ElectricCars

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by Baisteach, Mar 21, 2007.

  1. Baisteach

    Baisteach Junior Member

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    Saw this on OnLine Opinion and 'borrowed' it
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    John Howard recently stated that he didn't want to see production of an electric car in Australia because, as he put it, it would create major unemployment in the automotive industry, particularly in regards to maintainance and spare parts. Electric cars need little of either, but is that reason enough to prevent production of such vehicles?
    Jim Arian was invited to Australia to develop a fully electric vehicle for the Australian market. He successfully drove a prototype from Melbourne to Ballarat, a distance much greater than most commuters would travel on a working day. Since then, he's developed the vehicle to a point whereby the new prototype can travel at speeds of 160kph and can be "quick-charged" in approx 6 minutes. The latest version can travel distances of up to 300 kilometres and yet sadly, he's had no backing from Federal Government (Jim is based in Victoria) which is surprising considering Howard was caught on the back foot re: climate change. This is proof positive that John Howard thinks more of lining corporate pockets than seeking a sustainable future for our children and their decendants.
    Jim Arian is now in the process of packing up and heading to England where the Government says it is happy to accomadate production of his vehicles. Another lost opportunity for Australian GDP and employment.
    I'm not sure of all the details and I'm offering this post hoping that somebody can fill in the gaps. I believe the Victorian Government who invited Jim Arian to develop the vehicle here in the first instance, is not responsible for the lack of backing. It's the Federal Government who steadfastly refuses to legislate standards for electric vehicles, however, I will write to both State and Federal Labor parties within the next week to seek their version of the need for electric vehicles in Australia.
    Wildcat.
    Posted by Aime, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 10:25:35 AM
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    If the facts are right it's an indictement of the Libs.

    I have my doubts on lots and lots of electric cars as the pollution levels from the increased power generation would be not a small problem.
     
  2. hedwig

    hedwig Junior Member

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    well there is freedom of trade an Howard cannot prohibit the production in Australia. (But he weon't be in power long time anymore) perhaps it'll be too late and other countries take the advantage.
     
  3. Honeychrome

    Honeychrome Junior Member

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    It is all about the US, but as America goes, so goes much of (at least the western) world, but check out both the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" and the book "Internal Combustion" by Edwin Black. The book in particular is a compelling read of the history of attempts at 'electrification' of transport in the US. In one of the few cases of actually proven and prosecuted 'conspiracy' in the 1930s through the 1950s a front company backed by GM, Firestone and Standard Oil and several other oil and automotive interests went around buying up and dismantling the popoular but in need of upgrading electric trolly systems througout the US and replacing them with bus lines. They wanted to lock public transport into the increased maintainance, replacement and fuel purchases of internal combustion (to be supplied by them in binding contracts) rather than the cleaner, more efficient and longer lasting electric trollys. They also knew that the buses were much less popular with the public and more riders would be driven (no pun intended) to individual transport (which would benefit them even more). By the time they were prosecuted and given a slap on the wrist the damage was done. Interesting (and depressing!) stuff.
     
  4. Baisteach

    Baisteach Junior Member

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  5. Jim Bob

    Jim Bob Junior Member

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    I think we have to distinguish between electric vehicles as public transport - the kind which are mentioned by Honeychrome as being conspiratorially destroyed by GM et al - and as private transport.

    Public transport is always good. Since so much of the weight of a vehicle is the vehicle itself, the more passengers per vehicle, the more energy and money efficiently it transports people.

    Private transport's another matter. The electricity for the vehicles has to come from somewhere. If that energy comes from fossil fuel-fed power stations, it's better to just burn the fossil fuels directly in the vehicle itself, then you don't have losses of efficiency due to long power lines, etc. So if we had electric cars here in Victoria, they would be more polluting than regular petrol or gas cars. It's just that the polution would happen at the power station instead of out of the car directly. Which would be like me saying that my house doesn't produce any sewerage because the lines goes out to the street, off my property.

    It's only if the electrical energy comes from a renewable resource like solar or wind power stations that electric cars start looking more environmentally friendly than fossil-fuelled cars.

    So the question is not about electric cars, it's about how we get our electricity, and whether it's better to have one passenger per vehicle or twenty.
     
  6. heuristics

    heuristics Junior Member

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    ABC tv recently - try google -or the ABC online site.
    Had a program about sliver solar panel technology.

    IFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF we were really SERIOUS about renewables we would already have the option ob buying private vehicles that could draw solar power thru their windows. They could also charge themselves as they simulaneously discharged energy.

    I tied to start a post here soem many months ago asking if people could cie examples of where and when alternative energy fo rmotor vehicles had deliberatelybeen bought and buried by Big Motor.
    I had intended to got back and cite the examples I had found myself.
    For others on this hunt, Try googling ""Ethyl Wars" which will bring up a whole website/. Also Wiki Great Streetcar conspiracy.


    And then there is our very own Sun King. Did anyone watch SBS DAteline on March 21 about the Chinese born Aussis citizen who is now China's ruchest billionair. He made his money selling solar power technology he developed while a student here isn Oz.
    Technology our govt wouldnt support and which our home-grown clever dicks said would NEVER work.

    The Sun King says by 2010 China will draw its power from his solar power technology.
    Forget """""""""""""clean coal""""""""
    The future is solar. Aussies have always intuitively known this, which is why we have given the world technology to make this happen.
    Of course our cultural cringe also insisted we surrender this technology so that someone else could have the benefit and financial reward of capitalising on it.
    Wank on, so-called clever country.
     
  7. hedwig

    hedwig Junior Member

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    Jim, buses maybe even more energy efficient than trolleys or much better trams but both systems simply work better. Especially trams. Passengers perfer trams its much more comfortable -ever tried to read in a bus?
    Both system have the huge advantage of always beeing visible in the streets - like a permanent advertisement.
     
  8. Honeychrome

    Honeychrome Junior Member

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    There is an argument that having the electricity coming from a fossil fuel-fed powerplant rather than having each individual vehicle burning fuel, allows increasing efficiency and pollution control to be centralized. Instead of a million talipipes all over the place to worry about, you've only got one smokestack to focus on.

    The first step, of course, is to maximize public transportation, wherever the power comes from, and then worry about maximizing it's efficiency and 'cleanliness.' Replacing 100 cars on the road with two buses OR trams will make a much bigger difference than what kind of fuel the bus or tram is using.

    I'm not sure what it is about them, but doesn't just about everyone pretty much hate buses? Given the choice between taking a bus to a destination or taking the train/tram/metro/subway it seems almost everyone will choose the latter, even if it costs them more!
     
  9. Jim Bob

    Jim Bob Junior Member

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    And that argument's wrong.

    All heat engines - coal, petrol, hydrogen, whatever - have a practical limit to their efficiency - how much of the energy from the cehmical reaction ends up as mechanical energy (in a car) or electrical energy (in a power plant). This limit is about 35% for a coal plant, and 25% for a vehicle engine. That's the limit - most cars and power plants are worse than that.

    Energy appears in many forms. Chemical - like when you burn stuff, it's carbon + oxygen gives carbon dioxide plus energy. Heat. Light. Sound. Mechanical/movement. And so on. We like to convert energy from one form to another, for example in a car we go

    chemical (petrol) energy => heat energy => mechanical energy

    that is, the petrol is burned in the engine, its burning makes it explode and push the piston which makes the wheels turn and the car move.

    In a coal-fired power plant we go,

    chemical (coal) energy => heat energy => mechanical energy => electrical energy

    that is, the coal is burned in a furnace, that furnace boils water which turns a turbine which turns a generator and makes electricity.

    Each time you convert the energy from one form to another, you lose some of the energy to other forms. So for example when you start your car, it goes "vroom" - that sound is energy which came from the petrol, but didn't turn into mechanical energy, but sound energy. If you touch your engine, you burn yourself - it's heat energy escaping.

    So the more steps of conversion between the original thing and the thing you want to act on, the less efficient that initial grabbing of energy is. For example, consider electric heaters.

    We burn coal at the station to make heat to boil water to drive turbines to drive generators to make electricity to heat coils to warm ourselves. It'd be more efficient to just burn coal at home instead.

    Also, a lot of energy is lost along power lines. Every go past a big power line and hear a "hum"? That's because current travelling along a resisting conductor produces heat, just like the lines in your toaster. The loss is about 1/3; so for every 100 units of coal energy in the power station, 35 become electricity, and only 23 reach your power point. Whereas in a car, for every 100 units of petrol energy, 25 become the motion of the car.

    So if you're going to burn fossil fuels to get electricity for your electric car, well it'd be more energy efficient to just burn the fossil fuels in your car in the first place. Electric cars will get really shitty gas (or coal) mileage.

    As to the pollution, it's not easier to deal with if it's in one place, it's concentrated and therefore more dangerous; see for example Chernobyl. And history tells us that if the pollution is all in one place, it won't be dealt with, they'll just lock the gates and forget about it. Consider again Chernobyl.

    Electric cars are worse than fossil-fuel-driven cars, unless the energy source is renewable.

    You're absolutely right that the first step is to maximise public transport, as I said because having four or forty people travelling in a vehicle uses the energy - whatever the source - more efficiently than having one or two people in it.

    Buses are crap mostly because they're slow; they're slow mostly because of all the private vehicles on the road. If buses had the way cleared for them the way trams do, they'd be a lot more popular. Buses also carry less people than a tram of the same size. [/list]
     
  10. heuristics

    heuristics Junior Member

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    The latest ReNew magazine has a lengthy article on electric cars in Australia
    https://www.ata.org.au

    Kevin Rudd has just announced a policy of $500 milion for electric cars in Australia (OK, he is a politician, but its gotta be a start, right.... better than Howard's $3000 rebate to convert to LPG).

    I wish there was some way for a type of Bendigo Bank community owned car company could be formed to either import or manufacture electric cars in Oz.

    I dont have the stats, but some enormous amount of travel is short distance commutes. If cars were cheap people could have an electric drive to work and just hire a hybrid or dual fuel for the occasions they beleived they needed to drive interstate!!

    I know there are people here who are waiting to see the death of the personal motor vehicle, but I am still selfish enough to want to be able to drive where I want when I want. I would really like to do it in an electric car that charged itself while sitting in the sun in the carpark.
    Sliver technology should make this possible. Windows would be solar chargers. Sliver panels could be installed in the roof and other panels.

    GM Holden just spent $1 billion redesigning the Commodore. If that money had been spent on solar technology and battery technology - we'd have solved the problems, or got a lot closer to solving them.
    If only.!
     
  11. blinkblink

    blinkblink Junior Member

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    Our power grid does not have the capacity to charge a significant number of electrical cars. It's not just the power generation, it's the wires, the transformers etc. which are at or near maximum capacity. It would cost billions and billions of dollars to upgrade the grid so it could cope with providing power for a significant electric car population.

    Cars including electric ones, consume a huge amount of resources in there manufacture. More than they consume running the kids to school.

    There is really only one solution to global warming, peak oil and environment destruction and that is to Power Down.

    Get a bicycle.
     
  12. heuristics

    heuristics Junior Member

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    yeah, but the new Aussie sliver solar cell technology means the cars have the solar cells built in to their windows and body panels - they recharge themselves, even as you drive and as you park in the sun.
    Battery capacity can improve heaps too..... in fact really good batteries form part of the suite of """stolen"" technology that has been bought and buried by Big Motor.
    An overwhelming number of trips are short duration commuter, or mum's taxi jaunts to school-shops-home.
    A VW type vehicle as a simple people mover - which I thing VW means in German - would provide many of us with transport flexibility without making major emissions -
    especially if the construction of the car body parts uses hemp, as Henry Ford originally envisaged.
    Dump the Humvees and SUVs. I'll settle for a solar bubble car - glorified motorbike with weather protection - to get me and my shopping and shi-stuff from A to B to G etc.

    OK, I'll put myself out there, but I like the freedom of thinking I want to be somewhere that is 30kms away, I pick up the keys, and 30-40 mins later - I'm there.

    I dont think we are going to change that desire - better to match it in a carbon neutral, sustainable way - solar powered, biodegradable cars.
     
  13. Jez

    Jez Junior Member

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    I agree wholeheartedly with blink on this one Heuro.

    It's not just the energy to run the vehicle, it's the energy needed to build them - it takes more energy to build a Prius than a Hummer AND creates more pollution and waste. Then we get to the question of resources needed in manufacturing.

    There is approaching a billion vehicles worldwide...the cost in resources, energy and dollars to replace them (and not just once) is staggering when you think about it.

    I appreciate your sentiments about tiny cars, but even still, it would take resources, energy and money we simply can't afford.
     
  14. heuristics

    heuristics Junior Member

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    Sure, cars like the Billion Dollar Commodore and its brethren chew resources in the way we construct them now - but if we go back, way,way,way back, before we took all the $$$$-driven Corporate dictated technology left turns and cul-de-sacs, there were other ways the private vehicle could have evolved.

    One of the things that so impressed me about Warren Brown's
    Peking to Paris doco last year on ABC was that the "race" was conducted in 1904 to CONVINCE people the horseless carriage was something other than a passing fad..... the race was a technological proving ground, almost like the space race of the 60s.

    Also, there's a doco on Horatio Nelson Jackson and his attempt to be the first to drive across the US - the timing is about the same, early 1900s.
    His letters home during the journey are full of experts encountering him and telling him the horseless carriage will never catch on.....

    Some time in the 1920s Big Motor and Big Oil hijacked the private vehicle paradigm. We are now so conditioned to thinking of cars in the terms they have created, its almost impossible to imagine how it can be different.
    We THINK have to use refined petrol as fuel and we THINK the vehicles have to be constructed out of steel.

    I own (& have read!) the book, Hemp, the Lifeline to the Future, and have the video, Billion Dollar Crop.
    Hemp is an amazingly versatile plant - as I say, Henry Ford anticipated using bio diesel fuel for his cars - ie, grass growing along the highway, and he anticipated using hemp to mould the panels:

    Hemp, the Lifeline to the Future, Chris Conrad, Creative Expressions Publications (1994) pg 99:

    "HENRY FORD AND THE CAR HE GREW FROM THE SOIL
    "Here in America there’s a revolution in materials that will affect every home," reported Popular Mchanics in 1941, citing Henry Ford’s prediction that he would someday “grow automobiles from the soil”.
    "After 12 years of research, Ford Motor Company had completed an experimental car with a plastic body.
    "Its tough panels were molded from a mixture of 70 per cent cellulose fibres from hemp, wheat straw a sisal, plus 30 per cent resin blender, under hydraulic pressure of 1500 pounds per square inch.
    "The plastic withstood blows 10 times as great as steel could without denting.(1)
    "While the streamlined car looked like its steel counterpart, its design took advantage of the properties of plastics.
    "The total weight of his vehicle was about two-thirds that of a regular car (2)
    "This meant better gas mileage.
    "Ford also planned to fuel his fleet of vehicles with plant power, but was thwarted first by alcohol prohibition, then by hemp prohibition (3) and forced to use petroleum.


    chapter goes on with…… "Ford’s vision is once again within our reach. Using hemp cellulose for essential plastic products will reduce American dependence on imported petroleum and create jobs across the economic spectrum, without the risk of large-scale environmental disasters such as oil spills……… " (written, obviously before Peak Oil became the deciding argument to convince people of merits of biotech future)

    ( I wont retype all 300 pages, but that’s just a taste of what is a fascinating exploration of history of hemp and what it can be used for)

    citations: not numbered: Lewis, “plastics from vegetables” in Earth Island Journal, Winter 1991, pg 8
    Environmental News Service, Vancouver.
    1/ Weighed 2000 pounds, compared with 3000 pounds for the same sized steel car. Even the windows and windshield were plasatic. “Auto body made of plastics resists denting under hard blows” Popular Mechanics, vol 76:6, Dec 1941
    2/ The only steel in the body was a tubular welded frame on which were mounted 14 plastic panels, each 3/16 inch thick (ibid)
    also Morris, David “Pollution solutions; but Puritanism kills hemp, ethanol” in Mercury News Knight Ridder, Calif, Dec 5, 1990.

    An earlier chapter of the Hemp book talks about making plastic computer housing from hemp… so presumably battery housing could be made from hemp too….

    As I say, a self-solar powered hemp/plastic private vehicle that biodegrades...... a solution worth considering.
     
  15. Jez

    Jez Junior Member

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    Sure mate, I understand exactly where you're coming from (I'm a bit of a hemp advocate myself), but it's a question of logistics.

    For example, ethanol is currently only supplying a very tiny fraction of needed liquid fuel energy...yet look at the consequences for food prices, our last remaining forests etc.

    To 'grow cars' (as opposed to the fuel for them in the case of ethanol) even on a small scale would cause exactly the same problems.

    We simply have no land left to plant the necessarily mammoth amount of hemp (or anything else) to pull it off.

    If there were several billion less of us and the entire world monetary system wasn't totally geared around endless growth, these things would be feasible - but of course, if that were the case, then Peak Oil wouldn't be at hand either. :D
     
  16. digging

    digging Junior Member

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  17. blinkblink

    blinkblink Junior Member

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    Sadly, this is what is really happening. GM sold 300,000 cars in China in 3 months.


    MSNBC
     

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