Majestic94

20 years ago, they thought we’d having flying cars by now and Mars colonies.
My bets for the future are more along the lines of us riding chariots made of old truck beds, and throwing rebar spears at each other.

AzDave47

You have no idea how difficult it is to build new transmission lines. None will get financed/built in CA as they are liable for wildfires if the wind takes down a line and the sparks set a fire. One of the largest CA electric companies declared bankruptcy due to the liabilities of lawsuits due to the wildfires.

Majestic94

It’s like saying “why not power cars off old vegetable oil?” Because it’s only feasible when everybody else isn’t also doing it.
If the whole country is doing it, night rates would be more expensive than daytime rates. Add to the fact that solar panels would all be offline at night.
It’s much simpler to just don’t drive so much. A car getting 15 mpg but driven 5k a year produces less carbon per year than an electric car driving 15k-20k a year. It’s less about technology than it is lifestyle choices. The government would do more simply offering tax breaks to companies who work from home immediately than creating an entirely new industry and infrastructure over the next few decades to fit into people’s lifestyles.

MitchAlsup

Preventing the planet from heating to conditions unsuitable to civilization is not free either.

RKCRLR

Its all about the government's attempt at behavior modification. I.e., ignoring behavior, the logical thing to do would be to ban high efficiency vehicles from car pool lanes and have the gas guzzlers use them. That way they would get off the road quicker while the high efficiency vehicles would be the ones stuck in traffic but burning fuel at a lower rate than the gas guzzlers.

Phil1098

That's a bit dramatic, all I know is it's still cold in the winter and it's still hot in the summer. When I see the record highs or lows for virtually any given day, it's usually set decades ago, some as much as 100 years ago. Where I'm at right now was under a glacier.........about 3 million years ago, been receding ever since.

B Stead

Well, the politicians bragged about battery-powered electric-vehicles using existing infrastructure while hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles would require new infrastructure. But now the politicians are saying that a new powergrid is needed.

Actually, since wind and solar power are not fully utilized by the powergrid then wind and solar power should be connected to both the powergrid and to hydrogen production.

Another problem is that lithium-ion battery-powered electric-vehicles are prone to fire in a severe crash and it can take up to four hours to put the fire out. The road is closed for four hours due to one crash.

But the best battery-powered electric-vehicle is the BMW i3. It has a carbon-fiber bodywork, a reasonable battery load, and weighs less than 3000 pounds.

Now what size wheels and tires is the car-developer going to put on a 5000 pound electric-vehicle sports-car ? And what is a crash going to be like ?
.

Losbot

I just don't see EVs being practical. Look at recent holidays where there were reports of EV drivers having to wait for an available charging station. Even if we could pull a "Thanos" and with a snap of our fingers instantly replace every gas station with EV chargers, you'd still have a huge line of cars waiting. They can't charge fast enough and you're never going to be able to (anytime soon) pull up to a charger and get a full charge in 5 mins, like you can with an ICE vehicle. Look at how many cars flow through a gas station.

Now imagine each car needed to sit there for an hour to get a proper charge. You'd have to do that or only charge for 30 mins, just to get you to the next charger and sit for another 30 mins? I'll pass. They're just not practical for road trips and definitely not practical for long haul truckers. Goods will take forever to transport unless you've got a fleet of trucks, all charged up waiting along the route and you'll have to detach the trailer & transfer to another tractor.

ICE aren't going away anytime soon. We go through this sort of environmental scare every 10 years. They've been telling us the planet will implode in 10yrs.....for the last 50+ years.

rrsperry

pretty sure that the
next rank up from Capitan Obvious, would be, Rear Admiral lower half, if you are in the Navy, other services would be Major Obvious...

Majestic94

I thought Captain Obvious was a cop?

MitchAlsup

When was the last time you hears a politician say anything that was the absolute truth ???

My first car weighed in under 1700 pounds (after I removed some *.gov mandated bumper crap)

thill444

Well you guys seem to know more than all the major auto manufacturers because they are betting the farm on EV and it’s not just talk. Some of the top Corvette engineers have been moved to the EV program. Mary Berra has promised 30 EV models globally by 2025. And in the last 6 months they have accelerated the timeline. Ford is doing the same, as well as the Europeans. It doesn’t mean ICE engines go away, but clearly they will become less relevant with each passing year, and I think it’s fair to say the C8 will be the last V8 GM consumer sports car. Lots of rumors the next Camaro will be EV which would likely leave just the C8 with a V8 in just a few short years.

Westy R

Jumping back to nuclear energy -- I had a reminder a couple of days ago, on another forum, about molten-salt nuclear reactors. And I fell into the rabbit hole when I asked DuckDuckGo ... They really do sound like "all that and a bag of chips," or maybe a bag of gold doubloons.

Molten-salt reactors (MSR), like the Oak Ridge MSRE experiment of the Sixties, are inherently safer than the "light water reactors" (LWR) that we've been using since the Fifties. They are inherently fail-safe; when the molten-salt fuel gets too hot, it expands, which slows down the reaction and makes it cool. The easiest fail-safe control is a "freeze plug" at the bottom of the reactor, piped to a number of catch-vessels that are too small (tall and narrow) to sustain continued nuclear fission. (Much better than scram-rods in a solid-fuel reactor!) They run at atmospheric pressure, with an external heat-exchanger to make high-pressure steam for generating electricity. They can be small, modular reactors, and a 200-megawatt reactor can be built to fit a standard tractor-trailer-size container. They can "burn up" the high-level nuclear waste, the old fuel rods from decades of LWR use, turning it into less-radioactive forms that will lose their radioactivity in decades rather than millennia. And they can supply "process heat" to turn water and CO2 into hydrocarbons and gaseous oxygen -- a proven process for carbon-neutral gasoline!

MSRs are about as much like the current LWRs as cats are to catfish. They could supply our electric grid a whole lot more efficiently than fickle wind and sunlight-demanding solar. They could be built on assembly lines, at a cost-per-megawatt below wind and solar. But, of course, they would threaten the LWR manufacturers/operators with obsolescence -- just as they did in the Sixties, when Richard Nixon fired the head of the Oak Ridge MSRE research team, and threw the weight of Federal support to the LWR community.

Go ahead and run a search on "liquid fluoride thorium" to find out more about this ... I was amazed, and you may be, too.

TXFlyGuy

A coal powered Corvette? That is what we will have, as over 50% of the electricity is generated by coal fired plants. Emissions? Don't make me laugh! But wait...we can charge the batteries with wind turbines as long as the wind blows. Or maybe solar energy...daytime only.

That's why I'm buying a C8, the last gasoline powered 'Vette.

#flexgod~swag

gm is aiming to have their manufacturing carbon neutral. bmw and mercedes is doing it too, homie

C8J

I can't believe no of you remember who captain obvious is. Let me remind you. Too much time on Facebook and YouTube or the forum

Michael A

That's been said for years, and it has not evolved quickly. Think 1975 when catalytic converters came out, and how long it took before we got decent performing cars. That's where we are today with electrics. Electric cars are in their infancy, and impractical for anything other than local commuting. It takes an eternity to charge them to full capacity. In fact, right now, full capacity charging is discouraged, because it will reduce battery life.

There are physical limitations for charging electric cars at the same pace as gasoline cars. The Tesla Roadster is rumored to have a 200 kWh battery. To charge that from dead to 100% in three minutes, the same time it takes to fill your gasoline tank, would require 4 million watts. These charging stations better have their own power plants.

If the car is charged at 1000 volts (800 volts is the highest today), it would require 4000 amps. Do you know how big of a cable that would require?

Let say they upped the charging voltage to 10,000 volts. Are you going to have drivers handle 10,000 volt cables? Or have 10,000 volt wiring in your car?

You can't change physics. People are being sold a dream.

gbf_98070

That’s a great point. Queueing theory shows that as demand for a resource increases linearly the wait time increases logarithmically.

Electric cars have utility for people like my wife who works 8 miles from the house and never travels more than 50 miles per day. She could plug in at home and never experience range anxiety. Her car never leaves the city. But if everybody charges at home that also puts a major new load on the grid that is not currently present.

gbf_98070

Actually people are having an idiot’s dream crammed up their rectum.

gbf_98070

What I take from this is “invest in copper mining.”