and heads straight to electric cars. They plan to use lithium batts. Hopefully this gets going and the price of lithium batts goes down. Here’s the article.
this is some awesome news… 3 more years or so.
“In the hundreds?”
Doesn’t sound very optimistic about mass production.
GM is going to blow these guys away.
well only time will tell, who knows… with the release of the skyline, and if they decide to keep the performance in this car, people will be hard set to not at least want them.
[QUOTE=Jack the R;436]“In the hundreds?”
Doesn’t sound very optimistic about mass production.
GM is going to blow these guys away.[/QUOTE]
Maybe not… Chevy’s Volt concept is just that- concept. Unless there’s news about production that I’m not aware of, Nissan has a HUGE jump on Chevy. The Altima already exists.
Also, I wouldn’t knock the “100s” plan. Chevy could use a lesson from the Japanese car business model. In fact, there are American AND european companies that have consulted Toyota and are still around because of it.
One thing for sure. The Volt is a suhweeeet looking car.
http://www.chevrolet.com/electriccar/
I’m with Feus. Two to three years should tell the tale. And it’ll be about when I’m ready to start shopping for my conversion.
Cheers
The Volt is not just a concept, it’s moved on to the design stage and GM has stated again and again that they are committed to producing it. Read up on it at GM-volt.com
Jack
The EV1 was not just a concept car either. Somehow GM managed to pee that one done their leg. It is not the first time either. Look at the SS corvette, V8 P car (later neutered into the fiero), and a host of others. They have a strong history of screwing up very good ideas.
Lazlow
People are making too much out of the EV1. It would have never sold in the nineties. Rick Wagoner is saying he wished they hadn’t cancelled it now, but the only reason people are interested in hybrids and electrics today is because of gas prices driven up by the idiotic actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. If it hadn’t been for Bushco gas prices would still be low enough that there would be practically zero interest in electrics.
Jack
If there was no demand for them why was there a waiting list to get them? When GM went to crush them there was cash in escrow waiting to buy them and GM refused.
Almost all of the current car companies are afraid of electrics because there is almost no maintenance on them. A LOT of each dealership’s profits comes from maintenance. The manufactures make money every time the dealership does. Just about any way one looks at it, we will all be better off once a significant portion of vehicles are electric.
Lazlow
[QUOTE=Lazlow;449]Jack
If there was no demand for them why was there a waiting list to get them? [/QUOTE]
A waiting list of how many? Tens? Hundreds? Not thousands. EV1’s were expensive vehicles with very limited utility. I’ve heard their range in the winter, with the heater on, was only [I]12 miles.[/I]
[QUOTE=Lazlow;449]
When GM went to crush them there was cash in escrow waiting to buy them and GM refused.[/QUOTE]
Read up about it on Wikipedia. There were good reasons for reclaiming and crushing those cars. If they’d been sold GM would have been obligated under law to keep replacement parts in production ($$), and they would have been subject to other liabilities ($$$).
[QUOTE=Lazlow;449]
Just about any way one looks at it, we will all be better off once a significant portion of vehicles are electric.
Lazlow[/QUOTE]
Maybe. The other side of that coin is, when cars last longer, production will have to drop. When production runs are small, the cost of the product is high. Also, jobs will be lost and each auto manufacturing job supports 9 others in the economy.
Well here is the wiki I read:
GM’s internal research showed very clearly that the EV1’s already perilously low range would be reduced by as much as 50% for use in cold-weather states.
Thats a fair bit more than 12 miles.
Something like 85% of US drivers drive less than 70 miles per day. I would say that would be utility enough. If recharging stations were available at work that would totally elliminate the problem.
The point about them offering to buy the cars was to show that there was demand for the car. In order to even get one you had to go through a series of “qualifying” interviews often lasting over a month. After you were qualified it could take two months or longer to get the car. Does that sound like a good way to sell cars? The last number I had heard was that there were 438 approved people on the waiting list. As far as there marketing campaign, look at the interviews of the time. Nobody had heard of the EV1 until they started crushing them. Even if the commercials had been shown in prime advertising time, they were poor excuses for commercials. Watch them. If one would just go by the adds nobody would buy them(lease).
I think what happened was GM decided to run this project to prove that it could not be done. Except whoops, they came up with something that people wanted. Now what do we do? Sue(read the wiki), so we do not have to make them(which would cut into our maintenance profits).
I hate to tell you this but production is already rapidly dropping. Two plants have closed in St Louis alone. Holding onto old technology to save jobs will just bury
us. The way out (as it always has and always will be) is to move forward. I think at this point it is not a matter of if most vehicles will be electric, but when.
Lazlow
I’m not buying the conspiracy theory. If the demand for a low range ev were so great, Myers/Corbin could have stretched the Sparrow for a 2nd passenger and had an EV1 replacement. That they didn’t and neither did anyone else shows the demand wasn’t really there for one.
I think the batteries just weren’t ready in the 90’s, and they couldn’t have been made ready until we had cheap personal super computers available. No one can argue that the oil companies held up development of the PC.
Ok, all the rest of it aside, what does PC technology have to do with battery research. As a chemist I can tell you that there have not been that many instruments that have changed that much since the 90’s. Easier to use? Sure. Easier to run 100s of samples? Sure. But basic capability (in the inorganic area) has not changed significantly. IR specs are still IR spec, NMR is still NMR, and MS is still MS. As far a molecular simulations, they are still run on the big boys not PCs. While the big boys have advanced at a good pace, it is nothing like the pace of the 80s.
Lazlow
You’re claiming we could have had nanotech batteries without the computer revolution?
1st nanotech batteries are not batteries they are capacitors.
http://pesn.com/2006/02/09/9600232_MIT_Battery/
2nd No, I just said that the computer revolution was over by the 90s. It has been more of an evolution since then. IE that the computer power was more than sufficient for the developments.
I think part of what you are failing to realize is scale. The computers on the moon mission where 4k computers. Most calculators have more memory and computing power than that now. Computers are just a tool. They make complex tasks simpler and very little else. Science tends to grow slowly for long periods and then make major jumps all at once. Basically these jumps are really just due to someone coming along and putting together a bunch of minor discoveries into something that is significant. By the 90s we had more computing power than we really needed to make help make discoveries. As far as chemistry goes there is really very little that has been gained since the 90s(as far as being computer assisted by new development). We can do it faster but we really cannot do more.
Lazlow
I hope if they make a battery like this it will be dependable, I had a HP laptop and the battery only lasted for a year and then it took a puke. I replaced it with a new one and it took a puke a month later. the third lasted another year and then died too!
[QUOTE=new dawn;486]I hope if they make a battery like this it will be dependable, I had a HP laptop and the battery only lasted for a year and then it took a puke. I replaced it with a new one and it took a puke a month later. the third lasted another year and then died too![/QUOTE]
Did you unplug the charger from the puter before it reached full charge? Current Liion technology requires the battery to be fully charged before disconnecting. You can start a charge at any % of discharge, but once plugged in you should let it charge fully. Occasional “short” charges are ok, but they still hurt longevity. I have had a lappy for two years and the battery still has the same capacity as when new. I’ve been adhering to the above protocol fairly strictly.
Cheers.
I hope at least one of the big manufacturers builds a decent electric car in the next 5 years. That is the only way to keep the price down.
there should be other ways of storeing and using electricity other than batteries… maybe a different kind or a different design. like try to figure out how to store the power of a lightning bolt or something ya know? that would keep the range way up there, and if you need more power, there are many ways of getting big charges like that…
i’m not sure how it can be done yet, but i wouldn’t mind looking into something like that. and it shouldn’t be a process just to simply power a car/use batteries… it should be something easy like filling up with gas…
FEUS - I was thinking the same thing, they need a new way to store electricity, and they do, its called the fuel cell. Moreover they could put more funding into solar technology. I remember hearing something about a research institute makeing a breakthroguh in Photovoltaics. They were able to make a soalr panel the could capture and convert the full spectrum of light, not just visible light like they are now. If they could perfect that technology, a standard car covered in those panels would have the potential of powering almost all of the car, maybe the batteries kicking in for hard accel, but otherwise a VERY long, or infinant range EV. Even if photovoltaics could create enough power to power half of an EV, you will still get the ability for the EV to cahrge itself while sitting in a parkinglot…
Here is an article on it: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleId=643C3D30-E7F2-99DF-3108C4CB8A197667
"One cell of just 0.26685 square centimeter (or roughly 0.04 square inch) pumped out 2.6 watts of electricity when bathed at the maximum light concentration"
I really think the industry needs to focus on Photovoltaics, that will prove to be the most usefull outcome.