If GM wanted to bring out what is essentially a 40-mile-range EV with a genset "range extender," it could have done so years ago.
It's technology that GM's Oldsmobile Division showcased in 1969, which GM exhibited in 1999 with the EV1.
If GM wanted to bring out an EV, it could have simply left the 1150 GM EV1 in the hands of what was, then, fanatically loyal GM customers. GM, by confiscating and crushing the EV1, lost that demographic.
The EV1 had 140 miles EPA range (I still have the tag) but often got as much as 160. With better Toyota batteries, such as the PEVE EV-95 batteries used in the Toyota RAV4-EV, it would have a 200 mile range.
A small genset would have made it an instant VOLT, with up to 200 miles all-electric range.
Add a genset to the 100-mile-range RAV4-EV, and it's an instant VOLT with a range GM claims can't be done.
GM is only shooting for a 40 mile range, and will likely settle for much less.
Bypassing existing successful batteries is symptomatic of GM Vice Chairman and "Guru" Bob Lutz' ignorance; he continues to misrepresent the EV1, Electric cars in general, and the batteries. Lutz personally and professionally is not the role-model for eco-awareness or even successful business practice. Lutz' business failures are legendary, his successes moot, and his personal proclivities wasteful and bizarre, including owning and flying military jets for fun.
Bottom line: GM has excluded VOLT from MPG ("cafe") standards prior to 2015, at least, because any VOLT would only be produced, if at all, in tiny quantities. This is a legal statement, made to regulators to declare GM's actual intentions.
What LUTZ blathers to his groupies and the gullible machs nicht, means nothing, will be lost in the mists of memory.
If GM were really "struggling" to meet MPG standards, why would it exclude VOLT?
The only credible reason is that it allows them to cancel the VOLT.
If VOLT were used in MPG (cafe) standards, GM would actually be forced to build it. GM would not be able to kill it.
Of course, the faithful can assume that it's just one dirty branch of GM arguing out of the other side of its mouth so that GM doesn't have to meet MPG standards. But when it comes to what GM has legally committed to, it's not the VOLT; it's that it can't produce enough of the VOLT to help it, even in tiny ways, to meet the 4.5% proposed 2011-2015 annual increases in MPG standards.
So you could, if you felt GM were worthy of your extended faith, assume that GM just didn't want to be BOUND by being FORCED to produce the VOLT, and it will produce it even if not forced.
But on what basis would your faith be extended to GM? This is the company that, just 3 years ago, arrested Alexandra and Colette for "blocking the sidewalk" while trying to purchase one of the EV1 that GM had produced and was in the process of crushing.
Even now, GM lies about the EV1, makes false statements that it knows to be false, showing that any such faith has no basis in reality. GM refuses to allow restored museum versions of the EV1 to be driven and shown to the public, even though it's at no cost to GM.
Here's a great exposition of the PROBLEM:
"...GM...has asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to lower the 4.5 percent annual increases in the CAFE standards projected between 2011 and 2015...GM stated they won't have enough Volts and Vue plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) on the road by 2015 to meet the more stringent standards...a low-volume application.'.."
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/volt-birth-watch-64-nhtsa-calls-gms-bluff/comment-page-2/
And here's how they do it. The VOLT supposedly will COST GM $40,000 to produce; GM uses very wide margins, meaning that the equivalent retail price would be at least $90,000. Lutz "speculated" that the price could be $48,000:
http://wot.motortrend.com/6240642/according-to-lutz/lutz-speculates-volt-could-cost-as-much-as-48k/index.html
But even the dumb "dual mode" SUV are priced at $52,000 (and GM loses about $10K on each one).
Now who would willingly buy a 40-mile-range EV for $40,000 (assuming there's government subsidies of about $25,000 per VOLT to soak up GM's alleged excess)?
The "40-mile" all-electric range will be chiselled down to 32 or even 30 miles, and the power train will probably be altered so that the engine comes on even in the first 30 miles in the case of excessive power draw (acceleration or hill-climbing).
This makes it much less satisfying to drive, and eliminates the "oil free" part of the drive.
Moreover, the big thing, GM can retain control of the expensive Lithium batteries, so that you won't be able to take them out and replace them with, say, 12 kWh of lead-acid golf cart batteries, good for 48 miles range.
A lease or conditional-purchase agreement on the batteries would keep GM's hand on your throttle, which is how they've always stopped the Electric car in the past.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Smokestacks: sure sign of an unneeded con-job
When you see a smokestack, you are viewing a palpable representation of the old falsehood "the solution to pollution is dilution".
This is the first level of deception. Diluting only defers the problem, avoiding a solution.
More importantly, the smokestack has to be dispensing poison, toxic waste. Otherwise, there would be no reason to build such an expensive anomaly. The smokestack is the evidence of a grand deception, the spreading of that poison over people who don't even know it's coming.
For example, the refineries of Wilmington, California, spew a cauldron of chemical waste into the air, much of it rising high up into the atmosphere. The California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) looks to "prevailing winds" to solve the problem of this pollution, and to lessen the effects of it.
Refineries are exempted from many environmental laws, get subsidized water and electric, and are allowed to permanently defile former wetlands based on the claimed necessity of gasoline.
But what if gasoline is not necessary? What if solar power and plug-in cars could make gasoline a rarely-used fuel, and allow that refinery to be removed and the land healed? No one has ever totalled up the benefits of removing those monstrosities sitting to windward of Los Angeles.
Downwind breathers, from West Long Beach to Downey, all the way to Pomona and Corona, may not notice or even know about this refinery, may not be aware of the specious argument for its necessity. But the ghastly products of those smokestacks rain down on their air supply, on their homes, gardens, streets, and open fields. What doesn't stick in their family's lungs gets washed into rivers and into the Ocean, a particularly nasty component of the recondite problem of "urban runoff".
No one warns those who live inland, who unknowingly bear the brunt of these nightly emissions from known polluters. But the costly effects are very real, from health-care costs shifted to the Taxpayer from the oil companies, to cleanup, environmental degradation, air quality, misery, discomfort, permanent lung damage, death that's quantified by the AQMD as "only" 25 per million per year, and other debits.
Is the insistence on burning gasoline in cars worth this obscene cost, this permanent scarring of kids lungs and the death of thousands?
More generally, the debris from Chinese coal-fired and other polluters is now being carried by the jet stream across the Pacific, landing not only in California but all over the world. It's only a matter of time before there's no place left to "dilute" it to.
Nor is the current re-fascination with nuclear power any solution. Pollution from the Chernobyl disaster, and from other nuclear plants and open-air nuke bombs, has spread all over the world, significantly raising background radiation and causing pockets of severe nuclear contamination. There's no safe nuke except no nuke.
It wouldn't be so outrageous and inherently evil if there were no alternative to coal, petroleum and/or nuke power.
But it's clearly demonstrable that mere rooftop solar electric power could generate all our current domestic electric demand, as well as generate enough excess electric to power all of our cars and move cargo containers if it were done by electric motors.
Want proof? The numbers are easy to work out, showing theoretically how it can be done.
In a practical vein, to demonstrate, just look at any of those homes in the Los Angeles area who have plug-in cars and rooftop solar power.
Our own roof, covered only about 30% with low-efficiency solar panels, generates about all the electric to power two Toyota RAV4-EV plug-in Electric cars more than 20,000 miles per year, plus all our domestic electric power.
20,000 miles in a RAV4-EV (small SUV) takes 4,000 kWh of electric power, about 350 kWh per month, which is only a fraction of our actual production. The grid needs power in the daytime, so we "sell" our excess electric to the grid during the day, and usually charge slowly off-peak, when electric costs less. This enables us to be of service to the grid, lowering the daytime peak and raising the nightly need to shut down big generators, since they can "sell" the power for charging cars at night.
So in fact, our EV-PV household actually helps the grid while enabling us to drive free of pollution -- and to use our money to pay off our solar system instead of spending it at the Chevron station to power the pollution of their refineries.
Why not others?
If plug-in cars were for sale, any homeowner could buy one, and the savings from not buying gasoline would allow financing a rooftop solar system. That's why Chevron worked so hard to make sure that you don't have the choice of purchasing a plug-in car.
This is the first level of deception. Diluting only defers the problem, avoiding a solution.
More importantly, the smokestack has to be dispensing poison, toxic waste. Otherwise, there would be no reason to build such an expensive anomaly. The smokestack is the evidence of a grand deception, the spreading of that poison over people who don't even know it's coming.
For example, the refineries of Wilmington, California, spew a cauldron of chemical waste into the air, much of it rising high up into the atmosphere. The California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) looks to "prevailing winds" to solve the problem of this pollution, and to lessen the effects of it.
Refineries are exempted from many environmental laws, get subsidized water and electric, and are allowed to permanently defile former wetlands based on the claimed necessity of gasoline.
But what if gasoline is not necessary? What if solar power and plug-in cars could make gasoline a rarely-used fuel, and allow that refinery to be removed and the land healed? No one has ever totalled up the benefits of removing those monstrosities sitting to windward of Los Angeles.
Downwind breathers, from West Long Beach to Downey, all the way to Pomona and Corona, may not notice or even know about this refinery, may not be aware of the specious argument for its necessity. But the ghastly products of those smokestacks rain down on their air supply, on their homes, gardens, streets, and open fields. What doesn't stick in their family's lungs gets washed into rivers and into the Ocean, a particularly nasty component of the recondite problem of "urban runoff".
No one warns those who live inland, who unknowingly bear the brunt of these nightly emissions from known polluters. But the costly effects are very real, from health-care costs shifted to the Taxpayer from the oil companies, to cleanup, environmental degradation, air quality, misery, discomfort, permanent lung damage, death that's quantified by the AQMD as "only" 25 per million per year, and other debits.
Is the insistence on burning gasoline in cars worth this obscene cost, this permanent scarring of kids lungs and the death of thousands?
More generally, the debris from Chinese coal-fired and other polluters is now being carried by the jet stream across the Pacific, landing not only in California but all over the world. It's only a matter of time before there's no place left to "dilute" it to.
Nor is the current re-fascination with nuclear power any solution. Pollution from the Chernobyl disaster, and from other nuclear plants and open-air nuke bombs, has spread all over the world, significantly raising background radiation and causing pockets of severe nuclear contamination. There's no safe nuke except no nuke.
It wouldn't be so outrageous and inherently evil if there were no alternative to coal, petroleum and/or nuke power.
But it's clearly demonstrable that mere rooftop solar electric power could generate all our current domestic electric demand, as well as generate enough excess electric to power all of our cars and move cargo containers if it were done by electric motors.
Want proof? The numbers are easy to work out, showing theoretically how it can be done.
In a practical vein, to demonstrate, just look at any of those homes in the Los Angeles area who have plug-in cars and rooftop solar power.
Our own roof, covered only about 30% with low-efficiency solar panels, generates about all the electric to power two Toyota RAV4-EV plug-in Electric cars more than 20,000 miles per year, plus all our domestic electric power.
20,000 miles in a RAV4-EV (small SUV) takes 4,000 kWh of electric power, about 350 kWh per month, which is only a fraction of our actual production. The grid needs power in the daytime, so we "sell" our excess electric to the grid during the day, and usually charge slowly off-peak, when electric costs less. This enables us to be of service to the grid, lowering the daytime peak and raising the nightly need to shut down big generators, since they can "sell" the power for charging cars at night.
So in fact, our EV-PV household actually helps the grid while enabling us to drive free of pollution -- and to use our money to pay off our solar system instead of spending it at the Chevron station to power the pollution of their refineries.
Why not others?
If plug-in cars were for sale, any homeowner could buy one, and the savings from not buying gasoline would allow financing a rooftop solar system. That's why Chevron worked so hard to make sure that you don't have the choice of purchasing a plug-in car.
Friday, July 18, 2008
SUV vs. Electric car
Interesting that SUV gas-guzzler drivers now, with gas so high, proclaim that they "don't drive it more than a few miles each way, so it doesn't matter".
Wasn't this just the very argument against Electric cars, that you couldn't drive them more than 100 or 200 miles without stopping to charge??
No one seems to notice the irony, that the SUV which were purchased under the theory that they can "go anywhere", now are defended as not needing to do so.
And those who claimed that a 160-mile-range EV was not enough, now claim they only need to drive 20 miles per day.
In reality, range, or the lack of it, was never an issue with an EV; if there was an EV in a family, everyone wanted to drive it, and the gas cars sat unloved, moved only to avoid the street sweeper; and those who got to drive the EV tended to feel,
"...IF I CAN'T TAKE THE EV, I DON'T WANT TO GO!".
This happened, again and again, predictable and certain. Give an EV a chance, and it becomes the car of choice!
Wasn't this just the very argument against Electric cars, that you couldn't drive them more than 100 or 200 miles without stopping to charge??
No one seems to notice the irony, that the SUV which were purchased under the theory that they can "go anywhere", now are defended as not needing to do so.
And those who claimed that a 160-mile-range EV was not enough, now claim they only need to drive 20 miles per day.
In reality, range, or the lack of it, was never an issue with an EV; if there was an EV in a family, everyone wanted to drive it, and the gas cars sat unloved, moved only to avoid the street sweeper; and those who got to drive the EV tended to feel,
"...IF I CAN'T TAKE THE EV, I DON'T WANT TO GO!".
This happened, again and again, predictable and certain. Give an EV a chance, and it becomes the car of choice!
That's the real reason GM was afraid to sell the EV1, because people who had one, wanted two; and if you had one, you never wanted to buy another gas Internal Combustion car.
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