Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!ghettoperson wrote:
That's got to be the first eco-car that doesn't look like shit.
Last edited by 12/f/taiwan (2009-08-12 17:41:19)
Are you seriously trying to say that a toyota camry DOESN'T look like shit?12/f/taiwan wrote:
Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!ghettoperson wrote:
That's got to be the first eco-car that doesn't look like shit.
http://www.diggpoint.com/wp-content/ima … hybrid.jpg
My uncle has one and only spends $20 on gas every two weeks. Although he mainly uses it for work and back(20 miles/day).
At least it looks better than the Chevy...VicktorVauhn wrote:
Are you seriously trying to say that a toyota camry DOESN'T look like shit?12/f/taiwan wrote:
Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!
http://www.diggpoint.com/wp-content/ima … hybrid.jpg
My uncle has one and only spends $20 on gas every two weeks. Although he mainly uses it for work and back(20 miles/day).
But there has also been the accord hybrid, and a few SUVs that are normal looking hybrids.
I'm not going to say it looks pretty, but have you seen all the eco-cars up until now? They're microscopic, and look like a blob of molten plastic. Something vaguely normal looking - albeit ugly - is a welcome relief.VicktorVauhn wrote:
Are you seriously trying to say that a toyota camry DOESN'T look like shit?12/f/taiwan wrote:
Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!
http://www.diggpoint.com/wp-content/ima … hybrid.jpg
My uncle has one and only spends $20 on gas every two weeks. Although he mainly uses it for work and back(20 miles/day).
But there has also been the accord hybrid, and a few SUVs that are normal looking hybrids.
12/f/taiwan wrote:
Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!ghettoperson wrote:
That's got to be the first eco-car that doesn't look like shit.
http://www.diggpoint.com/wp-content/ima … hybrid.jpg
My uncle has one and only spends $20 on gas every two weeks. Although he mainly uses it for work and back(20 miles/day).
I actually meant to quote ghetto.m3thod wrote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMzmOrH … annel_page12/f/taiwan wrote:
Toyota Camry '09?m3thod wrote:
and it also helped resurrect optimus!
http://www.diggpoint.com/wp-content/ima … hybrid.jpg
My uncle has one and only spends $20 on gas every two weeks. Although he mainly uses it for work and back(20 miles/day).
Jolt is a volt.
The problem is that it just shifts the energy use from gasoline to power plants. And may I remind you that 50% of the United States' energy comes from Coal AND 40% of energy is wasted during transmission.Red Forman wrote:
I don't understand you guys. Here is a car that the majority of people in the US can get to and from work/store/bar/etc without ever using a drop of gas and ya'll nit pick still. Unreal. All were hear is "zomg evil oil companies" and "zomg saudi this and that." Well, here is the beginning stages of a real option and people just bash it.
solar is very limited in how much total power can be produced, there is only so much energy in light and even at 100% efficiency your not getting enough to cover consumption.Harmor wrote:
The problem is that it just shifts the energy use from gasoline to power plants. And may I remind you that 50% of the United States' energy comes from Coal AND 40% of energy is wasted during transmission.Red Forman wrote:
I don't understand you guys. Here is a car that the majority of people in the US can get to and from work/store/bar/etc without ever using a drop of gas and ya'll nit pick still. Unreal. All were hear is "zomg evil oil companies" and "zomg saudi this and that." Well, here is the beginning stages of a real option and people just bash it.
Gasoline is an efficient for energy transfer. What we really need to do though is make it cheap enough for everyone to put Solar panels on their houses.
Last edited by VicktorVauhn (2009-08-12 22:33:49)
Thank youVicktorVauhn wrote:
solar is very limited in how much total power can be produced, there is only so much energy in light and even at 100% efficiency your not getting enough to cover consumption.
Gasoline is efficient at energy storage, but IC engines are terribly inefficient method of recover it. Overall, changing heat to mechanical energy is incredibly inefficient.
Car engines are EVEN MORE inefficient because they have to be compromised to meet the needs of the driver, IE smooth power delivery over a large range of speeds.
and you wont buy GM? There is some strong logic for making 40 thousand dollar purchases...
And the Prius has always been a parallel hybrid system, I don't think that is changing with the next model...
I was reading an article talking about the jump in technology just over the last year. Conventional thinking has solar labeled as inefficient. There is however some good news coming out now.SEREMAKER wrote:
I remember some show that they were showcasing mass produced solar panels that are thinner then a sheet paper and as flexible as one
it was also see-thru - tinted but see-thru ........ imagine covering all windows, homes and commerical with that
Are you mad?VicktorVauhn wrote:
solar is very limited in how much total power can be produced, there is only so much energy in light and even at 100% efficiency your not getting enough to cover consumption.
Some simple maths says you need about 2500 sqaure miles of land to power everything in the US. But put another way, if everyone put a 25% efficient 1 square foot solar panel on their roof it would cover all energy power consumption for the US.In full sun, you can safely assume about 100 watts of solar energy per square foot. If you assume 12 hours of sun per day, this equates to 438,000 watt-hours per square foot per year. Based on 27,878,400 square feet per square mile, sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year.
The Sun
With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year.
In case you haven’t heard, a “quad Btu” refers to one quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy, a common term used by energy economists. The entire human race currently uses about 400 quads of energy (in all forms) per year. Put another way, the solar energy hitting the earth exceeds the total energy consumed by humanity by a factor of over 20,000 times.
Last edited by DrunkFace (2009-08-13 00:14:45)
Reminds me of this..DrunkFace wrote:
Are you mad?VicktorVauhn wrote:
solar is very limited in how much total power can be produced, there is only so much energy in light and even at 100% efficiency your not getting enough to cover consumption.Some simple maths says you need about 2500 sqaure miles of land to power everything in the US. But put another way, if everyone put a 25% efficient 1 square foot solar panel on their roof it would cover all residential energy power consumption for the US.In full sun, you can safely assume about 100 watts of solar energy per square foot. If you assume 12 hours of sun per day, this equates to 438,000 watt-hours per square foot per year. Based on 27,878,400 square feet per square mile, sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year.
The Sun
With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year.
In case you haven’t heard, a “quad Btu” refers to one quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy, a common term used by energy economists. The entire human race currently uses about 400 quads of energy (in all forms) per year. Put another way, the solar energy hitting the earth exceeds the total energy consumed by humanity by a factor of over 20,000 times.
Their are some inherent issues with solar including its efficiency of transferring energy and how it is weather and day light dependent, so it can't be the only solution, but there is theoretically far more sun light then we need to power the planet.
Woops I thought I had changed it. It's not residential but all power consumption to start with. Second, given a 100% efficient solar cell with 12 hours of sunlight a day you need a cell this big per person.VicktorVauhn wrote:
AHHH Theoretically... that's perfect...
How many places see perfect sunny days even half of the year?
Residential energy power consumption is a small part, industrial places burn up so much more, and that isn't counted into the electrical consumption your looking at... include onto that the fact that we are talking about powering cars with electricity...
Solar isn't bad, and makes a good supplemental source, but its not the answer its just a bonus. TBH I would think that if we ever stepped it up to levels your talking it would cease to be the green solution it is, and would likely start to effect the environment...
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/0 … mpg_on.phpHere's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.
Here's the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It's a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you're home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It's a very cool idea. I'm honestly excited about cars like the volt - and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you'd expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.
Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.
That's nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.
The trick is that they're playing with the definition of mileage. In city driving, the Volt is primary an electric car: it's powered by its batteries which you must recharge every night, not by gasoline. On average, you can drive it for about 40 miles on a full charge before it needs to start using any gasoline.
The "mileage" figure, as it's presented, is really meaningless - because it's being presented for a situation in which the gasoline engine almost never runs at all.
They compute it by basically saying: "If I fully charge the car battery every night, how far will I drive the car in typical city commuting conditions before it's consumed a gallon of gas".
What if you drive your volt around the city all day? Your mileage will drop to around 50 miles per gallon once you've driven more than 40 miles. If you drive your car 100 miles in a day, you'll consume a bit over a gallon of gas. That's very impressive. But it's absolutely not what you'd expect after being told that it gets 230 miles per gallon.
The method that GM used to produce that mileage figure is extremely dishonest and completely uninformative. The "real" effective mileage (excluding the cost of charging the car - which will be significant!) varies depending on the length of your commute.
My wife could commute in a Volt, and never put gas in it: her commute is about 12 miles each way - so she'd effectively have infinite mileage according to GMs method. If I commuted in a volt, I'd get something around 288 miles per gallon. (My commute is 24 miles each direction, leaving me with 8 miles per day running on gas; so about 6 days of my commute would consume a gallon of gas; that's 288 miles.) If one of my friends, who commutes 45 miles each direction per day, were to commute in a Volt, he'd end up burning a gallon of gas per day - getting around 90 miles per gallon.
Plug-in hybrids are a new class of car. You can't really describe their efficiency compared to a conventional gasoline-powered car using a single familiar figure. You could present energy efficiency in terms of a unit like "distance per kilojoule", but most people won't have a clue of what that means. The honest way to describe it is to say "Up to 40 miles without consuming gas, and then 50 miles per gallon". That's not so horribly difficult, now is it?
But it doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "230 miles per gallon".
Mekstizzle wrote:
Here's a good blog explaining that the 230 MPG can be misleading.http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/0 … mpg_on.phpWHAT VICK SAID ONLY 3Xs LONGER.
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Although at the end of the day, I wonder how many people actually commute more than 40 miles a day. 40 miles is a long way to commute. Maybe not in the US, but over here 40 miles is like, huge. I'd say most people here commute maximum 30 miles, but on average about 5-10 miles. Maybe less. So saying that, having a car like this would mean you'd probably never need to use the Petrol even if you take into account other car usage such as going to the shops and going out etc.. at least, over here it would be like that.
Still need to sort out the charging bit though, not everyone has a Garage where you can safely park the car whilst keeping it plugged in. Otherwise you'd have to leave the door or window open so that the cable can run from your plug to the car. And it would be a long unwieldy one too, so there's the hassle of charging it.
VicktorVauhn wrote:
Red Forman wrote:
The EPA could give the Chevy Volt a 230 MPG ratingI am not at all against plug in vehicles.... But the 230 rating is pretty much a gimmick. The car does the first 40 miles purely as a plug in electric, and GM is exploiting that to artificially boost fuel efficient ratings.It was not immediately clear how GM reached the 230 mpg in city driving, but industry officials estimated the automaker's calculation took into consideration the Volt traveling 40 miles on the electric battery and then achieving about 50 mpg when the engine kicked in.
By the same logic that rates the volt @ 230mpg, the Tesla gets infinite miles per gallon.
If you drive under 40 miles, there is no MPG rating because its not using gas. Once you cross that you are getting 50 mpg.
I like the system, its a good idea and apparently works well...
But the testing criteria used by GM is not even released. They can produce ANY MPG rating they want by manipulating the tests, they could drive 42 miles and only consume as much gas as is used in the last 2 miles of travel, then average that consumption over the trip distance and inflate their claims to what ever they want.
We will likely see this 230mpg rating plummet when the EPA releases a more realistic test criteria. And this current rating is likely based on tests designed to produce insane, but still believable numbers.
Sounds like the beginnings of new amenities at apartments/townhouse complexes. Some offer covered parking as a premium. Now the can add docks as a premium. The demand would have to be pretty high though.Mekstizzle wrote:
Still need to sort out the charging bit though, not everyone has a Garage where you can safely park the car whilst keeping it plugged in. Otherwise you'd have to leave the door or window open so that the cable can run from your plug to the car. And it would be a long unwieldy one too, so there's the hassle of charging it.
Can you explain how GM and the EPA arrived at the 230 MPG city estimate for the Volt?
In a conventional car there is two things that cause your efficiency to vary. The speed and intensity of your driving, and the environment; do you need HVAC, lights, etc.
With the Volt, you add two more things that makes your mileage vary, how far you drive, and how many times you plug in during the day.
So on any given day if you have plugged in your EV, range at low intensity driving, like the EPA city cycle is, is 40 miles. If you drive more aggressively your EV distance will be reduced.
Now, after you’ve depleted the battery, in the case of the Volt, the engine will start and the engine will keep the vehicle running for as long as you have fuel in the tank, and the fuel economy you have there matters too.
So in the calculation of the label, for that 230 you take into account the EV distance, the fuel economy after you depleted the charge, and the EPA used a traffic survey that was done in 2001 to create a composite.
They looked an an aggregate sample of the population and how far they drove in a day.
With the data we have and the data we shared with the EPA, from that value, they’ve created what’s called a utility factor.
It was a snapshot in time and based on this dataset we will weight the value on an aggregated probabilistic way what the value of the EV distance is, and we’ll also weight one minus that for the charge sustaining distance.
You go through this calculation that accounts for the fuel use and you come out with a number and the number is 230.
That’s a big number and you ask, will I ever get that number?, and its kind of interesting. In a normal car if you drive it high intensity you can never get the EPA , but in the Volt you always could, it just depends how far you have to drive. If you drive under the EV distance its infinite.
What was the percentage of time or miles in EV mode that was used?
The number was calculated by the EPA using this probabilistic curve and it had the statistics of the population in it.
How about the petroleum equivalence factor (PEF), is that included?
There will be on the label itself an accounting for the gasoline equivalent of KWH used. That’s a separate conversion that will get melded in another way and is not included in the MPG estimate.
So in summary, Nitz explains that the average Volt driver charging his car nightly can expect to burn one gallon of gas for every 230 miles traveled over time based on the behavior of a particular random population that was studied in 2001.
The highway calculation will be lower but the composite average is expected to be greater than 100 MPG.
The EPA has not confirmed this number yet because they haven’t tested the car, but they agreed to the testing method and GM is confident these are the numbers that will eventually become official.
