Future Not Bright for Plug-In's (Honda Statement)

I would like to make a key point here. There are quite a few "general consumers" who would pay for a viable electric vehicle RIGHT NOW, like me. Presently, the only choice is a Tesla, and that wait list is VERY long. While many point out that present technology cannot make an electric car that is better in every respect, that somehow gets twisted into a claim that the market is not there for what can be make with present technology. Real world results indicate the opposite.

That is probably a good thing in some respects. Toyota is having to work like crazy to keep Prius production up with the market, even after 9 years. When it comes to a pure electric, the true situation is even worse. There are a lot of very intelligent, forward thinking individuals....a whole lot. The limitation I see is not the technology, it is the lack of electric vehicles.

 

Very true, good point.

 

I must raise some red flags on this one. If you do the math for most vehicles that claim this charge rate, taking into account the useful battery capacity and the limited time to recharge, you end up with up to 600 amps of charge current!

It's hilarious to see some claims, most of them advertise very long ranges (above 100 km), battery capacities that go well beyond our wildest dreams, and then throw up this miracle of 80% recharge in 15 minutes or so... sure... if you have a nuclear power plant at home to feed the beast...

 

So does this mean I have to give back my electric bicycle:


I guess we who have already bought an EV are doomed! Doomed by those who know better than us. D*mn our lying eyes! <GRINS>

Bob Wilson

 

Wasn't that dirigible Graf Zeppelin that burned in New Jersey in the 30s filled with flammable hydrogen? That signaled the end to hydrogen in blimps and the use of helium. Maybe it's safer in cars, I don't know. But that's a bad omen for the public to swallow.

I think the near future is battery-powered cars. The technology is here, and better batteries are just a year or two away. Maybe Honda is trying to leapfrog Toyota, since Toyota has gained the initiative on battery power.

 

Historical note, it was the Hindenburg. (The Graf Zeppelin was named after the creator of the type and was grounded after the disaster, becoming a museum and then salvaged for materials in the German war effort.)

 

Details, details! Don't bother me with the details! I don't want the facts to get in the way of my opinions!

Icarus

 

that is true Brad... but how many "general" consumers will pay $5 a gallon or more for gas??

nearly every economist agrees that gas prices will only stay low while the country is in a recession. as soon as the country has recovered, prices will be higher than they were this past summer.

so what is the real question? battery limitations, or 25% of real income for transportation costs??

 

I know a few million that already do so, for quite some time actually...
Just come to Europe, and enjoy our prices...

Reference price for standard 95RON gasoline is now 1.149 Eur per litre.
At 1.27 USD per Eur that's about 1.46 USD per litre, which translates into... 5.53 USD per gallon! If you prefer premium 98RON which has a lot of better additives to help clean the injectors (never mind the octane level) then you'll pay 6.20 USD per gallon!

You would be surprised on how much people are willing to pay for gasoline... they complain a lot... but they still buy it... and remember today's prices are well bellow the maximum they reached some months ago, with prices close to 8 USD per gallon!

 

ok Evan already stated the obvious,

but you drive less, the average MPG's are MORE THAN DOUBLE what we drive

AND

you dont have enough fingers on one hand to list off alternative mass transit options...

in the US, a quadriplegic could do it.

 

Darn, I guess I'll have to go back to using those little tree air fresheners...

: )

 

Absolutely, I agree with you 100%!
I'm just saying you can't impose a limit on the price from where people will stop buying gas, because that limit does not exist.

 

hmmm.... its easy to see you dont live in the US, because around here, its pretty much agreed that we HAVE FOUND our limit that most of us will pay.

 

Sure they pay ... but most other countries have way better public transportation, so they don't HAVE to pay for gassing a car. In the U.S. public transportation got REAL popular when gas was $5 in some areas.

 

We drive less???? How come??? What do you mean?

Again, don't believe in every stereotype you hear... public transportation here in Lisbon area SUCKS bigtime

I work at about 50 km from my place. I do local roads, highway and city traffic every day, totalling about 90 km per day just to go to work. My average is at about 4.7 to 4.8 litre per 100 km, which means that roughly I spend about 4.5 litres per day which translates to over 5 eur per day (6.57 usd) to go to work and back. How much would you spend there for the exact same distance with the exact same car? See?

This means that even with a Prius, I spend about 150 usd per month just for gasoline to do my commute to work. Do you think this is cheap? If I was to go by public transportation, and given the fact I take my wife to work with me, we would have to pay nearly as much on tickets, and we would take at least 2 to 2.5 hours to do the same distance we do today in 1/2 hour to 45 minutes at top. European lifestyle is not that nice and cheap you know...

Just trying to give you a glimpse of reality, a reality check.

 

ok i admit to generalizing... and of course, Europe, just like any land mass of that size does have rural areas where public transportation is limited....

ok, so let me be specific...i live in the capital of Washington State. we have no subway, or local train service. we have a bus route that runs every 30 mins in the downtown area from 6 am to 8am and from 4 pm to 6 pm, hourly after that. it shuts down completely around 9 pm. that is during the week. On Saturday, it starts up about an hour later, stops 2 hours earlier. On Sunday, more than 60% of the area HAS NO BUS SERVICE AT ALL. areas that do, run hourly and end around 6 pm.

now, Olympia is surrounded by outlying towns in Thurston County, of which it is the seat, so all governmental and legal services are here for the entire county. we have bus service to these outlying areas but most have two shuttle to town in the morning one way and two in the afternoon. that means anyone coming to town to go to court, if they dont drive, they must pretty much come into town and stay all day or get a ride from someone else.

this was before the just recently announced budget cuts for the bus service. most likely routes will be cut (for about 3 years we had no service to the outlying county because of previous budget cuts. about 60% of bus funding is by bond according to law)

so, when you say your mass transit sucks, how badly does it suck?

**edit**

ok to be fair, transit north (to largest population area in the Pacific Northwest) is not bad, but CAN NOT BE DONE WITHOUT A CAR!!!

it leaves early and often (every 30 mins for two hours) and has several destinations. but if you need to be at work early than 9 pm. you must drive there, because we dont have local bus service to get to the transit area, which is the reason why the "Park and Ride" lot size rivals the parking lot of major retailers in the area

 

Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, a big city that is, so no rural areas around here.

OK, you beat me to it, but still... there are a lot of people like me who is not willing to have to switch bus/boat/train 3 to 4 times each way, spending over 2 hours to go to work when they can do it in 1/4 time by car and on top of it spend almost as much on tickets as on gasoline.

Anyway, my point was only about how each culture and each country has different gas prices and different limits on how much are they willing to loose in autonomy over how much price on gas vs electricity.

 

ok np... and getting into a pissing match over who has it bad is not the point anyway. fact is, CHANGE should no longer be an option. we are running on borrowed time EVERYWHERE and need to start building our future transportation network now. thw whole point of this thread is that EV's may not work for a lot of people, but they also DO work for a lot of people and not giving us that option simply because the car companies have decided that they wont make enough money from them is something we can no longer put up with. like gm, chrysler and who ever, if they dont give me what i want then to Hell with them, let them fail. i owe them NOTHING

 

Dave, I could not agree more with you. :rockon:

The thing we need to understand, and by "we" I mean early adopters and alike, is that we need to ask for performance (autonomy, charging times, speed, space, comfort, etc) the higher we can, so that other people can feel tempted as well.

Some projects fail not because they are not good enough from a technical pov but instead they fail because they are too weird or too specific. That's why we can't accept cars with only 20 or 30 km of autonomy, that's why we can't accept cars with 12 hour charging periods, that's why we can't accept cars with only 2 seats... and the list goes on...

We need to ask for serious cars, in the form of the current Prius, or the Volt, or whatever, but a serious car indeed. If we don't do that we are only dooming EVs for the second time in history, because they won't be a general success. They'll only be bought by people like you and me and other PCs, and we know that's not enough to change anything.