Gdetrailer wrote:
rjxj wrote:
They will be all wheel drive with a motor at each wheel with zero loss through a drive train. I have a Rayeo electric outboard motor on a pontoon boat that uses a Briggs & Stratton Etek brushless pancake motor. Four group 27 in series will do 8 mph. It's not powerful enough for a vehicle obviously but it could easily fit in the backside of many wheels. Motors at the wheel will provide anti lock braking, traction control and regenerative braking with only two bearings to wear out. The wheel could become half of the motor for further efficiency. The electric cars of today are still pretty crude compared to what we will have in 10 or 20 years.
Etek
Not a trolling motor :)
There is no such thing as "zero loss".
Electric motors STILL use pretty much the same principals as the early 1890s electric motors.
You have windings made of copper wire, you have iron, you have friction of the bearings and so on.
You can only REDUCE the "loss" but even that has reached the point of no returns there..
Then you add in all the parasitic losses, modern day motors are driven by electronic controllers, there are a lot of losses there.. Then you add in silly comfort things like HEAT, A/C, and stereo..
In reality, the battery IS STILL the weak point.
It is simply a means of "storing" energy, it is a clumsy means of doing so and even that has serious losses.
Building batteries is a DIRTY process, it uses a lot of extremely harmful chemicals not to mention requires considerable amount of metals (some are rather dangerous by themselves), then you have ll the leftover hazardous materials from the build process that must be properly disposed of.
Electric vehicles being touted as "clean" and "renewable" is nothing more than a mirage and smoke screen, there is nothing clean about them..
Then when the battery life is done, you have a large hunk of hazardous material that you you will have to pay to dispose of..
Then you have another problem.. Guess what happens when the manufacturer of your EV decides to discontinue your battery?
Yep, the vehicle becomes JUNK!
There is no set standard for modern EVs and the manufacturer CAN pull the rug right from under you by no longer providing a battery!
Nothing like planned obsolescence of the entire vehicle!
You could have a 3 or 4 yr old vehicle being hauled off to the scrap yard just because nobody makes a replacement battery..
Sounds very green for the manufacturer and the scrapper in the form of cash.. Manufacturer gets to sell another vehicle faster and the scrapper gets to turn over more scrap metal faster..
I don't know. I don't think you can get a dirtier process than what goes on in the oil industry. I have read a bunch of articles debunking the whole "toxic battery" thing. Lead acid batteries are considerably more dangerous but they don't present a problem as they are recycled. I suspect a recycling industry will grow up around the motive battery industry as well. I can't imagine any vehicle manufacturer abandoning a battery process. Toyota still supports batteries from 12 year old priuses. Every automotive manufacturer will be making their bread and butter in electric vehicles in the next twenty years. I don't suspect any want the reputation of abandoning their customers.
Re the hydrogen question. I don't know much about the hydrogen cars but it seems to me (and I'm no expert) it would be harder to get the filling infrastructure in place. Electricity for the most part is in place. Every garage already has a 120 plug and although a 240 volt or fast charger would be nice keep in mind that the vast majority of us EV drivers "fill up" at night at home while we sleep using a 120 volt plug. Angela does most of the miles on ours and she plugs in about three times a week. Obviously we just use ours as a commuter vehicle but that works for a lot of people...obviously not everyone. We will put less miles on ours than we thought as we recently bought a townhouse closer to work but we will still probably put about 6000 miles per year on ours. That will cost me about 160 to 180 bucks in electricity every year. I already bought a jug of washer fluid last year and that should last me a couple years so my maintenance is pre-paid for a year or two...or at least until the jug runs empty. :)
