Truth about the electric car.

Ive seen alot of people praise electric cars for their enviromental friendliness and cheap running costs, the reality is absolutely opposite. If you want a economical car and enviromentally friendly car, look into small diesel cars(or vegetable oils or whatever).

Good read on the subject.

http://ludens.cl/philo/electric.html

 

Agree here. Diesel engines in cars that run on hemp or other amenable oils would eliminate most of the air polution, I think.

 

We need a lot more diesel cars in the states. Many models they have in Europe you cant get here.

 

What's next, chocolate cures obesity?

 

There's not enough farmland on the entire planet to even supply enough biodiesel for all the fat Americans driving thru' McDonalds. Bio fuel IS NOT a viable option! Diesel IS NOT clean!

It's a shit read to be honest, same ol' flawed arguments, misinformation and even flat out lies:

"The fuel efficiency of a hybrid car on the highway is lower than that of an equivalent conventional car."

Bull shit! They may not be perfected but they get better mileage and there's forward thinking people modifying batteries and computers on hybrids to double their stock mileage. Yes, it's mostly an improvement for 'city' driving but dismiss it and speak lies because it doesn't fit your fantasy world?

How arrogant to just shit on EV's because some people drive on the highways. My car sees the highyway maybe once in 60 days. Other than that a short range EV could completely replace my car. EV's and battery tech needs support, there is loads of room for improvement. What there is no room for on this planet is biofuel farms, "sorry kids, this corn only feeds cars".

If anything is a myth, it's biofuel! Another evil corporate reason to clear-cut more forests.

 

relaxxx is spot-on.

The big problem is that everyone's asking the wrong question. They're asking, "How can we continue using horrific amounts of energy and resources without changing our lifestyles in the slightest?" If *that's* the question you're asking, then "diesel" or "biofuels" might look like an answer to you (but it's not, as one can see by even a cursory crunching of the numbers).

The better question is: "How do we stop consuming energy and resources like there's no tomorrow?" When *that's* the question, the answers include things like driving less and reducing the population.

 

More trains would help people drive less.

 

this is what ive been screaming for years, but i gave up cuz nobody wants to hear it.

 

I hear you, Death! I feel that most of the questions we hear about how to tackle environmental problems might as well be along the lines of, "What's the optimal speed to drive my SUV to get the best gas mileage?"

 

When our electricity sources no longer include water or coal.. then electric cars will be more efficient.. but until then.. They are just burning through another limited resource..

 

First of all , electricity is not a clean energy, and besides bio diesel there is normal diesel and vegetable oil, and all of them can also be mixed up. And im pretty sure that cutting rainforests and corn is not the only way to produce bio diesel, there are alot more enviromentally friendly ways for it.

The mpg is not everything, yes the hybrid uses SOMETIMES less gas/diesel, but where do you think they get the electricity? AND , your hybrid gets like 46(city) mpg ? Well, newsflash, a small economical diesel gets 50 mpg(city) aswell, the difference is that it doesnt use electricity to run and it does not need batteries to achieve it (batteries are enviromentally harmful to produce).

And do you seriously think that they will start using electric trucks in quarries, or electric transportation ships to produce your hybrids/electrics ? If they did that, the enviromental effects would be catastrophic. Thats why electricity is not and will never be an alternative aslong as fossil fuels or enviromentally harmful ways are used to produce electricity and batteries.

 

The production of electricity to run those electrics/hybrids and the production of batteries/cars themself is infact, "using of horrific amounts of energy and resources"

Yes you are right, we need to drive less and there needs to be fewer people and consumerism, but until we dont know how to stop the massive consumption of everything , we need to make it enviromentally as green as possible.

 

Again with the false blanket statement! Electricity is Not ALL dirty. People who support EV's tend to also support solar, wind and hydro vs burning coal and plutonium. How is producing bio diesel environmentally friendly? You are convinced batteries can't be produced clean but somehow if we could burn ten planets worth of farmed oil that carbon won't be a problem? It is possible to manage battery chemicals responsibly, they can be scaled to suit anything and all resource can be obtained using green energy.

When fossil fuels are no longer viable our power sources will be clean; Hydro, wind and solar. Improved battery technology for small/short transportation and hydrogen for larger/longer transport. Mass hydrogen stores will be generated with clean energy and burn clean. Cargo ships will probably be solar/wind/hydrogen hybrids. You somehow think battery powered ships are more absurd an idea than burning IMPOSSIBLE amounts of bio-fuel? Most new large ships are now running electric motors. All the diesel motors do now is charge batteries. When fossil diesel is gone, it will be not be bio-diesel charging those batteries. Bio fuel will never be more than a very tiny niche market.

 

Not all ways of producing bio diesel are enviromentally friendly, but for example, you could make huge hemp fields that grow wild, and then you harvest it with harvesters running on bio diesel made from the hemp, and im pretty sure 1 harvester wont use over 1 precent of that bio diesel.
And at the current state , producing diesel itself and running fuel efficent cars on it is more enviromentally friendly than producing electricity and using ev or hybrids.

Imagine this, every god damn car on planet gets 50-70 mpg. Or atleast over half of them, on diesel. That lowers the average fuel consumption drastically.
That gives us enough time to actually find something that works. Develop effective ways to make hydrogen or other new effective ways of making energy. At the moment, 90 precent of the electricity produced is fossil/nuclear energy, and aslong as that is true, your electric cars are actually worse for the enviroment. And electric freigh boats ? Yeah right, the batteries themself would weigh more than the ship or cargo itself.

In ev i can see a small fraction of reason, but hybrids are the most pointless cars ever, they get shitty mpg based on the fact that they run both on fuel and electricity, 44 mpg, are you fucking kidding me ? a 1988 vw golf with its 1.2 or something diesel engine gets even more than that.

Atm, there is this , the new golf, and bluemotion is not a hybrid, its a diesel that gets 70 mpg, it even produces less CO2 than a prius

http://articles.nydailynews.com/201...1_fuel-efficiency-new-model-energy-efficiency

 

I never said 100% battery powered freight ships. Open up some doors in your mind and re-read my actual words...

Lets do some basic high school math:

The world burns nearly 90 billion barrels of oil a year. There's estimated around 240 million hectares of farmland on the planet. Hemp can yield about 2.3 barrels of oil per hectare per year. If every hectare of farmland on the planet was dedicated to hemp oil that would make 552 million barrels of oil per year which would last us a little over 2 days.

2 days of bio fuel to starve 7 billion people to death over!


Hybrids and EV's are a work in progress. If everyone would rather drive around in dirty noisy diesels then this needed progress doesn't happen and all you've done is give fossil fuel a few more years, if that. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

 

90 barrels of oil yes, now, if most of people drove around in their 60mpg diesels, that would decrease the consumption of oil in a year, and im pretty sure quarter or atelast half of that could be produced by hemp oil. And why the fuck would anyone convert all fields to hemp fields? There is plenty of free land laying around that has no forests or nothing on it.

Also, solar powered freight ships ? Well, theres a prototype, but the making of the god damn panel itself will be as harmful as the ship running for 10 years. And a hydrogen engine that actually is effective hasnt been invented yet.

And electric vehicles are clean ? Im sorry, but no. http://www.green3dhome.com/Portals/298/graphs/graph_electricity2.jpg

Aslong as there arent any real energy sources that are renewable and green, the god damn electric car isnt clean. And lets not even start talking about the hybrids, they combine the worst of the both, it consumes gas, it pollutes air, it requires electricity , wich also pollutes air. And in the end it gets low mpg.

The thing with the electric car is that it doesnt dump the crap in your back yard, so you dont see it, but its there. So rather than that they should focus on diesel engines, making them even more economical than they already are. Maybe get like 100 mpg and 40g of Co2 per km.

Dirty diesels ? The vw bluemotion diesel engine emits less Co2 than a prius, gets better mpg than a prius and it does not require enviromentally harmful batteries.

 

Not! The small amount of unused arable land can't make a dent in our energy supply, and that's even if it worked, which it doesn't: It takes about as much energy to grow and harvest the crops as the energy output of those crops.

In any event, that's our solution? Exploit every last square meter of the planet so we can keep on driving too much? Sad.

 

An EV or modified hybrid running strictly off battery for short trips around town emits zero Co2. The argument that electricity is dirty is flawed. Utilities are working to develop more alternative clean power sources. They know they have to, they know coal will be gone soon. Plus home owners can set up their own green energy systems. If I had the money to buy an new EV, I'd also spend a few extra thousand dollars to invest in 1-2KW wind turbines to charge my batteries and supplement my household power. That would be my ideal setup. My power bill would be next to noting, if anything, plus I'd be saving $1800/year not buying gas.

Ooooh but batteries are dirty... and VW diesels are made by ferries, and their exhaust drips vitamin water that cures cancer and AIDs... and one VW bluemotion can power a cargo ship...

 

Have i said that we need more fuel to keep driving till the end of times ? No. Anyway, im not an expert on bio fuels, so maybe you are right, maybe you are not, but that still does not change the fact that at current times a small economical diesel engine is not as harmful to enviroment as an hybrid or an electric vehicle(exeptions in some cases). Hybrids like i stated before are useless , because they cant get better mpg than a diesel car and arent as efficent as electric cars.

 

Electricity is dirty because 70 precent of it is produced by fossil fuels or from nuclear reactors, so that leaves about 30 precent of energy self sustaining and enviromentally green. Until that is the other way around , its dirty. And betting on a possibility that it will finally be green after 20 years and start acting on it right away is like taking a huge mortgage hoping that you are getting hired next week.


Now, about your house setup, yes, that would be ideal, and in my opinion, that is the only time when EV actually works like it should, and thats why its not as pointless as a hybrid.


And the production of a hybrid car/electric pollutes more than the production of an internal combustion car. (requires more ferries to drive around and spend 20 liters of fuel per km, because the materials are rare and hard to obtain and are needed to build the complex electricity and battery systems)

And, did i say it cures aids and drops viatmin water ? no, i just said that its more enviromentally friendly than a hybrid and in most cases more enviromentally friendly than a electric vehicle. AND if they advance the diesel engines to run more efficiently, the cargo ships would be also more efficent. At the moment, there is nothing that could power them as efficiently.


Also people should stick to their old cars (unless their cars are gas guzzlers), not swap them for new after every 3 years.