getting off foreing oil

As I was driving to work today I was thinking.... the vast majority of driving is done comuting to work and back, not that far really. Most households have more than one car. Why not have the government guarenttee a loan to have one car conveted to an electric car? It would be the easiest loan in the world to pay back because you wouldn't be spending a hundred bucks a week to fill up your car. It only costs about a buck fifty to charge the batteries at night. Plugging it in is a pretty small price to pay to get off our dependence of foreign oil. You say that will bring the price of gas down. Well keep it high, they do it with cigraettes, why the hell not with gas. We could fix our roads and bridges, educate our children, and provide afforable health care. We would also be able to afford/require coal generation to add the scrubbers necessary run clean. The only thing we could dictate not to spend the money on would be useless wars. This would also lessen the use of corn for ethanol which will bring food prices back down. Put people to work starting businesses to do the conversions, and bring down the cost of diesel so we can get what we make where we want it without squeezing truckers out of business. What do ya'all think?

Electric vehicles wont pull my enclosed trailer , needed for my job...   

The ceo of Shell said on the news a few weeks ago, we just need to change our driving habits... I bet he's even had downsized to a 4 passenger Lear....poor guy...

You can keep your truck to tow whatever, 80 percent of the driving in this country is done by people in a car going to and from work. That is where this would be most beneficial. I appreciate the comments but so far I still don't see why it wouldn't work. I guess when gas gets to 10 bucks a gallon the will to do this will be strong enough. I'm saying why wait?
There was a 60 sometning Camero SS restored to electric, and it would do burn outs. I'd drive that to work everyday.

Think about this, What if we ever went to war against China? Who would make any of our "everyday" products? How many U.S. steel mills have shut down in the last decade? Where/who would be able to ramp-up to help wartime production?

No reason why there couldnt be standard batteries or fuel cells that you could exchange at a "gas" station anywhere in the country. There would of course need to be incentives to make it happen before it became an immediate need. There are a million better ways, none of them perfect, my issue is we arent even thinking of exploring any of them at this point.

Instantanous torque is a pretty cool thing. No one has the final answer yet, helium3 mined on the moon for fusion will someday be an option. The helium found on earth produces to many neutrons during the fusion and the walls of the reactor wear out to fast whereas helium3 fusion produces almost no neturons so the reactor life is much longer making it cheaper. A pound of helium 3 would power the city of London for a year or some absurb number like that.
My idea is you take the car you have now and take that to a shop someone like Eric opens and have it converted to batteries. There is so much coal that I don't see the price of electricty going up that much especially when it only costs a couple of bucks worth of electricy to charge the car overnight. Granted this is not for everyone but with a gurarentted loan that would be easy as hell to pay back look at it as a new deal for the times we're in. If we can build Hoover Dams and the TVA why not allow people to convert their minvans to take the kids to soccer practice. As far as the A/C issue goes it will take some hp for that but as far as I'm concerned we're in the mess we're in now because of A/C. Before there was a/c people sat on their porches and knew their neighbors, kids played outside and built forts, and we slept with the windows open with a fan on. Now everyone stays locked up in their homes to keep the cold air in and in the process the very fabric of our society has been destroyed.

well they are throwing around the hybrid word out very generously now a days because it should be labeled electric assist and not hybrid because a true hybrid doesn't have to have batteries to power it as it has IC engine that drives a generator to create the power and batteries are only need as a back-up to high current demands.

Also the drive motors are A/C induction motors that's why there is an inverter in the systems.

hmmmm,...... maybe I should "deep-6" the idea of putting that evil gas-hog 300 horse Crusader engine of mine in the 'cuda and go for 3000lbs of batteries..
   Or... Kristof...you got any spare BBQ cylinders laying around?

hey Joe, when calculaters first came out they were 800 bucks, now you get them in a box of cereal

plasma tv's 5 or so years ago were 15k

My job requires me to drive about 25k a year. Gas is killing me, but everytime I look at cars that get 30 mpg or better, they seem so small that I don't want to risk riding in a little POS, so I have a full size short bed 2 wd that gets 19 mpg. I think we need to start drilling our own oil and get away from OPEC.

Tim D wrote: quote A Ford Escape hybrid has $8,000 worth batteries in the back. If someone hits you, that's a lot of money. When the car gets some age on it, thats a lot for insurance to cover, you know they total out older cars now just because of the cost on air bags when there's really not very much body damage.

I would worry about batteries shorting out from the impact. If you ever saw one short out you know what I mean.

I kept telling my nephew who at his age knows everything that i kept smelling his battery overcharge, 10 minutes later it let loose and scared the *************** out of him, he didnt get hurt but i bet he learned a lesson..the gases from overcharging are whats flammable, if i smell the gas i'll turn off the charger and walk away for a while

Eric, I worked for the fire department for a while and saw a few gasoline explosions. One was a fuel tank on a old pick up in a wreck, it makes quite an impact.

I was making the point that we comfortable with the gasoline danger in vehicles. I think we would   
be fine with the batteries as well. However I think the ultimate solution to lower consumption vehicles will need to not use batteries for reasons other than safety.

eric lavine wrote: tique, i always got a story, in the 80's where i worked some idiot was mig welding on top of a empty thinner barrel

I too have see this! I was working at a metal fab shop and one of the helpers decided he wanted to get a promotion to be a welder but felt he needed to practice. It was coffee break so he went and got some scrap metal to weld. That scrap just happened to be a empty 55 gal drum of MEK. As soon as he struck a arc, it burnt through the barrel. It then split the bottom of the drum open and the drum took off like a rocket rattling around in the bar joists for maybe 2 seconds. He too was lucky that he didn't get hurt. The only damage was to the MIG gun that the handle broke off of. He didn't get the promotion to welder!!

You guys could really get me up on a soap box with bringing up the VW Diesels. My wife and I have been driving them for years, we both have had a couple. The only one we have right now is a 2002 Golf TDI. It consistently gets around 46-48 MPG. None of our VW cars have gotten the 50+ MPG that folks talk about, but we do live at altitude in the mountains so that may play a part.

We have loved the efficiency and good power the turbo charged diesels give us in the mountains as well. We run 20% biodiesel in them, and have had no problems with it. The VW diesels run for about 250,000 miles pretty well, but the car tends to fall apart all along the way.

The thing I get up on a soap box about is the price of diesel. Why the hell is it so expensive these days. From what I understand it's cheaper to make than gasoline. It makes me think someone is trying to discourage it's use in the states.

When we traveled to Australia we found new diesels made by Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, and Ford. Not trucks, nice practical cars that all got the mileage of our VW. Why don't they sell those cars here?

I think diesel is the best "bridge the gap" technology currently available. Even my diesel Dodge 3/4 ton, 4X4, Long bed,crew cab truck gets 19-20 MPG empty and 16-17 MPG pulling the Nautique. That's better than many of the mid sized SUVs that have less than half the towing capacity. Why don't we have more diesels in this country? I have never heard a good reason.