better carburettor that was bought out by the oil companies, it's possible that the conspiracy theorists have a point about this one but I'll have more sympathy if they mention the small things I mentioned above (and with luck, a few other downsides of the project that my limited knowledge of it doesn't give me). I'm at least moderately interested in electric car technology but that tends to give me reasonable awareness of why the infernal combustion engine has been king for so long - so far from the point of view of the typical person who wants to drive it, the gas-guzzling design has been better. I don't like it either but that's the way it is.

the_syco

mfitzy wrote:

The electric car was a non-runner imo.I would imagine that hooking a car up to run on electricity generated from primarily fossil fuels would be even more environmentally unsound than simply burning the fuel in the car as we do presently.

Question: if one were to get all their eletricity for the car from a nuke plant, would they be damaging the environment as much?

=-=

Some people think that the military has an intrest in it, as the cost of fuel would be high by the time it got to the battlefield, and that it's a large part of the load brought.

=-=

Meh. Tesla Car ftw, tbh! Pity the plans on how to build it died with him

SeanW

Question: if one were to get all their eletricity for the car from a nuke plant, would they be damaging the environment as much?

Nope. Nuclear power is clean, safe (outside the USSR) and is the only form of CO2 free/minimal power capable of reliable large scale generation. Ask the French.

Personally, I'd LOVE to have an electric car or moped charging itself off a Wind farm, hydropower, solar, tidal or nuclear generating station.

We'd need to build at least 4GW of generating capacity. Much as well all love renewables, the nuclear option might be unavoidable.

Ignoring the nuclear option for a second, the gov't could give small wind plants to petrol station owners, so when the wind starts blowing, electric car/moped owners could go and get their vehicles charged at the same places they would have got petrol. Wouldn't be cheap though.

Cuauhtemoc

Nuclear power is clean,

There is still the waste disposal issue.
If that was sorted maybe a lot of people would be happier.

Capt'n Midnight

SeanW wrote:

Nope. Nuclear power is clean, safe (outside the USSR) and is the only form of CO2 free/minimal power capable of reliable large scale generation. Ask the French..

surely you mean reliable large scale continuous generation without an interconnector

Nuclear power plants have had serious accidents in the US, Japan, India and UK. One californian plant was built in a seismic area. So they retrofitted an earthquake shield, the wrong way around :rolleyes:

clean nuclear power is possible, but not economically. Luckily for france many of it's ex-colonies have uranium ore. And they aren't shy about intervening if their research instuites there are affected.


have a google for africar the idea being that much of the environmental impact of a car is the resources used in it's construction. The amount of fossil fuel used when you take into account the blast furnaces used to smelt the steel and for the plastics and the tyres all adds up.

SeanW

Nuclear power plants have had serious accidents in the US, Japan, India and UK. One californian plant was built in a seismic area. So they retrofitted an earthquake shield, the wrong way around

And how many members of the general public have been killed by these accidents?

A person using nuclear power over their lifetime, will cause

this much High Level Waste. Source.

Electric cars backed by renewables AND nuclear power should be strongly considered IMO.