Sign of the times

I am sure you mentioned this member of the Prius fam-

Prius Pickup Possible, Toyota Says - PickupTrucks.com News

 

Glad to see a shift in attitude - wonder if it'll stick this time.

I took my daughter to a huge Girl Scout event last week and the parking lot was a sea of minivans and large suvs...

 

^ Depends on how much fuel is whacking them in the wallet.
My next truck isn't going to be a truck. It's going to be a sedan with a hitch receiver.

I haven't driven a car regularly in over a decade (besides my company G3) and I will miss the ride height bitterly---especially at night. BUT.....there comes a time that you have to bend to the inevitable.
The Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of rocks, they just figured a better way of doing things....well....mostly.

Until we can shove pickup trucks over the EV barrier, or develop some other way of making ICE's go, we're going to have to make vehicle choices based on some of the same criteria that led a lot of us to use trucks to begin with.

Money.

 

It's back to folks asking real questions when I do my occasional fill-ups, lots of how much MPG..Cost How do you like it? I point up the street and mention the Toyota dealer is just 4 blocks west of here, you should stop by and check them out, followed with a quick "5 bucks sure sucks doesn't it!" Then "Oh look I only needed 8 gal for another 400 miles."
Than leaves them thinking!

 

Unfortunately, there's still a bunch of misinformed anti-hybrid people and the gas price jumps still haven't changed the attitude of some folks.

A week ago, a FB friend of mine (I don't know him well, posted a pic of $4.23/gal gas). His friends commented w/some complaints, and one his friend posted comments like "Is there an "Angry Protest" button on fb?" and later "It's a conspiracy, we should indeed buy battery powered hybrids and drive them straight into Washington (someplace no one will get hurt but is still highly visible) then blow them up."

My reply was

Anyway, he then posted the usual misinformation about hybrids and showed his utter lack of knowledge:

It kept going back and forth and I kept debunking virtually all of his points.
One his replies (this is part of it) was comical...

It really is too bad people exist who are so misinformed.

 

LOL. I'm all for eating chocolate all day long and staying thin.

I suggest this guy fill his tank with water.

Well now, it was not so long ago the usual statement was "no one wants a hybrid", as proof that the tech was bad.

 

Just wanted to ditto that. I cannot understand why more people don't do that.

I had U-Haul put a hitch and trailer light kit on my non-hybrid, got a cheap 4'x8' bolt-together trailer (1200 pound max load), plus two-and-a-half sheets of ply for the bottom and sides. Total cost of maybe $600. Works like a charm. Trailer can stand upright in the garage when not in use. Registration in VA is permanent, one-time registration.

Also got a trailer dolly (another $50), which is well worth it. With the dolly, you can wheel the trailer around like a big garden cart -- take it right to wherever it is you want to dump the load, tilt the trailer bed and put the material right where you want it. All told, for the Joe Homeowner stuff I do, I think it's superior to a pickup. Certainly cheaper. Having done this, I'd never even consider getting a pickup for the occasional mulch/hay/firewood/furniture moving.

 

"Harvesting Hydrogen"

Jupiter or the Sun?

 

Maybe he means the purer uncollapsed gas clouds much farther away, the raw material of future stars.

 

The hydrogen on Jupiter is H2. Not combustible. The hydrogen in the sun is plasma. Too hot to handle. Of course, we can harvest the sun's energy right from here.

It's kind of like that joke about the guy caught in the flood praying to be saved and the punch line is "What do you mean 'Why didn't I save you?' I sent you two kayaks and a rowboat!" Well, we're complaining about the cost of gas, and all the time the sun is dumping a gazillion kWh of free energy on us every eyeblink.

People talk about "harvesting hydrogen" or various perpetual-motion schemes like water-for-gas or the Bedini motor. And all the time our own free thermonuclear reactor is just sitting there 93 million miles of safety away, free energy all day long.

 

Sure it is. All gaseous hydrogen is going to be H2. Just like gaseous Oxygen is O2.

 

The misinformed guy kept bringing up costs, comparing unequal vehicles and he brought up a BMW too... Here's where I'd asked about payback:

Here another of that more of that guy's misinformed responses to my replies (emphasis added by me):

Here was part of my reply about his crap about battery self-discharge:

Where do these random pro-hydrogen people come from, esp. hydrogen combustion? Is it just another excuse to be anti-hybrid and anti-EV?

 

I found how you were handling it to be pretty doggone good. At the end of the day, he learned a lot (that will never be admitted) and you learned that when it's time to buy a new Prius, they might not all be taken.

 

When we were kids13/14, in the 60's you could get away with a load of stuff...we used to take car batteries and breakdown water, collect the gases in dry cleaning bags, bundle THEM together, set the fuse, since we had extra H2, that was lifting gas, the other half of the H2 went into the O2 bag, a couple hundred feet up, KABOOM.... then we found out about Acetylene!
:flame::flame:

 

It sounds like this guy is innumerate -- can't think quantitatively. A lot of people are like that. To them, argument is like legal argument -- as long as you can make some case for something, then you've won. They literally aren't capable of making a balanced assessment of positives and negatives.

Anybody who would say, in effect, converting the US to hydrogen would cost more, and hybrids cost more, so we're even on that score -- that's innumeracy. That's comparing a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure and manufacturing to a few $K per car and saying, hey, more is more. It's a lawyer's argument -- both options cost more.

This sentence:

"Payback is very important, when drivers of Prius say things like, "I save money on gas everyday." Well, no, ultimately you have lost money and it'll take you quite a while to make up what I have saved already by buying a regular car."

is just plain confused.

This seems to say that in the long run, hybrids are cheaper. In which case you haven't "lost money". You've "lost money", over the life of the car, by buying a non-hybrid car. I guess it depends on what "quite a while" means. If hybrids are cheaper over the life of the car, then ... hybrids are cheaper. So what's his point? This again sounds like an innumerate argument -- you say you spend less on gas, I say you have an up-front capital cost, so we're even on that score. Without actually doing the arithmetic.

The argument about self-discharge, ditto. Because batteries self-discharge, hybrids are actually inefficient. That's an argument, sure, as long as you are very careful never to try to quantify it. The Prius battery is about 1.5 KWH. That's roughly the amount of energy in five ounces of gasoline. So if it takes maybe a couple of months for complete self-discharge of the traction battery (Toyota says to run your car every two months minimum, so presumably complete self-discharge of the traction battery takes longer than that), battery self-discharge wastes energy at the rate of one-half teaspoon of gasoline per day. Again, this is an argument by somebody who can't deal with quantitative data. It's a negative, so its an argument against hybrids. It doesn't matter that the quantity of energy involved is trivial.

I have no advice on how to discuss something with an innumerate person, other than, don't try. They only thing they'll recognize is tit-for-tat argument (as you already did pointing out the self-discharge of the hydrogen vehicle). But without being able to quantify costs and benefits, you'll never be able to reach any conclusion. There's always one more argument that can be made.

 

^^^
Well, the discussion's over. Essentially, he agreed to disagree. I hope he at least learned something and that I convinced him that most of this anti-hybrid arguments are wrong and aren't based on fact.

Hopefully, he's willing to dig deeper into hydrogen so that he can realize what I said and pointed to him is correct.

 

It is truly prodigious how ignorant most people are. As everyone here knows, hydrogen is so reactive that in nature it only exists in the bound state, or in a plasma (when the temperature is high enough). But whenever I speak with people who believe in the efficacy of fuel cells, in most cases, they believe that since "hydrogen is abundant in water" it's available simply by some unspecified refining process, essentially free energy.

When I tell them that hydrogen is a carrier and not an energy source, and that it takes a little more energy to produce combustible H1 than you get by burning it, they just regard me as part of that great conspiracy of scientists who want to deny them a free energy source.

And of course the really mind-bogglingly stupid thing is that we DO have free energy sources, such as solar and wind, which these same people reject because the sun only shines in the daytime and the wind doesn't blow all the time.

People are STUPID!!!