| Author | Message | ||
     Hootowl |
Shall we talk about the rhodium in catalytic converters? It’s so expensive that a team of researchers is working on a new type of converter that uses the much cheaper and more abundant metal -wait for it - Cobalt. | ||
| Hootowl |
The only legitimate point he makes is about running out of gas and the relative ease of obtaining an extra gallon. However, I am 51 years old, and I have never run out of gas. I don’t intend to ever run out of battery, either. It’s called paying attention. Not sure what sort of trauma caused by not paying attention the author has experienced, but it seems like he’s projecting his own failure. If you run out of gas, that’s on you. | ||
| Aesquire |
His blind opposition is affecting his perception of reality. I expect that from the left. Disappointing I agree! It's EXACTLY a copy, perhaps a mockery, of Greenie Propaganda. I don't know if it's intentional parody of Alarmist Bull, or just following their pattern, or too many of those brownies you shouldn't give to Santa or minors. Without emojis it can be hard to tell sarcasm from agreement by a moron.  My complaint with electric vehicles is 2 sided. A. Range/power density, which basically means you accept today's limits while you wait for the Battery of Tomorrow, or don't accept it, until it reaches the real world actual numbers you want. B. The idealistic conversion of a society to battery power From Engine power ( jet-A or gasoline or methanol or... ) ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES an order of magnitude more electric power generation. B is ignored or denied by the cultists. Thus they are stupid or lying, and I can't believe they are that stupid. There certainly isn't a push in D.C. to double the grid capacity in the immediate future, so lying is nigh certain. A is highly application dependent. Other than the extra hours to charge on cross continent trips, Electric vs. ( say ) diesel is fine for recreational travel. Not, today, for semi trucks. ( waiting for better battery ) If you live a dozen miles from work and it's your commuter vehicle, a '90s electric car makes some sense. You just own or rent a second vehicle for longer trips. That dozen miles is a bigger number today, and has expanded the utility to more people. The problem of A, power density, is of critical concern as I look at my next aircraft. I consider my "typical" desired range. It's 40 miles to my destination, a Very short hop for most vehicles today. That's 80 miles round trip, with another 20 desired for reserve, in case of headwinds or diversion around a storm. I can get the 40+ miles, today, with gasoline. I can stretch that to the round trip by cheating, ( fuel capacity is limited by regulation in the aircraft I typically fly ) Or landing at an airport that has gasoline. ( none in my area have fast charge capabilities ) I can get 35+ today, with batteries, at TWICE the cost. Or almost the round trip, for THRICE the cost. Keep in mind I'm in the tiny percentage of people that commit aviation that would actually climb to half a mile, and shut off the motor, and try to soar in nature's currents, instead of just buzzing along in a straight line. ( my last 30 mile cross country soaring flight in PA was calculated by GPS to be a twisty, circling voyage over 275 miles. ) So I'm willing to run edge of the possible in these things. I also want to not die. That's total cost, airframe & powerplant. | ||
| Hootowl |
I, personally, can’t see the day when airplanes are commonly running on batteries. The energy density of a liquid fuel is too advantageous. Weight is critical. I think it is asinine to mandate electric cars. Let people choose. Let the market signal the demise of gasoline, if that is its destiny. I seriously doubt it is. Electric and liquid fuels both have their strengths and weaknesses. Use the one that makes sense for you. And vote out of office the morons who want to take that choice away from you. | ||
| Zane |
I can see a place for electric vehicles. Applications like the post office, city buses or local delivery services. Maybe they'd work as a second, around town vehicle. Mom's grocery getter to take and pick up the kids from school with a stop at Walmart on the way home. But as main transportation? Nope, they aren't ready for prime time and won't be any time soon. I have a brother in Provo, Utah that I plan to see soon, In a gasoline powered car I can get there in about 11 hours. In an electric vehicle it's a full two days at least. | ||
| Hootowl |
Well, you’re wrong about that. I know. I’ve done cross country trips in an electric car. It’s a 30 minute stop every three hours. 11 hours becomes 13 hours, not 48. It is every day transportation for me. I leave the house every day with more than enough range to do everything I need to do. I never go to gas stations. Not in that car, anyway. I still have my diesel Jetta. Electric cars are perfectly viable options for most people. But it should be a choice, not a mandate. | ||
| Aesquire |
 Agree, but I'm not knocking the idea of electric cars & even light recreational vehicles. It's very application dependent. Some toys, like hydrofoil surfboards are easiest with electric. Ditto scooters. And the human carrying "drone like" multicopters the FAA is currently having fits over. ( they're studying the problem, it's a subject worth a thread, as it relates to autonomous cars and traffic laws ) Quiet matters too. Lawn tools, human cuisanart flying toys, bike paths! For under $500 & a medium used bicycle, you can assemble a gasoline powered death trap fun bike that is sketchy. Upgrade some of the bad parts, like the way the rear sprocket attaches, nearly good enough brakes, etc. & you're around a grand. The electric equivalent runs $1000 for sketchy to double that for good. Roughly double the gas versions. The best of both have dedicated frames and fairly robust drive trains. The biggest difference is the gasoline version is pure gearhead, ( good with wrenches ) while the electric is far more "phone app controls performance". ( there are models where the user registers the bike to unlock speed & features ) Another difference is noise related access. with loud 2 stroke "mopeds"You would absolutely get complaints on the extensive biking/hiking/horse "no motorized vehicles" trails. ( my area has hundreds of miles ) And you'd get hassled/arrested/impounded. With electric, you can just try and not annoy the Karens. & get away with it. ( I try not to trigger Karen's or horses, on my pedal bikes. It just courtesy ... & enlightened self interest ) Leaving the politics and religious cult aside, take advantage of the new toys! | ||
| Rick_a |
Your daily dose of maximum wokeness.  | ||
| Needs_o2 |
Hoot, So, should people then be expected to own two cars? I live out west and there are a lot trips we do with nothing in between for milesssssssssss to plug into. I guess we would have to bring our own solar panels as well. | ||
| Hootowl |
I don’t expect you to do anything other than make your own decision about what kind of vehicle you drive. https://www.tesla.com/findus There aren’t many, if any, places in the US where you are out of range of one of their charging stations, however. All that said, most people have more than one vehicle. That’s up to you, too. (fixed broken link) (Message edited by hootowl on December 03, 2021) | ||
| Hootowl |
And their network grows constantly... | ||
| Aesquire |
There's a fine line between brand loyalty and evangelical zeal. I have 2 "cars". That's because I tend to keep them until they are piles of rust, long after any reasonable resale value is gone, typically one is long paid for before I buy the next, in staggered order. It's not a "collection". I tend to have a van-like vehicle for moving friends and stuff and camping, and a mileage runner for commuting and non heavy hauler trips. I really liked my VW diesel. But the offer to buy it back at more than any trade in value, at the same time it was due for thousand$ in maintenance costs influenced my decision. In retrospect budgeting $10k a year to keep it might have been smarter? My 2013 Caravan is well into sunk cost fallacy zone. With over 270k miles and a fresh steering rack it owes me nothing, and I see no reason to hurry to replace it. I'm figuring next year I'll be shopping for a replacement. A retro-mod Dodge full sized 2nd gen van, with Luke Skywalker and the Death star? The current, and hopefully long term, mileage maven is a Rav-4 hybrid. I don't have a garage to plug in a "more electric" car, or a Prime or Tesla might have made sense. Honestly, in 2021, I don't think I can repair a new ( fresh out of warranty ) car myself anymore. In the Before Time, I thought nothing of changing timing chains or installing headers etc. Most of my full sized vans had "speed" mods that improved efficiency & power. ( breathing improvements are good for both! You choose with your foot which at the moment ) Then I got a Ford conversion van, and unless I stripped the engine of the induction system and spent thousands, it ran best with stock exhaust. ( shudder ) The end of an era was at hand. So I'm resigned to never doing more than filter and oil and brakes and tires on a modern car. They're too computerized and need specialized gear to go deeper, plus regulations make changes illegal in many cases. So a 2013 Caravan may well be replaced by a much older vehicle that can be a mechanical enthusiast machine with technology I understand. A "practical" hobby toy. That's all my personal problems. The Bigger issues of Electric cars, the need for increased generator capacities and charger infrastructure, shouldn't unduly influence your desire as an Individual to get one. Make your calculation on range, cost, needs, and compromise, based on YOUR life, and don't sweat the big picture. There may be aspects You care about that others don't. You want to brag about saving the unborn baby seals? Enjoy. ( I may mock you, but it's your bag, man. ) You don't want to support child labor and horrific pollution? I understand. ( my Rav-4 battery materials come from Canada! It's becoming a very unfree speech land, but they don't imprison tennis players for comp!aining about government masters raping them. Yet. ) Woke, ego, concerned, or dispassionately practical, your priorities are different from mine, and ditto needs. I might want to haul a quarter ton of 10 foot lumber next week. The Rav-4 won't work. The Caravan will. If I go visit a relative 50 miles away, the Rav-4 gets double the range on a gallon of gas. Etc. Etc. With today's tech and infrastructure, a hybrid offers more choice and freedom than an all electric. Refueling is faster and you don't have to worry about finding a station as much. You'll pay more for some aspects and less for others. No matter how much you wish it's not so, it's always a compromise. | ||
| Hootowl |
“There's a fine line between brand loyalty and evangelical zeal.” Why can’t it be both?  | ||
| Chauly |
Patrick, configure the RAV4 to tow a lightweight utility trailer. I pulled one with my Prius for awkward loads or bikes. It worked out well | ||
| Hootowl |
I pull a 1/2 ton trailer with the Jetta. Works great. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://alp.news/2019/05/06/pink-batts-at-100-km-h/ https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_e lectric_highway_a_fuelish_policy.html Battery fires are real, but so are gasoline fires. Most car fires I've been to were internal, plastic fires from dropped joints/cigarettes, or electrical. Not a pro, so my sample size is small. Gas fires take special tools and techniques. Ditto metal fires. I worked with magnesium and titanium in machine shops, and knew what to not do. ( water makes it worse ) But using any flammable materials have risks. And sometimes the manufacturer cuts too many corners. Both Boeing and Chevy have had recalls for badly installed/programmed/designed Lithium batteries. You don't smoke while pumping gas, you don't fill the Turkey fryer before heating the oil and dropping in food, and you don't trust Alec Baldwin with a gun. Just common sense. | ||
| Ebutch |
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| Hootowl |
Look up the number of car fires every day in the US. You might be surprised. | ||
| Aesquire |
I think there may be Unrealistic expectations happening. You don't expect an electric toothbrush to burst into flames. But you don't have enough power packed into one to start a big block Chevy, which is what The "best" available Lithium Cobalt Iron etc. batteries deliver in the same volume. You also seldom hit a steel pole at 116mph with one. Growing up with D cell powered toy cars, the average person isn't going to change attitudes from toy to Serious Hardware easily. Guys who build higher powered model cars and airplanes are more likely, since a battery in flames is fairly common. ( speed charging bare bones packs, often marginal junk from a "Asian slave state" ) Common to talk about, anyway. The editorial I posted above overhypes the fire risk. Imho. But it's not zero. Or Chevy wouldn't have issued a safety warning not to park near your home. Someone done messed up in design, QC, or both. Am I surprised running a Tesla into an obstacle at 2 miles a minute started a battery fire? Nope. A Ferrari or Suzuki in the same collision might be in a flaming pool. I'm not surprised the battery kept reigniting. But I have more experience with metal fires and keep up with the aviation safety issues of high power density batteries. The next generation will solve the problems, we are told by the evangelicals. Probably true. A hypothetical next gen Aluminum Air ( or yogurt plastic ) battery may solve the child labor and pollution problems with Lithium & Cobalt. Great. Be cheaper! Awesome! Otoh we don't know the Next generation problems, yet. Like using a Lithium ion charger might launch your 2030 Ford E-150 into the neighbor's yard. Or self discharge problems with a software glitch/hack. And that too cheap to not buy Chinese Electric car that monitors your social media and murders you for supporting a free Hong Kong. ( headline - "Racists mass suicide? Or judgement of Gaia?" 78 thousand racists all drove into walls, rivers, head on into heavy trucks, etc. On Tuesday. Scientists can't explain the incredible odds on so many suicides in one day. Details on page 6 ) | ||
| Hootowl |
Musk seems pretty conservative. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://astronomy.com/news/2021/09/understanding-j ust-how-big-solar-flares-can-get The Carringtion Event, big solar flare & coronal mass ejection, wasn't the first, only, or biggest the planet has seen. I'll skip the Doom cry part of any discussion of Solar storms, where everything our technology uses burns up along with civilization as we know it. It's a near certainty, but... Big Solar particles at high energy strikes now seem rather common, and most happened long before we had photographs and telescopes. Our perspective of time is deceptive. Based on personal memories of a lifetime, and cultural memories & record. Consider the ever increasing jumps in perspective as you go back from TV to Steam to Written Word, to Ice Age, to lots of weird critters to lots of hot rock, to spinning dust cloud with swirls... is the tiny fraction of the tiny fraction in receding enormity and dimness. Thus it's hard to have a grasp of the odds on the many species or civilization ending natural phenomena that will happen someday, in the future. We know they will, because they have. Asteroid strikes, Solar flares, volcanic eruptions, big quakes & tsunamis, Ice Ages and Supernova, are all real. The continents are still moving, the gravity effects of orbiting masses that stir the substance of the heavens hasn't stopped, but we don't have perfect understanding on a personal level to judge the risks, well. Imho. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/cli mate-dreams-and-energy-realities.php I'm reminded of the National Lampoon radio show, iirc, that had the fake Monolithic Oil commercials. ( or was that someone else? ) "We at Monolithic are killing all the birds around our oil refineries. Birds eat food, and food takes energy to grow. At Monolithic, we're doing our part, so you do yours. At Monolithic, we want you... To pay." bottom line is... if Germany or California had built clean Thorium reactors ( and not on a fault line ) instead of windmills and solar farms, millions of birds wouldn't have been killed, hundreds of thousands of acres not stripped of oxygen giving trees and brush and be available for recreation and sightseeing. There would be far less need to burn precious natural gas, better used to heat homes and make useful things, ditto coal and oil, and in a rational time frame, the elimination of the need for big fossil fuel power plants. Also no energy shortages when the sky is dark with clouds and the winds too high, or low, to feed the grid. Well, except in California where they refuse to change their insane fire and forest/brush management laws, and deliberately ruin the government controlled power grid, half built water and flood control systems, and ruinous crime/immigration/street feces policies. That may take extreme measures. Like banning vote collection by political groups. Or neutron bombs. ( sarcasm ) Better yet would be orbital industrial scale solar power and Lunar He3 production, but both, while long term useful for creating infrastructure, would be fiercely fought by the same folk that make rules that lead to massive brush fires. | ||
| Hootowl |
If spacex’s starship comes to fruition, orbital solar might be viable. | ||
| Aesquire |
I submit having any technology is a "two edged sword". A car can deliver chocolate or bombs. The technology to reflect asteroids can also throw rocks at your house. But since cosmic impacts are a known hazard to life on our planet with a probability of One, it's worth developing the technology and infrastructure. But planetary defenses don't pay the bills. We need to exploit the natural resources of a Solar System and colonize space to put some eggs in a different basket. Solar power is a great resource. Of course the Greenies will object because of dangerous radiation, and I can't say they're absolutely wrong. After all, I was told cell phones cause brain damage, and I was also told a majority voted for a guy who hid in his basement and had a curfew before 6 pm. So..... | ||
| Aesquire |
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/12/12/the-real-cl imate-and-health-crisis/ Contrary to faulty global warming “research,” far more people die in cold weather than in hot summers. In the United States and Canada, cold causes 45 times more deaths per year than heat: 113,000 from cold versus 2,500 from heat. Worldwide, with air conditioning far less available in already hot countries than in the United States, some 1,700,000 people die annually from cold versus 300,000 from heat. I joke about burning politicians for heat, but despite how greasy they seem, they're too hard to light without accelerants, and just go out. Pity. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/tal king-back-to-sen-warren.php | ||
| Hootowl |
It’s too bad that sen warren will never read that. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/a-f unny-thing-happened-3.php by | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/w e_need_a_political_climate_change.html Because "science" is out of fashion, except for an excuse for tyranny, expect the over century long drought plus Bad Management to result in water rationing. So the Governor will have plenty of water to keep his own wine business and lawns green, but towns and his competition will burn. ( as he shut down competition with Covid Dictatorship ) I don't recall any changes in the Bad Management of the brush lands, ( please correct me if wrong ) OR the State Run power grid, then expect record fire season, followed by record rain induced landslides, and possibly dam failures and mass casualties in deadly floods. All blamed on Climate Change & not Democrat Big City Greed. That's a Certainty. It's possible that Biden* corruption and incompetence might create "oh, it's not a war, really!" Mass casualty events if China detonates a few nukes in container ships off San Diego, or Long Beach, or Portland, or... that cripple the U.S. Navy and kill millions with Nuclear Tsunami, and since container concealed missile systems offer the possibility of tossing a nuke over the SoCal fire zones, you can "speculate" on a fire/ flood/sewage plague triple whammy on the West Coast that rivals a Biblical Wrath scenario. Which would be stupid of Xi Jinping, as leaving California alone to destroy itself with a little Continuing push from the highly profitable narco terrorism operations ongoing, is a zero risk option to ruin his enemy, us. | ||
| Aesquire |
I point out that War with China isn't a dead nuts certainty. It's possible, even likely, that the bulk of the Panic over China invading Taiwan is a combination of Xi using the threat to both increase his power abroad, and quiet any dissent he can't just casually murder. ( among his high elite ) Also the Big China Threat might be an exaggeration by the Party Propaganda Media here to distract from the abuse of political prisoners and the lack of legitimacy of the Occupation of the White House and the incompetence of the alleged Leaders. Otoh, it's not in doubt that the CCP is the most murderous and dishonest regime in the history of the planet. And the current Glorious Leader thinks he will keep the job forever. ( or until he dies, which for a Godless Evil Man is the same thing ) And Xi Jinping is more than willing to murder anyone to keep his power. Or insults him. Or it's a day ending in y. So while I personally don't think any sane Chinese leader would order a nuclear war on America, despite owning the Government, you can't assume Xi is sane by Western standards. And far too much rides on a sick old man who has multiple people poised to stick him in the basement with some ice cream, not bothering to even upset him with bad news, like San Diego being flooded with radioactive water and a death cloud of fallout sweeping the continent. Or Taiwan being bombed. I find the scenario that Jill, or more likely The Chief of Staff Ron Klain will take "unofficial" power in the event of an emergency more likely than Xi nuking the U. S. And completely plausible that someone in the White House makes the decisions in a crisis instead of telling Joe*. Despite layers of protection put in place for decades to keep anyone except the Commander in chief ( President ) from issuing nuclear strike orders, Barry spent 8 years firing Generals and Admirals to put in military incompetents dedicated to personal ambition and social engineering duty and honor out of the military. See Afghanistan. So I don't know that Ron, or Jill, or George Soros can't access the codes and order a nuclear strike. And in turn I rather hope Xi Jinping has some doubts. How certain is Xi that Biden will stay obedient? That if he sinks a carrier, that someone besides the increasingly ill old man will act to stop him? The fate of civilization rests on the perception of a guy who orders people murdered for mocking him with political cartoons, about a corrupt incompetent old man who might forget that he Owes the first guy loyalty. Btw, Xi just announced that he changed his mind on the empty promises he made at the latest Climate Con Conference. To quote “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”– Darth Vader. |
