Reply With Quote
It's a little early to call Tesla a success. Yeah, they are finally to market with a $70,000 plug in car and sold 4000 in Q1 but how much of that was pent up demand that was waiting for them to finally deliver product?
If you say so.
It's a little early to call Tesla a success. Yeah, they are finally to market with a $70,000 plug in car and sold 4000 in Q1 but how much of that was pent up demand that was waiting for them to finally deliver product?
I agree.
It's possible everyone who wanted a unique car now has one. Not many people willing to pay such prices. Still, the Tesla Roadster is real nice, and the Fisker... Really now... 38 mile range... What did anyone with half a brain expect?
We bought an SUV this year (the CX-9) and the only reason we did so was because we have two kids and are thinking about a third. (Plus, the trunks for Pontiac G6's suck balls.)
Fox Slams Natural Gas Cars It Once Defended
Fox News' Stuart Varney portrayed a natural gas automaker as a "green energy failure," even though he pushed the federal government to make transit agencies buy vehicles from the same company only a few months prior.
Vehicle Production Group (VPG), a Michigan-based company that makes wheelchair-accessible vans, recently ceased operations and closed its offices. The company, which had drawn attention for designing the first vehicle specifically for people with disabilities, was awarded a $50 million conditional loan commitment in 2010 to develop vans with natural gas engines as part of the Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program.
On Wednesday, Varney depicted the company as "the latest embarrassment for the [Obama administration's] green energy policy" on Fox & Friends:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05...efended/193969
Fox's assholes really think everybody is a dumb and forgetful as the bubba choir they preach to.
The abridged version of the article: Fox anchor responds to failure of green energy automaker by labeling them a green energy failure. Mediamatters instructs boutons and other brain dead minions to be outraged.
lol mediamatters
lol boutons
This calls for a Picard Facepalm.
NB4 GFY
Tesla Wows Again — 90-Second Battery Swap Unveiled (VIDEO)
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/21/...eanTechnica%29
Generic batteries permitting battery swapping among all EVs as well as charging has to be the future.
Why Toyota and GM Are Pushing Fuel-Cell Cars to Market
Falling costs are making fuel-cell vehicles look like a plausible alternative to conventional cars.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles have been out of the spotlight for years, but they’re about to make a surprising comeback. Toyota says it will unveil a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered sedan later this year that will go on sale in 2015; several other automakers, meanwhile, have announced partnerships to commercialize the technology (see “Ford, Daimler, and Nissan Commit to Fuel Cells”), including GM and Honda, which announced such a collaboration this week.
While many challenges remain for hydrogen vehicles, in recent years researchers have made big improvements in the oft-maligned technology, including greatly lowering its cost. As a result, fuel-cell vehicles look poised to play a significant role in meeting ambitious vehicle emissions regulations, particularly in places such as California.
“GM, Toyota, and a couple of other automakers have done a lot of great work. Fuel cells are getting close to being viable, closer than most people might think,” says Brett Smith, co-director for manufacturing, engineering, and technology at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Costs have come down at a pretty steady rate,” says Daniel Sperling, director of the Ins ute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis and a member of California’s Air Resources Board, which oversees vehicle emissions regulations. “Most people in the auto industry think that, once in large-scale production, cost won’t be a barrier.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516711/why-toyota-and-gm-are-pushing-fuel-cell-cars-to-market/
So govt policies spur, accelerate research and innovation that would not happen in a "free market". dubya ed up, no surprise (and very probably with lobbying from BigAg), by switching support from fuel cell to the laughably disastrous biofuels.
they might be cheap alternative
but where can you go and refuel/re-energize them batteries at a station? not many stations dont want invest in that costs them
If a wind turbine spins and creates energy, i dont see why the same mechanism cant be done with spinning wheels of a car so that very little gas or electricity from a plug is needed
Uh, not sure if serious.
will it scale?
MIT create an artificial leaf that can split water, power fuel cells
Aresearch team at MIT has managed to create a self-contained artificial leaf that can split water into oxygen and hydrogenusing solar power.
The artificial leaf can be seen to work just by dropping it into a glass of water and placing it in direct sunlight. The solar cells the leaf contains go to work generating energy, which is then used to release the oxygen and hydrogen from the water surrounding it.
The leaf is created from earth-abundant materials and is very cheap to manufacture. At its core is a sheet of solar cells made from silicon. This is what generates the required electrical energy for the process to happen. On one side of the leaf the outer layer is coated in a cobalt catalyst that releases the oxygen from the water. On the other side of the leaf is a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy that takes care of releasing the hydrogen.
Now that the leaf has been developed and proven to work, two challenges remain. The first is to come up with a solution for collecting the hydrogen produced. The gas can then be used to power a fuel cell, but just as importantly, it does so after being collected in a completely green way, using only the sun and water as part of the production process.
The second challenge is to improve the efficiency of the artificial leaf, which currently only manages to use 2.5% of the solar energy collected for hydrogen production.
http://www.geek.com/geek-pick/mit-cr...cells-1425635/
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-08-2013 at 09:07 PM.
Cool.
Who here is going to own the first fuel cell Pinto?
I hate to say this, but I think he is...
how about super nano-graphene capacitors for electrical storage rather than batteries?
Graphene Micro-Supercapacitors for On-Chip Energy
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Graphene_Mic...ergy_Store.php
Sure... until you short circuit them, and have this massive arc-flash.
Exploding Pinto anyone? i would have a difficult time trusting such instantaneous power in a vibrating, moving object, subject to collisions with other vehicles.
With a power density of 200 W cm-3, that's based on single layers of a material that my be hard to layer and cool for large storage purposes. It otherwise looks pretty promising.
Because that would violate the immutable laws of thermodynamics?
Efficiency losses due to mechanical friction and heat would mean that any wind power mounted on the car would return you less energy than it took to overcome the friction.
Hybrids do use the braking system to generate power already. (spinning magnets in a coil = electricity). You can't run wind through wheels and get energy out of them.
Meh. no more dangerous than having a vehicle powered by highly flammible volatiles.
Sign me up, if the cost comes down.
You might be able to get utility companies to install the charging stations for fast charging for the right price. Probably cost a premium though.
Alternately, if you could charge the car overnight, it would flatten out usage, since power demand dips a lot at night.
Currently our power grid probably couldn't handle supplying all the raw energy needed for the physical work of movign people and vehicles in the US.
Upgrade the grid and increased demand for electricity would make renewable energy and nuclear a lot more feasible. But then, you can say the same about coal. The Koch brothers should be all over this .
Going to be a lot of disruptive technologies coming online in the next 10 years.Siemens says its electrolyzers are about 60 percent efficient; 40 percent of the energy generated by a wind turbine would be lost making hydrogen gas. Then at least 40 percent of the energy in the hydrogen would be lost in generating electricity in gas-fired power plants or fuel cells. So only about a third of the original energy would be retained. But Weinhold says the system would make hydrogen from electricity that couldn’t otherwise be used on the grid and therefore would be wasted without such a storage system.
In addition to being inefficient, the system could be expensive. The high cost of fuel cells is a key reason they haven’t been used widely in cars. But Weinhold says Siemens is working to bring down costs. Siemens is conducting pilot demonstrations of the technology this year, and it plans to sell two-megawatt systems by 2015 and to build systems as large as 250 megawatts by 2018. The largest plants could harness the power produced by about 100 wind turbines.
Once the infrastructure is in place, renewables become less expensive than the fossil fuels they replace.
Germans are going to pay through the nose, but be well insulated from the energy inflation the world will experience as Asian and African standards of living get to the point where they start consuming more energy, which they are both really beginning to do now.
Well, I disagree. I will contend that hydrogen explosions are more dangerous than gasoline fires.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
