Who killed The Electric Car?

Originally posted by Obliv_au
one thing i always wondered.

why do we need +1.5 tonne of car to transport an 80kg human?

It's called safety due to mass and correct engineering design.

The main people responsible for the death of the electric car were the environmentalists (Luddites.) The same people now curtailing the plans for a wind farm in a couple of states (California for one).

Do the math: a land based oil rig takes an area of about 100 feet by 100 feet.
For a solar or wind farm to produce the same amount of energy, would be right around 40,000 acres.

For those who prefer the Prius: from the time it was designed to the time it hits the scrap yard, Prius pollutes more than a mid-sized Hummer.

reply to post by hotpinkurinalmint


a third problem is that compared to petrol electric cars just plain suck

The one thing about oil is the availability.
No need to go home and plug in batteries.
If there was a was to not only recharge batteries while moving but also
to have the reassurance that in moving you are also powering the vehicle
would have to be the win all situation.

I wonder if the Tesla black box was the so called Radium electric generator
of direct electricity from a radioactive source. Tesla spoke of making Radium
cheaply at one time by transmutation with high voltage. Why.

If this was before the car event we might have a clue.
In 1914 a generator technology was sold by Tesla to Germany.
Was this the so called tri metal generator with 5 miles or 50 miles
of wire picking off the Earth's magnetic field interrupted by an
oscillating piston. Was the car's iron pipe addition a similar type
of energy capture. Tesla used tube diodes for switching and doubt
he wore down batteries without a supply of power yet there is no
report of external power supply as not told about with his remote
controlled and powered ship. Tesla supplied wireless power to
remote radio controlled ship as the batteries never wore down.
The ship battery was there for storage being supplies wireless.

Hi Zap, I have some questions and, hopefully constructive, commentary...

Originally posted by zappafan1
The main people responsible for the death of the electric car were the environmentalists (Luddites.) The same people now curtailing the plans for a wind farm in a couple of states (California for one).

My first question is simply this, where did the environmentalist ( the real one's, not the oil/coal lobbies trying to crush nuclear and other energy tapping infrastructure) get the political clout to do this sort of thing? Are they more powerful than the recent auto manufacturers groups that managed to crush the EV-1 and other similer cars because they lasted so long and completely undermined their after sales cash generation, due to maintenance, capacities?

As for the wind farms i can easily agree that some people want electricity but just do not seem to accept the fact that however we do it it needs to be in SOMEONE's back yard. This sort of arrogance, or the protection of this or that specific butterfly species, drives me quite mad.

Do the math: a land based oil rig takes an area of about 100 feet by 100 feet.
For a solar or wind farm to produce the same amount of energy, would be right around 40,000 acres.

The processing of the oil into usable fuels , to say nothing of coal mining and the like for electricity, takes much more space than that and the resulting ground water and general ground pollution , to say nothing of air pollution, spreads to a few magnitudes of that figure. To maintain non polluting wind farms not only creates sustainable work but can be quite silent and utterly non polluting. Admittedly thee wind turbines needs to be built somewhere, and that process is likely polluting, but at least it's much nearer to a once off cost than constant refining of oil is. Once one starts calculating what it costs to take other people's oil/gas ( Iraq) ( Afghanistan) in terms of the pollution of those countries and the loss of life on both sides wind farms and hydro electric schemes starts seeming not only cheap but also the only morally acceptable choice. I still do not think wind and solar farms are good ways to 'generate' electricity but still beats something as ridiculous as oil as 'power source' hands down. If it wasn't for the oil monopoly's a century ago we would not only have started with electric cars , as we did, but would have kept right on using them resulting in the needed investment in electricity tapping technologies.

For those who prefer the Prius: from the time it was designed to the time it hits the scrap yard, Prius pollutes more than a mid-sized Hummer.

And that you must at some level understand to be a utterly ridiculous claim. I don't know who you are copying it from but perhaps you would like a chance to elaborate as to how building or later incinerating a prius ( or rather a true electric car) is in your mind more polluting on the various levels of creation and use.

Either way i think the question of pollution is terribly misunderstood as there is no industry under the sun that actually needs to 'pollute'. The problem is not that pollution is unavoidable but that it is saves cost, meaning it creates profit, to externalize the cost by simply not going trough all the chemical processes needed to treat waste materials in all their forms. Pollution is thus just the externalization of cleanup cost by industry onto society; you the taxpayer or you the sorry fool who still gets your drinking water downstream from the oil processing plant.

But i guess we can just argue about what pollutes slightly less or slightly more and thus giving some rich guy who can afford the joke of a prius some environmental 'street cred'. In a way i can understand why the urge exist to get a hummer and , obviously accidentally, drive over such silly people and their silly cars.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX
Hi Zap, I have some questions and, hopefully constructive, commentary...

Originally posted by zappafan1
The main people responsible for the death of the electric car were the environmentalists (Luddites.) The same people now curtailing the plans for a wind farm in a couple of states (California for one).

My first question is simply this, where did the environmentalist ( the real one's, not the oil/coal lobbies trying to crush nuclear and other energy tapping infrastructure) get the political clout to do this sort of thing? Are they more powerful than the recent auto manufacturers groups that managed to crush the EV-1 and other similer cars because they lasted so long and completely undermined their after sales cash generation, due to maintenance, capacities?

REPLY: Environmentalists have been around since before the first electric car was produced. They have had money behind their lobbies for quite some time. That's my point; it was the environmentalists that killed the EV-1. There's been a couple of books written about it.

As for the wind farms i can easily agree that some people want electricity but just do not seem to accept the fact that however we do it it needs to be in SOMEONE's back yard. This sort of arrogance, or the protection of this or that specific butterfly species, drives me quite mad.

REPLY: I agree.

Do the math: a land based oil rig takes an area of about 100 feet by 100 feet.
For a solar or wind farm to produce the same amount of energy, would be right around 40,000 acres.

The processing of the oil into usable fuels, to say nothing of coal mining and the like for electricity, takes much more space than that and the resulting ground water and general ground pollution , to say nothing of air pollution, spreads to a few magnitudes of that figure. To maintain non polluting wind farms not only creates sustainable work but can be quite silent and utterly non polluting. Admittedly thee wind turbines needs to be built somewhere, and that process is likely polluting, but at least it's much nearer to a once off cost than constant refining of oil is. Once one starts calculating what it costs to take other people's oil/gas ( Iraq) ( Afghanistan) in terms of the pollution of those countries and the loss of life on both sides wind farms and hydro electric schemes starts seeming not only cheap but also the only morally acceptable choice. I still do not think wind and solar farms are good ways to 'generate' electricity but still beats something as ridiculous as oil as 'power source' hands down. If it wasn't for the oil monopoly's a century ago we would not only have started with electric cars , as we did, but would have kept right on using them resulting in the needed investment in electricity tapping technologies.

REPLY: I have to disagree. We're still 20+ years away from a solar cell that equals or beats the cost of using oil/gas as a fuel. We do not "take" oil from Iraq or Afghanistan. We purchase it like everyone else does. Both wars have nothing to do with oil. The space required to refine petroleum is much less than the space required to use wind or solar. Even a Nuke plant only requires 20 acres and usually less.

For those who prefer the Prius: from the time it was designed to the time it hits the scrap yard, Prius pollutes more than a mid-sized Hummer.

And that you must at some level understand to be a utterly ridiculous claim. I don't know who you are copying it from but perhaps you would like a chance to elaborate as to how building or later incinerating a prius ( or rather a true electric car) is in your mind more polluting on the various levels of creation and use.

REPLY: Much of the nickel for the batteries is mined in Canada or Alaska (and the area around those mines looks like the surface of the moon.) That nickel is then placed in cargo ships that burn one gallon of diesel fuel every 80 yards, and shipped to Europe. It's partially processed, then loaded again onto those cargo ships and shipped to Korea or China to be further refined and transformed into a foam-like substance. Then it's back onto
more cargo ships and shipped to America for production into batteries. Then we have coal, gas or oil-fired power plants to generate the electricity to charge those batteries. Those batteries might last 3 or 4 years, then have to be processed into it component parts; some of it able to be re-used. The rest goes into landfills. What most people don't realize is that there's only so much nickel, of which the workld will run out of in as little as 30 years.

Either way i think the question of pollution is terribly misunderstood as there is no industry under the sun that actually needs to 'pollute'. Pollution is thus just the externalization of cleanup cost by industry onto society; you the taxpayer or you the sorry fool who still gets your drinking water downstream from the oil processing plant.

REPLY: Capitalism is the one ideal that generates enough wealth to allow the companies to clean up after themselves. The air in America is cleaner now than it was before the industrial revolution. IE: most everyone used coal or wood to heat their homes and cook their food, etc. New refining and burning techniques of oil and coal produce very little pollution.

Stellar

edit on 28-9-2010 by StellarX because: Spelling and content

reply to post by Bluess


Great reply to the limbo of electric sales.
I wonder who killed the inventor of the "water engine" ?

Hi Zappafan,

Originally posted by zappafan1
REPLY: Environmentalists have been around since before the first electric car was produced. They have had money behind their lobbies for quite some time. That's my point; it was the environmentalists that killed the EV-1. There's been a couple of books written about it.

There were no comparable environmental movement in the USA more than a century ago ( the vast majority of Americans were more concerned with getting enough food to survive on) and as for the idea that the environmental movement killed the EV-1 that while i can certainly believe that some parts of the movement is subverted or misdirected enough to do so i don't have any reason to believe that they had the power or the economic interest in maintaining the rule of the hard-to-maintain internal combustion engine.

REPLY: I have to disagree. We're still 20+ years away from a solar cell that equals or beats the cost of using oil/gas as a fuel.

I don't know how one could compare the two and even begin to work out comparative cost. We can start by just talking about how to define cost. Cost to who? Society? Industry? The environment? A great part of this whole discussion is the externalization manufacturing cost by industry onto society which makes it so impractical to know work out what it really cost us as individuals and as humanity to consume the goods we are.

[quote[We do not "take" oil from Iraq or Afghanistan. We purchase it like everyone else does. Both wars have nothing to do with oil. The space required to refine petroleum is much less than the space required to use wind or solar. Even a Nuke plant only requires 20 acres and usually less.

Strictly speaking your right but which corporations are allowed access to the oil and what sort of understanding or deals do they have with the governments that creates access to this oil by military or economic muscle? I am surprised that you believe these wars have NOTHING to do with oil when the officials in charge of managing ( some, including me, would say creating) these wars talk so openly amongst themselves of the energy and economic prizes to be had by 'freeing' these countries to the world market. Perhaps you are just not aware of the collusion between governments and industry and how practically everything the majority of national governments do is in some way related to protecting industry ( the owners of industry) against humanity? As for the fuel the space required to refine petroleum is not massive but the environmental effects ARE and comparative solar infrastructure production is at the very least much quite close to a once off cost. Nuke plants are already a massive improvement over oil ( France) and coal but since the oil and coal lobby's have had such success at making people paranoid about them ( by contributing generously to those environmental sects that are scared of nukes) that i don't hold out much hope for sanity to prevail in that regard.

REPLY: Much of the nickel for the batteries is mined in Canada or Alaska (and the area around those mines looks like the surface of the moon.) That nickel is then placed in cargo ships that burn one gallon of diesel fuel every 80 yards, and shipped to Europe. It's partially processed, then loaded again onto those cargo ships and shipped to Korea or China to be further refined and transformed into a foam-like substance. Then it's back onto
more cargo ships and shipped to America for production into batteries. Then we have coal, gas or oil-fired power plants to generate the electricity to charge those batteries. Those batteries might last 3 or 4 years, then have to be processed into it component parts; some of it able to be re-used. The rest goes into landfills. What most people don't realize is that there's only so much nickel, of which the workld will run out of in as little as 30 years.

The world will no more run out of nickle in thirty years than it has run out of iron in more than three thousand years; in my opinion this is the same as the belief in peak oil. Sadly we will have ample opportunity to destroy our biosphere long before we run out of the raw materials that fuels corporate capitalism. As to the long description of how batteries are produced i am surprised that you are not aware that practically everything you buy these days ( depending on it's complexity) is manufactured from minerals mined in environmentally destructive ways, criss crosses the oceans many times in various stages of assembly/refining while ending up in landfills much sooner than batteries. If you investigate how globalisation truly works ( the search for the country where people are least free to struggle for proper wages and least able to protect their environment against polluting industry) you will soon realise that what you have described is still 'cheaper' than manufacturing and mining in a country such as America and that the cost to the environment does not figure into the choice of energy industry chooses. If electric transportation could make corporate capitalism wring a few more cents out of the average consumer that's what it would change to as soon as it becomes profitable over the short term.

REPLY: Capitalism is the one ideal that generates enough wealth to allow the companies to clean up after themselves.

Capitalism does not generate wealth and capitalism can no more do so than any other economic theory. What the capitalist system nominally entails is private OWNERSHIP of property ( land ownership being the basis of all wealth) the control of which results in the ownership of exchange value. Essentially, and this is my opinion/understanding, Capitalism can fundamentally be regarded as a system whereby everything under the sun is ( perhaps including the sun, soon) assigned a subjective value or processed into something that can be assigned such. In this way things can be exchanged and profit can be had by continually adding to the volume of 'commodities' ( such as drinking water and food; formerly free to anyone who could catch it or pick a fruit) traded and processed. For capitalism to generate wealth it would have to be able to generate land and matter in general and since that's the realm of science and engineering we can do away with that as description of Capitalism.

I can only marvel at the notion that capitalism/capitalist will clean up after themselves when capitalism is about the creation of private property and thus private profit. Since profit is gained by competitive advantage of rival manufacturers/service providers the first thing one does is to externalize cost in as many of the following ways as possible:

1. Pay your workers as little as you can get away with, to get the product made to the standard you require, without a riot or the like every other day. To this end it's logical to employ whatever power you have to ensure that the workers do not get sufficiently organized to make trouble for you. This is obviously extended to entire countries who's economic and social policies you may attempt to influence if you have sufficient economic muscle to do so. It is after all not your business to create consumers and it would be completely contrary to capitalistic ideals to pay your workers sufficiently high wages to allow them to actually purchase the products their making. If you ever looked for a reason why capitalist is a self, and human, destructive economic theory there it is.
2. If someone gets injured , fire them if you can replace them easily; if there's no one to replace them frighten them into carrying as much of the health bill as you can get away with.
3. Use the infrastructure of the host country to the greatest extent possible and use all your power to lobby for reduced prices on water, electricity and access to harbors and rail networks. It is after all something the citizens of said country paid for so employ it as best you can for a higher profit.
4: Ignore environmental laws ( or just find a country that is too poor to be able to afford it) as far as makes economic sense to do so. If you wont get caught or wont get fined much dump everything that can not be be reprocessed for profit in whatever hole or river is closest.

Essentially every sent that you have to spend is a sent less in profit and if some other manufacturer manages to cut that cost investor funds will soon start flowing to reward him for 'generating wealth'. What so few people seem to understand is that the world is capitalistic and the vast majority of it's people are either poor, starving or slowly on their way there. The countries which are relatively wealthy compared to others have just as nations managed to externalize the costs onto other countries and people by fighting for and gaining relative economic, and thus political, power over their local industry. It is the fight against and the resistance too capitalism that have made the lives of those in the west bearable and our air and local environments somewhat less devastated and exhausted than those elsewhere in the third world /Southern hemisphere.

The air in America is cleaner now than it was before the industrial revolution. IE: most everyone used coal or wood to heat their homes and cook their food, etc. New refining and burning techniques of oil and coal produce very little pollution.

The air is not cleaner now than before the industrial revolution. What is meant when industry/pundits or regular people say that is that coal and wood home and city industry's used to burn these minerals much closer to home creating 'smog' ,( ash that could not easily disperse into the local atmosphere) resulting in devastating respiratory diseases that greatly helped to shorten lifespans in places like London to thirty-five - fifty. The air quality in cities in the west ( London has been improving since the worse years perhaps 150 years ago) not because the air quality overall has improved but because our pollutants are now MUCH finer and dispersed relatively uniformly throughout the earths atmosphere.

Overall things are still getting worse( lung cancer is not caused by smoking cigarettes; one industry suffers so that the other 99.9% can continue to pollute) but since we can not often see or smell it many people in the west is fooled into believing that things are getting better while the polluters just pack up and move to countries where there are less people who can afford to complain about dying at forty or fifty due to toxic pollutants in the air, ground and water.

Either way it's a depressing story and after all this disagreeing with you i should just make it clear that i don't believe that all electric transport will help enough as long as the power is still 'generated' by means of burning coal. The transition to electric must go along with renew ables in general with the transition period covered by Nukes for the biosphere to stand much of a chance. That's sadly the best we can hope for but with the powers being who they are and even that is probably just fantasy.

In closing i hope i did not give too much offense; it's certainly not my aim and i have already retyped much to try avoid doing so. Let me know how badly i failed!

Regards,

Stellar