Last weekend, we watched the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" for movie night. With gas prices the way they are, I think I became especially hysterical as I watched this movie. I mean, we HAD electric cars, and there were people who WANTED electric cars, but they went away anyway, crushed and destroyed, so no one got ANY! NO ELECTRIC CAR FOR YOU! HAHAHA!
Enough maniacal caps-lock screaming. I just think that Electric cars are such a good idea. I know they aren't perfect, but for most people such a car would suit their needs very well. And no oil changes, fewer parts to maintain, and no more gas! It is far cheaper to charge one of these puppies than it is to fill up a gas
ON ANOTHER NOTE: I went to my 5-year high school reunion last weekend. Let me tell you, it is beyond strange to think that I've been out of high school that long. Dave went with me as a guest, but it was fun for him because we went to the same school and he's only a year older then me, so he knew people there. It was okay. I don't know if I should feel old or not.
The moving day is coming soon. That is very exciting! I've been packing some things and getting ready by cleaning and getting rid of some of the things we don't need/can't fit in the new apartment.
6 comments:
hey! i am so glad someone felt as i did about that movie! it made me completely hysterical. and it totally turned around a lot of my thinking. before that movie, i was like, "PSHAH! hydrogen is the way to go!" but now i'm all about electric cars. i really hope that we'll always live in a place with such excellent public transportation so that having a car won't really be necessary. we're even planning to build a trailer for our bike so we can do our grocery shopping without borrowing a car. someday we'll probably have to suck it up and buy some form of personal transportation, if only for emergencies. but sometimes i feel like being a real stickler and saying that i refuse to buy a car unless it's electric. not that my little abstention will make GM roll over or anything, but seriously, are they not the most awesome thing ever?! and affordable! and adorable!
sigh.
I am optimistic about the whole thing, though. When people put up with crap long enough (like cars that run on gasoline that costs a fortune), they change because they must. It's gotten to that point. We have hybrid cars all over the place, and that is the first step toward electric (well, electric AGAIN, since it's already BEEN done). What I'm really excited about is the possibility of a hybrid that can be charged. I heard someone was working on one that will run the first 40 or so miles on electric alone. I would love a car like that. It's the perfect transition over to full-electric, and I hope that in a few more years we see them again.
In the meantime, we have just had to reduce how much we drive and hope that these impossible gas prices drop...which they probably won't :( No vacations for us this year.
It's tough listening to yet another victim of perhaps the most dishonest film ever made.
"Who Killed..." is nothing but a long sequence of lies, starting with the absurd claim that
GM killed the electric car by cancelling its truly crappy EV-1. The Toyota Rav4 Electric and Honda
Electric were far better cars than the small cramped EV-1, and Honda cancelled their electric car
program after less than a year due to lack of public interest, and Toyota kileld their the same year the EV-1 program was cancelled, which had been long overdue.
So how come Toyota and Honda aren't painted as killers
of electric car? Simple. Chris Paine made a backroom deal with those two companies and in return rewrote history and does not mention them. And do you really
believe that the EV-1 was cheap transportation? If so, it's quite obvious that the film failed (on purpose) to inform it viewers just how exorbitantly expensive
those electric cars really were.
Some electric car facts the film never told you:
Production costs: EV-1 : over $50,000, more than 3 times
that of the much better Honda Accord. Toyota Rav4 - $43,000,
Honda EV - $53,000.
Costs of ownership : new battery pack about every 5 years :
25 NiMH batteries that weighed 1200 pounds (!!). Replacement
costs : Toyota dealerships reportedly priced a complete
battery pack replacement at $35,000. The EV-1 battery pack cost
well beyond $20,000, but GM leasees were never asked to replace
their batteries, while Toyota demanded that their leasees pay for
theirs (none ever did - they simply turned in their leased
vehicles). The per mile costs of owning an NiMH powered EV are
astronomical - more than 30 cents per mile in battery costs alone,
or over $4,000 per year, 4 times what gas powered drivers were
paying for fuel. Still think those electric cars were cheap?
Still think avoiding a $20 oil change makes me want to go
own an electric? Do you really believe that maintenance costs
for an EV are significantly less? How can that be, when 98% of
the parts on the electric are found in gas powered cars?
Popularity : no one wanted the EV-1, despite large federal
and state subsidies to those who leased them. No leasee ever
paid anywhere near the cost of those vehicles. Of 5,000 GM
customers who responded to a survey saying that they were
interested in an electric car, only 50 were dumb enough
to sign up. NEVER, in the 6 year life span of the EV-1 (which was
longer than the production run of most cars, making a complete
lie of the claim that the cars weren't available) were more
than 800 of the 1200 EV-1s produced on lease at the same time.
ONLY the conscious-striken, those desperate to drive one and greenwash their image, wanted those cars. They were one gigantic, expensive headache. They required 8 hours to recharge. Always available? Are you kidding?
Other problems: GM reported that fear of running out of electricity was very strong, especially among their women drivers.
Could the EV-1 get you where you wanted to go? Not likely. Can you survive with just the EV-1 and without a gas powered car?
Not unless you never needed or wanted to go to a destination over
35 miles away.That was the limit of the car's driving radius, although it would shrink as the batteries aged. At 5 years of age, they had less than 80% of their earlier power (car became slow) and range capacity.
Customers played Russian roulette if they dared try to go too far. Just because the EV-1 could get you there a year ago, didn't mean it could today. And those distances varied depending upon all kinds of things - terrain, driving style, A/C usage, etc. It simply was often impossible
to know whether the car could make it to you destination or not, even in the unlikely event that you knew how far you had to go (assuming no detours, etc).
"Who Killed the Electric Car?" is basically the most dishonest advertisement ever created. Contrary to the cheerleading film, the EV-1 was recently named
by a panel of auto analysts as one of the worst cars ever built. There was no conceivable reason for producing and of those cars that depended upon NiMH
batteries. They were only built because of the Federal government's grants and,
to a lesser extent, California's so-called zero emissions laws (which illogically considers a car using non-zero emission electricity as being a zero emission vehicle). Recent studies have shown emissions produced by coal fired electrical plants as far more harmful to humans than the emission coming out of the tailpipe of a modern car.
The film's claim that GM was required to produce the EV-1 is ridiculously absurd: there were two dozen other auto manufacturers selling cars in California, and not
one of them ever felt compelled build an electric car or produce any other type of zero emission vehicle. The zero emission law was a joke, and wouldn't have withstood a court challenge. Recently an appeals court ruled in an almost identical situation that states do not have the power to force manufacturers to produce products according to their desires.
Without a practical electic battery, any attempts to build a battery-only electric car are doomed, and even dimwitted 7 year olds are aware of that obvious
fact. Anyone can build an electric car - they were doing that long before World
War I. Problem is, the EV-1 wasn't any better than those early electric cars in the critical areas of driving range, costs, and recharge times. In 90 years
the electric car that had been made obsolete by the Model T Ford in 1906 was much the same. I was originally interested in the EV-1 when I learned about it in 1989. But when it finally appeared (after waiting for those "NiMH wonder batteries" which turned out not to be so much wonderful as they were expensive) I was appalled to learn of everything it couldn't do. Nobody killed the electric car in 2002, because the electric car wasn't alive. It was, in the words of senior
Motor Trend editor MacKenzie, DOA.
GM is currently building the Chevy Volt, a car which avoids all the stupidity of the battery-only, can't-do electric car. And it will achieve virtually everything an battery-only electric can and still be a viable alternative to the gas powered car, which the EV-1 never was. Do the simple math and you'll find that as a commuter (which accounts for over half the gasoline usage in this country) the Chevy VOLT can eliminate the need of over 96% of liquid fuel, and what remains can easily be met using ethanol. There simply is no need for forcing consumers to accept inferior products like the totally crappy EV-1, which met the
transportation needs of practically no one, even if they could afford its high
costs of ownership.
hm...sounds to me like somebody is trolling. that's a form comment if ever i saw one.
Eh, yeah. Nothing's perfect. But it is an idea that we have got to focus on, regardless of which car company makes it work.
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