What I want for my birthday…
April 29th, 2008
Ok — so it’s my birthday and I’ve decided to make it easy on the world. No guessing what I want this year because I’m just going to tell you all. I want an electric car. I’m tired of spending $60/week on gas. All I want is a tiny, lightweight, plug-in electric commuter vehicle. Ideally – it needs about a 40-50 mile range per charge. Why the hell don’t these exist? The Tango is close, as is the Myers Motors NmG (formerly the Corbin Sparrow). Unfortunately, the only Tango that you can actually *get* is currently $108,000 – and the NmG only has a 30 mile range – which would just barely get me from my house to my office. Additionally, the $36,000 price tag for the one-seat NmG is ridiculous. If you assume $4/gallon gasoline in my 22mpg Blazer versus the $0.02/mile electric NmG, I would need to put 225,000 miles (5000 commutes – or about 14.5 years) on an NmG just to break even… Versus an SUV!!!
Why isn’t there a fully electric version of the SmartCar yet? I guess I’ll just have to wait until my Blazer goes tits-up and see what’s available then. I hope that, by then, they’ll have figured out how to make an affordable, composite frame/body, fully electric, two seat commuter vehicle.
Come to think of it, if I compare a SmartCar to a Myers NmG on purely economic terms – it would take 22 years of my commute to make the NmG pay off… So is it the market that is stupid, or people driving NmGs?
Comment by Brock — April 30, 2008 @ 12:46 am
Your Blazer has tits?? And you still want to give it up? Color me surprised.
Comment by Carrie — May 14, 2008 @ 11:47 am
Hey, great job at the Championships today; did you end up catching me on the burpees?
Quite frankly, the reason electric vehicles are not as good as they sound is that they are still essentially petroleum and coal-powered, (yes, even in Seattle where we have a lot of hydropower). Basically, you’re just buying into another environmental blinder sold to the consumer on the basis of convenience. You (the consumer) lose context of the consequences, and pay a good portion of money to have that convenience. (Why, it’s the American way!) However, by plugging into an outlet, you incorporate the (in)efficiency of the electrical grid into your vehicle, which is about 70% (average) at the power plant, and by the time you consider line losses (think 30-40% or more) and engine efficiency, you’ve probably burned more oil barrels than would normally be required by a regular gasoline engine! Your best investment right now is a Toyota Prius (about 1/2 as evil on both sides of the coin), or, if those are too girly for you, a truck with a diesel engine (that meets or exceeds EPA Tier 4 emissions ratings especially if you want something REALLY big) which you can run on biodiesel (BS100, not any of that other stuff that is subsidized and has diesel additives). Otherwise, be patient until they develop the recyclable rocket balloon car.
Comment by Jeralee — May 19, 2008 @ 4:13 am
Oh — I take into account the generation. Dirty coal (as opposed to “clean coal”) power plants operate at about 36% efficiency. Grid transmission is about 65% efficient. A battery/motor system in the average electrical vehicle is about 90% efficient. An electrical motor that gets electricity from a coal power plant has a net efficiency of about 21%. That sounds bad, but gasoline engines tuned for efficiency only get to about 20% efficiency whereas diesel engines hit almost 25% efficiency.
However — this isn’t a completely fair comparison, because where the numbers for electrical motors take into account line loss (distribution inefficiency), the combustion engine numbers don’t. Without even taking into account energy invested in the refinement process, it costs energy to move gasoline/diesel from production facilities to distribution points in exactly the same way that it does for electricity.
Ultimately – electrical motor efficiency is as-good or perhaps slightly better than gasoline engine effiiency and as-good or slightly worse than diesel engine efficiency. However, that’s not the only consideration to be made. In terms of emissions per unit of net energy (energy to the wheels), dirty coal plants are worst, then diesel engines, then gasoline engines and “clean coal” power plants. The biggest benefit of electrical vehicles is the *potential* to decouple from dirty power – even if this wouldn’t be the case currently. If everybody started using electrical vehicles today, we’d probably be spewing slightly more crap into the atmosphere than we were before. *BUT* – we would be able to change that behind the scenes by changing our generation technology.
My BIGGEST concern however, isn’t even with the power-source of the vehicle. What I’m looking for is a *light weight* vehicle. Even the much-lauded Prius has a curb weight of nearly 3000 pounds. This means that if I drive one of those, 95% of the energy it consumes is spent moving the vehicle while only 5% is spent moving me. Reducing vehicle size/weight is by *far* the best way to improve efficiency. Composite frame vehicles can shave 25-50% of the weight off of a car and sacrifice virtually nothing. The problem is that large-scale composite manufacturing in the automotive industry has been *way* too slow out of the gate, so it’s still on the pricey side.
Novel over.
Comment by Brock — May 21, 2008 @ 10:55 pm