Killing the electric car, again: Part I
Is CARB up to its old tricks? 17
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Posted 4:47 PM on 13 Mar 2008
by Joseph Romm -
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Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
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theBike45 Posted 1:12 pm
13 Mar 2008
Earl the Pearl and utter nonsense. Again.
We over here at the EV society get a good laugh whenever morons like Earl here continue the fantasy that California ever had the power in its hands to create a viable alternative to the gasoline car. Certainly their definition of "zero emissions" was totally bogus and really, really, braindead. I note that the other day two seperate studies indicated that electric cars can actualy increase pollution. Whether they are technically correct or not, the point is obvious : zero emission cars as defined by California in their law were frauds. They also had the enormously
damaging effect of devaluing plug-in hybrids, the only technology that is approaching practicality
as a method of electric propulsion. If mentally challenged folk like Earl here were to actually
analyze the effect sof a 40 mile plug-in like GM's Chevy VOLT, they would see that the Volt is all that's needed to destroy any more need for gasoline : the liquid fuel requirements for a fleet of Volt-like vehicles would easily be satisfied by ethanol. Earl can keep fantasizing about the magical properties of a zero emissions law and keep up the illusion that if you just get it right, it will produce millions of zero emissions vehicles. What's propelling the plug-in forward are battery technologies that arose, without the least bit of help or impetus from any silly zero emissions "law." We are all laughing hysterically here at Earl and the logical contortions that are needed for him to continue to cling to his religious belief in zero emission laws. Earl, you're embarassing all of us other humanoids. Zero emission laws suck and have always done so and have damaged progress towards electrical propulsion.
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bigTom Posted 1:53 pm
13 Mar 2008
All oil will be consumed anyway.
I'm of the opinion that electric (or PHEV) vehicles will increase -not decrease GHG. Why do I have this contartian view? I think essentially all of the worlds economically accessable oil will be pumped, and consumed, not matter what we do. Adding BEV, simply means that we increase the total number of vehicles -not reduce emissions. Emissions might be displaced, probably some oil consumption will be displaced from the developed world to the developing world. But total CO2 emissions from oil, are fixed by oil availability. And we have just increased electric demand.
Now this doesn't mean that PHEV/BEV's should not be pursued. Merely that that by itself this won't lesson GW. It will however reduce pressure for biofuels, unconventional oil, and coal to liquids. It will also buy time for the world to come up with low carbon energy -i.e. the world economy can remain healthier on decreasing oil supply longer.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:01 pm
13 Mar 2008
Lutz busted again
"it is the infeasibility of FCVs that is being used as the excuse for delaying clean air."
This is why Lutz recently dissed FCVs. He boosted BEVs in doing it though. You got it right bike, Lutz boosted BEVs in dissing FCVs in order to delay plugin hybrids like the Volt for as long as possible.
I saw through his diversion...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/3/12/ ...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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BlackbirdHighway Posted 12:08 am
14 Mar 2008
They Can't Stop Me
Screw CARB, screw the naysayers, I'm buying an electric car anyway! And I don't even live in California.
Further, I'm putting up solar panels, and I'm driving on sunshine. Screw OPEC! Screw Exxon!
They can't stop me!
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Solar John Posted 12:28 am
14 Mar 2008
Volt now, BEV soon
Amaz...
Lutz is right to be excited about the possibility of 300 mile range BEV, as long as he stays on track with the Volt.
You've got it right Blackbirdhighway. I've had enough of negativity. Just do it!
Solar John
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joelado Posted 1:56 am
14 Mar 2008
Post this on other Blog sites like the Daily Kos
Ever since I learned about you from the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? I have been a fan. It really takes guts to stand up and tell it like it is Joe. I am a paying member of Plug-in America and I knew of them from even before their days protesting in front of the GM facility in Burbank, California. I have also been watching you. Since I first say the movie and am very happy that I am not the only one talking about the shortcomings of the hydrogen vehicle. The shortcomings being something I discovered when doing research on hydrogen for my master's thesis, which was on alternative fuel's entry into the marketplace.
I have read what CARB has posted on their Web site. What had surprised me most was that in the draft they have struck out all notations that used to apply to time periods past 2008. I didn't want to comment on that because most other commentary seems to state that things are preserved into the future. Can you comment on that change and whether or not that striking out of future time periods is going to affectively kill the ZEV mandate beyond 2008?
There are two big problems I see with the mandate. The first is the provision that allows automakers to take credit for ZEVs installed in other states for the mandate, which is supposed to be a California law. This, I believe is a poor provision with bad affect for Californians. How the provision would hurt California as it is currently written is this, if California gets let's say 100 ZEVs than the affect of having these vehicles concentrated in California would be 100% of the 100 vehicles. If those vehicles are distributed let's say to 10 states equally that have signed on to the ARB proceedings including California and the automakers are given credit for creating these vehicles for the California ARB ZEV law, then the beneficial affect of the law and the creation of the vehicles would be diluted to 10% in California. California is the state that has the poorest air quality in the nation and it doesn't benefit at all if 90% of the credit for creating ZEVs is actually working to benefit other states.
What I would like to do with your help is to submit comment to the California ARB that should adjust the language so that instead of referring to California in the law, refer to rather to "the state." Therefore California would get the full benefit of the mandate, the 100 vehicles, with out having it diluted to the other participating states, California only getting 10 vehicles but the manufacturers getting credit for 100 vehicles under the provision. This would benefit the other states as well because the other states would have the full benefit of the mandate as it was conceived in the first place.
Another thing that I would like to have added to the comment for the March 27th meeting is that the CARB report actually states that it has reduced the requirements of the mandate because of the hardship it may cause the automakers. This to me is a violation of the fiduciary duty ARB members have to the public good. California has the highest number of deaths related to repertory illness, greater than the deaths reported by all other states combined and by 150%. Responsibility for the breathing health of the California citizenry is the expressed mission of the Air Resources Board. Why are they taking into consideration the economic affect it would have on the polluters? It seems, Joe that ARB is saying that maintaining a rate of 6,000 deaths a year is OK, because to reduce that number would be too great an economic burden on the auto makers. Who do our government officials think they represent? The auto makers or the citizens of California. I know that this now sounds a little radical, but I am not a radical, I am just a person who is getting increasingly incensed by these things as I become more and more aware of them. The automakers should not recant on their fiduciary duties to their stockholders either, but rather should figure away to produce the cars and remain profitable. The small numbers of vehicles that CARB has put forth as requirements to meet the mandate is one clear problem in this scenario. The numbers are too small for the automakers to put enough resources behind making ZEVs full production vehicles and therefore they remain experimental and loose money. At full production an EV takes literally a thousand fewer steps to manufacture then a comparatively simple internal combustion car. Batteries may cost more, but production costs are far less in a BEV. The "engine" of an electric car has three basic parts, a stator, a rotor and windings that compared to an internal combustion engine with thousands of parts. The savings in a BEV come form the cost of labor to put them together.
Four years ago I bought an electric car off of Ebay. Thinking I just drove off a cliff, I worried about a bunch of things. Where would I go to get it repaired? Would its range be long enough to make the car useful? Would the cost of electricity be very high? After having driven the car on a daily basis for the 4 years and saving my self somewhere around 6 thousand dollars in fuel costs, and countless dollars in not having to lube, tune up, grease and filter the thing, I can honestly say that electric is the way to go. It is clean, quiet, simple to repair and the 50 mile range meets all of my daily use needs. I have two other regular cars that are now killing me at the gas pump. I wish like heck that I could have another electric car to replace one of those. The future is electric; it is just a matter of time and the effective placement of laws to push automakers to provide what the public wants.
Thank you again for your post. Keep doing what you are doing, Joe, and I will remain a loyal fan.
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acampbell Posted 3:38 am
14 Mar 2008
Electric Car Addiction
I hate to break it to you guys, but I've been driving electric cars for about eight years and I'm totally addicted. I find gas stations distasteful and places to be avoided if at all possible.
1 Car = 200 trees
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amazingdrx Posted 3:38 am
14 Mar 2008
My point John
Lutz is touting BEVs as a diversion, to keep the Volt off the market. He'll say why should we mass produce plugin hybrids with 300 mile range, quick charge batteries righhjt around the corner?
He wants to keep gas guzzling going as long as possible, to get as much money and power accumulated by his cohorts in the oil bidness.
When in reality cars like the Volt are the perfect transition to pure electric transportation. As batteries get better and better, the plugin range of the Volt will get longer.
The Volt can start out with an ICE backup generator, then go to soliod oxide fuel cell/turbine backup generator that runs on any liquid or gaseous fuel and is 70% efficient.
Meanwhile battery development will allow smaller and smaller backup generation to do the backup job. Eventually the backup will wither, like a vestigial limb, no longer needed by an evolving species. and batteries that charge in 5 to 10 minutes and get 300 mile range will replace them.
But that will take maybe 10 to 20 years of development and the buildout of quick charge "gas" pumps. The high current necessary for quick recharge will take millions of these high tech recharging stations. That makes immediate roll out of BEVs impractical, Lutz knows this.
Plugin hybrids, like the Volt, can charge from regular outlets in a few hours and fuel up as usual at gas stations. They are reasdy to roll right now. As Audi and toyota are proving with new plugin models. Lutz is intentionally delaying the Volt, like he intentionally killed the EV-1.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 3:46 am
14 Mar 2008
Great "a"
But for most people it is impractical to get stranded when unexpected extra driving miles are necessary. They would need to calla tow truck to get home to plugin again.
Plugins like the Audi have backup internal combustion when the battery range is exceeded. Saving 90% of liquid fuel use on average and allowing the same utility as a regular ICE vehicle.
Even talking about the Volt anymore is feeding Lutz' disinformation campaign. Boycott GM until they fire Lutz and their present board. They ARE the problem.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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joelado Posted 4:23 am
14 Mar 2008
What are you some kind of idiot?
"We over here at the EV society get a good laugh whenever morons like Earl here continue the fantasy that California ever had the power in its hands to create a viable alternative to the gasoline car."
What EV society do you belong to so I can remind myself not to join? California succeeded in getting thousands of cars on their streets (leased not sold), but then when ARB gutted the ZEV mandate in 2003 all the automakers took their electric cars back and crushed them. Signifying the biggest idiot move by ARB that they have ever done. Those cars, one of them being the EV1 by General Motors, traveled well over 100 miles on a charge. The EV1 having the distinction of being the best vehicle GM ever made. An electric vehicle designed to be so from the ground up, it could get 160 miles on a charge with its NiMH battery pack. The RAV4 EV, a conversion of the RAV4 gasoline car, made to comply with the ZEV mandate could get 130 miles to a charge on Panasonic NiMH batteries. Batteries that were in essence 1990s technology. Panasonic had announced in 2003, or there abouts, that it had made a 30% reduction in weight and increased the energy density of its NiMH batteries which would have given it something like 170 miles range, and if those batteries were to be used in the true EV the EV1, its range would have been somewhere around 208 miles per charge. I get around fine with an electric vehicle that gets 50 miles on a charge. I wonder where I would be able to go if I had 200 miles on a charge? The beach is only 150 miles from where I live.
"Certainly their definition of "zero emissions" was totally bogus and really, really, raindead. I note that the other day two seperate studies indicated that electric cars can actualy increase pollution."
Read the studies and not the biased stupid articles. They said if and only if all the electric cars were to charge up on old unsophisticated coal-burning power plants would they possibly pollute more. California's grid is much cleaner than most states, nearly all the electricity of Washington State and Oregon come from hydroelectric dams. The grid across the United States is less than 50% coal, so really, with a fair distribution of EVs across the country you would clearly see a strong net gain on lowering pollution. Need I remind you that EVs are the only vehicles today that can get their energy from completely clean wind, solar and hydro? No gasoline car or hybrid vehicle can do that. None.
"They also had the enormously damaging effect of devaluing plug-in hybrids, the only technology that is approaching practicality as a method of electric propulsion. If mentally challenged folk like Earl here were to actually analyze the effect sof a 40 mile plug-in like GM's Chevy VOLT, they would see that the Volt is all that's needed to destroy any more need for gasoline : the liquid fuel requirements for a fleet of Volt-like vehicles would easily be satisfied by ethanol."
Oh? I am sorry. You really are an idiot. Must be tough on you? The air resources board is now considering plug-in hybrids for the first time. There wasn't anyone offering plug-in hybrids at the time of the first mandate. GM had put forth the prototype of the EV1 the Impact at the LA auto show and the then CEO of the company said that they were going to make a full production vehicle out of it. CARB saw the vehicle and realized that the major automakers could build a zero emissions vehicle and so it put in a mandate so that all the automakers would have to supply the market with some ZEVs if they were going to sell any vehicles in California. GM is putting forth the Volt, which is great, but GM executives have told Chelsea Sexton that if it hadn't been for the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? they would have never come back the idea of a range extended electric like the Volt. At some point in the future when battery technology makes it possible to have a 300 mile range vehicle, you will see the major automakers dump the internal combustion engine to save themselves buckets of money. Just you watch and see.
"Earl can keep fantasizing about the magical properties of a zero emissions law and keep up the illusion that if you just get it right, it will produce millions of zero emissions vehicles. What's propelling the plug-in forward are battery technologies that arose, without the least bit of help or impetus from any silly zero emissions "law." "
Similar to what was said in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?, it was a law that got people to ware seat belts, it was a law that took lead out of gasoline, it was a law that required car manufacturers to install catalytic converters and it is going to be a law that will get EVs in the show rooms at dealerships. It may be a carbon tax, it may be tougher pollution standards, but you can bet it's going to be a law.
What propelled plug-in technology was the ZEV mandate law, but more than that it was the frustration that we all felt with the gutting of the ZEV mandate. The plug-in idea was something that was talked about during the first oil embargo crisis of the 1970s. The Federal Government paid to create at that time what was in essence a Prius built into a Buick Skylark. We had the technology back in 1978 and by 1980 we had the battery to make it happen even better because Stanford Ovshinsky patented NiMH in 1980. So why did Toyota end up producing the Prius parallel hybrid rather than the United States car manufacturers who had the technology decades before the Japanese? Because the US automakers have their heads up their you know whats. Most of the technology that you see coming to the forefront today was born out of the ZEV mandate law, when experimenters and companies alike though that there would be a market for their research. What GM and possibly the oil companies and the like didn't plan on was that those researchers and companies would continue the work they had started during the ZEV mandate and try to make a market on their own. Something that might happen, but it was the ZEV mandate "law" that spurred on the research and investment. Not the goodness of the researchers and investors hearts.
"Earl, you're embarassing all of us other humanoids. Zero emission laws suck and have always done so and have damaged progress towards electrical propulsion."
Well, there your are wrong, and the only people who are embarrassed are us who have to listen to your drivel. As for me, I like what "Earl" has to say, so I am sticking with Earl.
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:49 am
14 Mar 2008
May not ready for all electric yet
I would love an all electric car but there are still some serious cost, performance, and technological hurdles. Will enough consumers pay the price for what they will get? I can see why the automakers wiggled out using whatever legal loophole they could create. According to Toyota: http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/rav4ev/index.html:
"Although a significant marketing effort was undertaken for the RAV4-EV, we only sold about 300 vehicles a year."
Toyota was selling almost 300 Priuses a day last year. Consumers didn't flock to buy the electric cars because you could get much more for your money from a conventional car. They have unlimited range and can haul four or five people over mountain passes at highway speeds for a fraction of the cost. The EV1 was a two-seat, $40,000 car with a 100 mile daily tether.
Toyota spent about a billion dollars developing the Prius and took a big risk. Other car companies spent a similar amount developing electric cars thanks to the California law. They didn't sell and that piece of government legislation cost them, all of them, not just American manufacturers. Instead of using this as a lesson learned, we have come up with essentially conspiracy theories to explain why that government mandated experiment failed.
- They didn't advertise them hard enough (they had no desire to recoup their billion dollar investment).
- Some suggest that the automakers did not want the evidence of what was possible on the roads (a car with a 100-mile daily tether for twice the price).
Look at the success of the Prius, which didn't even advertise on television until last year and this is the first year they have used incentives as supply has finally caught up with demand. Without consumer demand, all you are likely to get is another government prop job, like with biofuels. Just being honest. I have no hidden agenda. I would love an affordable electric car with adequate performance for the price. I could be wrong and I have said all this before. Technology may have come far enough that another attempt to kick start all electric cars by government mandate might work. It's a probability game. Being intimately familiar with battery technology and the limits of my own electric vehicle, I'm skeptical of attempts to "economically" propel something that looks on the outside like an ordinary car with the energy density of today's batteries.Although I agree that the government bureaucracy has created a tangled mess, as they are wont to do, I also see the tremendous success of hybrid cars on the market driven by consumer demand. And one also has to admit that the emissions reductions of the Prius fleet, accomplished primarily by using much less fuel, is significant.
Here is an article where some researchers are saying EVs will cause water shortages, which strikes me as ridiculous. We are not keeing our current inefficient power generation. With cogen and renewables, our power does not need to use more water. And if we don't change how we make power, electric cars are pointless from a Global Warming perspective:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080310-thirsty-ele ...
And finally, bigtom makes a few good points. As much as I don't want to believe it, I have to admit, we are unlikely to leave much easily accessible oil in the ground unless we can come up with something cheaper. Maybe someday soon that will be electrified transport charged by clean powerplants.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 3:55 am
16 Mar 2008
Follow the money
"Toyota spent about a billion dollars developing the Prius"
The best point bio-d. Why would any failing auto company take a risk like this? They can't afford to now.
The only way GM and Ford can survive (the other one is already DOA) is to kill alternatives to gas guzzling. It's too late for them to shift to electric "fuel". The transportation power of the future.
We'll have to get our cars on the outside. From now on. No (coffee) or car manufacturing on the premises. The future of manufacturing jobs here?
Moving bed pans or stocking walmart shelves. Those are jobs fit for a proud patriotic working class! Sing while you work...
"And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I'd gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
`Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land God bless the U.S.A."
Snif..sniffle. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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david23 Posted 1:36 am
18 Mar 2008
electric cars
we have to pass a law that 5 percent of cars made
be plug in hybrid or electric cars.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:58 am
18 Mar 2008
Electrifying transport
Just give 10 cent per kwh subsidy to people who plug their plugin hybrid into solar panels on their garage. Around 60 cents per gallon of gas saved. Ethanol gets 3 bucks per gallon in subsidy? And it produces twice the GHG of gasoline.
And it will never go down in price. It will remain as high as gasoline prices go.
An electric "gallon" of gas equivalent costs around 75 cents. A solar panel powered "gallon" costs you nothing, after a few years payback on your solar panels.
The total cost of both oil wars puts the extra hidden amount that is being borrowed (to try and keep oil prices down?) at around $1.00 per gallon of gas consumed.
A 10 cent per kwh subsidy would insure that payback periods for solar and plugin cars would be under 5 years. That would get people to invest. Free solar electric "gas" to tool around on in 5 years? That's a pretty good investment.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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DougKorthof Posted 2:59 pm
20 Mar 2008
Solar power for Electric cars
The problem is, NO ELECTRIC CARS FOR SALE, so it's deceptive and ludicrous for such as Lutz to talk about EVs as if empty promises were real. GM is promising what it has no intention of delivering.
If they want to produce an EV, they don't need Lithium "research"; Panasonic EC-EV1265 lead-acid batteries on the 3100-lb. EV1 propelled it up to 110 miles on a charge, and the NiMH used in the 1999 EV1 had an EPA certified 140 mile range. Used in the non-crushed Toyota RAV4-EV (Toyota sold the last 330 to the public), these NiMH batteries exhibit longer than 100K mile lifespan (maybe longer than 200K) and still give 100 miles on a charge.
GM IS JUST DOING A PUBLIC RELATIONS DISTRACTION.
Ironically, the cost of Lithium batteries is about 4 times what the cost of existing NiMH batteries would be; and Lithium doesn't last even 50,000 miles (there is no Lithium car, to my knowledge, that has travelled more than 50K miles without battery degradation; Lithium TALK is good, but SO FAR, NO CAR.).
UNLESS THERE'S A GOVERNMENT MANDATE, THERE WON'T BE ELECTRIC CARS.
GM is still suing California to keep our air dirty, and still spending $3B on ads to push gas-guzzlers out the door. If GM were serious about "going green", it would stop its desperate and expensive fight against higher mpg standards (lobbying weakened mpg standards to allow GM exceptions!).
And GM is pushing to have its "dual mode" hybrid counted as plug-in cars, even though you can't add to them (it's one complete unit) and the motor is too weak for highway driving. So even when there's a mandate, there's also
AUTO AND OIL COMPANY DECEPTION.
Meanwhile, we drive our oil-free Toyota RAV4-EV every day, powering them with credits from our daytime peak production of electric; slow-charging at night, usually, to help the grid both ways. Our solar helps avoid brownouts, and our off-peak charging helps run the generators more efficiently.
All it would take is for California to require GM (and Toyota) to resume construction of, and honorably SELL, these EVs that we drive EVERY DAY.
If an EV were for sale, it would make solar self-financing: the money you formerly spent on gasoline pays for your solar system in only 3 years.
After that, drive FREE OF COST as well as OIL-FREE.
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DougKorthof Posted 3:21 pm
20 Mar 2008
TOYOTA LIES, TOO
From the Toyota website: "Although a significant marketing effort was undertaken for the RAV4-EV, we only sold about 300 vehicles a year."
Toyota never sold the RAV4-EV until Mar., 2002 (prior to that date, it was only offered for fleet lease, never to individuals).
Toyota only offered the last few of them for sale long after Chevron bought control of the NiMH patents (from GM) on Oct. 10, 2000, and sued Toyota (2001-2) to stop production of the RAV4-EV.
So Toyota only had 300 RAV4-EV left!
There was only the 6 months during which they were offered for sale, THERE WAS NO MAJOR MARKETING EFFORT, and TOYOTA COULD NOT HAVE DELIVERED ANY MORE EVEN IF THEY WANTED TO, because the RAV4-EV was based on the 1996-1999 RAV4, and it had undergone two design changes since then (2000 and 2001-2002). The 500 EV-speific parts required to make the RAV4-EV would not fit in the 2003 gas RAV, and so, Toyota only had the 300 to sell!
When they were snapped up by the end of the summer of 2002 (you didn't know they were for sale, generally, unless you already had an EV1 or HondaEV you were losing), Toyota hastily CANCELLED THE SALE without fanfare by shutting down their website (NO OTHER ANNOUNCEMENT WAS MADE!). No warning, and it took them until Sept. 2003 to scrape together the last of what some call the last 28 "frankenstein versions" of the RAV4-EV, seemingly made with spare parts and odds and ends. We know, we got probably the last one, and it had a (rare for Toyota) defective EV-specific high-voltage air conditioner.
So to say that they sold "only 300 per year" is a GROSS DECEPTION! The total sale was only 328, and it was after the batteries were no longer available.
To this date, we can't buy the EV-95 batteries in the RAV4-EV, no one can import them, and Chevron won't sell them, not even for replacement on the 328 existing RAV4-EV in the hands of the public.
It was never offered for sale on the free market, which means, as many as people buy, get delivered; Toyota only had the last 300, and had to dig up old RAV4 bodies even to meet that extra 28 before they could stop the sale, IMO.
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joelado Posted 1:41 am
24 Mar 2008
Thanks Doug
I lost track of this post from Joe Romm and I knew that "people" or the paid for opposition would be putting up misinformation on this posting. Thank you for catching the bull stuff.
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