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Old October 10th 04, 02:25 PM
Matt Whiting
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Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> "Jimmy" > wrote in message
> om...
>
>>What city will this be Ted? Being a life long New Yorker, many if not
>>most people I know who even have a garage store junk in there. The car
>>typically gets parked in the street. And if you have 2 or 3 cars, 2 or
>>3 cars get parked in the street. Will each owner run an extention cord
>>to thier vehicles? No matter how nice the area, I would expect not to
>>find my extention cord in the morning. And in some neighborhood you'll
>>be extremely lucky if you can even park near your front door. I can't
>>imagine what the solution would be if you lived in an apartment
>>building. Short trips in the city here may be short distance wise but
>>the stop and go cycling of the motor will kill the charge rapildy
>>since it won't be a steady ride to your location but a series of stop
>>and go. I imagine New York is not alone in this instance.
>>
>>If this is the future of vehicles, horse and buggy will be more
>>efficient. You can even use the horse poop to light a stinky fire when
>>it dries.
>>

>
>
> There was a huge amount of real world data and observation on the
> GM EV1 that refutes everything that you have brought up. No, the
> stop and go cycling of the motor didn't kill the charge. No, the power
> grid in California didn't melt down as a result of charging them. There's
> a number of websites on that vehicle out there, and many testimonials
> from people who leased them. Read what the actual owners of these
> cars had to say for answers about junk in garages, etc.


There weren't enough EV-1s to be a concern regarding the power grid.
However, if you had them by the 100s of thousands or millions, rather
than thousands (I think they had more than a thousand anway), it would
have been different. A friend of mine had one and liked it, but the
range would be a problem for most people, especially in cold climates.
He lived near San Fran and worked out of his home, so neither range nor
cold were big issues for him.


> The only reason the EV1 isn't sold today is that the cost of manufacture
> was too high for the volume sold. Once again, it was the economies of
> scale in action. If GM had been able to place 4 times the number of
> EV1s that they did, they would still be making them.


The cost of the EV-1 was inherently greater than the cost of an IC
powered car, and even similar volumes wouldn't get the prices to be
similar. And even if the price was equivalent, you still had the
shortcomings in range, interior space, etc.


> All this is old tired arguments that the EV1 study was designed to test
> to see if they held water. They didn't. Fundamentally, what the project
> boiled down to is that the simple reason electric cars aren't feasible in
> the United States is the same reason that passenger car Diesels aren't
> feasible
> in the United States. It's because the population here is too suspicious
> of any fundamental change to vehicle technology to embrace it with enough
> volume to make the economies of scale be able to produce it work out. It
> has
> nothing to do with what people CAN do and everything with what they
> have been CONDITIONED to think.


Baloney. People are embracing hybrids rather nicely. People didn't
embrace electric cars as they have many drawbacks compared to
conventional gasoline cars. People aren't embracing diesels because
they cost more to buy, are noisier, have a different smell, have less
convenient availability of fuel in some areas, etc. Hybrids, but using
gasoline as the fuel, have sidestepped almost all of these issues except
higher initial price.

People will accept new technology when it shows a decided advantage over
the old. Neither all electric cars nor diesels have yet achieved this.
Hybrids have, and they are selling well.

Matt

 




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