So How is the Gov’t-Supported Electric Car Industry Doing? Guess…

Yea these are great. Next year we'll get more efficient electric cars that will recycle lost energy while braking, or even while riding on the road. That extra energy will be welcome here in Canada, with our harsh winters and our need for heater that previously emptied battery juice way to fast!

Governement should throw the first stone and replace police cars and all other service cars with these electric ones. That would make an intense difference on CO² emission.

Electric cars are doing very well:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/citing-a-lac...

MrBig, electric cars already recycle energy lost during braking. All you do is run the motor as a generator. As far as replacing police cars with electric cars:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/green-police-cars-ar...

And hybrids tend to be larger than electrics.

all electric cars are ridiculous. 80 miles (at best)...really? when the technology gets better and more practical the American people will want them. i dont see why the government has to support them at all (other than their green planet fantasy which they want now when the technology says it is impossible...   ). their green planet fantasy is ruining the economy too. they are preventing job creation with their stupid regulations on natural gas, oil, ..... when the technology comes we will have a greener planet.

^ It's really the battery technology that is the problem. On a more generic note, it is an energy density problem. Hydrocarbon liquid fuels like gasoline & diesel are naturally energy dense, whereas natural gas, hydrogen gas etc are not.

IIRC you have to compress H2 gas to enormous pressures (15K psi or thereabouts) to get to the same energy density as gasoline. That requires thick metal storage tanks which increase the weight considerably, whereas a 20 gallon gas tank just weighs maybe 25 lbs.

I recall reading lots of 'nano'-this and 'nano'-that tech for increasing the storage density some 10x for LiOn batteries, over on Dailytech some 3-4 years ago. Lots and lots of glowing reports about how we would soon all be carrying around cellphones that you could talk on for days without recharging, electric cars getting 400 miles on a charge, etc. So, what happened with all that R&D??

No, it the only way to carry enough hydrogen to be effective, sorta the same thing.
Theres someone from CA working on this issue, where the pressurization is cut dramatically to safe levels, I think using corn silk?, as it has many structures for the hydrogen to attach to naturally with little pressure

^IIRC there was an article in Scientific American about using - you guessed it - carbon nanotube technology that would bind H2 using the Van der Waals forces (surface "stickyness"). Then passing a small current through the nanotubes would cause the H2 to be released, at a rate dependent on the current so that one could have good control over the resulting pressure. Since the surface area of the nanotubes was some incredible amount, you could hopefully make the container small enough to fit in a car.

Ther has been a lot of "not quite ready for prime time" technology mentioned. But for now, in the U.S., electrics are half coal powered. That's great for the greenies.

About 70% of our electricity comes from coal and fuel oil generators.
So we are really wasting time and tax payers dollars on this supposidlly "GREEN" technology.
Have you seen the pictures of the battery plant that produces the batteries in Canada? Everything within 5 miles of it is dead. How can that be considered "GREEN"?

The same with Ethanol. We create more CO2 producing and burning alcohol than burming gas. But our government has stipulated the ethanol use to double then triple what is in our gas today.
It is like the "Alternative Fuel Program" Companies were caught grinding coal, spray a little diesel fuel on it and apply for Alternative fuel tax credits. We gave away millioms on this scheme.
The list goes on and on.
It is not about being "GREEN".
It is about how much tax dollars can be put in congress's friends pockets.

Ethanol can only be shipped by truck. Big, diesel burning trucks. Yeah, thats very green.

Don't even get me started on the lunacy of using your FOOD as an energy source other than for your body.

And even while being "half coal powered" they are still greener then gas powered cars (at least the driving part is, batteries are still not green but that will change with carbon based batteries). Fossil fuels will run out, there's nothing anyone can do about that so eventually all electricity will be green and no cars will be able to get anywhere on fossil fuels. Ergo, the electric car makes sense, we might just as well start putting the necessary infrastructure in place now because we will have to eventually.

I thought carbon was a pollutant? Are carbon based batteries really wise then?

carbon is not a pollutant. CO2/CO are

ya we will run out of fossil fuels in about 500 yrs. by that time we will have electric cars that can go 5000 miles on one charge since how fast our technology is changing. ON ITS OWN. anyways we will not run out of fossil fuels. plants and trash are decomposing as we speak and that will be the future's fossil fuels. you have to put this into perspective. our technology is moving fast but we are not able to produce electric cars that are totally functional. give it 20 years by then we should have some real nice electric cars. as for now let the oil business boom no regulations so our economy can flourish and jobs can be made.

No, we must act derr leader
I really dont want to see our dear leader doing something like holding a battery and saying its coming soon, with amazing abilities, ala this guy

Trying to do too much too fast is illustrated here, the main difference here is, its our money, and yes, the economy sucks

It is not a carbon based battery.
http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800612280_765245_NT_136a023...
It is an Li-Ion battry with one carbon nanotube electrode. So you do not avoid the environmental problems of working with lithium.

And there are problems:
http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800650031_590626_NT_50e70c6...

The idea is promising, but like I said, there's a lot of "not quite ready for prime time" technology around.

CO is. CO2 is not.

Hydro-oxygen combustion looks promising...althouhg H2 containers are expensive.

well, we have until 35 years until all of our deposits run out.

Ill give our oilburners about 10-20 years left before most of us wants electrics.

Estimates suggest we have 40 years of oil consumption left, and that includes a lot of "new discovereries" alà fresh reservoires. So, even though we may still live ignorant and with bliss, the end is coming, and we know it. But why am i talking as few as 10-20 years?

Because of market price and annual growth in consumption.

Up until now there has been annually growth in oil consumption. However, already production is getting harder and fields are drying out. Within a year predictions are, we will meet the wall where consumption is no longer catered by increased production, and as a direct catalyst to the oil price, we will see prices soar.

Some experts even points to $400 per barrel, thats four times up from today.

So while some of you wants to prolong the easy addiction on oil as long as you can, some of us, like the goverment, wants the technology to be ready for when the cataclysm hits. And for that to happen, either the market has to be early adopters and sponsor the research by purchasing the early product, or, the goverment can subsidise further research so that when the time comes, the technology and means to change is there.

So three times hooray for people who can think and plan further than most of us are willing to even grasp.

Carbon is not a pollutant in any way, although you could turn it into CO2 (which is not really a pollutant but it is a greenhouse gas) by burning it, leaving some charcoal (pure carbon) which you could actually eat safely. Our bodies consist mostly of carbon, so do wood and paper.

The MIT battery is a transitional form, it's entirely possible to create a battery based on carbon and without using lithium, but it'll take a few years before those will become available.

It's more like 40 years for oil (of course it will become scarce years before that) and something like 100-200 years for coal, which we realy don't want to go back to, but even if we do that would lead to electric cars (as awesome as the idea of a steam-powered car is they would just be too inefficient to compete with electric cars).

So would a "carbon tax" tax my breathing or mere existence? We all have a "carbon footprint" after all.

If it did you'd hardly notice it because it doesn't contribute much. But of course it won't be, that would just be ridiculous: multicellular life as we know it can't exist without producing some CO2.

So, why were politicians debating taxing my "carbon footprint" then? It was referred to as "Cap and Trade" in the American media.

If they were debating it, that means they were thinking about it. If they are thinking about it, being politicians, it means they want to do it.

Seriously? The whole world understands "carbon footprint" as the CO2 produced by the cows you eat and the cars you drive, why would it be different in America?

ya 40 yrs because we are not drilling gulli. there is a lot in canada and the US. and have you ever hears of oil sands?

I have and aside from their extraction being hugely inefficient, expensive and damaging to the environment they will only give a few years of fossil fuels.

Are you finally beginning to understand why I don't want to give more power to these people also known as our glorious leaders?

From this statement? No not really. Do you really think a carbon tax in the US would br radically different from those of other countries?

There is a saying that says: all (democratic) peoples get the government they deserve. Bad politicians only get where they are because people vote for them. Besides, politicians only make the laws: civil servants carry them out, they make sure things run ok even with the most incompetent politician leading their department (America and Italy still being places that support human life after years of Bush and Berlusconi are proof of this), this is why I trust the government more when it comes to things like safety and environmental regulations.

so you trust them to strangle our economy?

If a corporation goes under because of basic regulations and fair taxes than we're better off without it because aparently it was unable to stay afloat doing honest business. I guarantee you: as much as corporations bitch and wine about even the smallest increase in taxes or regulation, 99% of them would do just fine after the fact. For most of them it would be the difference between executive bonuses going up "only" 10% every year instead of 15%, if at that. Like I said: don't pay protection money. If the United States spend only a fraction of the resources it gives to the military on making clear to corporations that they shouldn't "f*ck with America" it would make them shut up and even pay their taxes. The government shouldn't fear corporations, the corporations should fear the IRS, EPA and the labor department of the democratically elected government.

Will this cause them to leave? They'll surely try to convince us they will, but they won't: Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada will ride their asses just as hard, they know they'd regret registering in Russia, the Middle East or China (where intellectual property doesn't exist and the government will nationalize any corporation that's useful to them) , in Africa there are no functional courts and they run the risk of being burned down (literally) in a civil war. That leaves India, Brazil and Turkey: countries which quickly rising wages and increasing legislation (emulating Europe), as well as a lot of corruption. In the end most of them won't bother moving.

i mean the oil business that is being strangled. their was this article i read recently on how a lot of people were being hired in this pretty dumpy town in West Virginia because they were drilling for natural gas. it was shut down and all of the people lost their jobs because of government regulations. it isnt green enough for the government i guess. getting people back to work isnt the government's priority right now i guess. getting their green planet is though.

Oil companies are not pulling out because regulation strangles them (besides, they get tens of billions of $ in subsidies, while regulations are more stringent in Europe which doesn't have any problems finding companies to exploit their oil and natural gas), they pull out because they've found somewhere else where it's cheaper to do business (though it's very well possible they were planning on pulling out anyway and just blamed the regulations). Some other, more ethical company will come along: natural gas is so lucrative no amount of regulations can keep all companies away. What's wrong with wanting a green planet? Pollution kills people, you want those miners to get cancer, and/or the surrounding land to stay too toxic for agriculture until the year 3000 just so one greedy oil company can make a quick buck (and hide the profits in Switzerland).

dont get me started on cancer. everything causes cancer. the sun that gives us life causes cancer. diet sodas cause cancer. it is ridiculous. what is wrong with a green planet? well first off we are being forced to when we dont have the technology. wind power doesnt produce enough. neither does solar. we are still a while away from fusion which will be our primary energy source. I know there is enough oil for 100 yrs. (there is always some being made right now) by then we should have fusion figured out which will eliminate the need for coal. just let the ball roll. there is no need to push the ball with a big wall in the way. it will all happen in time and we cant rush it or we willl be paying for very expensive energy.

This is nonsense: solar power could generate enough on its own and you don't have to be a doctor to know that getting cancer from pollution is a lot more likely than getting cancer from the sun. The worst thing is you think it all doesn't do much damage. I guess you don't live near heavy industry. And oh yeah, whole ecosystems and communities are getting sick or die out around the world because of America's oil addiction. Look beyond your own backyard for once. Finally, yes, oil is continuously being made but the process is incredibly slow: we're using it up a million times faster then it's being produced.

i think it does a lot of damage. it kills people obviously i know that my two grandfathers died from cancer. A lot of people get skin cancer early. one kid had it before he was even 12 dont kid yourself the sun is very powerful. i havent seen any one smoking for 10 years and die from from it that quickly. i live in LA i know how bad pollution can be i am right at the heart of it. solar technology is expensive and decades away from being a big part (not even all) of our energy production.

All well and good Gulli. However once again you put forth the idea that corporations pay taxes. They do not. The consumers of whatever good or service provided pays the tax. People who have actually run a business, unlike yourself, understand this.

Who are the consumers of Wall Street? Not you and I, it's the rich themselves. Meanwhile oil companies can't sell their oil for more than the rate OPEC has set. Furthermore the government can put price caps on the cost of goods and services it (partly) subsidizes, such as health care and education. Finally American corporations have to compete with foreign corporations: if Ford increases the price of their cars and Toyota does not then Ford won't be selling many cars. Finally 2.0: if corporations can just increase their prices and not notice a slump in sales then why haven't they done so already?

Many people seem to be under the illusion that corporations have a fixed desired profit percentage: tax them x% more and they'll increase prices by x%, tax them x% less and they'll invest all of that money. No, that's not how it works: they try to make as much profit as possible, they don't think "20% ought to be enough", if they did then profits and bonuses wouldn't be skyrocketing, they wouldn't be outsourcing (adjusted for inflation American labor hasn't really become that much more expensive) and they wouldn't be asking for tax cuts, no, their profit percentage is the maximum value the market allows. Tax them x% more and they won't be able to increase their prices, or only by a fraction of x%, tax them less and they'll take the extra income as profit and get used to this situation, until they demand even more tax cuts.

Yes Gulli, taxing people, and corporations are people, actually causes a change in behaviour. The ruling elite knows this. What do you think the US tax code is for? To raise revenue? LOL!

Corporations are not people, they are groups of people. Groups of people behave different from individuals. This is the difference between sociology and psychology. In a corporation 99,99% of the people have no say at all, they just do what they're told to keep their job and not become homeless. Subsequently 99,99% of the people in a corporation sometimes do things they do not agree with on a personal level. Only the CEO and the board have a say but they too serve the shareholders (most of whom don't give a sh*t, or just don't know about why their shares go up). So even they will sometimes do things they don't personally agree with, in order to make the corporation more profitable. It's this sense of "I don't wanna do it, but I have to because the system works that way" that makes people do things for the group even though no one in the group agrees with it on a personal level, this stems from the human trait of wanting to belong to some kind of group system, something bigger then them and also from a lack of information (you don't know what other people are thinking, so if the majority actually agreed with your dissent you wouldn't know). It's kinda like religion, or a situation in a soap opera where everybody is hiding dirty secrets from each other and performing immoral acts to do it, all the while not realizing that since everyone has those dirty secrets there would be no one who could judge you and not be a hypocrite, so if everyone just told their secrets nothing would happen and nobody would have to perform immoral acts to hide their secrets anymore. And of course there just are a lot of selfish/greedy bastards in this world and they are more likely to be running corporations than nursing the elderly, that's something we just have to acknowledge, or else we deny the existence of the robber barons and dictators in history. And oh yeah, when you're part of a group you can share the blame or pass it around until everyone forgets about the whole thing.

Corporations are not made up of people who make decisions on a daily basis? Ok, what are they then? Reptilians from the Orion constellation? Sheesh Gulli!

Heh, OK next time I grill steaks on my charcoal grill, I'll forego the steaks and just eat the briquets.. MMmmm, yummy!  

I'd think we see a bovine methane tax first, as methane is supposed to be more 'green-housey' than CO2. Butt I'll leave that up to our resident methane expert, JDJ  ..

It's not even how short battery life is. It's not even that you have to pay for special disposal when they go bad. It's not even that your electric heater or ac run the batteries down too fast or that you have a limited distance to drive them. It is the fact that you have to charge them with Electricity which is a second generation power source. In lot of places Electricity is made with what? You guessed it fossil fuels...So you have the loss of converting those fuels to electricity then you have the loss of transmitting that power over the power grid to your car charger then you have the loss of the transformer to charge the batteries...bottom line it is extremely inefficient. You end up using twice the fossil fuels you would just burning gasoline... That's the real problem...

No, you don't: power plants are simply more efficient energy sources than car engines.

I already explained: groups are different from individuals, just look at ants (who is the opposite of humans in that they are smarter in a group then as individuals, but they do demonstrate that the whole is more than just the sum of the parts). Now I'm no sociologist but neither are you and I challenge to find a factual flaw in what I just wrote down.

It's all flawed because it comes from your brain.

Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/04/us-europe-men...

Oh, come on. 99.99%?      
That's called micromanagement and it is not a good thing.

As most of the regulars here know, I am working in Saudi Arabia. I am somewhere between a supervisor and lead tech. I have very little authority. Headquarters for Saudi operations is 1100 km away. I make a lot of decisions daily. Agreed, in the great scheme of things, they aren't too terribly important. And I have the corporate guidelines to help. But if I bounced every question upwards, I would always be waiting for decisions that I could make and I would never get anything done.

Military career: retired as a senior NCO (senior sergeant for all of you civilians). In Germany, my units were always chronically short of officers. For about a year, I had to sign for about $100 million of equipment. That basically meant that I temporarily owned it. In some ways that sounds more impressive than it was. It is much harder to keep track of $500,000 worth of repair parts (done that also) than 20 times that in major equipment pieces.

You apparently would be surprised at the amount of low level decisions (corporate and military) being made in a well run unit. You can go to school for years, but ultimately, the only way you learn to make decisions is to make decisions.

I never said lower levels don't make decisions, I said they have very little choice in those decisions and will eventually have to do things they personally don't agree with it. I'm sure you've encountered that phenomenon.