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February 2009 Posts
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Join us with our friend Darell Dickey ashe takes live caller questions (as opposed to deceased callers) and works the live chat. Some great information from a man who has lived through the days of the EV1 and to this day, still drives his RAV4 EV. Check out his website at http://www.EVNut.com.
Don't just listen to the EVcast -- experience and be a part of it! Join us at 1:00pm Eastern, M-F, in our live video broadcast and chat along with us!
Your are talking about standardised charging conectors and proprietory styles the vehicle maniufactures must standardise it and then anyone that wants to produce it can. I feel that it is like pluging in a toaster the plag and voltage was standerdised along time ago they still make lots of money with anything that is pluged in and they all do it the same ! Look at the filler neck of gars the fuel is put in the same and until recently the american manufactures all used the same clicking screw on cap. Antways I feel that the government needs to mandate this and letting the ARB of states do what CARB did a century ago it will give the encentive to TOYOTA to produce a electric pryus and then hopefuly it will catch on .
quote comment
http://evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Scroll to the bottom for some facts and figures about how much electricity (and/or equivalent energy) is in gasoline.
Also note that NG can eaily be thought of in terms of equivalent electricity - since at least in CA, any NG that isn't used to make gasoline would likely be used to make electricity.
Darell, I agree that the battery swapping stations don't make sense, but I am afraid the U-Haul comparison is seriously flawed.
Let's assume there are 10 battery packs in LA and 10 in SF. If I go to LA and swap my battery pack in LA, then there were 10 before the swap and 10 after the swap. The packs don't need to be shipped around. There might be a temporary shortage of charged packs, but the number packs at each station will be constant.
This is different from the U-Haul problem where people move from Boston to Florida and all the trucks get stuck there.
LaterJohn C. Briggs
Very good show guys! Enjoyable to hear Daryl, er, Darrell, um, Darell talk about his EV journey with us- you can tell he is very passionate about this. I know I had heard this before (maybe even read it at Darell's site a long time ago), about the total cost of gasoline, in terms of energy to make and transport it, but hearing it again really resonated this time, as a reminder on how our grid will adapt even more easily than people realize to EV's, once less and less refining of oil is being done in response to their adoption.
> I agree that the battery swapping stations don't make sense, but I am afraid the U-Haul comparison is seriously flawed.
John - yes, good call. One of the hazzards of speaking live. Sometimes I don't even listen to myself! You are correct that the batteries themselves would not over-accumulate in one area like the U-Haul problem. Certainly what CAN still happen is that we quickly run out of charged ones, as you mention. Do you prepare each battery swap station with enough batteries for the worst-case scenario? How expensive would THAT be? And if you don't do that, then actually you would have to shuttle batteries around to the areas that have cyclical traffic patterns.
Any way you slice it, it is not going to work. Thanks for being pleasant about pointing out my error!
- Darell
Darell, Right, speaking live is tough. I was doing it on the EVcast the other day and wanted to bring up three points. By the time I got through the first point, I totally forgot the other two. Guess I need to prepare more.
I don't know how politicians do so well at speaking live.
