Toyota's long term sucess with prius will be short lived.

It's a 'have to' case for everyone. Some realize this much earlier than others.

 

I note that a lot of us in the States driving long distances to work. Me, I drive 66 miles a day to work and back home. Thats 300+ a week just to go to work.

I wonder if those with very high gas prices (EU and AUS, etc) manage to work closer to home as a society?

 

i wonder if the fuel prices will eventually result in a shift to higher population densities in our city centers, and a reduction of the expansion into the suburbs. will be interesting to see 20-30 years from now. if'n i live that long

as others commented, the average in the us is 12,000 miles per year per car, or thereabouts. this from the DOE web site. e.g., 1/5 of the OP's numbers.

might be interesting to track TM stock against average fuel prices. prii seem to be selling like hotcakes recently.

 

While house prices have fallen across the country, they have fallen the sharpest and lowest in areas distant from city cores and not on public transportation. Conversely, housing prices close in and on transit have not declined as much or have risen. You can see it now, no waiting!

 

That's something that has got to change. 3 years ago, after a bit of searching, I left my average job that was 14 miles away for a better job that was only 8 miles away. Then I got the Prius. My gallons/month went from 48 to 15. I've always been a proponent of measuring your cost and your impact as gallons per month, not miles per gallon.

The idea that we can afford a house in one area and a job in a totally different area is a concept we need to leave behind. In Eastern Europe, it is common to live in the city, but have a 'dacha' or 'villa' or perhaps a grandparent's house in the countryside where you take your weekends and long summer vacations, etc. That's where you have a yard (actually a garden and grape arbor, rarely any grass that is mowed). Suburban sprawl will be a thing of the past as we are forced back into the European model.

BTW, most electric vehicles would struggle to provide the mileage you are needing. A BEV that gets 50-60 miles per charge would be affordable, something that gets 150 miles or more would be quite expensive (if it gets 140 miles/charge, then you'd probably be comfortable going actually 100 miles at a decent speed or with the A/C on, maybe really 80-90 miles so that there's still a little charge left which probably helps lifespan of the battery, depending on exact chemistry). And it likely wouldn't be any bigger than a Prius.

 

I'd love to see it happen, but I highly doubt it. Our country is built with massive interstates, urban centers, and suburban sprawl. Even if gas prices get out of control, it's hard to see where all the capital will come from to completely rebuild this country to allow people to live near their work, as the current set up simply won't allow for it. Moreover, where will the will to do so come from? People don't want to change. More likely? We get off gas and start using zero emissions vehicles, and sprawl continues or even gets worse.

 

IMO, I don't believe that. I can buy a replacement aftermarket battery pack and use it in electric mode only. I am spending less than $50/month on gasoline now and gasoline is $3.65/gallon in my area.

Don't get me wrong, I want a total electric car. But it needs to be affordable.

Hey, do you think $6/gallon gasoline will get rid of the useless pickups and SUVS I see everday right now? (1 driver... on cell phone, weaving, tailgating, speeding) I sure hope so.

 

There is a bit of hysteria right now because gas prices are rising almost every day.
That's because oil futures are too heavily speculated, and Congress is about to do something about it--at least in this country. Another factor is the weak dollar--partially due to reckless deficit spending by the Government. These are not related to supply and demand. That is a longer range issue.

 

When you figure future EV costs don't forget: the governments (federal, state and local) are going to figure out how to tax the electricity used to recharge those batteries. They are desperate for $$$$.

Bob

 

While speculation and the weak dollar do play a role, supply and demand is king.
Unfortunately Mexico and Russia both are producing less oil each year while their population uses more.
While US consumption is down to flat, China and India are more than making up the difference.
Global demand is up, global production is flat and the trend doesn't bode well for gas prices.
I would be surprised if we didn't have temporary corrections in the near future. I would be even more surprised if oil didn't continue its upward trend year over year.

 

A quick thought...given that a lot of new power plants to power those electric cars are coal-burning, good luck to us on that global warming thing. This country (and the world) needs to make a swing to nuclear and other non-polluting sources of utility electricity to make electric cars work on a large scale.

China is also building coal-fired power plants at a rapid rate. Germany as well.

And while I haven't sat down and compared the pollution from a coal-burning electric power plant to charge up an electric car versus the pollution from a Prius for equivalent miles driven, my intuition says that there's more pollution on the coal-burning side.

Good idea, though...looking forward to when electric cars will be practical on a large scale.

-Roger

 

if I could plug my Prii into an outlet I would get solar panels for the roof and let the govt give me credits galore for that! I could be very happy just using the panels to recharge two Prii and the water heater!

 

On properly outfitted plants your intuition would be wrong. The coal-fied plant powering an EV would pollute less overall. I'll try to find the paper most of us reference but this will give you the general idea.

I'm curious how they got 22lbs of CO2 though. Generally it's 19.6lbs or 24lbs if refining is added into the number.

"For starters, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, they generate a fraction that expelled by a normal gasoline engine car. For every gallon of gasoline burned, approximately 22 pounds of CO2, an important global warming gas, are created. If a car gets 25 miles a gallon it will emit 22 pounds of carbon dioxide over that distance, as well as other pollutants. By comparison, an electric car may travel the same distance consuming 5 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electric power at a rate of 200 watt hours/mile. Assuming the local grid is 100% coal-fired, roughly 5 lbs of coal would be consumed to create that 5kWh. Depending on the grade and carbon content of the coal, one kilowatt hour creates approximately 1.4 pounds of CO2. That's 7 pounds of CO2 vs. 22 pounds to travel the same 25 miles. But recall that the power grid isn't entirely coal-fired; it includes hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear and a small, but growing segment of renewables." ~ EVWorld

 

This is from an older paper published in 2002:

Battery-Powered Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicle Projects to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions:

See section 4-0 pages 35-39

Here is the newer summary report from CalCars on the EPRI-NRDC Definitive Study: PHEVs Will Reduce Emissions If Broadly Adopted

 

Something doesn't quite sound right:

• 6 - carbon
• 8 - oxygen

So for every unit of carbon, there should be (6+8+8)/6 of CO_{2}, 3.67 units of CO_{2} per unit of carbon. My understanding is coal grades have carbon contents of:

• lignite - 25-35% :: 0.92 - 1.28 lbs CO_{2} / pound of coal
• subbituminous - 35-45% :: 1.28 - 1.65 lbs
• bituminous - 45-86% :: 1.65 - 3.15 lbs (*most abundant)
• anthracite - 86-97% :: 3.15 - 3.56 lbs

My only interest is in accuracy.

Bob Wilson

 

I hope that $6/gas would clear the roads of cars. However, a quick check of the highways at rush hour (with gas at $4.05/gallon for regular) tends to dispute this conventional wisdom. How many cars have more than 1 occupant? Not many in my neck of the woods. People have been cutting other expenses (as well as buying smaller/more efficient cars), but cutting driving or carpooling? Not yet.

Maybe gas needs to go to $6/gallon?

 

One thing not mentioned is that most power plants - except nuclear and hydroelectric - stand to gain efficiency from co-generation, or more precisely "combined cycle. These gains have many important benefits, I'll touch on a few:

1. Much improved efficiency, >80%
2. Much cleaner burning
3. Valuable residuals

Point #1 has been proven many times. Whether the source plant runs a reciprocating engine on natural gas or diesel, the "waste" heat is used to run digesters, say at a sewage plant, to produce methane to run the engines. Another benefit from the extremely hot, efficient combustion of coal is that gases like CO can be catalysed into other residuals, such as oil refinery catalytic reforming used in the newest plants

Point #2, due to the much higher temps, catalyzers, and tight process control, in combination with cogen, can in theory have less than 1/100th the flue gas as an old fashioned coal fired system using pulverized coal

Point #3, as combined-cycle and catlytic reforming/conversion is applied, you can turn the sulfur - hard to remove by conventional methods - into H2S, which is easily reformed. The nitroen can be reformed into ammonia, which has valuable application as a fertilizer.

Again, we have to explore all possibilities, and have to improve the cycle efficiency of these systems. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably cleaner and more efficient to use our valuable and limited petrochemical resources to generate electricity, then to burn it in transportation

 

They're starting to move in on e-retail. They're talking about making the "gas" tax based on miles instead of gallons. (who are they kidding? both!) The libertarian in me knows that if they stop the war on some drugs, it will only be a truce so they can collect the taxes. You do it, they'll tax it.

"declare those pennies on your eyes" -- John Lennon