Comments on: The Honey Trap for Obama

By: ted rado

ted rado — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:20:16 +0000

The whole electric car deal is a farce. I looked up the specs for the Chevy Volt and ran a few calculations:
1) It has 16 KWH battery. This is >20 HP hours. If you
use 40 HP, the battery will be dead in 30 minutes.
2) It has a 1.0 liter engine for backup. This has a
rating of 40KW continuous, which is ~53 HP.

They report a range of 40 miles on electricity alone. If you do this in one hour, the car is using 20 HP. What kind of car and/or performance can you have with a 20 HP power source?

Another problem: Idle night-time electricity available is about 15 KWH per household. Thus, the 16 KW battery can be recharged overnight with existing generating capacity. If more recharging is required (a bigger battery), dedicated generating capacity must be built, to be used only at night for electric cars. This will increase costs enormously.

The only feasible electric car appears to be a small, golf cart size vehicle for short, low speed trips. California mandated electric cars a dozen years ago. Billions were spent on development, and the whole thing was a fiasco.

Since any engineer can run the calcs in a few minutes, it is apparent that these schemes are hatched for political purposes, with no expectation of success, other than getting government grants.

If anyone has an idea (complete with numbers!) on how to make full electric cars feasible, taking the whole system into account, I would love to hear it.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:52:42 +0000

Chrysler is not ending its EV program; it has disbanded its stand-alone EV/hybrid vehicle team and integrated the development into their regular product development effort.

http://rumors.automobilemag.com/6589184/green/chrysler-electric-car-development-team-envi-disbanded/index.html

“However, Chryslerâ€™s engineers will still take the lead in developing new electric and hybrid vehicles for the Fiat organization, and former ENVI chief Lou Rhodes is now in charge of EV development for the entire company.

According to Reuters, Fiat is interested in developing an electrified commercial van for the U.S. market — a suitable replacement for the Town & Country EV cargo van once promised”

As I mentioned before — this makes a lot more sense. General acceptance of EV and hybrid, long term, is going to be based on normal vehicle platforms; not ‘statement’ vehicles like the EV1 and Insight, which trade off practicality for making a “Look At How Much Better I Am Than You!” statement. You do that by making an EV/hybrid platform that you build normal cars off of, or you develop normal cars that can accept a range of powertrains, including series or parallel hybrids and BEVs.

By: m

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:29:53 +0000

What makes me laugh about your post is the thought that all the government/lefty types that read the business plan are thinking “yeah, what’s wrong with that?”