Is this accurate about electric cars?

Been in a Tesla 2? Seriously impressive


In Australia the payback period for solar installation is 5 to 9 years. Useful life guaranteed is 20 years.

Thus after 9 years using solar you are in profit.

Disregarding the environmental and energy security benefits it's a good investment.
I get it, the tech is cool and the performance is impressive. But it will never move me the way my first mustang did the first time I put my foot into it. The feeling, the sound, the excitement. None of that will be replaced by a quiet, smoothly accelerating electric car that doesn't even have gears to bang. Just a completely different experience.
 
It appears we have a cyber sleuth in our midst. Angela Lansberry - watch out!

This was a random email forward that was sent to me. I had no idea where it came from. Apparently I should have disclaimed that in my original post so all the fact checkers wouldn't lynch me.


Here's a tip -

If you receive information about some sort of hidden truth that someone doesn't want you knowing in the form of a chain email, always start with the default assumption that it's a troll job or ignorant bullshit. You'll be right at least 95% of the time. Maybe 99-100%.

Credible information appears on reputable websites or dead-tree formats.
Garbage gets digitally passed from gullible moron to gullible moron in urgent emails that beg you to "share with all your friends!".
 
I get it, the tech is cool and the performance is impressive. But it will never move me the way my first mustang did the first time I put my foot into it. The feeling, the sound, the excitement. None of that will be replaced by a quiet, smoothly accelerating electric car that doesn't even have gears to bang. Just a completely different experience.

Am I weird for preferring quiet and smooth? I just want to drive, man. Maybe listen to some tunes or chat to whoever is with me. Not listen to an engine roar.
 
Am I weird for preferring quiet and smooth? I just want to drive, man. Maybe listen to some tunes or chat to whoever is with me. Not listen to an engine roar.
No problem with that, we appreciate different things as far as enjoying cars goes.
 
*Edit - the text below was sent to me as an email forward. Author unknown. Don't know if it's true or not, just wondering.*

INTERESTING - ONE OTHER QUESTION. IF ELECTRIC CARS DO NOT USE GASOLINE, THEY WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN PAYING A GASOLINE TAX ON EVERY GALLON THAT IS SOLD FOR AUTOMOBILES, WHICH WAS ENACTED SOME YEARS AGO TO HELP TO MAINTAIN OUR ROADS AND BRIDGES. THEY WILL USE THE ROADS, BUT WILL NOT PAY FOR THEIR MAINTENANCE!


In case you were thinking of buying hybrid or an electric car:

Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it. This is the first article I’ve ever seen and tells the story pretty much as I expected it to

Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things yet they’re being shoved down our throats. Glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper.

At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He laughed, then got serious. If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla, each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load. So as our genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system! This latter "investment" will not be revealed until we're so far down this dead end road that it will be presented with an 'OOPS...!' and a shrug.

If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are eco-friendly, just read the following. Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. It’s enlightening.

Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he writes, "For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.” Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles.

It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.

According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so I looked up what I pay for electricity. I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile

The gasoline powered car costs about $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000-plus. So the American Government wants loyal Americans not to do the math, but simply pay three times as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.

As a power engineer that has worked in system protection and transmission planning, the large adoption of electrical vehicles would require a ridiculous amount of grid investment. A good size house maxes at around 3 kw. These cars when they are charging pull around 9 kw. That is a lot of power even if you figure out how to stagger the charging of people's cars. There is a IEEE article in one of the 2011 Power and Energy Society magazines that breaks down the car charging issue. I remember then seeing that the large adoption of electric vehicles was not compatible with our present system. That said, when system upgrades are being decided on the transmission level (100 kV and up), regions consider various scenarios like cheap natural gas, high green energy penetration, and large scale adoption of electric vehicles. So, it is not like people are not planning for it but a shit ton of upgrades would need to be done at the distribution level to your house. Utilities would love electric vehicles because those upgrades would get added in to the rate base to the public utility commission (PUC). Electrical utilities in the U.S. are reimbursed on a percentage of capital investment into the grid.

I don't believe your math works out because electric cars compete with $1.00 gasoline. It is probably less because Li-Ion batteries have been costwise dropping like a rock. There is a break even point not like what you are indicating that there never is. The recovery time is pretty far out like 100,000+ miles so I wouldn't be buying an electric car now and looking at it as a way to save money unless you drive a ton and put on that mileage in a hurry.

miles-recoup-cost-electric-car



http://www.wisebread.com/how-long-does-it-take-break-even-with-an-electric-car


Some other things to bear in mind is that some of this is a cost of electricity vs the cost of gasoline. In states that have high electrical prices, without subsidies they might have longer breakeven points or if we have another oil crisis maybe it will be shorter. If you want shorter break even points, live in a region with cheap electricity and expensive gasoline.

Here are two maps for electrical prices vs gasoline prices for 2015.


2015-electricity-prices-map.jpg



I would preface this final point. The final hurdle to the electric car was the battery. You think the telsa is hot shit and fancy and all but you get rid of all the bells and whistles, all you have is an induction motor, a vfd, a battery, and some system to recover breaking energy. You could have built all that back in the 70s. The price of lithum ion batteries is dropping like a rock. So much so, li-ion battery installations are being incorporated into projects for electrical system reliability. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/business/energy-environment/battery-storage-tesla-california.html) The price hasn't come down enough to allow for energy arbitrage, buying cheap electricity at night to selling into the market during the day, but it is going to happen. Electric cars will happen. There is no question about that. If you go to talks here in Houston given by the big six ,Exxon-Mobile BP ect, even they talk about that in the near future oil as a fuel source will be phased out. BP and BASF have got into purchasing and building wind farms. Electric cars will happen and the economics will dictate it at some point but I don't know when but there is no doubt about it.

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Where are these cheap gas prices at? I haven't seen gas at under 3 dollars for years.
 
I get it, the tech is cool and the performance is impressive. But it will never move me the way my first mustang did the first time I put my foot into it. The feeling, the sound, the excitement. None of that will be replaced by a quiet, smoothly accelerating electric car that doesn't even have gears to bang. Just a completely different experience.

It's different. Smooth but merciless in its acceleration.
 
Where are these cheap gas prices at? I haven't seen gas at under 3 dollars for years.

Get a Delorean and travel back to 2015. Best maps I could find with how much of a fuck I give.
 
Buy wtf you want and stop telling others what to buy.

If someone wants to buy a hybrid or electric based on their own needs, that's on them. If gas powered is better for them, that's their choice.
 
LIAR. I have PG&E in California and have pretty much the highest electricity prices in the nation. Baseline tier 1 is .20 kwh. Even if you hit tier 3 and have the highest rate in the nation it is 40 cents a kWh.

Nobdy pays $1.16 per kWh, that is A FULL DOLLAR more than average Americans pay.


lmao, and residential solar is growing at a similar rate to electric car adoption. This will ease infrastructure problems like what is happening in CA. PG&E has been cancelling projects and infrastructure upgrades because of solar generation is easing the burden.

That's because PG&E has burned down half the state, denied it was their fault and then raised prices to pay for their fuckups.

Then they have the nerve to air commercials all day acting like they give a shit about the people.
 
Been in a Tesla 2? Seriously impressive


In Australia the payback period for solar installation is 5 to 9 years. Useful life guaranteed is 20 years.

Thus after 9 years using solar you are in profit.

Disregarding the environmental and energy security benefits it's a good investment.

I checked into solar here and for a system that could supply as much power as I use over the course of a year including purchase and installation, it would take 30 years to pay for the system. A 5000 watt system would save about $650 per year at 13 cents/kilowatt. The system alone costs about $20,000 installed if all of the tax credits can be used. At $650/year savings, it would take 31 years to pay for itself. The tax break is an income tax credit. Since I'm retired with no taxable income, I wouldn't get any benefit so the system would cost $5000 more and take another 8 years to break even.

Then there is the question of the warranty. The warranty covers the panels for 20 years but they are only about 1/2 of the cost of the system. The warranty is through the panel manufacturer so if the panels don't meet the specifications, it's likely the manufacturer will go bankrupt and you won't get any money.
 
I checked into solar here and for a system that could supply as much power as I use over the course of a year including purchase and installation, it would take 30 years to pay for the system. A 5000 watt system would save about $650 per year at 13 cents/kilowatt. The system alone costs about $20,000 installed if all of the tax credits can be used. At $650/year savings, it would take 31 years to pay for itself. The tax break is an income tax credit. Since I'm retired with no taxable income, I wouldn't get any benefit so the system would cost $5000 more and take another 8 years to break even.

Then there is the question of the warranty. The warranty covers the panels for 20 years but they are only about 1/2 of the cost of the system. The warranty is through the panel manufacturer so if the panels don't meet the specifications, it's likely the manufacturer will go bankrupt and you won't get any money.

That's really expensive!

It's about 10k to install 5kw systems in Australia and then you get about 3k back.

Also electricity is about double.
 
I'm really looking forward to a few decades from now when we get to find out the downsides of taking energy out of the environment through solar and wind farms.

We'll get to see how much better it really is or isn't.
 
That's really expensive!

It's about 10k to install 5kw systems in Australia and then you get about 3k back.

Also electricity is about double.

Actually even cheaper when you take into account currency conversion. Installation that is.
 
I'm really looking forward to a few decades from now when we get to find out the downsides of taking energy out of the environment through solar and wind farms.

We'll get to see how much better it really is or isn't.

Buildings disturb airflow more than windmills.

Hard surfaces disturb heat adsorption more than solar which is usually mounted on existing hard surfaces anyway.

I would not worry about it until energy generation starts taking up an even slightly material amount of space.
 
Actually even cheaper when you take into account currency conversion. Installation that is.

True.

Seems strange that Americans would pay triple.
4x after considering the rebate.
 
Buildings disturb airflow more than windmills.

Hard surfaces disturb heat adsorption more than solar which is usually mounted on existing hard surfaces anyway.

I would not worry about it until energy generation starts taking up an even slightly material amount of space.
Oh yeah, that's why I said decades from now. It probably won't even be a measurable impact until at least 25% of our energy is coming from renewable sources.

When hard surfaces that aren't solar panels interrupt up the natural process of heat absorption, the heat still ends up dissipated out into the environment in the end. When solar panels do it a of the energy (as much as possible) is harnessed as electricity and converted into kinetic energy somewhere else. The energy is far more drastically altered than by someone's roof getting in the way.

We're switching from using potential/chemical energy from minerals to directly taking energy out of the environment and repurposing it. There will be some sort of effect in the future if/when we switch to mostly renewable energy. I'm genuinely curious to see what the effects will be and how large they will be.
 
Damn TS got fucked up big time. Pretty much ran a train on the poor bastard
 
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