[ausev] A/C

[Gil Dawson]

Hi, John--

My apologies for my rant about none being made.  I was irrevocably 
burned when GM took my EV1 away with no reasonable reason given.  The 
only reason that makes sense to me is that it would reduce oil 
company profits.  The possibility that oil profit might drive auto 
manufactureres' decisions, coupled with GM's arrogant silence when 
the question has been posed, gave me an insight into the tremendous 
power at play in this economic system.  It eventually became clear 
that automobile manufactureres are not responding to the demands of 
their customers, but to something else.  What that something else is, 
I do not know nor understand.  It is certainly nothing like what we 
were taught in Civics class.  The arrogance and silence together 
engender a feeling of powerlessness and betrayal I have never before 
experienced.   I take consolation in the works of Howard Zinn and 
Noam Chomsky, but neither they nor I have any clear idea where this 
political economy is headed.

Nonetheless, we have to try.  Your ideas may well catch fire in a 
culturally significant way.  Let us hope so.

I completely agree that we as a culture could use a large selection 
of differently-fueled vehicles to great advantage.  Oil will run out. 
There are a couple of important transportation systems that EV-only 
technology probably cannot supplant: airplanes and interstate 
trucking.  Long-distance vacations in a personal car may be another.

But for commuting and getting around the city -- and its freeways -- 
for our daily routines, we need no oil at all.  Electric vehicles -- 
fueled entirely from your wall outlet or your PV array -- absolutely 
work.  It's stupid to keep paying for oil when we don't need it.

Yet we have no choice.  The start-up cost for a vehicle manufacturer 
is huge.  As an ante, you have to crush several fully functional cars 
to prove that they meet federal collision survival requirements. 
Making and selling a new kind of car requires a huge investment -- 
the size of a Google or a PayPal.  That's why the Tesla may have a 
chance.

In the interim, you can build your own or hire someone to build it to 
your specifications.  You just can't take advantage of mass 
production to spread the nonrecurring costs over many units.  That 
would be against the law.

There are a dozen companies who have made some beautiful machines. 
AC Propulsion has since 2003 made a wonderful car -- the TZero.  It 
comes with an internal combustion engine-generator on a trailer you 
can hook up for long trips -- pretty close to what you have in mind 
-- with computer-steered wheels to make backing up a breeze:

    http://www.acpropulsion.com/videos/backtracker.mov

But can you buy it?  No.

What you can buy is a Prius or a Scion and then pay to have them 
converted.  Or you can buy a souped-up golf cart, called a 
"neighborhood" electric vehicle.  But you cannot buy a 
production-line manufactured freeway-capable electric car anywhere in 
the US today.  Even though I and about 600 others like me own one. 
And that's a darn shame.

--Gil



At 11:43 P +0100 6/20/07, John Rumsey wrote:
>Thanks for answering. There are people building
>experimental vehicles all around the world. I doubt
>any major automaker would change, but I am hoping to
>inspire some dreamer with enough money and a machine
>shop to actually build a car similar to my idea. Who
>knows, if it works well he may find backers and start
>making them. I want someone to build a car that will
>be competitively priced compared to standard cars yet
>be better on mileage, carry the same number of
>passengers and get more mpg of fuel. I think EC is
>more flexibly fueled than IC and less polluting. I had
>hoped the attitude of the EV group would be flexible
>enough to see that EV's are not perfect. It is great
>that for over 90% of your driving and EV works fine,
>but there usually is a time when a person wants to
>drive a long distance quickly without having to buy an
>extra IC car or rent one. My main problem with the EV
>purist is that an EV won't just drive for 1000 mi with
>only 5-10 min stops every 400 mi like an IC car. Even
>using an IC engine instead of a steam engine to keep
>the batteries charged would improve mileage.
>
>Load up your EV truck and drive it to Canada to fish.
>You'll make a lot more stops than if you used one like
>my idea. Put a 12 hp Honda generator in the bed with a
>big fuel tank, then try the same trip. All I want is
>for people to think about other ways of doing things
>and to not be closed minded. I think EV's have a
>definite place in our future mix of vehicles, but so
>do other types. I will keep putting forth my ideas in
>the hope of finding someone who will try them and
>hopefully prove them to be better.
>
>
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