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  • 15
    Posted by $ jbrenner 1 year, 10 months ago
    EV's aren't even a good idea down the road. I have been on almost every side of the energy production game. Each time that I solved a technical barrier to the latest environmentally friendly energy technology, Lucy moved the goalposts and said that we should pursue a less environmentally friendly and more costly technology. I shrugged from that field in 2010, moving on to tissue engineering instead.
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    • Posted by $ Commander 1 year, 10 months ago
      I think they are a GREAT idea!
      As long as the batteries do not have transponders.

      Ragnar
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      • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
        a reminder of the issue that Tesla had a few months ago

        a server issue that prevented people from driving their EVs
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        • Posted by $ Commander 1 year, 10 months ago
          I'm talking repurpose. Without transponder battery cannot be located.
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          • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
            i understood what you meant
            but it also opens a bigger door

            some EVs can be turned off on people
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            • Posted by $ Commander 1 year, 10 months ago
              Yes. The trap is closing rapidly.
              I've been preparing for some 20 years. Watching the methodology of comfort and security traded for freedom and liberty.

              John Calhoun's experiments with mice and rats in closed environments is becoming human reality. Aberrant behaviors of heightened aggression and withdrawal. No meaningful rights of passage for maturing young adults. The distractions of prosperity degrading into subjective hedonism (compare 1920s to 2020s) in drugs, alcohol, fetishes.
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  • 12
    Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
    lots of issues with EVs

    battery reliability
    EV range in various weather
    power generation
    power grid
    recharge time
    use in emergency vehicles and recharge

    can you imagine a Fire Engine needing a recharge at a fire? do we need battery trucks now also?
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    • Posted by mccannon01 1 year, 10 months ago
      Could there be a business opportunity here? Put a diesel generator on my gasoline powered pickup and answer calls from EVs stuck on the road - charge a fortune. Of course, they'd have to be more prolific than they are now to make it worthwhile.
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      • Posted by $ 1 year, 10 months ago
        Hate to tell you but way back in the 60's a jet pilot friend of mine transferred to the far north and he drove a jeep. So he put a hook up on it and pulled people out of the snow for a small fee! Believe it or not! Paid well.
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      • Posted by $ Markus_Katabri 1 year, 10 months ago
        BINGO!!!!! Have it set up to “FAST CHARGE”.
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        • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
          you mean to blow up their EVs?
          LOL
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          • Posted by mccannon01 1 year, 10 months ago
            Almost, but not quite. Maybe shorten the battery life a bit so they will call for our service again and again and again... LOL

            Bring lunch and reading material as you kick back and relax while the charging takes place. And the meter goes "ka-ching ka-ching".

            Maybe we can offer additional services during charge time. Vacuum and cleaning? Wash and wax? Perhaps offer entertainment for a fee - trailer with comfort seating and a big screen TV (air and heat as needed, of course). After all this could go on for hours. Snack bar and necessary facilities? We'll need a quad cab pickup in case we need a few employees on a particular call. Maybe we could petition government to force insurance companies to cover the costs - it is a road hazard with public safety concerns - and that would make sure we get paid the big bucks.
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  • Posted by GaryL 1 year, 10 months ago
    EVs put the cart in front of the horse. Our grid is not even close to being capeable of handling the added demands and the battery technology is far from adequate. I believe the push to go electric is at least 10 years too soon.
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    • Posted by TheRealBill 1 year, 10 months ago
      That depends on the reasons for the push. An electric grid incapable of supporting mass EV use is a feature of the goal is control.
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      • Posted by GaryL 1 year, 10 months ago
        YUP! Welcome to the left coast. Keep your lawn and shrubs well manicured and buy an EV. Too bad you can't water the lawn and shrubs and you can't charge the EV. Makes me want to pack up and move right out there, NOT!
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  • Posted by VetteGuy 1 year, 10 months ago
    I would like to see EVs developed but WITHOUT the government shoving them down our throat. Let the well-off early adopters work out the bugs, get them cost effective, and then maybe they will be ready for prime time. For SOME purposes. If I commuted a reasonably short distance every day, an inexpensive EV might be the ticket. But I am retired, and I like to take road trips, and they are NOT cost-effective, even with subsidies. So ... no EV for me in the forseeable future.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 1 year, 10 months ago
    I agree, 25n56il4. Right now they are great for virtue signalling rich people who also have a gasoline vehicle. With that said, maybe if there are enough people buying them there will be enough investment dollars for the drawbacks to be overcome. Home computers were expensive and didn't do much in the beginning, but enough people bought in for the industry to grow.
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    • Posted by $ gharkness 1 year, 10 months ago
      I can clearly remember wondering what in the HECK anybody would want with a computer at their house! (My failure has always been a lack of imagination, I suppose.)
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      • Posted by NealS 1 year, 10 months ago
        You comments reminded of a 1954 Popular Mechanics issue that I subscribed to in my younger days. Now the photo is being evaluated by Snopes to see if it's true or not. I remembered the photograph well, I was so impressed. https://www.jsu.edu/news/july_dec2004...

        And about 6 years later I got to see some real computers that took up whole buildings at Rocketdyne in Canoga Park. I got a job at their test facility in the Santa Susana mountains, now contaminated from a Sodium Reactor and other things we knew little about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_S...
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    • Posted by TheRealBill 1 year, 10 months ago
      There are limited cases where it does make sense to use them, though from a pollution standpoint they do not make sense. This is because at best one trade speculative harm for real and uncontroversially recognized harms.

      But, as with roof PV, from a cost perspective they don’t make sense if you’re wanting to save money. Even if you are off grid with your own power for charging, gasoline is still cheaper and will likely always be so absent heavy handed government mandates.

      A real eye opener is to consider an electric rover versus a liquid fuel rover on Mars. As the economics involved are dominated by transport costs and transport is limited by rocket capacity, even their liquid fuel rules supreme.

      So if in a fully new space where there is no existing industry and infrastructure to compete with, EVs can’t compete, what hope is there for them to compete against that same tech when it has the infrastructure and industry to support it?

      And just to be clear, the things WV rovers lose out on would be quite familiar: range, resupply time and expense (energy), maintenance, repair, flexibility, and cost to power.
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  • Posted by ProfChuck 1 year, 10 months ago
    The battery in an electric car is the functional equivalent of the gas tank in an internal combustion powered vehicle. They both serve to store the energy necessary to operate the vehicle. However, while a gas tank is a very simple device modern batteries are marvels of technological complexity. They are made of exotic and potentially dangerous materials and have a limited life span. They constitute a major fraction of the cost of manufacture and maintenance of the vehicle. Economically, they are a poor substitute.
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    • Posted by mspalding 1 year, 10 months ago
      It is a lot cheaper to fill a battery than a gas tank. Maybe the extra complexity is worth it. Also the engine of a gas car is hugely more complex than the motor of an electric.
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      • Posted by $ blarman 1 year, 10 months ago
        But which is easier to dispose of at end of life? Something can rust in a landfill and present zero danger to the water shed. Not so for batteries of any kind, which have to go to a hazardous waste facility...
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  • Posted by STEVEDUNN46 1 year, 10 months ago
    The state does not subsidize your solar project. The taxpayers subsidize it.. how do you morally justify stealing from other hard working people to pay half of your solar panel costs?
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  • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 1 year, 10 months ago
    It's like solar power.

    We had a solar salesman give us a presentation at our new house. I've been attracted to solar for a number of years and was curious.

    Doing some "pre-sales" research, we discovered that our electric bill was averaging $53 a month (we have natural gas) and was 1/3 the cost of our old house.

    After all his calculations, we figured we would be paying $115 a month, for the next 20 years, just to pay off the solar installation.

    With both of us in our 60's, we'd never see a payback on the system, so we politely declined.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 1 year, 10 months ago
    Not ready to be released upon us? Not trustworthy? Still in EXPERIMENTAL STAGE? Cannot see in the present situation we are in!?

    Gosh...where did I hear thus just recently? What was the reaction by my fellow non-Gulch citizens?

    Haha....
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  • Posted by Eyecu2 1 year, 10 months ago
    I agree that electric vehicles will ultimately be a failure. Battery energy density and recharge times will never compare to what internal combustion engines (ICE) can currently provide.

    In my opinion the answer to this issue is for us to convert over to using hydrogen as our fuel source. Current ICE vehicles can be converted to run on hydrogen, and as hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe we will never run out.
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    • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
      easy to make/generate also
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      • Posted by Eyecu2 1 year, 10 months ago
        I have been an advocate for H2 ICE for most of my life and for the life of I can't understand why it hasn't taken off.
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        • Posted by TheRealBill 1 year, 10 months ago
          Probably because it isn’t nearly as good as the assumed promise. I used to be on the H2 camp until I dug into the energy economics of it. We don’t find it just laying around in a reservoir to pump it, so we have to make it. And as it turns out when you have to make it you don’t get a positive energy return from burning it. H2 isn’t an energy source, it is a storage - but in a form we can’t get enough of it back out to be a net win.

          I know, people talk about it having so much energy in it. This is true but not as relevant as how much you can extract. People make the same mistake in reverse with ethanol. Ethanol
          has less, true. But in an engine designed for it, we get more of it out.

          I usually describe it thusly:
          I have two suitcases of money. One has a million bucks in it, the other has 700k in it. On the surface you’d want the first one. But there is a catch. You can only get 40% out of the first one, but 80% out of the second. Now which do you want?

          Hydrogen has tons in it, but we can’t extract but a fraction of it and it takes more than we extract to make it. This is borne out in diesel heavy trucking versus HICE when diesel has a significantly total cost of operation. If you compare HICE energy chain efficiency to diesel, diesel is about 2x as efficiency - and that is not counting the energy that goes into producing the hydrogen. That last bit is missing from every single pro-hydrogen article.

          When you do a full comparative analysis, hydrogen is a poor choice. The amount of energy that would be needed is far and above what we can produce (sounds familiar eh?) and where do you get that from? The best answer is nuclear. But if you go nuclear the more efficient cycle is electric storage in batteries for vehicles. On that way mass hydrogen and electric vehicles share the same problem: that of electrical production and distribution.
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        • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
          not enough money it in for the right people?

          just like with EVs, if serious, were are the power lines in the streets to give power to them, where are the solar panels in orbit??
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  • Posted by chad 1 year, 10 months ago
    The first electric vehicle was invented in 1890 and an electric vehicle held the land speed record until 1900.Electric vehicles were experimented with when cars were being developed. After almost 150 years of experimenting, developing and research they are still experimental and unable to compete with carbon fueled automobiles.
    With subsidies maintaining the entire infrastructure required to make them work they are still expensive, unreliable and difficult to maintain. It may be that until electricity can be produced incredibly cheaply and power lines laid into the roads to supply constant power they will never be able to compete. Even then they could not provide the freedom of choice to leave the road for the trail less traveled.
    When government plunders people who would not make a choice to enforce and provide a choice for those misguided people who think they are saving the world by creating more pollution than they would if they would drive a gasoline powered car then mistakes are not only made they are magnified until the destruction is so complete that it cannot be ignored and they give up.
    Then they will request those who can use violence to direct others to make another unwise choice, wind powered cars, and use the existing system of violence to continue to force others to live unwisely. I think the government should enforce the production of buggy whips. All those unfortunate people who know how are not gainfully employed. I have a long list of where the government should be employed to help make the world fair, just and the Utopia that I have always dreamed it could be.
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  • Posted by tutor-turtle 1 year, 10 months ago
    Love the idea of an electric car:
    Pluses> quick, silent, techkie for the geek in me, fill 'er up at home.
    Minuses> Cost, Range, Batteries from China, too much tech, in a world with already too much tech.
    Add this all together with an already strained electric grid and it doesn't add up.
    Last: the big push for going electric is contradictory.
    The Woke doesn't want hydrocarbon fuels (oil does not come from rotting dinosaurs) and they don't want nuclear.
    On a still night, zero power is coming from "renewables" That doesn't leave enough juice for a light bulb and a dorm fridge.

    Zero-Point Energy exists. Be it ancient technology or off-world reverse engineered, we know it exists.
    Until the powers that enslave us economically allow it to be known (and why would they?) Electric cars will remain play things for the rich.
    Then there is the control factor (hat tip to mhubb)
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  • Posted by MikePusatera 1 year, 10 months ago
    I am just finishing putting solar panels on top of my manufacturing building in Illinois. We are paying about half the cost ($500K). The balance is state subsidies. Technically this is a below average business decision. The ROI is projected 11 years. Normally I would not choose an investment with an ROI over 6 years. But the uncertainty of energy prices and wanting to support this industry we went ahead with it. This is the beauty of capitalism. We can all have opinions but as objectivist I think we all agree that the market should determine the future of EVs and Solar. No one entity should be making these decisions for us. Anyone who believes that is the enemy of an Objectivist.
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  • Posted by CaptainKirk 1 year, 10 months ago
    My favorite review was about the "CARBON" consumption over the lifespan of the vehicle...

    Basically, you have to own this thing for like 8 years to get to 70% OF a normal cars carbon.

    If you own it for 2yrs, you are under water on Carbon damage. (It would have been better to drive a normal vehicle, your total carbon footprint would be smaller).

    Now, some of this is a problem of SCALE, and some of this is the DIRTY Mining for the elements...
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  • Posted by Owlsrayne 1 year, 10 months ago
    There are only four members of Congress who own EVs.This shows a lack of confidence they have in EVs. As I have posted in the past owning an electric car, never again. More development needs to be done on battery element composition expanding the driveable range and tolerating a faster charge rate. Until then I will drive my ICE car.
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  • Posted by $ Markus_Katabri 1 year, 10 months ago
    For a Bop around Town car....I’d use one. But I just happen to have that kind of environment.
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    • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 10 months ago
      an EV would make sense is some use scenarios

      i used to drive 70 miles back and forth to work
      in the worse conditions, using a EV for that range would be possible (cold hurting battery charge, cold requiring the heater, ect)
      but that would mean it is a second vehicle
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  • Posted by Dobrien 1 year, 10 months ago
    It only takes a few moments of rational thinking and reasoning to know this is a genocidal push on mankind. They want to control you. Imagine a targeted city where the power grid is shut down.
    An immobile population is at risk of not being able to evacuate. The bigger Question is why do we let the Delete who push this on us continue to breath.
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    • Posted by $ blarman 1 year, 10 months ago
      Correct. Adam Smith pointed out the benefit to the worker who is able to move to find better employment in The Wealth of Nations. It's one of the fundamental checks/balances in the marketplace. You can't corrupt/control the market without limiting the movement of the population. For more info, see the late Thomas Sowell's comments regarding the modern day plantations: the black urban jungle.
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  • Posted by jaisim18 1 year, 10 months ago
    Agree E V are like the early days of motor cars shifting from Horse carriages. It will take a decade or so before they become normal communication; Too many issues involved, including safety and reliability.
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