yossarian wrote:
bubspeed wrote:
Let's say I want to buy one of these new fancy shmancy electric cars that are coming out.
What is the equivalent MPG that you get with these things? Sort of a gas to electric conversion factor... How much would the average car add to our electric bill every month?
As for the fuel efficiency, as I recall cars are under 1% efficient (let's call it 1%) and power plants are about 50%, however about half is lost in transmission so it's about 25 times more efficient.
So if the power company is buying gasoline (they aren't) and paying the same price you would at the pump (they don't) you pay about 25 times less on your electricity bill then if you buy the gas yourself.
There are a couple complicating factors I'm leaving out, but it's probably right to within a factor of 2.
There's more then a couple factors you're leaving out. Attempting to calculate efficiency values is vastly more complicated and honestly completely unnecessary in this case. What matters to the consumer at the end of the day is miles/dollar and cost/year of different types of vehicles. Looking at efficiency values alone is worthless since it doesn't tell me anything about cost. A nuclear powered car might be amazingly efficient, but would presumably cost vastly more "per mile" of driving then one powered by pretty much anything else.
The viability of alternative vehicles isn't just in the efficiency, but the utility and overall cost as a vehicle. These aren't experiments at some science fair. People actually use their vehicles. No amount of efficiency matters if I can't do what I need to do with the result. Full electric cars will not replace some form of internal combustion engine vehicle (hybrid or not) until someone comes up with an electric motor and battery system that can power said vehicle with similar operational characteristics to todays vehicles for somewhere between 800 to 1000 miles per charge. Because that's the approximate upper bounds of how far someone may wish to drive a car in a single day, so that's what you need to build to get any significant amount of the market. Guess what? We're nowhere close...
Hybrids are nice. But most of the hybrids on the road today don't get more then 10-20% better dollar/mile rates then normal gasoline powered engines. When you then calculate the extra cost for the vehicle and the cost to replace/maintain the battery system over a 3-5 year timespan, the total cost is actually higher. Not lower. The trade off with most hybrids is that you'll use maybe 20% less gasoline over time, but produce extra pollutants in the form of the batteries themselves. And you'll pay something around 5-8k more over a 5 year period to do it. It's really a wash IMO...
The benefits of an electric car only appear when it's full electric (or very close to full electric). And we have a significant amount of additional research to go on that. Until then, full electric cars are pretty much a neat hobby. Now, if only someone would propose that we really focus on more powerful electric motors and batteries that could hold more charge, we might just get where we need to go...