Discover Brilliant Q&A: Bill Williams of Zenn Motors
A chat with Zenn about NEVs and EEstor 3
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Posted 2:19 PM on 4 Oct 2007
by David Roberts -
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David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/david_h_roberts.
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WWAGD?! Posted 6:44 am
04 Oct 2007
Kids, Dont' Forget To Bring Your Bike Helmets
Nice to know no effort is spared to protect your toddler.
John Bailo
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theBike45 Posted 8:37 pm
04 Oct 2007
Everyone's waiting for EEStor
Unfortunately few think it will work. If it does, then the real automakers will have a means of building all-electrics right npow. Otherwise it will be plug-in hybrids for quite some time. There is no good argument for the need for all-elctrics as expressed by the obviously biased ZENN motor company. For now, their vehicles meets the needs of almost no one,and are not viable alternatives to gasoline cars. And ZENN's false claim that electric cars get rid of pollution implies that electrical generation doesn't
produce any, an absurd notion and convenient lie. The idea of solar panels recharging cars is also nonsense. The cost would be prohibitive for anything except a PR stunt. Photovoltaics is the absolute worst method of producing carbon free electricity, and he knows, or should, know it.
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:04 am
05 Oct 2007
The only reason our cars are not
electric is for want of a competitively dense energy source to feed the electric motor. The electric motor is over a century old. When we get mass marketed battery or whatever packs with controllers and chargers for them that are priced low enough and have enough power, most cars can be converted into a plug-in. The Zenn car would be obsoleted unless it had sole access to that enegy source.
Electric power steering and power brakes would allow a car to run on all electric until the battery gets low. At that point your engine can come on and your car becomes conventional with an alternator powering the pumps instead of drive belts. How much gas you use would depend on your driving envelope. If you never use the plug-in feature, your car would get worse mileage than one without the electric motor and battery. Hopefully people would not pay for the retrofit or package if that was their driving profile, but if it was cool to have the package, they might do it regardless because that is how people are wired.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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