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My new favorite EV phrase is "range anxiety"
This is the fear that you will not make it to where you need to go in your EV.
quote comment
BS alert
The car will cost "less than purchasing a cup of your favorite coffee" to recharge, and use less electricity annually than a refrigerator.
Refrigerator 448KWH/yearChevy Volt 2920KWH/year
The Volt takes 6X as much electricity as my refrigerator.
THE MATH
The Volt has a 16KWH battery pack but can only use 8KWH to keep it in the range of 30% to 80% state of charge.
8 KWH/day * 365 days/year = 2920 KWH/year
Since this is supposed to be 40 miles per day it is
40 miles/day * 365 days/year = 14,600 miles/year
This is a little higher than the 12,000 miles/year that the average American uses. So if we adjust this to 12,000 miles this is still
2400 KWH/year or 5.4× the refrigerator
The cost of electricity is $0.19/kwh or
2400 KWH/year * $0.19/KWH = $456/year
This works out to be $1.24 per day. So I will give them the "cup of coffee" story as TRUE, but the refrigerator story is a big FALSE.
Nice to hear good news about the Tesla manufacturing plant. However, I disgress with your vision of it being "built in the backyard." Every town or city have places where industrial buildings can be made because they need easy access for the big trucks, higher electrical power supply, water, waste, etc; which are very different from those needed for domestic ones. In addition, an EV manufacturing plant can be made very clean, since they won't need neither test beds for engines nor enormous gasoline & oil reservoirs for their products. They will still need to use chemicals for certain procedures as in painting and curing, but the Tesla comes already painted from GB. Furthermore, any manufacturing plant pushes local economy forward, not just by creating direct employment, but secondary ones as well: transport, housing, health asistance, catering, and education. Let's hope other states can modify their legislation to allow more EVs on their roads thus building more manufacturing plants to be installed there. As we know, the future is electric. And if it could be cleaner, then much better!
Link for GM's interesting first hybrid:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_XP-883
"Range Anxiety!" LOL! This sounds like the title for another spoof comedy;-)
Global Warming or Global cooling- neither is good-but it does not really matter if either are true, considering that both are 'caused' by pumping unhealthy additives into the atmosphere- there is a reason you don't want to run your car with the garage door closed. There is a reason why there are many more pulmonary-related illnesses in traffic/industrial-congested areas now than ever before- it is not the global-warming that we should just, or even primarilly, be worried about- we are literally choking on the exhaust;-) (Okay- I don't mean to downplay Global Warming- my point is that there are other, more immediate and verifiable downsides to pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere- that there are other, compelling reasons to ditch ICE vehicles and coal-fired plants)
BO AND RYAN MAKE IT TO THE SMALL SCREEN
Well our heros have made it to the big time. This evening they were on a TV show called Chronicle here is Boston.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/chronicle/17440414/detail.html
Soon they will be too important to answer our phone calls.
I don't think it is good news that Tesla moved to San Jose. It is an expensive place to live. Thus, employees are going to want a good wage. Which will lead to higher priced cars.
Yeah, but they got incentives there that they would not have gotten elsewhere, which will offset the wages somewhat- and since most of their market for the near to mid-term future will be in California, they will save more money with shipping and Tesla suppport being local.
More math:
I think I heard a quote that someone said recharging an EV used about the same amount of electricity as a "power hungry" flat panel plasma TV. My 50" plasma TV is rated at a maximum power usage of 400 watts, but really uses about 200 watts as measured by my Kill-a-Watt meter. (The power used by a plasma TV depends on what is being shown. A bright all white screen uses the maximum power while a dark screen uses very little. When I measured mine over time, it used about 1/2 the max on average.)
Anyway, my TV is on about 3 hours per day. 3 hrs/day x .2Kw/hr x 365 days = 219 KWH per year.
50" Plasma TV = 219 KWH per year
Volt = 2920 KWH per year
Even if you double the number of hours watched per day or doubled the power used by the TV, it still would not compare to recharging a Volt. While I am very much in support of EVs (and the Volt), I don't think it is wise to mislead people and then have them be surprised when they get their electric bills.
