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Old 01-30-2012, 04:18 PM   #7
HipToBeSquare
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Member#: 119958
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: (IA) flyover cornfield country
Vehicle:
1992 SVX LS-L

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Quote:
Originally Posted by JC View Post
Why?

You can stop going to the gas station and simply plug your car in when you get home.

The motors is MUCH simpler so it requires far less maintenance.

The electric motor has instant torque for those fun electric burnouts and pop out of a corner. I even like the whine they make under high load though YMMV.

The car is also much quieter in normal driving for that extra female approved factor.
what happens when you can't get home. Are you going to have someplace to charge? Most cars carry two or more gallons in reserve... which is usually 40-60 miles to get to a gas station.

Leaf gets 40-60 miles as a matter of full capacity, if everything is ideal.

Are you going to steal or buy someone else's electric current if your car goes flat? Can you plan on taking many hours to charge at household current, without high current for a quick charger? A quick charger is still more than an hour, at more kilowatts than a house usually has service for.

what happens when it is cold, and cabin heat drastically reduces the range, or conversely in the heat, where A/C reduces the range? Those are electrical, not mechanical, on an electric car... they directly usurp the motive energy supply. A gas engine might drop an MPG or two for full heat, or full A/C. What about adding headlights and fog lights, heated seats, and news radio to listen for road conditions to that demand?

What happens if you get stuck, and the batteries run dry? You can't run the engine to generate heat, nor can you power the heater directly once the batteries are flat. If you are in sub-freezing temperatures, it could become life threatening, if you are stranded. You couldn't pay me to risk a blizzard in rural areas in an electric car, and I commute less than 40 miles one way in those conditions during the winter.

What happens if you get into an accident, and the car bursts into lithium-fueled flames just by battery cells being exposed to oxygen by a damaged battery envelope?

How are years of use going to affect the car, with terminal corrosion, and other increases in electrical resistance, as well as a depleting battery?

Tech companies can't build a portable device, or a laptop that any tech company will offer a standard warranty on the battery for more than a year, because the batteries are known to deplete by design over a series of charge cycles. And short-cycling just wastes duration out of the battery's cyclic lifetime. And a car has many, many times more cells to replace, when they do deplete... and they will.

Do you want your electric car to burn down your garage after you bring it home from the body shop, 3 weeks after an accident? Something like Volt batteries are showing the possibility of, and that isn't even with the other limitation of a purely electric car.

Nikola Tesla tried electric battery powered horseless carriages... and the inherent problems with battery capacitance still exist 120 years later.

Electric motors are nice... they suck down the current at higher speed, but they are nice... supplying that current from hundreds to a thousand pounds of batteries on board on board just sucks. Tesla Roadster had 900+lbs of batteries, and couldn't match ~11 gallons of gas in a Lotus Elise, which weighs about 90lbs, including the tank.
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Last edited by HipToBeSquare; 01-30-2012 at 04:25 PM.
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