Tesla Motors is Circling The Drain

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
Does anyone here own an electric car? I've read some articles that the electrics didn't fair so well during the cold snap.

And that Musk is sending out an software upgrade to help deal with cold temps.

And everybody is disappointed in panasonic batteries.
 

Thread Starter

Glenn Holland

Joined Dec 26, 2014
703
Does anyone here own an electric car? I've read some articles that the electrics didn't fair so well during the cold snap.

And that Musk is sending out an software upgrade to help deal with cold temps.

And everybody is disappointed in panasonic batteries.
Cold weather requires the heater and defroster to be turned on and that will run the batteries down in a jiffy. Keep in mind that a gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of 33 KWH so you can get a lot more heat just burning the gas in a heater.

Furthermore, all the big automakers experimented with electric cars back in the 1990s and the market just wasn't there. So why does anyone believe this shovel with a rope handle will be any better?
 

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
A lot of the complaints was that they couldn't get in the car. Maybe they depended a little too much on simulation.
 

Thread Starter

Glenn Holland

Joined Dec 26, 2014
703
If I was getting a few $$$ Billion from the government to develop a new type of automotive propulsion system (electric VS gasoline), I would go for fuel cells instead of batteries. Fuel cells can be run on natural gas which is a lot more available than the huge amount of electric power.needed to recharge batteries.
 

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
H fuel cell car..........64% efficiency. With free pure H source. None known. Non H cells with reformer much smaller.

Gasoline car......20%.

Electric car with fossil charging......26% with solar and hydro charging......65%.

Horse......

According to Eric Morris, in 1898 delegates from around the world gathered to discuss urban planning. The issue they were "desperate" to solve was what to do about horse manure.

Rutgers University has a fact sheet about horses and manure. It states that a 1000 lb horse will produce about 9.1 tons of manure a year. Additionally, each horse needs about 10 to 20 pounds of bedding each day. If you assume 15 pounds of bedding per day on average, that's 2.7 tons per year. Combine this with the amount of manure each horse produces and it's 11.8 tons of waste each year. This excludes horse urine not absorbed by bedding which adds a further waste burden to the environment.

One million horses will produce 11.8 million tons of solid waste each year. Disposing of that is a massive environmental problem and why the delegates to the 1898 conference in New York were desperate about the waste produced by horses. With so much manure to dispose, it ground water can easily become contaminated.

Additional problems produced by horses are what to do with the numerous quantities of horses that will die each year.

The removal of horses from urban environments has resulted in one of the major improvements in human health. The permanent removal of horse manure from urban environments has significantly reduced the amount of disease carrying flies in cities and towns. Also, people in cities and towns no longer have to deal with smell of horse manure and urine or avoid having to step in horse manure or urine as they walk around town.

The other aspect of horse manure is that horses need to eat. According the Eric Morris, each horse needs about 1.4 tons of oats and 2.4 tons of hay each year. That's 3.6 tons of food each year. Rutger's University uses a figure of 25 pounds of dry feed per horse each day; that's 4.56 tons per year. Growing that much food for horses will require a lot of land.



So.....the obvious Gaia solution is travel by river using sail. We should be building rivers, not cars.
 

Alec_t

Joined Sep 17, 2013
15,149
One million horses will produce 11.8 million tons of solid waste each year. Disposing of that is a massive environmental problem
Nah. Just burn it to power the turbo-generators needed to produce all that battery-charging electricity. Brings a new meaning to 'horse-power'.
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
18,134
If I was getting a few $$$ Billion from the government to develop a new type of automotive propulsion system (electric VS gasoline), I would go for fuel cells instead of batteries. Fuel cells can be run on natural gas which is a lot more available than the huge amount of electric power.needed to recharge batteries.
You'd only do that if your goal was to burn money at a faster rate for a less certain outcome. Existing technology for converting the energy in natural gas to propulsion at your wheels is far ahead of using a fuel cell to do that.

One source:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-fuelcell-vehicle-great-idea-theory-paul-martin
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,438
You'd only do that if your goal was to burn money at a faster rate for a less certain outcome. Existing technology for converting the energy in natural gas to propulsion at your wheels is far ahead of using a fuel cell to do that.

One source:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-fuelcell-vehicle-great-idea-theory-paul-martin
Fuel cells?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/possum-was-living-in-unused-1-million-taxpayer-funded-bus/
A possum in Southern California has been relocated from living in the belly of a zero-emission bus that was never put into service, CBS Los Angeles reports. According to the station, more than a million dollars in state funding paid for the bus in Burbank, outside Los Angeles.
...
The board told the station that knowing the technology didn't work helped develop other fuel-efficient methods. A taxpayer advocacy group told the station it was a waste of money.

"The government doesn't care because they coerced the money out of taxpayers," said Susan Shelley of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. "It's not their money. They're just happy to write the check, and then they're done. They can say, 'Look, we funded this,' but it's useless. It's a waste."
 

shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,049
You guys are funny. You seem to think that all of the money thrown at the defense department comes up with a working weapon the first or every time. But complain when money is spent to help everyone.
Or the money still given to any other form of energy. Like oil or gas. Through subsidies that were put in place a century ago and never removed.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,438
You guys are funny. You seem to think that all of the money thrown at the defense department comes up with a working weapon the first or every time. But complain when money is spent to help everyone.
Throwing all the money in the universe at the problem won't change the laws of thermodynamics. I would never use the DOD in any example of product development success related to efficiency.
 

Norfindel

Joined Mar 6, 2008
326
Hydrogen cars aren't very efficient at all, even when considering a charging station that produces hydrogen by electrolysis on the station itself, so that there isn't any transport involved:




Currently, hydrogen is produced almost entirely from natural gas, anyways. But that's a fossil fuel, and the process isn't 0 emissions.
With the low efficiency of an hydrogen fuel cell car, a lot of electricity would be required when using electrolysis. Certaintly more than a BEV would require. However, they don't need to add a lot of weight in batteries to get more range, and the recharge speed is quite fast.

The electrical grid can be upgraded. It isn't happening over night, but it will need to be done if the number of BEVs on the street increases. If it's what is required, then so be it. At some point, fossil fuels are going to be depleted, and judging by the changing climate, we can't really afford to continue burning them like there is no tomorrow.
And there are clean ways of producing electricity.

Every kind of EV has its pros and cons. It's substantially different technology, and it requires changes in infraestructure. None of them will be an easy transition from gasoline.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
33,075
Just the first one on this page, it is repeated often in this thread, by a few other people. Or was this another of your jokes?
I don't recall a bunch of people in this thread claiming that the defense department comes up with a working weapon system every time money is thrown at it. But I'm not going to go back through and read 150+ posts to see. Since you clearly have a much better memory for that sort of stuff, perhaps you could provide links to just two or three of the posts in this thread where someone makes that claim.
 

shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,049
I don't recall a bunch of people in this thread claiming that the defense department comes up with a working weapon system every time money is thrown at it.
No you totally missed what I mean. The defense dept. , petroleum industry and etc were examples. Examples of where tons of money over many many years, don't always come up with a solution, the first time or any time for that matter. But the electric car industry/ development in it's short period of time and small amount of money spent is a failure to some in the thread.

And you guys know full well that what is/has happened with the defense dept. is done mostly by outside contractors, not the dept. itself, but it's the government that's throwing the money at it. Money that could be put to better use for humanity.
So I think is funny, as in strange, to spend money on one thing but be totally against spending it on something that could be beneficial.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,438
I'm opposed to the DOD wasting money on weapons systems but it is one of the few things we should expect governments to spend money on.

My primary criteria is if it's likely to be successful not just possible. Lots of pie in the sky things would be beneficial but we generally don't waste government money on mainly private enterprise for profit systems after researching the basic science of its possibility and after testing the practically of a technology from that research. Large automobile companies around the world are spending plenty on every possible type of EV because of a profit motive and the EV market gets plenty of our tax money in subsidies today.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CarSubsidies_final_web.pdf
 
Top