I thought this was the very reason manufacturers liked the notion of Ev's. It gives a little bit of wiggle room for selling their land barges on the cheap all the while keeping their CAFE ratings high. .
Pretty much true for most manufacturers. BMW, Nissan, GM and Tesla are the only ones selling nationwide. To me, that suggest the others have only the reason of CAFE standards and or ZEF credits.
I believe you are correct. I actually asked to test drive one a year ago. The dealer didn't have any and the closest one was 400 miles away. He then proceeded to tell me I didn't really want an EV. Sigh...
That's why the plug-in owners group here is working to establish a list of EV savvy salespeople. With so little quality support, we want to prevent the dealer disappointment experience by guiding interested consumers to someone actually helpful.
the focus ev is testing the waters type ev. IMHO ford got its market research cheap. Nissan lost a lot of money, but I don't think it gives them a step up in the next round. The focus ev is available nationwide, but the dealers need to want to sell them or a driver needs to ask for one. Ford is doing better with the energis, and that is getting more dealers trained. With bolt, ioniq, and 30 kwh leaf with next gen leaf coming this year and model 3 reveal this month, the focus never was going to get market share. Ford teamed with magna the supplier for a lot of the parts for the ev-1 to do this on the cheap. IMHO that 28 kwh ioniq battery will be the smallest that works in a bev next year. Bellow that it needs to be a phev or at least a phev option like the i3 to sell. Between the fusion and c-max energi and the focus ev ford did very well in the plug-in race last year. Tesla and bmw led the way last year, but ford was number 2 in the US when you add their 3 cars together, and numbed 1 this year. IMHO ford needs a whole redesign to compete in bevs. There are rumors. They simply need some redesign to really help sell the energis. Ford should have a new hybrid/phev platform out in 2018.
An interesting read: Power Shift Away From Green Illusions Basically, that we need to slow it down, and (shudder) let go of our cars.
Yikes, its an interview with a very opinionated id... um person, not any factual thing. You look at ercot, right, and we challenge the myth that green can't replace black. Wind is now 11%, coal dropped 10%. Sure lots of metal goes into those tubine, but mining and forming the turbines is a tiny fraction of the coal mining pollution no longer needed, even not counting the pollution burning the coal. Can plug-ins reduce oil? Absolutely. Just 50 million plug-ins will reduce oil as much as our current short fall in demand again. That has been enough to drop oil prices. We are a little ove 1 million plug-ins today. It will take time, but that is a small percentage of US can China new car market. Don't belive the garbage that we can't shift from dirty to clean. Those same people were saying that you couldn't feed 1Billion people. Tech can find the way if we are willing to support it.
Oh its even worse than that. His hatchet attack on plug-in cars comes from a 2010 NAS study that basically said for them to really improve over gasoline the grid needs to be much cleaner than it was in 2007, and the country needs to use less coal. Battery prices need to come down, etc. Other studies at the time assumed these things would happen, and disagreed with the NAS. Well all that has happened in the 6 years since that research. The point of view is from a neomathusian that has to close their eyes to technological developments to pretend people can't simply live on less (land, coal, etc) because of better technology like wind turbines and plug-in cars, but we need to cut down population. Now who do we trust in government to cut down population. Do we kill old people when they reach a certain age? Mandatory abortioins? Sterilization? I mean what is the policy. To me I'd rather look for technical instead of such authoritarian government solutions. In the 60s which the author harkens back to, the idea was to allow people in fast growing india to starve instead of push the green revolution. Lower population would make energy easier, but low population is not easy at all. I wish people that wrote about it would be honest about their less than humane solutions instead of pretending they have a magic wand to drop population.
One step further - with so much wind & solar coming online - & its uncontrolled ability to ramp up and shut down fast, that this would be a decent surplus to use (gulp!!) for hydrogen. How's that for a paradigm shift in thought. .
Not too much of a shift. Lots of people have liked the idea of storing excess wind energy in hydrogen. I personally love the idea, run those wind turbines full out, all the time
Der Spiegel asked a lot of experts and they thought that wouldn't happen until 2050 in Germany,and they are far ahead in terms of green energy compared to ercot which has the most concentrated wind in the US. After that switch over sure power to make hydrogen will be very cheap, and by then there will be breakthroughs to make stations less expensive and stacks in cars will be better. I don't think we have anything in the next decade though. Already in texas if you pay more during the day you can sign up for plans with free energy at night. In california where fcv are pushed maybe 2060 we get to the point of the cheap green electricity. Still if you can make hydrogen you can use electricity and co2 to combine it for methanol. That is much easier to supply to gas stations. PHEVs and hybrids running on methanol may be able to use all that surplus electricity for methanol, Furture is uncertain, but there certainly are ways to power cars and trucks after oil becomes too expensive to pump from the ground or mine from shale. The problem today is it costs more to create/store/use the hydrogen than to just build more turbines or burn natural gas. At some point that changes though, but it's not for decades. They are experimenting with batteries to give bursts of power to keep the grid efficient as turbines spin up.
Oh, I think limited use cases can already be made in limited form for some stationary hydrogen storage and use. For cars, it is rather ridiculous, but for some building/industrial uses I don't think we are too far off.
Oh I'm not disagreeing that hydrogen has potential for excess night electricity. Its not really looking as promising as it was a decade ago, because the price of batteries and natural gas have dropped, and those are competing technologies. Where natural gas is expensive (e.g. Japan) you could make a case to generate up to 10% hydrogen in the pipeline. At that level most natural gas users and pipelines work fine. That saves the storage and conversion to electricity costs. In Japan and american natural gas fuel cells show promise for many applications, and those currently available can also oxidize hydrogen to produce electricity. As more renewable is added sure, but even with clean power plan there won't be enough to make hydrogen electricity break even in 2030, it will take longer. R&D is always good, and DOE, METI, and some of their counterparts in other countries are investing for when natural gas gets more expensive.
