Not that website in particular, but the general fact that China has nearly a monopoly on the raw materials needed to manufacture electric cars. That website doesn't make quite that statement, just that China currently has all the production capacity, but he's told me that almost all the rare earth metal deposits are in China. He's not too keen on mass deployment of electric cars in the US. Given how the US automakers have pissed away any shot they had at innovating in this market, it seems unlikely to me that a US company would ever manage to dominate that industry. The tree-hugger in me says "Screw em: buy a foreign electric" but the flag-waver in me says "Hey what about biodiesel?"
Electric cars aren't inherently green - they are only as green as the local source of electricity. Depending on where you are in the US, the percentage of electricity you get from renewable energy varies significantly. If we both have the same identical electric car, but you live on a mostly coal-burning grid, and I live on a mostly geothermal grid, I am a lot greener than you, despite the fact that we drive the same vehicle.
The reasons electric cars are a good idea is that once there is a mass adoption of them, individuals don't have to do anything more; as the grid becomes greener, everybody's car becomes greener. So it allows society to change its fossil fuel consumption much more quickly, vecause bold changes are made in the infrastructure but are transparent to users.
Right. And the transport of electricity to the charging station, the storage of electricity (and the attendant need to carry that storage) and the conversion of that storage back to kinetic energy is inefficient. The internal combustion engine, for its flaws, has evolved into a fairly efficient device.
I'm utterly convinced that electric cars are a red herring. Look instead at our insistence on dragging around behemoths of cars. We could save a tremendous amount of energy by quitting the race-to-the-top phenomena of escalating car size due to the (largely false) perception of safety.
> transport of electricity to the charging station
> storage of electricity
> conversion of that storage back to kinetic energy
I'd love to see actual numbers to back up your statement--I imagine you are right about efficiency, but I'd like to see how bad the numbers are.
We have to drill, transport, and store oil, also. Efficient and dirty doesn't help us much if the dirtiness overshadows the efficiency. Lossy and clean seems preferable, because then you don't have to shed tears over losing energy bought at a steep price in terms emissions.
> We could save a tremendous amount of energy by quitting the race-to-the-top phenomena of escalating car size due to the (largely false) perception of safety.
Actually, we can't because:
(1) Personal transportation isn't that big a fraction of total energy use.
(2) Cars are getting smaller and have been for some time.
The most useful vehicle for fuel savings purposes costs less than $2,000 and gets around 50mpg. Higher mileage doesn't help much and higher price is a killer.
Do the arithmetic using $4/gallon gasoline and a "main car" that gets 20-25mpg. And no, you don't get to replace the main car. Folks have it because they need what it does "often enough" and renting doesn't work.
> escalating car size due to the (largely false) perception of safety.
Actually, it isn't false. All other things being equal, a larger car is safer in an accident. (That's not to say that the extra safety is always enough.) No, a larger car is not necessarily more accident prone.
Electric makes the energy source only loosely coupled to the car. Even if the energy doesn't initially come from clean sources, we can solve that problem iteratively.
Also somewhat impractical - when did the USA last build a nuclear power plant? Where are they going to magic up the people with skills to build and run one? What about the fact that nuclear fuel sources are just as much a limited resource as coal or oil? What about nobody wanting one built near them?
Build a plant, good question. Run a plant, you get those people from the Navy (which runs nuclear plants on every submarine and aircraft carrier). What about fuel sources? We've hardly begun to explore for uranium—nuclear is a stopgap for 100-200 years that doesn't have the drawbacks of fossil fuel.
I don't have an answer for NIMBY, because I don't know politics.
a) It's OK to burn all the coal we can extract and sod the pollution -> build more coal power plants now to use for electric cars. Burn through the coal more quickly.
b) It's not OK to burn all the coal we can extract -> "200 years worth" is a meaningless statment as we have to stop using it, and the sooner the better.
The suggestion was that nuclear wasn't an option because it was as limited as coal. If so, that limit is 200 years, which suggests that the limit isn't all that important.
For all the good ideas, I still haven't heard of a car producer planning to sell a car with replaceable batteries.
Also what I don't think is said enough: electric cars should be better then conventional. Much better acceleration, better reliability, less noise... the list goes on.
What about batteries that are recyclable? BYD has created a plug-in hybrid with batteries that use nontoxic electrolytes. This should cut out many of the recycling problems we have with current batteries:
The car goes 60+ mi before needing to use the gas engine. I haven't done much research on performance/reliability/safety though the article does say the BYD cars lack the polish of Toyota's.
Replaceable as in "gas-station replaceable". With a top that's easy to remove and a mechanism to take them out and put another set in in less then 5 minutes. Without this, most of the ideas in the video don't really work.
:) Maybe my mastery of English isn't what I thought it is.
I mean people should expect electric cars as an improvement, not as a compromise. So when they come, they should (as in they most likely will) be better then what we're used to.
http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=16620
Not that website in particular, but the general fact that China has nearly a monopoly on the raw materials needed to manufacture electric cars. That website doesn't make quite that statement, just that China currently has all the production capacity, but he's told me that almost all the rare earth metal deposits are in China. He's not too keen on mass deployment of electric cars in the US. Given how the US automakers have pissed away any shot they had at innovating in this market, it seems unlikely to me that a US company would ever manage to dominate that industry. The tree-hugger in me says "Screw em: buy a foreign electric" but the flag-waver in me says "Hey what about biodiesel?"