I assure you a Tesla will not smoke a E63. It might feel like it due to lack of noise.

And the E63 will do it all day long with 4 doors, 4 people in the cabin, 4-matic, and luggage in the trunk, AC on high music blasting.

With only 10 minutes between refueling!

[Link: mbusa.com]

[Link: teslamotors.com]

The Teslas are good looking though.

P.S. I hate the sound of the new F1 cars with the new ERS systems

[Link: formula1.com]

I really like Electric cars, but they are not going to save us as they depend on oil just as much as any other product produced. there are 27 gallons of oil just in the tires alone, there there are the plastics and the energy required to mine the raw materials, transportations cost and thousands of other interconnected businesses and services that all depend on a system that is built on oil.

If you took all the gas burners off the road and replaced them with electric vehicles the system would collapse, because everything depends on a very precarious balancing act. It is very expensive to bring oil to market in the many forms it ultimately takes from cosmetics, fertilizer,  to medicine, fuel, lubricants and plastics.

If you were to cut the demand for gasoline by 1/3 the result would be an economic nightmare since a refined gallon of oil is broken down into many parts in the process, each of which is utilized by industry in a different way, if you use a 1/3 less of gas you now have a 1/3 portion that becomes an escalating  surplus, which drives the oil market down, which reduces profits and therefore forces the refiners to spread the cost across all the other industries  to make up the difference.

This means that a great many products such as medicines and plastics will go up dramatically in cost. In time you will have so much surplus that gas will become a waste product just as it was before the invention of the motor vehicle. There will be many meetings by congress as to what to do with the hundreds of millions of gallons of excess gas (which has a limited useful shelf life) the refiners probobly wont actualy put the gas through the full refining process so as to save costs, so you will end up with a low grade high polluting substance, people will propose using it to power power plants and so forth.

The end result will without question be economically grim. the bottom line is. With out oil being produced in quantity you will have no electric cars, no wind turbines, no nuke plants, no hydro dams, no electronics. And no one anywhere has any sort of legitimate exit strategy to turn to when the oil industry collapses, and it will sooner than you think, not because they will run out of oil, but because they are loosing control of the peak production balancing act.

The grid will be just fine.

The cycle of purchasing vehicles will take decades before everyone would switch over. It's not like there won't be clear indicators of where and when.

Both sides will receive incentives to buy the cars as well as improve the grid.

The whole argument about how the energy is produced is silly. It is far more efficient to mass produce in very large amounts and distribute it is no different than any other product.

The volt is cool but is far less efficient in being a mobile power plant

Even Hydro has emissions in the manufacture and maintenance of the hydro plant. As stated clearly above, it's in interrelated system, and while it's amazing to consider, gasoline really was a waste product before automobiles found a way to use it! What's worse than using gasonline? Having it created as a waste product! Then it must be stored forever or burned up!

What are your thoughts on this: At least in my area of California, recharging stations do not charge anything to the electric vehicle owners at time of charge to charge up. Just how much am I, with only my antiquated 2005 Ford Van, paying for other people to keep their electron tank full? And is this a national system?

I am not too sure about that.

1) Yes in an insane example where everyone runs out and replaces their car with an electric car that might be true. But assuming that it will happen is a bit nuts since cars are a big ticket item and so even if we assumed the government passed a law tomorrow on a whim that only allowed new cars being sold to be electric it would still take well over a decade for everyone to be driving an electric car.

2) electric cars don't use that much electricity, that is why here you have chargers that only cost 2.50 per use (and you can fill up for that). For example if we go on Tesla's site if you have the dual charger that does 240V 80A 1h of charge is 20 kW and that translates to roughly 58 Miles of driving

3) you are looking at it too simply. The electrical grid is not like your shop where you say "we need more employees or we have to not take some jobs" if demand grows all of a sudden by a lot because there is only so much any employee can do. The electrical grid is variable and is build like roadways (except a lot better). You have that large highway going into the city because it is needed during rush hour and not because it is needed 24/7 so off peak hours it can be relatively empty. The equivalent of high traffic on the roads during peak hours when it comes to electricity would be brown outs and possibly blackouts but they don't happen often, because at peak times when the power plants are running full steam they produce enough but since electricity can't really be stored (and I know the irony of the statement since cars and their battery are essentially storing electricity to be used when driving) that means that production is directly connected to usage and so capacity is turned down. If we assume somewhat smart car meters in peoples home you could have a lot of people charging their car with no need to increase the capacity of electrical consumption. Let me go with a simple example you have 25 people that are watching their TVs that use 800 Watts/hour at 8PM, if none of them are watching TV at 2AM and someone is charging his car at that time the amount of electricity needed is the same and the car replaces those 25 TVs and Tvs are not even the big hogs in the home, I used them as example since it deals with a subject that we are familiar with and it is easy to find 25 households watching TV at the same time (let's say 8PM). But if we go with a 2KWh clothes dryer (low end) one car charging at night would be the same as 10 people using their dryer at the same time during the day and if we go with a 5kWh dryer (one at the higher end) that would mean we need 4 people using that dryer at the same time to match the electricity needed for that car charging at night when they are not using the dryer.

agree

Typical argument that a $1 calculator can destroy.

Let's say that an electric vehicle and a standard gas vehicle require the same amount of oil to produce and maintain. They both hit the showroom floor and get sold the same day.

The first week passes and the gasoline vehicle hits the gas station. Electric vehicle just won that argument and its only been a week! Wait until 5-10 years pass.

yeah but I see that a bit of a fools proposition.

1) there is a lot of electricity that is from green sources and that means that it is wasted when it is not needed but can be produced since there is no human control on the elements. For example a hydro electric dam can't decide to leave a lot more water than makes sense out (to make more electricity) because it might flood areas downriver, on the other hand if electricity is not needed they can't go past a point of closing the gates) because they still need to let the amount of water that makes sense for the river past that point as well as it might flood what is up river. The same with wind ( how many windmills you build is important but you can't control if the wind is blowing hard but the electricity is not needed.

2) none green power plants that use none renewable resources are much more efficient than a car engine and a lot cleaner too. So even if we forget about # 1 and assume that all the extra power needed is an extra draw on these bad power plants, it will still be better. To make it simple, let's take an example where a car gets X miles to a gallon, if I we replace it with a power plant that makes W Watts to the gallon and an electric car that does M miles to the Watt for that one gallon used by the plant to make electricity the electric car will go more miles. Second that plant that uses gas will have a chimney so the exhaust will be higher and not at the height were it is bad for peoples health, and due to stricter regulations that exhaust of the plant will be cleaner than the exhaust of that car for the same number of gallons of gas used.

(also there is a reason that gas (or as said in this report liquid petroleum) is one of the least used sources for power plants. It makes sense for cars since it is easily transportable and used but not as good as other none renewable sources at keeping a motor running at a cost)
[Link: eia.gov]

I hope Honda has a lot of success with their fuel cell powered design. It seems like a more viable option than a plug in vehicle.

[Link: automobiles.honda.com]

Gasoline as waste, history [Link: books.google.com]
 

Do you have a link? I don't think gas was ever considered a waste product (but I don't know). I can't see a reason to refine it if it is just meant to be thrown away ;)



that is where your theory falls apart. Even if we assume there was a time in the past when gas was considered a waste product, it does not make sense for it to be in the future even if we assume that all vehicles are 100% electric. Think about it, why would they pay to store it forever or just burn it up for nothing when someone could take all that free waste product gas and use it to make electricity.


Here they charge (fixed cost of 2.50), but let's face it the electric cost will be minimal. You are thinking of your car where it costs a lot for the gas, you can only do it at the station and it is fast at the station. Even if the guys battery was completely dead when he gets at the station (because the guy is that cheap and wants to use the free electricity to fill up), it might be around 10$ to fill up one of the bigger batteries in a place with high electricity prices and even if the station is like the 400V supercharger (as opposed to a 240V charger) it would take a long time to charge so unless there is a reason to leave the car for a while at the station it does not make sense to over use the stations just because they are free. My guess with our relatively low electricity rates, the fact that here they are run by the electric company and so I should not even look at what I pay but go with what it costs to produce it, that the 2.50 charged probably makes money to the utility.

cool thanks

your point is right on, but you are still missing the point a bit. Like RTI pointed out (but not in so many words) it takes two barrels of crude to make one of gas. The rest (that other barrel) is used for other stuff (plastics, other fuels, medicine....). You are right that a gas powered car will need a lot more barrels of crude over the life of a gas powered car and there is no need to assume the electric will need more to be build but since for every two gallons of crude that is needed to build the car there is also more or less a free gallon of gas that comes with it, the car will be able to run for a while without needing more crude to make more gas.

His analysis is also missing two more things that the gas could still be used (i.e. a power plant that uses gas for example t make some of the electricity) and maybe the gas that is not used can be used for something else (refined differently) so better used.

His economics is also not completely sound. He looks at something like this and thinks the price of crude is fixed and if you throw away the gas the rest will need to make up the difference (for example double in price). But that is not completely true since gas is one of the major driving forces in the price of crude. If gas were to become worthless the price of crude would also drop by a lot. In the end each component will be priced depending on the component price that makes sense like it is now and not as a % o f the total price of a barrel.

Yes but you have to really think about this carefully. The corporate mandate is growth and profit. We all know that oil companies are really big on profit, but so is the US and local governments who place very heavy taxes on vehicle fuel.

Maybe I should put it this way.

Taxes on cigarettes are used among other things to fund a very large anti smoking government engine. If everyone stopped smoking the anti smoking engine would run out of tax money to fund it thousands of people lose their jobs, and the people who recived money from those people also suffer a loss on down the chain. So then the gov not wanting to cast its own to the side and suffer bad voting press will in a manor of speaking retool the agency to do something else all at tax pay expense. This is an example of the rule of unintended consequences.

The whole electric car issue is full to the top with future unintended consequences. The very obvious unintended consequences relate to Oil as I mentioned before. If the price drops so does the incentive to drill and pump, if you have less supply the price can go back up per barrel, remember the oil industry is run by cartels who have an oligopoly agreement just like banks with each other so that they can fix global prices.

So OK now they have the price of oil back up but the unintended consequence is that refining is down in proportion to the reduction in pumping, now you have less available ingredents for non fuel products like plastics & lubricants used in electric cars.

Another unintended consequence  to consider is that the oil companies will simply sell more crude to china and other emerging industrialized nations that are not totally on the electric bandwagon yet, with the same result, leaving the USA with less crude to refine.

Personally I love electric cars I think everyone should have one or two.

However, before we can become a truly electric society, we will have to figure out how to move away from being a totally oil based society

 

A friend has one, and says Tesla has established "super charge" charging stations all around town here. Totally charges the car in 30 minutes --- for free!


Someone here,(who has probably never driven or rode in one) called the Tesla's POS.


Hmmm I guess that is why they got the highest rating for a car ever by Consumer Reports, calling them a nearly perfect car, and a rating of 99 out of 100?