Electric cars, a fad and its own demise?

natural gas and HE diesels are what appear to be the most reasonable interim answer till the fossils run out and were on a fusion economy (maybe in 100 years).

The recent finds in massive amounts of gas and the bacteriological breakdown of CO2 sinks into methane (ethane) "town gases" will last us for a centurt or even two.
I have a Ford escape hybrid. Its getting to its life terminus for the battery (6 years) and Ford just quit making en cause people didnt want em. I love mine but its got some major limitations that are more annoying than anything else

1Ya cant use the hybrid function with the AC on. the batteries wont support such an amperage draw and an engine at the same time

2Its built with a teeny gas tank so the range is only about 350 miles

3Whe in hybrid mode its like a window fan with huuuge torque. I can beat a Porsche from 0 to 45, then the engine kicks in and its like somebody threw out an anchor
4The work is as pricey as a BMW because of the minimal space and close tolerances
5 The information center on the various digital readouts gives a ;ot of annoying irrelevant crap.
6 It slis into hybrid mode at lights so, if you dont get used to a soft peddle, you will go shooting off through the intersection. (Mny old ladies have turned in their hybrid Ford Escapes for the reason of safety at traffic lights--They lay their feet on the peddle expecting some forgiveness in starting off , and , instead, the damn car would shoot off into the intersection. ) Not a pretty sight, I believe there ere a lot of front enders with this car

The good features are
1Its fun

2Its an SUV with 34 mpg and can do what any real SUV can (its not like these "Snow queen SUVs" like a Lxu or a BMW or an AUDI. Its a real go-in-the field car that I use on the job sites and mine roads and off (Mine has an additional after-market adjsutable air lift shock set so I get and additional 3" of ground clearance.ITS more like a JEEP than a BMW(even though theyve outfitted em in leather and creature crap)

I can sneak down a side road as silent as a bicycle

It was a neat idea, the other gas hybrids are even less powered than the Escapeand their ranges suck more.
The ALL ELECTRIC car i still a prisoner of battery technology(slow charge, short rage). I hear theyve got em up to 250 mile range but it then takes all night to recharge. The other day I drove 550 miles. With an all electric car, that would have been a 4 day trip.

Natural gas is the way, diesels are second cause of the new health effects dicovered

They are being produced because they improve Corporate Average Fuel Economy, allowing the producers to make more guzzlers with high profit margines. If they're total electric, non-hybrids, I believe they are allowed to be counted twice for CAFE purposes.

That's why they are being made. They are being bought because of a federal subsidy to the buyer.

Notice that both production and purchase are the result of government regulation.

My sister and I test drove a Honda CRZ the other day and we both loved it. Your battery charges when you break so it's great for city driving. You get about 100 km on the battery then the gas kicks in.

It's also a beautiful car, but I agree that the battery charging and other displays could be a lot smaller on the dash. It was annoying.

Had no trouble with it at all - very peppy.

If we nearly get nuclear fusion to work, it would definitely put hydrogen as the most sustainable fuel, especially if we can harness the fusion reaction in the sun in a small scale, which produces hydrogen as byproduct.

I don't know if we can harness fusion energy itself in a space big as a car hood, even in 100 years. Safety is another issue, especially in accidents. Maybe, I don't know.

The current approach to just purely electric powered cars is a failure because the cars are very expensive to build in the first place, and car’s battery itself is half the price of the car. As you mentioned, the electric car has a very bad range and cannot travel far, and has a long recharge time for the batteries.

Then think about the higher rate of depreciation because, currently, batteries will lose its capacity to hold charge and simply does not have the longevity of a combustion engine. It is true that the battery technology is getting more efficient and better, but the problem for the consumers is that such news is only beneficial to those buying a car in the future, and not to individuals who has already bought an electric car.

Another dilemma is the basic power source. Purely electric driven cars run on electricity alone, and the source of the electricity is from the power grid. It is all right if a few people owned electric cars, however, if at least half of the people owned an electric car in America, there would be massive blackouts from the exorbitant current drawing from the grid lines. The blackout dilemma can only be solved by implementing a smart grid system; this is an additional investment added to the technology investment to perfect the battery technology. That is not profitable nor economical.

An additional foreseeable expense is when electric cars reach their end. There will be expensive required processes to neutralize toxic battery materials.

Hopefully, this electric car fad is nothing more than a fancy distraction in the midst of finding a "green" source of energy.

I believe they count them only as they are sold or leased.
As venom says, yhey are fraught with problems and the battery tech is still limited. However, I dont see fuel cels tech as orthy of anything but "gizmo speak". Fuel cells need so many safety precautions (stirrers etc) that , while they may ork in space, I feel they arent safe enough n efficient enough for car application. Hydride tech is better.
HOWEVER, Im stickin with natural gas/propane drive nd HE diesels as the way to go.

I don't know if we will even get it working on a large scale, even in 100 years. We've certainly got decades of failure to learn from, don't we.

youre like the cavemen sitting there beating n rocks, saying "We aint ever gonna have television"

Okay, any progress in the past several decades, excluding thermonuclear bombs?

They are keeping it a hush hush secret.
I've heard one of my professors say Cornell university and a few other universities are trying and may (??) have reached nuclear fusion conditions to the point where release of output energy is greater than the energy fed into the fusion container.

That physics lecture was interesting. Something along the lines of powerful superconducting electric magnets holding a plasma in the center which is heated to very high levels with powerful lasers.

There was a really interesting bit on a repeat of Quirks n Quarks on CBC radio today about this subject. New concepts on how to store energy from new batteries, to compressed air stored under lakes in balloons to liquid aluminum batteries and so on. If your interested.
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/09/10/september-10-2011/

Honda CRZ is rated for 35 mpg city/ 39 mpg highway. Not all that impressive.

That's one cheap and smart way to store/ recycle excessive electricity produced.

A natural detriment to electricity is that it can not be stored as electrical energy. That's is why in all grids, production and consumption must be equally balanced.

Hydrogen is safe because if the tank is breached by an unfortunate circumstance, such as an accident, then the hydrogen gas will escape very quickly, and the fire will quickly subside.
Maybe a safety mechanism can bet put on the tank, such as automatic dispersion if an accident is detected.
On the small chance the escaping hydrogen catches fire It won't be a lingering.
Electric batteries and fuel cells are also related in many ways. Difference being that instead of storing energy toxic chemical reactants within the cell, there is an external fuel source that flows into the fuel cell, and from oxidation-reduction reaction, electricity is produced.


The only problem I see is storage/ transportation. Hydrogen has a low energy density, so it can't be compacted as easily as hydrocarbon molecules. But that is offset by the fact that hydrogen is the lightest fuel containing the largest amount of energy per its weight content. I'd assume that efficiency is quite similar to the battery electric vehicles (BEV), because the fuel cells are significantly more efficient the combustion engines, and they power an electric motor, similar to BEV.

The Hindenberg didn't have any problems when it caught fire.

I was waiting for someone to bring the Hindenberg.
Fear from that incident is possibly why some people have doubts about hydrogen.

Yes, parts of the Hindenberg were combustible just as parts of current automobiles are combustible.

Hydrogen can cause a rather large explosion. That explosion will ignite anything else that is combustible.

(Your assumption that I was referring to the hydrogen was incorrect. Car fires consume more than just the gasoline.)

On the off chance that hydrogen gas explodes, ya, it is about 2.5 times that of common hydrocarbon fuels.
Hydrogen gas explosions are more destructive and carry further. However, the duration of a conflagration tends to be inversely proportional to the combustive energy, so that hydrogen fires subside much more quickly than hydrocarbon fires.
So either you get a big explosion with hydrogen gas, or you get lingering fire with gasoline. Both will ignite anything else that is combustible.

But this is unlike Hollywood movies. A crash wouldn't cause a hydrogen tank to combust unless it is ignited. Proper placement of the fuel tank and security measures will avoid any form of explosions. Furthermore, special care in the design of the fuel system to ensure that any leaks can disperse with minimum hindrance, as well as the use of dedicated leak detection equipment on the vehicle.

The risks are the same as for a gasoline powered car.

In both cases keep electrical devices that may short circuits, power input cables, hot exhaust systems, air bag detonators from combustible materials, such as fuels, oils, etc.

well, not quite. Hydrogen gas (and liquid) are about 3 times the energy density of gasoline ( per unit mass) , but H2 is still about 2.3 less energy dense than gasoline per( UNIT VOLUME). SInce we fill our tanks by the gallon, Ill go wth gasoline, diesel, or natural gas than hydrogen. Hydrogen gas , as a leak, will burn with a fierce flame, however, should there be a tank leak into your cockpit that is filled with atmospheric (N2/O2), then it will neatly explode . Thats why an empty gas tank can often be more dangerous than a full one and why we could do explosive hydrogen tricks in grade school physics demos by "bubbling" hydrogen gas into a soap solution where it picks up a ride with air .

It is possible to work around that, by storing hydrogen in metal hydride, such as borohydride.

Although Hydrogen's flashpoint is at a very low temperature, and is flammable over a very wide range of concentrations in air, extreme safety sensors must be utilized. As you said, the cock pit must be sealed near the hydrogen fuel tank to avoid hydrogen form entering it.

In many respects, hydrogen fires are safer than gasoline fires. Hydrogen gas rises quickly due to its high buoyancy and diffusivity. Consequently hydrogen fires are vertical and highly localized. When a car hydrogen cylinder ruptures and is ignited,the fire burns away from the car and the interior.

Hydrogen fires can only exist in the region of a leak where pure hydrogen mixes with air at sufficient concentrations. For turbulent leaks, air reaches the center-line of the leakage jet within about five diameters of a leakage hole. This rapid dilution capabilities of Hydrogen implies that if the turbulent leak were into open air, the flammability zone would exist relatively close to the leak.

Gasoline forms a pool, spreads laterally, and the vapors form
a lingering cloud, so that gasoline fires are broad and encompass a wide area. When a car gasoline tank ruptures and is ignited,the fire engulfs the car within a matter of seconds (not minutes) and causes the temperature of the entire vehicle to rise dramatically. In some instances, the high heat can cause flammable compounds to off-gas from the vehicle upholstery leading to a secondary explosion. Much worse off....




... see how long the fire lingers


Hydrogen burns with greater vigor than gasoline, but for a shorter time. Pools of liquid hydrogen burn very rapidly. Furthermore, Hydrogen emits non-toxic combustion products when burned, while gasoline fires generate toxic smoke.

They did a article on the test of gasoline vs hydrogen tank rupture here:
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=482