TreeUnit

This one made front page news today in Columbus Ohio.
https://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/con...1_4V77MOK.html

There was a documentary made about this one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Kil...e_Electric_Car

So. What do you think of these?

Roody

I think the hydrogen from water story is bogus. You can't argue with the laws of physics and the principles of chemistry.

The electric car story is more plausible, but it's hard to ascribe motives to the behavior of a corporation or even an individual. GM may have been trying to "buy time and profits" with the battery car, as the article claims. or they may have just over-hyped some lousy technology.

One things for sure. Practical alternative cars won't be developed until somebody figures out how to make them economical. And that may never happen. There are many solutions to peak oil and climate change that don't involve the use of any private motor vehicles whatsoever.

lyeinyoureye

The demise of the electric car was not a conspiracy in any way. Everyone owns everyone else these days, so since the same financial institutions that owned the majority of GM, also owned ten times as much in various oil companies, they sought to eliminate the threat the electric car posed to their long term profitability, and succeeded in doing so. We've had to use monumentally inefficient vehicles for damn near a century just to burn through as much oil as we have. If we start to see a drop in consumption right as the total amount extracted per time period drops, all that work would've been for nothing. Trillions, maybe even quadrillions of dollars lost. It's no conspiracy, just good business as usual in America.

wirehead

I thought that an electrolysis motor like that would work. When I was in maybe second or third grade and didn't understand thermodynamics.

There's a few larger problems.

People think they need features out of their car that they really don't. For example, a person who goes off-road once or twice a year buys a SUV, just for those few times they go off-road. Even though it's far cheaper to just rent a SUV for that span of time.

Similarly, you only need one car that can do long-range driving.... so why not buy one electric vehicle and one gas vehicle? But people want to not have to charge either car.

So, the problem is that it's a common logical failure we're dealing with and you can't just flip a switch, deliver a set of products intended to be the future, and assume that culture will change around it.

Hence the promise of a plug-in hybrid. Even though you are carrying around some amount of deadweight, it provides a better way to evolve our culture towards a better goal.

The other problem is, of course, that we still have too many fossil-fueled power plants, so even were all cars to go electric tomorrow, it wouldn't solve anything without adjustments on that end.

Nickel

I think the grid would collapse if there were mainstream electric vehicles.

cujet

The Chevy Volt certainly speaks well for GM when it comes to EV's. As it can be made to be powered in nearly any configuration, including pure electric/fuel cell.

Be very careful with those who put a conspiracy behind every automotive decision. The automotive business simply produces what we purchase. If they didn't, they would go under.

Chris

mtnroads

You plug them in at night when the grid is idling and there is a bunch of spare capacity. Most studies predict the overall impact on the grid, and fossil fuels burned, would be minimal. This is a concept that is very close to being practical.

Roody

Since we're on a carfree forum, I'll say it again;

There are many solutions to peak oil and climate change that don't involve the use of any private motor vehicles whatsoever.

Thor29

It's a fun story, but the probability that the guy built a car that ran on water is pretty darned close to zero. For more fun, imagine what would happen if it were true - water shortages would be inevitable, dams would be built all over the place, and the coming environmental collapse would still happen. Just maybe in a little bit different way. Keep the thought experiment going and imagine that the car could run on seawater and not just fresh water. Maybe no water shortages caused by car driving (unless inland drivers drained the lakes, rivers, and aquifers rather than import seawater) but then this "free" energy source would mean almost unlimited power that would result in massive overconsumption. The world would be a smoking, lifeless cinder within a few decades.

Highcyclist

Check out this site: https://www.hytechapps.com/
Verrry interesting.

dejinshathe

+1

JeffS

That's a frequent argument in here. I say you have to start somewhere, and centralizing energy production should, in almost all cases, increase efficiency.

Tom Stormcrowe

A Saline battery:

https://www.patentstorm.us/patents/50...scription.html

jeff-o

If you mean entertaining pseudo-science, then you'd be right.

Paraphrase: "We describe it as HHO gas" Ahuh. Before you know it, the air will be polluted with dihydrogen monoxide! Oh no!

bac

I would guess that 99.9999999999999999% of SUVs have NEVER been off the pavement - ever.

... Brad

Roody

Too true. I make a habit of asking SUV owners where they like to do their off-roading. most have no idea what I'm even talking about and I have yet to meet one who does drive off-road. They usually give three reasons for having an SUV:

1. feel safer
2. more room
3. status/style

KnhoJ

I'd say quite a few more than that have been off the pavement! The four wheel drive is handy for lumbering that lard back out of the ditch or parking lot divider barkdust and dodging a $90 tow.

Anyway, I'd speculate that "conspiracies" at one level or another are inevitable. When there's that much money on the line, large corporations would be crazy not to invest in efforts to forecast and plan for future events and market swings. Including stuff like "retaining and extending market share", also known as, "monopolizing our segments and limiting or eliminating competition by any justifiable means". It's a fiercely competitive market out there, a real live life or death battle, separate entity vs separate entity, and none would hesitate at the opportunity to utterly destroy or enslave the competition. Pressing the limits of the rules is necessary to stay alive.

TimJ

You know, in your effort to argue there's no conspiracy you pretty much describe a conspiracy. I get what you're saying, that's just how big business works, but that doesn't mean it's not a conspiracy. In fact I would argue big business and global finance are most definitely conspiracies in every sense of the word. All a conspiracy are really is coordination of efforts with little to no oversite.

ChipSeal

Let's see, we convert from liquid energy used for personal transportation to electrical energy from the grid, and the the impact on the grid would be "minimal"?

The impact (if all personal vehicles switched) would more than double the demand on the grid. Shoot! our present grid is stretched to the limit when we have hot summer days! Even if all the recharging happened during "off peak", demand would outstrip present supply capacity of the grid. You underestimate the amount of energy used for cars.

Tailwinds to ya! ChipSeal

The Human Car

dihydrogen monoxide is nasty stuff https://www.dhmo.org/

FWIW Trailer for who killed the electric car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSBykAngDpY

Cyclon

That is plausible especially during the hot summer months when people are running their A/C at full blast. I haven't turned on the A/C at home in years.

fuerein

You mean like the SUVs at the end of Disney's Cars?

TimJ

Where are you getting all of that?

bhtooefr

I'll go with "this guy was a nutter."

And, the reason that the automakers don't want to make smaller and more efficient cars? Nobody wants them. Everyone wants somebody ELSE to be the one to buy them. (Except for some people - I'd love a diesel Geo Metro, or smaller, myself.)

Anyway, funny thing about the SUVs... minivans are more spacious (crawling back to the third row of an SUV SUCKS,) and they're safer too (unibody > body-on-frame for that.) Then again, they're soccer mom vehicles. Um, wait, thanks to soccer moms, SUVs are now soccer mom vehicles, too! (FINALLY station wagons are recovering from that stigma... give me a compact wagon for hauling all my junk any day over a pickup...)

ChipSeal

We are talking about REPLACING gasoline used in autos for electricity from the grid, right? The present electrical grid is barely able to provide adequate amount of energy for our present electrical usage. Add on top of that the energy used by cars and you can "fugget about it".

OK. I just spent some time googleing this and crunching numbers, and here is what I found: the USA burns about 390 million gallons of gasoline a day, which we want to change into electrical energy from the grid, right?

So, convert daily usage to annual usage, gallons to btu's and btu's to watts to get equivalent energy. Our annual gasoline consumption equals roughly 4,759,756,900,000,000 watts of energy (4.7 billion KWH)

In 2003 our grid supplied 3.7 billion KWH.

Here is the problem: Petroleum is a very high energy substance. A good table is found here:

https://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=1&gl=us

So far, no alternative can replace the mass to energy ratio found in gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. Until the natural market forces make petroleum more expensive than alternatives nothing will change. Even then, it will take time for the early adopters to create the necessary new infrastructure to make the new energy source convenient enough for mass appeal.