Will Electric Cars Finally Succeed?

I find the comments on these types of articles both interesting and amusing; and disturbing. There is still so much bloody misinformation out there on hybrids. Like the comment from cbischof1 at the bottom of the "Batteries Matter" article where he claims it costs $15,000 to replace a Prius' batteries. Huh? Maybe on the moon. Here on Earth it's no more than any other major repair (like a transmission), far less if you choose used or reconditioned and arguably less likely. Where does this nonsense come from?

 

The Leaf will have minor success, probably a lot more than many think, but in the bigger picture it will be a minor success. What it will do is drive other things that are absolutely necessary for EVs to succeed. Unfortunately our government is unwilling to offer true help for the EVs. Tax incentives are great for purchasing a vehicle, but if you can't use it everywhere you can like a gas or diesel vehicle it will remain a marginalized market.

Once charging stations are made available to more people more people will be interested in buying EVs. There is a large amount of wasted space in front of my building here at work that could be used for parking spaces with charging stations. We need less help now from the government in buying vehicles that only a small percentage of the population can use. We need more help from the government putting in the infrastructure so a large percentage of the population can use them. All the money spend on tax breaks could be used to put in a lot of charging stations, and create a lot of local jobs!

 

The Leaf could be a great 2nd vehicle, or 1st vehicle for some. Only time will tell how much it catches on.

Tell you what though - the Leaf, as a car, looks very good - would seat 4 adults very well, tons of headroom, comfy, nice cargo hold out back. Don't get the fold flat 2nd row seats for the mondo room though. Sitting in the Leaf, it looked of high quality. Driver's seat bottom had a tilt feature.

IIRC, top speed is 90 mph. 8 hours recharge time at 240 volts. Purchase a home charger for about $750 (salesman said), pay labor to have it installed. What else ....

I didn't get any answer of what the battery pack might cost. 8 year warranty though. Salesguy said pack would degrade such that get about 70 miles range on 10 year old battery (what he said). Battery does not fare as well in very cold weather. Not being very specific, but anyhow...

to me, the Leaf looks like the most practical, mainstream and affordable BEV one could buy within 2 months (provided they are presigned up

 

We're almost there.

The Nissan Leaf essentially takes the idea of the late and lamented GM EV-1 and thanks to modern Li-On batteries, can actually seat four people and a small amount of luggage and still go around 80-100 miles on a single charge.

As battery technologie improve with future-generation Li-On batteries with higher storage density, I can see the range of BEV's the size of the Leaf go as far as 400 km (248 miles) on a single charge by 2015 and 800 km (496 miles) by 2020, and we will see recharge times from commercial chargers drop to under an hour.

 

Electric cars will succeed in Europe and China- not here. It's like super fast trains- we can't build them here- it's too expensive over long distances. Of course, how many Americans know about the Chinese high-speed rails? All those darn socialists.

I figure in about 10 years we will all be driving Hummers just to get around on our roads.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20019159-54.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=GreenTech

 

Funny thing is with some redesign and intelligent use of materials an EV hummer is not an unreasonable thing to consider. They have the chassis to handle large electric motors and really heavy batter packs, and the additional weight would really only be a significant disadvantage offroad, which pretty much none of the hummers actually do.

 

This got me thinking. Have an companies built or are there any rumors of aftermarket range extenders for these EVs? For example retrofit solar panels, small generators on trailers or trailer hitch, etc....

 

It is not likely that charging times will come down significantly (500 miles at .3kwh per mile = 166kwh ) charge current at 250volts for 1hour would be 684 amps, at 120volts would be closer to 1500 amps, requiring a very large plug and leads.