The Pickens Plan

[Dolmen]

torque on an electric engine is better (dunno if you have much experience with magnetic motors) so. yes, the technology is capable of doing all of these things.

energy is energy, where it comes from isn't really that important in terms of how much work it can do for you.

in fact, with tractors specifically, an electric tractor would significantly reduce the weight required (higher torque means less mass is required in the tractor etc) and that would potentially cause massive efficiency gains.

you wouldn't have to breath gas fumes all day long either, and it would have fewer moving parts that could break.

with solar to charge it and a large enough battery system to smooth out cloudy days you could even do this completely off-grid, so you wouldn't need to keep a fuel reserve on site or drive into town just for gas. etc.

and I should've been clearer: when I say 'Ban' I mean new-production only. the only way to remove them from the road before they naturally end their life would be if we instituted some sort of trade-in program where 1 gas vehicle (used) was exchanged for 1 electric vehicle (new) - with the costs of the electric vehicle over the value of the scrapped gas vehicle being absorbed by some larger entity.

in towing, torque is what matters. - and electrics win on torque by a large margin.

The problem as I see it comes in terms of weight. My wonder is how would a lighter vehicle deal with the actual towing? Obviously having a lighter truck would screw up a hitch-based trailer, seeing as (for this example) a 2-horse trailer is going to weight ~1-3 tons (purely depends on the model), horses anywhere from .75-1 ton each. Now would they have to install weights throughout the truck so that the trailer isn't lifting the front end of the truck off the ground (seeing as a lot of pure electric models I've seen don't have the "engine", the bulk weight, in the front)? Then, from there will that decrease efficiency?

[Amele]

I was going to do lots of quoting and refute everything point by point but I'm not going to bother.


it's obvious that there's a couple people in here who prefer the intangibles of gas cars and that's understandable. it's not alot different than people who prefer paper books to e-books. (I'm one of the latter)

but to make the claim that the tech isn't there when it provably is for the majority of drivers (I mean, come on. how often do you really exceed 100mph in street driving?) or to claim that an electric can't accelerate like a gas car when we've shown you the tech *can* is borderline trolling. It doesn't matter if the first model is targeted at dot-com CEO's and people with old money. the point is that the tech can do it. and in 2010 you'll see the electric equivalent of a BMW 5 series, and in 2012 you'll see the electric equivalent of a Mustang.

for beckwin: when they get to the coupe it'll be 30,000$ new and loaded. the luxury sedan is going to be lux sedan priced at 60,000$~. Both of those are going market rates for their respective classes.

The roadster is arguably too, depending on whether or not you consider a 240+ top speed to be a requirement for the class (personally I think that's balanced by not having to dump 50$ into the car for every 120 miles you want to travel) but the point I had in showing people the roadster was that *yes* the tech is possible. scale will bring the price down, same as the ICE was.