
A review of the new-fangled "Petrol Powered" car - dabeeeenster
http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/6277/a-review-of-the-new-fangled-petrol-powered-car
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jerf
No, it just doesn't work. Electric cars aren't facing challenges because
they're just too darned new and people just can't deal with the change, they
face issues because on all the metrics that people really care about, electric
cars eke out a small win on a couple of them at the cost of major losses on
quite a few more of them. They really _are_ inferior solutions for many car
use cases, perhaps even the majority of them.

Hopefully that will change, and there's good reasons to believe that's a very
plausible outcome (though not guaranteed), but you won't convince people by
trying to essentially argue the problem is in the people and not the cars,
because frankly, that's _obviously_ not true, to the point of being insulting.
Insulting your listeners is not a good argument technique.

~~~
VLM
"on all the metrics that people really care about"

Minor correction, but its really extremely important to the discussion:

"on all the metrics that journalists really care about"

Another important part is all the gas mfgrs ganging up on their advertising
salesmen and telling them exactly how the review had better read if they want
to continue to get highly profitable advertising.

~~~
smackfu
You don't think range is the single most important concern for regular buyers
of an electric-only car? The article starting this was all about range.

~~~
madaxe
I just want to know who the hell all these people are that need to drive 600
miles a day every day, with no opportunity to stop and charge.

Unless the only employment in the US is "taxi driver", I fail to see the
issue...

~~~
tbrownaw
My parents live about 7 hours away, we go visit them a couple times a year.

My wife got a masters degree a couple years ago, that was 2 hours away a
couple times a week.

If we only had an electric car, either of these would require renting a gas
car for the trip. Which could well be reasonable for a couple times a year,
but probably not if we visited my parents more often (say, every month).

Of course this being the US we both have cars, and there wouldn't be any
problem if only one of them was electric.

~~~
VLM
There is also an interesting childcare aspect in that for logistical reasons
my wife shuffled the kids around when they were little... car seats are
expensive and cumbersome to install and a PITA on a 2dr car, therefore while
the kids were small, my car-seat-less little commuter car was quite literally
limited to my commute only and we always had to take the giant wife-mo-bile on
any (including long) family trips.

In practice I really didn't care, although the bigger the vehicle the less
comfortable I am on the road (high winds scare me in a tall vehicle, I know if
a tall vehicle hits a curb in an accident its rollover time killing everyone
unlike my little car, obviously I have to drive more carefully to avoid
hitting things because its huge, very low performance by all measures compared
to my 2dr sports car, in summary I hate driving big cars). In theory if I
experienced the same limitation due to gas vs electric I'm told over and over
that I'm supposed to experience extreme agony, although I suspect it would be
OK.

The startup lesson is to glom onto existing limitation. Oh you can't take a
road trip because it doesn't have those little car seat mounting bracket
thingies. Not some spooky hidden techno stuff in the engine compartment. Keep
it simple, "Oh you can't road trip because it can't hold a car seat". This is
a simpler marketing message.

~~~
kbutler
Your perception that increased vehicle size decreases safety is backwards.
Larger vehicles (SUVs, minivans) are safer for the occupants, though SUVs
impose more risk on other drivers (because of weight).

[http://www.lbl.gov/Science-
Articles/Archive/assets/images/20...](http://www.lbl.gov/Science-
Articles/Archive/assets/images/2002/Aug-26-2002/SUV-report.pdf)

See graph on page 3: sports cars are far more hazardous to the driver than
larger, lower performance vehicles.

"Of all major vehicle types, minivans have the lowest risk"

"sports cars have the highest combined risk, of all vehicle types studied"

And from another paper: "For automotive crash safety, the determining factor
is size, not weight: larger vehicles have more crush space to absorb impacts.
"

[http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-
Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight...](http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-
Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight_changes_vehicle_size)

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pkorzeniewski
This article feels really forced.. No place for bags in front of the car? You
have a huge trunk. Car heating in traffic jam? Maybe if there is 30'C outside.
Huge amount of mechanical technology? Electric cars are full of far more
complex technology, harder and more expensive to fix. And what about
refueling, why didn't he mentioned "wow, refueling takes only 2 minutes! I
don't have to wait an hour".

I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young and
given some time many of the issues will be fixed, but it doesn't mean people
can't complain about it right now, I think there is still a huge gap between
electric and petrol cars.

~~~
Terretta
> _I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite
> young..._

No. This article is satire, but the best kind as it's grounded in truth.

This article isn't making a point electrics are young, but rather about
journalistic integrity. This article is responding to a couple of Tesla
reviews that went way out of their way to complain about the Tesla and the
idea of electric cars in general, by forcing situations to complain about.

This article's "really forced" gripes mirror the "really forced" gripes of the
journalists complaining about their electric test vehicles, e.g., "What, the
battery gets lower just sitting in traffic?" And yet, as noted above, it's
also truth. If we didn't grow up just accepting fumes killing fellow drivers
behind us, we likely wouldn't jump at a technology that introduced those
downsides out of the blue.

PS. He specifically did mention refueling speed as a plus for the gas car, one
he said wasn't worth it given the downsides.

~~~
Gravityloss
It seems you're almost the only one who understood this.

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rexreed
I think the issue is about expectations of what has been hyped about electric
cars (for better or worse) and the reality of their operation vs. what is
already known and accepted about internal combustion engines (ICE). People
already understand and accept the tradeoffs and costs of using ICE cars, and
the "general joe" is hoping for something that provides a significantly better
/ different experience with their electric car experience.

This has little to do with reality, but regardless, explains why the TNW
article was written as it was and why the parody article analogy doesn't hold
as well. Although I understand that at some point, people need to get more
"real" about what electric cars can truly offer and their real advantages /
disadvantages.

~~~
notimetorelax
Off-topic for non native speakers.

I feel stupid, for the last several days people were using "ICE" acronym in
the posts and I was thinking that it was another brand of electric cars...
Well no, it refers to "Internal Combustion Engine".

~~~
rexreed
Thanks for the tip - I added an acronym decode in the comment above.

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digitalengineer
Too bad BMW couldn't make the bivalent (Hydrogen) engine very effective. One
day I'd like to tank H2O and have my car's engine create the hydrogen using
electrolysis. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7>

~~~
VBprogrammer
Hydrogen cars always seemed like a solution waiting for a problem to me. The
fact is if you can distribute and store hydrogen reasonably well then ordinary
everyday cars could run it today, as easily as they do petrol except they only
produce H20 as exhaust.

If you have to create hydrogen from water and electricity you'd have been just
as well using the electricity directly.

~~~
digitalengineer
Well, for electricity the world still burns coal, gas or destroys nature for
things like dams.

I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at
first, but than the hydrogen that is released takes over. It would be _so
great_ if the only thing cars produce is clean water and oxygen. Imagine
entire city's with clean air. That is something to behold.

~~~
VLM
"I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at
first,"

No talk to a chemist or chemeng. Virtually all industrial H2 comes from steam
reforming natgas. At red heat in the absence of air, natgas basically "burns"
steam generating reformer gas or syngas or whatever which is carbon monoxide
and hydrogen. Then at a much lower "cooking" heat you oxidize the toxic /
poisonous carbon monoxide to CO2 with more steam. Separating out the CO2 is
moderately annoying an energy intensive, too. In summary H2 comes from partial
combustion of natgas, using water as an O2 source. Or another way to phrase it
is you burn the carbon out of methane at great effort leaving you with just
the hydrogen. As you'd imagine its terribly inefficient, even if you fed that
H2 into a 100% eff fuel cell (LOL) you'd get more kilowatt-hours per BTU of
natgas by simply burning the natgas in a turbine. Even a small turbine (hybrid
car sized) would be a higher system efficiency than H2.

In theory is not relevant WRT electrolysis, because in theory you could have a
natgas hybrid turbine in a car, or in theory you could have a mr. fusion
burning the H2. In practice H2 is just extremely highly processed natgas.

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smackfu
Wow, a whole article full of analogies to argue about. Not to mention...

>Exhaust systems need to be replaced every 20,000 miles.

Wha?

>And all this after 80 years of research and development.

I thought this was supposed to a new-fangled petrol car.

~~~
madaxe
Exhaust systems need replacing, usually far more frequently than most people
do. If you've got a rusty mess of an exhaust system, you're just blowing
unburned fuel through your engine.

I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change
to the ICE since its invention apart from the addition of more and more
compensatory systems being introduced to mitigate the shortcomings of the
traditional four-stroke piston-driven engine. The Otto cycle sucks but we
stuck with it because it was the best trade-off between implementation cost
and mechanical performance. 120 years ago.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
> _I think 80 years of R &D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental
> change to the ICE since its invention_

Fuel economy has been greatly improved. That same type of advancement in the
electric world should translate directly into longer range (perhaps faster
charging and/or easy battery swaps). So in 80 years... do you think we'll
still be worried about getting 200 miles out of an electric car? Doubtful.

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jack-r-abbit
I think the point many are missing is that the electric car is not nearly as
developed as today's petrol car. Great advances have been made over the
decades to make today's cars safer, more reliable and more fuel efficient. The
needs to be done with electric cars. It will come. But only if people believe
it can happen. If too many nay-sayers poo-poo all over the advances that have
already been made, confidence is going to be shot. The original review this
was a parody of could have conveyed the same concerns without thumbing their
nose at it. They did seem to have a lot of bias against the car that didn't
need to be there.

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amalag
Lets not forgot the millions of American's who cannot charge a car. I don't
have a garage and my HOA does not allow fixed structures outside. There was a
discussion about changing HOA rules, but it costs thousands of dollars for an
attorney, plus residents have to actually vote on it. We can get 3 people out
of 200 to attend an HOA meeting.

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matte8000
My issue with lekky cars at the moment is one of style. Unless you have a
skwillion pounds to spend, you have to get a prius or leaf or something.

There doesn't seem to be a stylish looking electric on the market yet.
Something that might change once BMW release the i3.

~~~
mertd
Model S isn't that expensive, if you factor in the long term costs. Quoting
from ([http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-
St...](http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-State.html)):

    
    
        Based on a price of $3.75 for gasoline, a 15 mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 25 cents per mile, while a 30mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 12 cents per mile. 
    

Model S gets 3-5c per mile in most states.

~~~
tbrownaw
The trouble is that that $3.75 includes taxes that are supposed to cover road
maintenance. And sooner or later those taxes will have to be replaced by
something else, likely paid when you renew your license plates and likely
designed to be more expensive for cars that use less/no gas.

~~~
mertd
I think the portion of gasoline tax for road maintenance amounts to less than
a cent per mile, while the frequently quoted cost for road maintenance is 5-6c
per mile per car. Thus it is already being funded from other sources.

