World class pedantic dickweedery
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@morbiuswilters said:
What.. no.. how did you.. no. Obviously wind resistance affects both types of vehicle. At low speeds, wind resistance is negligible, so when driving in a city you get better mileage with an electric than on the highway. However, ICEs are not efficient in the city; whatever gains you get from not having to deal with wind resistance are more than lost to idling and working the engine outside its ideal torque range. That's why electric cars get better mileage in the city than on the highway,
OK, with you so far...
but it's the opposite for ICEs.
Because you say it is. Got it.
@Mason Wheeler said:
Also, whence the claim that "on a highway, you're not getting peak efficiency out of an electric car"? Do you have any numbers to back that up?
Yes, the numbers you yourself posted: highway efficiency is lower, due to wind resistance (and not, as you tried to claim, regenerative braking..)
Begging the question, in the classical, correct sense of the term. My source says nothing about wind resistance.
@Mason Wheeler said:
Clearly there is only one way in your mind to interpret something that you want to be false, and that's in whatever way you can find to contort it into something that casts it in the worst possible light. That doesn't change the fact that you're putting words in my mouth in order to ridicule me, which is invariably the mark of one who knows he has an unsustainable position and wishes to distract the audience from his plight.
No, you said regenerative braking "not only" does "not ruin your mileage" but "it can actually improve it!" Those are not words I put into your mouth. Those are the words you said. If you think I'm putting words in your mouth, then please answer the following questions:
- By "not ruin your mileage" you meant that regenerative braking would reclaim a portion of the energy that would be lost to heat from friction braking. Is that correct?
- What did you then mean by "it can actually improve it!"? What were you referencing as a baseline? Because your first statement was about reclaiming some of the energy lost to heat from friction braking, right? Then what the hell were you referring to in the second part of your statement?
- Is it unreasonable to assume that you were simply restating your first claim (about reclaiming energy from regenerative braking versus friction braking), in a very confusing, clumsy, poorly-worded manner?
- If that's not what you were talking about, what other possible improvement were you referencing? Because both myself and someone else who read your post interpreted it as saying you would get better efficiency from driving stop-and-go with regenerative braking than you would at a constant speed.
In your reckless haste to convict me of crimes against the First Law, you seem to have completely forgotten the Second. You're apparently operating under the assumption that maintaining a constant velocity at highway speeds is free, or at least of a negligible cost in energy. Glance down at the tach sometime at 60 MPH (but not for very long; keep your eyes on the road!) and you'll see that this is certainly not the case. It's not revved as high as while you're accelerating up to 60, but it's still running a lot faster than idle speed, just to keep you going.
You're continually losing a non-trivial amount of energy to entropy just to maintain that velocity. This energy is lost, period. However, a significant fraction of the energy that you put into acceleration can be regained through regenerative braking, if your car supports it. (And it is a pretty significant fraction. Regenerative braking operates by basically running the electric motor backwards, and the electric motor has to have a high efficiency for conversion between electric and kinetic energy in order for the car to work at all. You get that high efficiency in both directions.)
Therefore, if you lose energy which is never regained by maintining a constant speed, but you lose energy to acceleration which can be regained, does it not stand to reason that a higher ratio of acceleration/deceleration cycles to time spent at constant speed means less overall loss to entropy?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
Range: My current car is a 2013 Ford Focus. I picked it in large part because it gets really good gas milage for a pure-ICE car, and I couldn't afford anything electric. It gets between 200-300 miles on a full tank, depending on conditions. So does the Tesla Model S.
So you bought a car with an 8 gallon gas tank and somehow this makes the range of an electric car acceptable? My Jeep gets 200-300 MPG and it only gets something like 12 MPG.
12 gallons, and... wait, what? How many MPG does your Jeep get?
@Mason Wheeler said:
The other main objection I hear raised is that most of the electricy that powers an electric car comes from power plants that run on fossil fuels, so they're "just as dirty" anyway. This is an obvious strawman, since anyone familiar with the concept of economies of scale would need about three minutes to poke a hole in that argument big enough to drive a car through.
They're probably dirtier, although it depends on the source. A lot of electricity is generated from coal, and coal is fucking filthy, economies of scale be damned. And then there's nuclear, which we still lack facilities for long-term storage. At this point, both are probably worse for the environment than burning gasoline or diesel.
...and a lot of electricity is produced cleanly. Hydroelectric power, for example, has been a very serious reality for decades. (Just ask Hoover!)
@Mason Wheeler said:
Over a century in which no one has really tried, due in large part to oil companies suppressing relevant research in order to preserve the status quo.
Bullshit. Nobody pursued electric cars because they were a bad idea. And, as I've already fucking pointed out you moron, research into batteries and electric motors didn't stand still.
@Mason Wheeler said:
...and it's still new enough to count as early-generation research, with plenty of room available for iteration to improve on the engineering.
I am punching you in the face over the Internet. You clearly don't understand how engineering (especially automotive engineering) works. This isn't the beginning of some great, untapped field of research. This is the end-result of a century of furious development of electric motors, batteries, rapid charging and light-weight automobile components. All of this shit has been continuously worked on and improved upon over the last century. This isn't some new fucking field that your ass-buddy Elon Musk invented, you mentally-stunted idiot man-child.
The name-calling isn't necessary. All you need to do is prove me wrong.
If, as you claim, Tesla's products are the result of continuous engineering evolution, and not a revolution, as I claim, then it should be easy to make your case by showing what they evolved from. Put simply, where are the predecessors of the Tesla Roadster? Its power system doesn't look anything like an ICE, of course, but it also doesn't look like a hybrid, or like the toy science projects that were electrical cars during the 1990s and much of the 2000s. So where are the previous electrical vehicles? What are the predecessors of the Tesla Roadster? Because from where I'm looking at it, your evolutionary theory has more missing links than fossils, as it were...
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@morbiuswilters said:
And 99% of holistic healers believe crystals prevent cancer.
Well, if I may interject an anecdote... A old friend of mine (we're talking easily 20 years ago) had some health problem affecting him. Doctors couldn't find what it was, and at long last, his girlfriend convinced him to go to a magnetic healer. Now she was probably a lot more into these things than he was; he was the absolute opposite of that. Studied physics at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, to give you an idea.The magnetic healer waved some little bottles about and declared that my friend was sensitive to sugar. He switched from sugared soft drinks (which he drank in great amounts) to diet ones, and his health problems ceased to be.
The morale of this story is that just because something looks like absolute BS, and just because you don't believe in it, doesn't mean that it's not true. Personally I think that putting hands on people and waving little bottles about is as valid a medical procedure as is bein burned at the stake, but it did solve his problem. Something to think about.
@morbiuswilters said:
No, it's still a fallacy. Your argument should be based on evidence and reproducible results, not an appeal to authority.
That's not quite how science works. The scientific method is to come up with a hypothesis, possibly not too outlandish, and then try to disprove it. If you don't manage to disprove it, you might be on to something. Might.Because you can't prove everything with evidence and reproducible results. One example is the evolution theory, and the difficulty in proving it is what gives the creationists and "intelligent designers" (a misnomer if I ever heard one) their ammo. Same goes for large parts of astronomy. I mean, "dark matter" and "dark energy". It means that because their calculations don't add up, there must be something that they can't measure. So does that means it's all nonsense? Hard to say, really.
When it comes to climate change, again it's difficult to prove. Repeating the experiment is definitely not an option. But just because it's difficult to prove, and because it's almost impossible to predict what the outcome will be (people in Greenland love it; people in low-lying Pacific island states will drown), doesn't mean it's not true.
And what if it is true? People in NewYork wouldn't take kindly to you if their city flooded just because you insisted that you need to drive a 18 foot SUV just to get to the mall and back.
And what definitely isn't helping is the unsubstantiated "it's all nonsense and scientists are wasting my hard-earned money" that has featured quite prominently in this thread.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
There are two major issues that still need to be worked on: buiding out charging infrastructure (which technically isn't a problem with the car itself) and bringing the prices down.
What about the third - the fact that they (over the whole lifetime of the vehicle) are currently no better than ICE cars when it comes to their carbon footprint?
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@Mason Wheeler said:
but it's the opposite for ICEs.
Because you say it is. Got it.
I fucking explained it in the previous paragraph. And what human over the age of 10 doesn't know that traditional gas-powered cars almost always get better mileage on the highway?
@Mason Wheeler said:
You're apparently operating under the assumption that maintaining a constant velocity at highway speeds is free, or at least of a negligible cost in energy.
Um.. no? I even said several times that it consumes more energy to travel faster due to wind resistance...
@Mason Wheeler said:
You're continually losing a non-trivial amount of energy to entropy just to maintain that velocity. This energy is lost, period. However, a significant fraction of the energy that you put into acceleration can be regained through regenerative braking, if your car supports it. (And it is a pretty significant fraction. Regenerative braking operates by basically running the electric motor backwards, and the electric motor has to have a high efficiency for conversion between electric and kinetic energy in order for the car to work at all. You get that high efficiency in both directions.)
Therefore, if you lose energy which is never regained by maintining a constant speed, but you lose energy to acceleration which can be regained, does it not stand to reason that a higher ratio of acceleration/deceleration cycles to time spent at constant speed means less overall loss to entropy?
This just.. what the goddamn shit.
Can somebody else tell him why he's wrong? I can't explain physics to somebody who has less than a sixth grade education..
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@Mason Wheeler said:
12 gallons, and... wait, what? How many MPG does your Jeep get?
I just said it gets 12 MPG. Are you blind or something?
@Mason Wheeler said:
...and a lot of electricity is produced cleanly. Hydroelectric power, for example, has been a very serious reality for decades. (Just ask Hoover!)
If by "a lot of" you mean "less than 15 percent", then yes. Hydro's kind of a disaster ecologically, and the hippies are busy dismantling those, anyway. Sorry you missed the memo, but "hydro" is no longer cool with the pro-global-warming hipster doofus crowd.
@Mason Wheeler said:
The name-calling isn't necessary. All you need to do is prove me wrong.
I prefer both.
@Mason Wheeler said:
...or like the toy science projects that were electrical cars during the 1990s and much of the 2000s.
That's actually what it looks a lot like. Sure, it uses Li-ion batteries (much more expensive, much less recyclable, much more toxic to the environment, but with slightly more energy density!) and the styling is that of a poor man's Ferrari, but what do you think is particular novel about the Roadster, when compared to earlier cars? It's just a more-polished turd meant to trick people into parting with money that would be better spent on a real car.
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@Severity One said:
Personally I think that putting hands on people and waving little bottles about is as valid a medical procedure as is bein burned at the stake, but it did solve his problem. Something to think about.
It's called the placebo effect. It's well-documented in medical science.
@Severity One said:
The scientific method is to come up with a hypothesis, possibly not too outlandish, and then try to disprove it. If you don't manage to disprove it, you might be on to something. Might.
No, you don't just try to disprove it, you try to make falsifiable predictions that can be proven with experiments. Think about what you just said: do you think lack of disproof is the only thing holding up most scientific theories?
@Severity One said:
One example is the evolution theory, and the difficulty in proving it is what gives the creationists and "intelligent designers" (a misnomer if I ever heard one) their ammo.
Creationists just want to believe their pet theory and ignore the scientific method, sort of like global warming hysterics. There is plenty of proof of evolution, and I wouldn't say evolution has been difficult to prove. It's some of the most well-trod ground in biology at this point.
@Severity One said:
I mean, "dark matter" and "dark energy". It means that because their calculations don't add up, there must be something that they can't measure. So does that means it's all nonsense? Hard to say, really.
I find dark matter and dark energy somewhat questionable, but at least they account for a legitimate discrepancy in some calculations. That is not the case with global warming. It's an explanation desperately seeking out a discrepancy to insinuate itself into.
@Severity One said:
Repeating the experiment is definitely not an option.
Why do you people think the only type of experiment applicable here is a massive, man-made one that must recreate the entire scenario you're trying to model?? Do you think general relativity was proven when Einstein hopped into a rocket ship, flew at the speed of light and then came back and discovered everyone else had aged?
Seriously, I'm kind of feeling oddly proud of the US public education system right now. I mean, at least they managed to teach me the basics of how science is conducted..
@Severity One said:
But just because it's difficult to prove, and because it's almost impossible to predict what the outcome will be (people in Greenland love it; people in low-lying Pacific island states will drown), doesn't mean it's not true.
Being difficult to prove doesn't mean it's true, either. These are basically obvious statements. The point isn't whether it's easy or difficult to prove, it's whether it is proven or not.
@Severity One said:
People in NewYork wouldn't take kindly to you if their city flooded...
Eh, screw them. Shut down the airports, fill in the tunnels, blow the bridges and let it flood. New York's already a shithole, I don't think anyone will even notice.
@Severity One said:
And what definitely isn't helping is the unsubstantiated "it's all nonsense and scientists are wasting my hard-earned money" that has featured quite prominently in this thread.
Are you claiming governments aren't wasting billions on this? And proposing sanctions (that thankfully will never pass) that would waste trillions more?
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@PJH said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
There are two major issues that still need to be worked on: buiding out charging infrastructure (which technically isn't a problem with the car itself) and bringing the prices down.
What about the third - the fact that they (over the whole lifetime of the vehicle) are currently no better than ICE cars when it comes to their carbon footprint?I think it's even worse than they claim. The battery packs lose their ability to hold a charge over time (preemptive citation: have you ever owned a cellphone or laptop?) which means a lot of owners will be swapping them out every 5-7 years. Now that's tens of thousands of dollars right there, but the people blowing money on a Tesla clearly have more cash than brains, so that's not a problem. However, the CO2 emissions of making new Li-ion battery packs are obviously going to be quite significant.
We better hope global warming isn't real, or the enviro-kooks are going to doom us all the faster with their electric cars. (And does anybody else think it's somewhat amusing that Elon Musk's other venture is a business which launches billionaires into space and creates the CO2 emissions of a small town along the way? Oh, sure, they buy "carbon credits", the modern equivalent of indulgences which--when they aren't completely fraudulent--result in indigenous people having their land taken away so "carbon farms" can be thrown up. Elon Musk: you can take the man out of South Africa but you can't take the hateful exploitation of brown people out of the man.)
Also, we might as well explore how Musk made his fortune in the first place: by running an online bank that does everything in its power to circumvent banking regulations. Now, personally, I don't care, Paypal is fine by me, but it is amusing that this man is being held up as some kind of visionary. A gray-market bank; carbon-spewing jaunts to space for billionaires; and a car company that makes green cars that aren't. (Not to mention, I'd rather be stuck driving Mason Wheeler's Focus than a Tesla..)
And, as I will once again point out, recycling Li-ion batteries is pretty much a no-go. Most of them end up in landfills because there's so little of value to be recovered from them. Conversely, although lead-acid batteries are more toxic, they are highly-recycled because it's easy and economical to do so.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
If, as you claim, Tesla's products are the result of continuous engineering evolution, and not a revolution, as I claim, then it should be easy to make your case by showing what they evolved from. Put simply, where are the predecessors of the Tesla Roadster? Its power system doesn't look anything like an ICE, of course, but it also doesn't look like a hybrid, or like the toy science projects that were electrical cars during the 1990s and much of the 2000s. So where are the previous electrical vehicles? What are the predecessors of the Tesla Roadster? Because from where I'm looking at it, your evolutionary theory has more missing links than fossils, as it were...
Your ignorance has its funny moments. This is the immediate predecessor of the Tesla Roadster:
The Tesla Roadster took a Lotus Elise, rebodied it in carbon fibre to save a little weight at great cost, then swapped the drivetrain for a bunch of laptop batteries - literally - and electric motors. If you think electric motors and batteries haven't been developed for a century for other purposes than electric cars, you're just unfathomably ignorant of the subject you're pontificating about.@Mason Wheeler said:
And what does any of that have to do with me "not knowing how to drive properly?"
Because, apart from all the other nonsense here, stop-go traffic shouldn't normally require you to touch the brakes unless you're the kind of incompetent who accelerates up to the highest speed they can reach in whatever short gap appears before slamming on the stoppers. So regenerative braking doesn't come into play, because all the losses are frictional anyway.
@Mason Wheeler said:
the guys who definitively understand cars
Consumer reports?! OK, now you've jumped the shark. I mean, your conspiracy theories about research being suppressed - because there are no other uses for electric motors than in cars, natch - were ludicrous enough, but no-one, no-one at all, thinks the Consumer Reports guys understand cars. They're notorious for not understanding cars.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Not to mention, I'd rather be stuck driving Mason Wheeler's Focus than a Tesla
That's a bit unfair. I'd love to have the money to own a new Tesla - they're fun toys for rich people, even if they are still eyewateringly expensive after all the government subsidies. Of course, it's not responsible for taking a single car off the road, because they're all second or third cars, but they're fun to drive short distances.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
@cdosrun said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
I've said nothing that violates the First Law.
Yes you did. You said that regenerative breaking would change the effect of stop-and-go from ruining your mileage to improving it (in other words, giving an improvement over normal, continuous driving.) Now clearly regenerative braking still reduces your mileage when compared to continuous driving, although it's still better than just using friction braking.
Oh, let me try.
What you said: "But with an electric motor, you can use regenerative braking, which means that not only does stop-and-go traffic not ruin your milage, it can actually improve it!"
For this to be true, the same car, driven over the same road, would have to get better gas mileage driving stop and go then a steady pace.
This does not happen.
From the linked report that you did not bother to read:
- The electric 2013 Nissan Leaf returns the mpg equivalent of 129 in city driving and 102 on the highway.
- The 2012 Nissan Leaf returns the mpg equivalent of 106 in city driving and 92 on the highway.
...you were saying?
Again, none of this violates the First Law. What's happening is that regenerative braking allows you to put (essentially) the same energy to productive use more than once. With gas, once you've burned it, it's gone. But regenerative braking gives you some of the energy back to use again. Not all of it, and certainly not more than you put in, (which would violate the Second and First Laws, respectively,) but a non-trivial fraction of it
(On a side note, why is it that people who clearly have no understanding of how the Laws of Thermodynamics actually work are so fond of trotting them out to try to disprove scientific claims that they don't like the political implications of? It feels like it's right up there with Godwin's Law sometimes...)
I read it. It doesn't say what you think it said.
It says the leaf gets better MPG in City than in highway. They said the same for the Prius- This isn't new.
What it didn't say, is that is caused by regenerative breaking. It's not, although regenerative breaking reduces the lost energy.
Part if it is that electrics are just plain more efficient at lower speeds. Part of that is that the EPA tests for MPG aren't really accurate.
You can think it out- If you are driving 30 MPH, and break to a full stop using only regenerative breaking (Most, if not all, cars currently on the market have friction breaks that kick in if you break too hard) - You recover a fraction of the kinetic energy you had- The conversion is not 100% efficient, nothing is. You then accelerate to 30 MPH- Again, the conversion is not 100% efficient. You are now at 30 MPH, having incurred a significant loss of energy. GM reckons the efficiency of the breaking portion of this process to be, at best, 72%
If you, however, just maintain that 30 MPH- You may have to overcome some minor increased air resistance due to a high average speed, but you never go through that horribly inefficient energy conversion.
How does this compare to the First Law of Thermodynamics? In the above experiment, consider the Wheel, Motor-Generator, and Battery a closed system. The wheel has Kinetic Energy. You convert it to electric energy, and then to chemical energy stored in the battery. At very least, you are heating up the wires and the Motor-Generator, right? There's other losses, but the heating of wires is one example that most anyone can get. When you convert the energy back into Kinetic energy in the wheel, you heat up the wires again. You know have Kinetic Energy and thermal energy- You can't possibly have more kinetic energy than you started with.
Just to through some anecdotal real world numbers out there-
On a typical drive I take - 87 miles, 2 to 2.5 hours depending on traffic, some of it highway, some of it stop and go- I regenerate approximately 300 Wh due to regernative breaking. That's not unusual- Regenerative breaking displays often show 25 or 50 wH increments.
A gallon of gasoline is 33.7 kWh, or 33,700 Wh. Rule of thumb is that 200 Wh = 1 mile. Regenerative breaking, as reported by my on board console for my commute when I drive it, is responsible for ~1% of the total energy I use.
Regenerative breaking makes stop and go traffic ruin your gas mileage less than friction breaking, but does not improve your gas mileage compared to continuous driving over the same road.
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@cdosrun said:
You recover a fraction of the kinetic energy you had- The conversion is not 100% efficient, nothing is. You then accelerate to 30 MPH- Again, the conversion is not 100% efficient. You are now at 30 MPH, having incurred a significant loss of energy. GM reckons the efficiency of the breaking portion of this process to be, at best, 72%
But what if Kevin Bacon from X-Men First Class was driving the car?
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@cdosrun said:
You can think it out- If you are driving 30 MPH, and break to a full stop using only regenerative breaking (Most, if not all, cars currently on the market have friction breaks that kick in if you break too hard) - You recover a fraction of the kinetic energy you had- The conversion is not 100% efficient, nothing is. You then accelerate to 30 MPH- Again, the conversion is not 100% efficient. You are now at 30 MPH, having incurred a significant loss of energy. GM reckons the efficiency of the breaking portion of this process to be, at best, 72%
If you, however, just maintain that 30 MPH- You may have to overcome some minor increased air resistance due to a high average speed, but you never go through that horribly inefficient energy conversion.
How does this compare to the First Law of Thermodynamics? In the above experiment, consider the Wheel, Motor-Generator, and Battery a closed system. The wheel has Kinetic Energy. You convert it to electric energy, and then to chemical energy stored in the battery. At very least, you are heating up the wires and the Motor-Generator, right? There's other losses, but the heating of wires is one example that most anyone can get. When you convert the energy back into Kinetic energy in the wheel, you heat up the wires again. You know have Kinetic Energy and thermal energy- You can't possibly have more kinetic energy than you started with.
Just to through some anecdotal real world numbers out there-
On a typical drive I take - 87 miles, 2 to 2.5 hours depending on traffic, some of it highway, some of it stop and go- I regenerate approximately 300 Wh due to regernative breaking. That's not unusual- Regenerative breaking displays often show 25 or 50 wH increments.
A gallon of gasoline is 33.7 kWh, or 33,700 Wh. Rule of thumb is that 200 Wh = 1 mile. Regenerative breaking, as reported by my on board console for my commute when I drive it, is responsible for ~1% of the total energy I use.
Regenerative breaking makes stop and go traffic ruin your gas mileage less than friction breaking, but does not improve your gas mileage compared to continuous driving over the same road.
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
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@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
If you say so. I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
Hint- My decision was not related to Carbon Footprint.
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@cdosrun said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
If you say so. I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
Hint- My decision was not related to Carbon Footprint.
Was your decision related to Oxygen Handprint?
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@Ben L. said:
@cdosrun said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
If you say so. I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
Hint- My decision was not related to Carbon Footprint.
Was your decision related to Oxygen Handprint?
It was probably the Cesium Cockprint.
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@dhromed said:
@mikeTheLiar said:
It was probably the Cesium Cockprint.
Titanium cockprint.
I wish! That's a myth I can bust- owning a Hybrid did not noticeably increase my cockprint.
TCO.
I've driven 150k miles in the past 8 years. At ~45 MPG (Slightly lower than what I really get), that's ~3,300 gallons of gas. At $3.50 average price, that's 12k in gas.
The same 150k miles at 20 MPG is 26k. 25MPG is 21k.
Maintenance cost is roughly similar. If you want to nitpick, I have much less wear on brake-pads. No battery related maintenance yet.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have looked harder at lower MPG, lower price cars instead. Gas prices did not raise as quickly or as far as I expected. I think it's likely I could have found something in the 20-25MPG, 15k-20k price range that might have been a better choice.
As always with anecdotal evidence, other folks may have other experiences.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
@boomzilla said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
According to Consumer Reports, they're already there, and in fact well beyond "remotely competitive." There are two major issues that still need to be worked on: buiding out charging infrastructure (which technically isn't a problem with the car itself) and bringing the prices down.
Sorry, but refueling in about a half hour after only 200 miles is not remotely competitive. Especially not for the prices required just to get that piss poor performance.
Wow, it's like you didn't read a thing I said when I specifically addressed those very issues.
No, it's more like I'm saying you're wrong.
@Mason Wheeler said:
It can recharge overnight, so when you can burn those "only 200 miles" in a day, then you have something to complain about. But unless you're driving cross-country, which most people don't do all that often, that's irrelevant.
How many people don't have a convenient way to charge overnight? I certainly don't. Why do I need to plan ahead to do this? You may say that you don't care about the inconvenience forced upon an electric car owner, but that doesn't mean anyone has to agree with you.
@Mason Wheeler said:
It's called "optimized for the common use case," and they've done a very good job of it, especially considering this is still early-generation technology! Give the engineers a few years to refine and improve on the less common use cases, and watch the remaining objections vanish, one by one...
It's not optimized, it's just a poor workaround for nonexistent easy and convenient charging that currently exists with putting liquid fuel into a tank. We'll see what the future brings, and they may be competitive in the future. They aren't even in the same ballpark right now.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:
Personally I think that putting hands on people and waving little bottles about is as valid a medical procedure as is bein burned at the stake, but it did solve his problem. Something to think about.
It's called the placebo effect. It's well-documented in medical science.
I would have said that it was a lucky guess. The anecdote says that the healer just told him that he was sensitive to sugar. That could have been true, and reducing his intake may have helped. Or he just got better for whatever reason, (possibly the placebo of, ironically, avoiding sugar).
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@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
I don't think that's accurate. We're just pointing out how much worse these toys are compared to actual cars. I've looked at hybrids, but I don't drive enough to make it really cost effective.
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@boomzilla said:
@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
I don't think that's accurate. We're just pointing out how much worse these toys are compared to actual cars. I've looked at hybrids, but I don't drive enough to make it really cost effective.
Also, Hitler drove an electric car.
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@drurowin said:
@boomzilla said:
@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
I don't think that's accurate. We're just pointing out how much worse these toys are compared to actual cars. I've looked at hybrids, but I don't drive enough to make it really cost effective.
Also, Hitler drove an electric car.
But Hitler was sensitive to sugar.
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@joe.edwards said:
@drurowin said:
And insensitive to the plight of the Jews.@boomzilla said:
@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
I don't think that's accurate. We're just pointing out how much worse these toys are compared to actual cars. I've looked at hybrids, but I don't drive enough to make it really cost effective.
Also, Hitler drove an electric car.
But Hitler was sensitive to sugar.
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@TDWTF123 said:
I'd love to have the money to own a new Tesla...
So would I, but I'd use it to by an M6 convertible.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
Ah, the "I'm not really an idiot, I was just trolling.." defense.
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@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
I personally don't want to own a hybrid, but I don't care if you own one, either. The thing is, hybrids are actually way, way, way better for the environment than pure-electrics. There's a limited number of batteries we can produce in a year and they do much more to reduce emissions and fuel consumption when used as a supplement to an ICE rather than a full replacement. Also, electrics are prohibitively expensive (even with government subsidies--but according to Mason Wheeler it's not welfare if the government gives $8k to millionaires so they can buy an expensive toy, the profits from which are then used to pay back the sweetheart loan given to Tesla in the first place..) whereas hybrids are quite reasonable.
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@boomzilla said:
I would have said that it was a lucky guess.
Possible, but less likely. Considering how many people are "cured" by the placebo effect, it's more likely the cause of his recovery.
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@morbiuswilters said:
So would I, but I'd use it to by an M6 convertible.
And you have a Jeep at the moment? Wow, your car choices are gayer than My Little Pony. I mean, the M6 convertible doesn't just say gay, it even tells people you're a receiver.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
Ah, the "I'm not really an idiot, I was just trolling.." defense.
Ah, the "double down on insisting that my opponent was serious all along so as to not have to admit I'm too dense to realize that someone blatantly and gleefully contradicting himself at every turn is trolling me" defense. ;)
You make it way too easy sometimes...
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@TDWTF123 said:
And you have a Jeep at the moment? Wow, your car choices are gayer than My Little Pony. I mean, the M6 convertible doesn't just say gay, it even tells people you're a receiver.
D:
But it's so pretty and blue and shiny..
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@Mason Wheeler said:
Ah, the "double down on insisting that my opponent was serious all along so as to not have to admit I'm too dense to realize that someone blatantly and gleefully contradicting himself at every turn is trolling me" defense. ;)
You make it way too easy sometimes...
Wow, this is like talking with a 7 year-old. And I thought my constant name-calling was immature..
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@Mason Wheeler said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@Mason Wheeler said:
Very nice! But did you have to do that so quickly? I was wondering how long I could keep trolling this moron until someone jumped in with actual data...
Ah, the "I'm not really an idiot, I was just trolling.." defense.Ah, the "double down on insisting that my opponent was serious all along so as to not have to admit I'm too dense to realize that someone blatantly and gleefully contradicting himself at every turn is trolling me" defense. ;)
You make it way too easy sometimes...
I guess you're also admitting that today's electric cars are more boondoggle than a useful transportation option?
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@boomzilla said:
I guess you're also admitting that today's electric cars are more boondoggle than a useful transportation option?
Of course not. No no no.
He merely laid a trap wherein he implied regenerative braking increased your efficiency over the baseline of driving a constant speed. It was a clever trap, because he made it sound very much like something he was saying and then he proceeded to argue about it for a day--insisting that's how regenerative braking worked--but all along the joke was on me. What other explanation could there be?
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@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.
Personally, I have my doubts about hybrids. However, I have absolutely no doubts about electric cars: they suck and they have about as much future as does Zionism in the Islamic Republic of Iran.To give you an idea: I live on an island. If you take it easy, you can drive from one end to the other in less than an hour. On face value, this would be the ideal situation for electric vehicles, since all distances are short. However, even here it's difficult to drive one.
This island has the 7th highest population density in the world, and the 5th highest car ownership ratio. This means that there are really a lot of cars here, and not everybody has a drive with their home (most people haven't), or can even park in front of the house, and therefore it's often not feasible to charge your car overnight. Which kinda makes electric vehicles useless in the one place where they would seem to make most sense.
If you want a truly environmentally friendly car, or more accurately, one that harms the environment the least, you'd have to get a tiny car with a three cylinder diesel engine, or something of the sort. But you look like a dork in one, if you fit in it in the first place.
So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car, which basically had two criteria: (1) full marks in the EuroNCAP (the European version of NCAP) crash tests and (2) looks, with an upper price limit of €25,000. Practicality, performance, fuel consumption and other things were important, but not as important as those two.
It's not a hybrid and it's most certainly not an electric. It has a relatively modest 1.4L turbo engine and consumption is reasonable. (Incidentally, petrol costs around €1.50 per litre here. 10 years ago, it was less than half the price.)
I'm pretty sure that my next car (probably 10 years from now) will rn on something other than petrol (gas), but I'll worry about that when it happens. Let's see what the manufacturers manage to come up with, perhaps something with hydrogen.
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@Severity One said:
So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car...
Was it that Renault you were going on about awhile back?
@Severity One said:
Incidentally, petrol costs around €1.50 per litre here.
You son of a bitch, where do you live, Qatar??
Edit: Nevermind, liter.
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@Severity One said:
If you want a truly environmentally friendly car, or more accurately, one that harms the environment the least, you'd have to get a tiny car with a three cylinder diesel engine, or something of the sort. But you look like a dork in one, if you fit in it in the first place.
A common misconception. Women love men in tiny cars. Small cars are cool.@Severity One said:
So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car, which basically had two criteria: (1) full marks in the EuroNCAP (the European version of NCAP) crash tests
I've seen how the Maltese drive. That makes perfect sense.It's a long time since I was in Malta, but from what I remember isn't it actually somewhere that's perfect for public transport, if only you had a decent system?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@TDWTF123 said:
Women love men in tiny cars. Small cars are cool.
Mebee in Yurop..
Let me make this simpler for someone well learnèd as yourself:
The size of the car is inversely proportional to the size of the nearest man's genitals.
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@Ben L. said:
The size of the car is inversely proportional to the size of the nearest man's genitals.
Yeah, that's what guys with tiny cars always say. And since nobody ever lies about penis size, clearly they're right.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Ben L. said:
The size of the car is inversely proportional to the size of the nearest man's genitals.
Yeah, that's what guys with tiny cars always say. And since nobody ever lies about penis size, clearly they're right.
Are you implying you bought the wrong size of car?
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@Ben L. said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@Ben L. said:
The size of the car is inversely proportional to the size of the nearest man's genitals.
Yeah, that's what guys with tiny cars always say. And since nobody ever lies about penis size, clearly they're right.
Are you implying you bought the wrong size of car?
No, I'm saying that my penis and my car are both tiny! Ha, gotcha there!
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:
I was talking about that, yeah. But when we actually went to the dealer/showroom, they were so unprofessional and so rude, that we just left. (The 12 years of terrible service were a factor as well.) Apparently they're the only dealer who are not suffering from the economic crisis, or from the massive imports of second-hand cars from the UK and Japan. Maybe because they're cheap, but that's not surprising given that the only colours you can get are various shades of excrement, the ubiquitous white and black, and "Malta Blue" which is a colour that manages to look bad in the showroom.So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car...
Was it that Renault you were going on about awhile back?
So instead I got a bright red Opel Astra GTC. It should make you happy: it's a General Motors car designed in Germany.
@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:
Indeed. Could be worse: in the Netherlands, it's more like €1.80 a litre. But as said, distances are short, so I don't care that much. I still put in €50 every two weeks.Incidentally, petrol costs around €1.50 per litre here.
You son of a bitch, where do you live, Qatar??
Edit: Nevermind, liter.
@TDWTF123 said:
@Severity One said:
No no, women love driving small cars, because they're easier to manoeuvre. For men, they prefer cars that put style over practicality, because it reminds them of the clothes they wear and the sacrifices they have to make.If you want a truly
A common
environmentally friendly car, or more accurately, one that harms the
environment the least, you'd have to get a tiny car with a three
cylinder diesel engine, or something of the sort. But you look like a
dork in one, if you fit in it in the first place.
misconception. Women love men in tiny cars. Small cars are cool.In the case of the woman I'm married to, she loves it, particularly that it's red. And I like it because it isn't bland. Everybody is driving a bland hatch, or crossover, or something really practical. Well, I've driven an extremely practical car for the past 12 years, but that also has the sex appeal of a dead fish. I wanted a car that puts a big smile on my face. Never mind that Opel's sportier models, particularly the Manta, are associated with chavs.
@TDWTF123 said:
@Severity One said:
Well, we got rid of the old buses, which were hand-built by shipbuilders on top of old army truck chassis, the oldest actually dating back to the 1930, and replaced them with Arriva buses. Most of the buses are brand new, made in China and of the high quality standard we associate with that country, in Arriva's pleasing colour scheme of Puke Beige and Decomposition Turquoise.So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my
I've seen how
new car, which basically had two criteria: (1) full marks in the
EuroNCAP (the European version of NCAP) crash tests
the Maltese drive. That makes perfect sense.It's a long time since I was in Malta, but from what I remember isn't it
actually somewhere that's perfect for public transport, if only you had
a decent system?The driving is not that bad. There's actually a driving test now that involves more than driving once around the block, and driving style has improved over the past 12 years, not in the least because the infrastructure is so lacking and snaking between the various ever-expanding localities, all built with absolutely no holistic vision, that you can't drive fast anywhere. Fancy that, we even have speed cameras these days.
And with all those cars, and buses stuck in traffic, and the terrible layout of the roads (I'm not talking about the quality, which has improved as well), the one thing that might improve public transport is some sort of mass urban transport system, but the cost of that would easily incrase the national debt by 50%.
But admittedly, my obsession with full marks for crashs tests comes from an incident where someone decided to just drive off and make a U-turn, during rush hour, when I was driving downhill on a road with slippery tarmac. I had been looking at all four spots where a car might come from at that intersection, but alas not at someone who decided to drive off during rush hour without checking his mirrors first. My car was never the same after that.
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@Severity One said:
It should make you happy: it's a General Motors car designed in Germany.
I hate GM, but I do like Germany. I'd be happy if GM went out of business and every piece-of-shit UAW goon was unemployed for the rest of their short, miserable lives.
@Severity One said:
But as said, distances are short, so I don't care that much. I still put in €50 every two weeks.
I probably spend $100 /month on gas, but I don't really drive much and my car gets pretty bad mileage.
I really miss my last car. It was extremely reliable and fun to drive. It had weird gas mileage, though: something like 13 MPG city / 30 MPG highway, which is very lop-sided.
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@morbiuswilters said:
It had weird gas mileage, though: something like 13 MPG city / 30 MPG highway, which is very lop-sided.
Maybe the engine was installed upside-down.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I hate GM, but I do like Germany.
Well, even though I ordered a German car (built in the UK; my Renault was built in Turkey, which explains a thing or two), German cars have a bit of an image problem:- Mercedes is for building contractors
- BMW is for pimps
- Audi is for people who are just unpleasant and don't want to admit that they're either a contractor or a pimp
- Volkswagen is for people who want to be bland
- Porsche is for posers
- Opel... does that brand still exist?
@morbiuswilters said:
I really miss my last car. It was extremely reliable and fun to drive. It had weird gas mileage, though: something like 13 MPG city / 30 MPG highway, which is very lop-sided.
What car was that?
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@morbiuswilters said:
The climate of the Earth has always been unstable. It wasn't cozy 10k years ago and it probably won't be cozy in another 10k. We'll find a way to live. Or we won't. Either way, it's not our problem and there's nothing we can do about it.
No wonder you Americans pollute the whole world...seriously fucked up attitude.
You do know that every major civilization (mayas, egpytians, romans,...) failed due to environmental problems they caused themselves? Just that those problems were minor compared to global warming. and anyone denying humans caused global warming is just plain stupid.
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@Severity One said:
- Opel... does that brand still exist?
Opel I think is just a brand of GM. I know at least one incarnation of the Vectra shared a body with my blantly GM Chevrolet Malibu Maxx.
TRWTF is that people think that the Maxx part means I spent lots of money on the options package when in reality it means it's a completely different car with a hatchback instead of a regular trunk.
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@morbiuswilters said:
The climate of the Earth has always been unstable. It wasn't cozy 10k years ago and it probably won't be cozy in another 10k. We'll find a way to live. Or we won't. Either way, it's not our problem and there's nothing we can do about it.
"Yeah sure the pool water isn't healthy, we got nobody to clean it and leaves and shit keep blowing into it. And since it's not clean and cleaning it is out of our control anyways, we'll just continue to piss in it" - how the fuck does that solve any problems?This entrenched attitude being portrayed in this thread is really depressing. We can't do anything about climate change, since we don't have much clue what is causing it. So we should just ignore the problem altogether since alarmists and religious fanatics have taken over the debate? Bullshit dude!
CFC not CO2 is responsible for climate change (phys.org) <- This guy found a near perfect correlation between global temperatures and his own pet theory - big woop, but at least he's trying.
