8 Comments »

AO said:

because the resources used do not make it better for the environment,
than some cars that are already on the roads.
- 8 March 2010 at 11:10 am
Jay said:

It’s not that it’s so hard to make an electric car, but that automakers choose not to.
The only major hurdle to overcome is batteries, and even then its not a major problem. Look at all the cooling and heating equipment you have in your car, that’s the major problem for lithium ion batteries (temperature). Other than that, the technology is here, the parts and equipment is here, but they choose to keep building gasoline vehicles- more parts for a gasoline vehicle means more jobs, more jobs means more money floating around.
I don’t want to say it’s totally the auto manufacturer’s fault, but much of the problem is they simply choose not to.
- 8 March 2010 at 12:05 pm
Cribber said:

It isnt’ so hard. They have had fully electric vehicles since the 70s. Watch the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car and your eyes will be opened. We could be off oil totally in 12 months if they would just do it. But the oil companies want one more decade of profits.
- 8 March 2010 at 12:55 pm
Doc Hudson said:

Making an electric car isn’t that hard. It has been done since about 1900. The tricky part is to build batteries that will hold a charge that will give them a reasonable cruising range at a decent speed, and still be small enough to fit into a normal sized automobile.
Doc
- 8 March 2010 at 1:09 pm
Doug W said:

Recharging by friction or traction is not 100% efficient. Eventually, you will run out of battery power. You always use some power to move the car so you aways end up with less energy going back to the battery than what comes out to mive the car. That is a major problem for how far you can drive.
- 8 March 2010 at 1:12 pm
phucctup said:

The limiting factor is the amount of energy that can be stored in batteries versus the weight of the batteries. It is a problem that engineers often refer to as “storage density”.
Here is the basic thrust of the problem: It takes a certain amount of power to move a vehicle. The amount of energy required is proportional to the weight of the vehicle. The heavier the vehicle, the more energy is needed to move it. If you need more energy, you need more batteries. Batteries are heavy… therefore you need MORE energy to move the car with more batteries loaded on it. So, you need more batteries… OR you need lighter batteries!
The limitation is that batteries that can hold enough charge to provide a lot of energy, that can be reused over and over, that DON’T contain toxic heavy metals, and can withstand bumpy roads, lots of movement, AND work in the desert or the cold mountains AND be cheap… can’t presently be made very light.
The devices you mention, like the baby swing, usually utilize a wound spring and a compensated reduction gear to get the baby moving. The pendulum action of the swinging baby helps keep it moving – in essence gravity is helping move the baby. So let’s consider those two energy sources – a spring, and – gravity.
Gravity is easy: sooner or later you’ll have to go up hill and you might have to go up hill before you’ve gone down one. As for the spring – Springs are made from spring steel. Spring steel is surprisingly heavy for it’s size. It’s dense. To get enough spring power to move a car would require a HUGE spring – so big that the spring wouldn’t give enough energy to move it!
As for the “self-charging” batteries using friction or traction. There are technologies that do this called regenerative braking and active charging. Regenerative braking uses the friction of the brakes to recharge the batteries. Active charging reverses the drive circuit while decellerating to use the motor as a generator to back-feed into the batteries. In both cases,the batteries are charged as you stop. But still, it comes down to the batteries. The present charge store technologies simply weigh too much
- 8 March 2010 at 1:40 pm
efflandt said:

The problem is that batteries to store enough power are much bigger and heavier than any type of fuel that could move the vehicle farther and faster. If a vehicle can only go 50-60 miles before a charge, it may not be practical as your only vehicle. For example where I am in the far northwest Chicago suburbs, I might not even make it to Chicago and back (80-90 miles). And what happens if the batteries go dead on the road. It is not like you can run to the corner and get a can of electricity.
There are techniques that increase battery life, like regenerative braking which turns the motor into a generator to somewhat recharge the batteries to slow the vehicle. But there are losses (heat), so it is nowhere near a perpectual motion machine.
So until we have better batteries and efficiency at reasonable cost, or until hydrogen becomes practical for fuel cells, as close as we get to a practical electric vehicle that you can get moving with a can of juice (fuel) if it runs out of energy, is a hybrid.
- 8 March 2010 at 1:55 pm
Randy C said:

It’s not hard at all to make an EV. It’s all political, the old cronies that are set in their ways are trying to fight it and one of them is named George W. Bush (makes money from oil). The best batteries to put in an EV are being held hostage by Chevron.
An EV conversion can be done by just about any handyman check out http://www.kiwiev.com He is a telephone repairman by trade and he has built a very capable car. If he can do it anybody can.
You need to see the film “Who Killed the Electric Car”, it shows the real situation with all of the gory details. Also check out Plug In America’s web site at http://pluginamerica.org for the truth. The gentleman that put up the site http://sealbeach.org has a 2002 RAV4-EV that is still running. He charges it with solar panels and drives around for free.
- 8 March 2010 at 2:41 pm

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