What are your thoughts on electric cars?

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bk7794
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What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by bk7794 »

I'm kind of curious what a community of manual transmission enthusiasts think of a car that is direct drive.

I'm kind of intrigued that the model 3 picked up more than 325k pre-orders.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by Rope-Pusher »

Like having a charge card with a $30 daily limit. Sure, most days you can live with the limitations, but you prolly want to have another charge card for those times when you'll need it.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by potownrob »

my understanding is they are usually not really better than regular cars when you get to where their power often comes from (unless their power comes from windmills, water, solar or some other "wasteless" source), but i am intrigued by how they run. due to the awesome way an electric motor works, oozing with torque, they don't need gears, so they can seem boring to us enthusiasts. i personally think hybrid's are better since you can recharge the batteries and not have to stop to charge. i like watching winding road videos on youtube to get an idea of what they're like to drive/ride in. the e-golf is like the cool people's e-car (if you can't afford the tesla at least)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsPW0-F9FKY

of course we can all dream of getting the VW GTE stateside...
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by Rope-Pusher »

Electric cars not needing gears is a phallusy. Formula E racers use 5-speed transmissions.

Optimizing for cost, mass and packaging space is what leads to single-speed compromise on electric cars.

Optimizing for performance or range might suggest there are gains to be had with multi-speed gearboxes.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by kevinf »

I'm biding my time for the Tesla Model 3, it'd be my first ever automatic vehicle :)
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by Bill B »

Here is a link to question on Tesla forums

https://forums.teslamotors.com/forum/fo ... on-offered

They probably could come up with a manual trans on a mass market electric car, but demand from the automatic driving public would just not be there.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by IMBoring25 »

Lots of folks there who read the press clippings and take them as gospel.

It is absolutely possible to get range and performance benefits from a manual or SMG even with an electric motor. It's just that the cost, weight, complexity, and maintenance burden don't make sense for most of the market. When you can get Ludicrous mode and 300 miles of range without a transmission, why bother (in the eyes of most, anyway)? As for me, the Empulse appeals a lot more than the Zero for just this reason.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by tankinbeans »

My own unscientific thoughts are that electric vehicles are an interesting concept, but that they're not the answer. My memories of driving the Model S were of "whoosh, all of them torques yo!"

I'm personally more interested in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. If the infrastructure can get built up, and the processing of whatever into straight hydrogen can be make clean and efficient, I'd roll one. I've heard there are ways to process natural gas into hydrogen and of course electrolysing water.

Of course we don't need the Hindenberg problem either.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by theholycow »

tankinbeans wrote:I've heard there are ways to process natural gas into hydrogen and of course electrolysing water.
If you're going to spend effort processing natural gas, might as well process it into gasoline/alcohol/diesel/etc. There are decent processes for converting all common fuel hydrocarbons (including coal) into all of the others (except coal). I guess turning it into hydrogen does allow sequestration of the carbon from it instead of letting cars spew it into the air, though I'd rather see more trees planted than less carbon released.

IMO, the plan should be:
1. Stop making gasoline vehicles in general. (Maybe make a few, the way a few diesel cars are made now, but not for general usage or people will just only buy those models.) Replace with ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen internal combustion, hydrogen fuel cell, electric, etc. Include hybrid (for regen) on combustion vehicles.
2. Fully develop and popularize conversion kits for existing gasoline vehicles/engines/etc to more easily renewable fuels.
3. Turn all fossil fuels/other reasonably convertible hydrocarbons (coal, gas, oil, etc; also landfill gas) into gasoline to support remaining gasoline usage as deep into the future as possible.
4. Make ethanol/diesel/heating oil/kerosene/jet fuel/etc from the waste stream (food/bioprocessing byproducts, recycling, garbage, algae grown on sewage (excellent process, it passively cleans the sewage until it's good enough to use for crop irrigation, etc) as much as possible and from farming (probably hemp).
5. Use solar/nuclear/wind/hydro/tidal/geothermal/etc to crack water into hydrogen (and release oxygen), to be used in electricity-producing fuel cells as well as burned in ICEs (which will produce zero pollution and zero-sum oxygen usage, just recombining the water that was cracked).
6. For cripes sake make plastic out of something other than mined oil...there are plenty of renewable alternatives.
7. Use biofuels (from #4 above), electric (from #5 above), direct geothermal, and sustainable wood pellet production (waste stream, fast growth farms, and I suspect used paper could be turned into passable wood pellets) for heating, external combustion, industry, etc.
8. While we're solving the world's problems, develop and build passive solar/geothermal (and direct-drive tidal) desalination systems that scale well and are cost-effective.

Of course, that's a huge, ambitious, and unrealistic plan, but it would be nice to preserve easier gasoline production BEFORE fossil fuels run out (if they do).
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by IMBoring25 »

1) Authoritarian much? El Presidente is making a serious go at attempting this by regulating gas vehicles to be more expensive and artificially subsidizing alternatives, basically as far as he can go without having riots. Also take issue with ethanol. Well-to-wheels efficiency for ethanol the way we do it here (corn) is appalling. The cane ethanol Brazil uses is better.

2) Not practical. In most cases the depreciated price of an existing car plus a conversion kit would be higher than the cost of a new alt-fuel vehicle and have inferior packaging and performance in all respects. It would take a long-term forecast of fuel prices several times what they are for break-even on the conversion to ever be achieved even relative to the un-converted vehicle.

3) This is going the wrong way. Energy is lost every time you do anything. As long as the different fuels that are easy to extract from the reserves can be used by existing infrastructure, reserves would only be further depleted by processing fuels into a single stock and converting the infrastructure to run on that stock.

4) It's being done. The issue is scalability (and to some extent cost).

5) Again, scalability. Further, combustion of hydrogen still produces water vapor, which is also a greenhouse gas. Wait until they've converted us over to Hydrogen for the radical environmentalists to figure that one out...

6) Good in theory. Two major issues...Material properties and utilization of resources. The bioplastics, as a group, have inferior material properties in most respects (especially temperature resistance) when compared to the petroplastics, as a group. As for resources, we already have some discussion over whether it is smart to be "burning our food" in the form of ethanol. The more farmland you dedicate to growing corn for ethanol (or bioplastic), the less remains for food corn and other crops.

7) External combustion, especially of waste paper, on a large scale is going to be a tall order to get past the environmentalists. All the scalability issues directly impact this bullet point, too.

8) As you said, scalability and cost. Further, most of the good sites are already used and tidal would probably be as hard to get permitted for sea life concerns as hydroelectric is.

Gasoline will not run out. It will get expensive enough to drive mass adoption of currently-more-expensive alternatives long before that happens.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by Rope-Pusher »



Electric vehicles are inherently safer than gasoline-powered vehicles, because they don't have all that gasoline stored on-board.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by Rope-Pusher »

Leaf Me Alone!
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NISSAN LEAF + SUZUKI SAVAGE = LEAFY SAVAGE - From Autoline Daily
Nissan has come up with some ways to re-purpose used Leaf batteries, but this is far cooler than anything the automaker came up with. An electric startup called Night Shift Bikes shoehorned a Leaf battery pack into a custom made 2003 Suzuki Savage motorcycle. They call it the Leafy Savage. A brushless DC motor that puts out up to 40-horsepower was stitched into the spoked rear wheel to bring the system together. Electricity is pulsed to the motor so all that torque doesn’t rip the bike out from under the rider. The harder you twist the throttle, the shorter the pulse width becomes. You can even adjust the power curve for better acceleration or more range via a data port behind the seat. But we were a bit surprised to find out the Leafy Savage has the same range as the car the battery came out of, about 100 miles.

http://www.nightshiftbikes.com/savage/
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by AHTOXA »

I think that there's a good reason why electric motorcycles aren't as popular as one would expect. There's really only one manufacturer that's large enough to be producing anything of quantity (that I'm aware of), and that's Zero. I have seen a few of them in real life, but not many at all, even in California, which is full of motorcycles and sunny days.

Reason? Riding a motorcycle is focused around the senses. That's why people ride. People don't drive (regular) cars for the 'senses'. Bikes are about the sounds, smells and feels. Electric bikes take a lot of that away by removing the soundtrack of the motorcycle. In a car, the noise of the engine and exhaust is mostly unwanted, but the same isn't to be said about bikes - those are essential parts of the experience. Also have to consider the engine vibrations at speed and at idle, too. That's another major part of the senses and 'feels'.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by IMBoring25 »

There are almost as many Victory Empulse TTs on CycleTrader right now as there are Zeros, with considerably shorter time that they've been badged as a Victory. The six-speed might make some difference for the experience and there are obviously some who don't consider sound part of the experience, or they wouldn't ride bikes that sound like sewing machines.
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Re: What are your thoughts on electric cars?

Post by potownrob »

no soundaktors for those ebikes?? :lol:
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