I'm still waiting for somebody to tell me it isn't...for somebody to explain to me how plug in cars are better.
And I don't want to hear about just needing to invest more in the technology. Why not invest that same money into the technology of making more fuel efficient gas engines, or more oil exploration.
Originally Posted by lacrew_2000
Wait no more! I assume that you already know that an internal combustion engine (both Diesel and gasoline) waste about 2/3 of their energy as heat. The radiator gets rid of a huge chunk. Some of the heat gets blown out the exhaust pipe. Some heats up the transmission and diff. And some escapes via the brake disks. Only the clever engines out there with turbos (pretty much all modern Diesels) recover any power from this wasted heat.
So for starters, any car with regenerative braking has a leg up on these cars. That includes every hybrid car out there. So before you even get to advanced plug-in hybrids like the Volt, hybrids have already won the efficiency game.
Plug-in hybrids get to tap into cheap electrical power...especially if they charge overnight when off-peak rates are cheaper. Why would you want to pay $3,$4,$5/gal for gas when you can pay pennies for the same amount of energy? Before you even get into the pollution aspect, plug-in hybrids have won the fuel price game. Hands down. Not. Even. Close.
EXAMPLE TIME! Let's say you live in a place like Tennessee where your electrical power comes from hydro. And let's say you drive your Chevy Volt 50 miles round trip on your daily commute. Instead of burning 3 gallons of gas every day, you burn zero (0!) because the electrical charge is used up before the gas engine even fires up. At the end of the five day work week you've spent a few dollars for your electrical charge instead of $50+ on 15 gallons of gas. In fact, the gasoline car has likely cost more to idle during this work week than the plug-in hybrid cost to run. It has also polluted more. From the perspective of OPEC, Americans have invented a car that doesn't need to run on any (of their) oil.
ICEs have had over a century of development and will continue to be developed into the future. Why wouldn't you allow battery technology to be developed similarly...especially since the payoff is bigger and there is more low-hanging fruit? Gasoline engines still have the problems they had 80 years ago anyway (...poppet valves, butterfly valves, static compression ratios, pumping losses, have to run richer than stoic to make peak power, power-sapping valvetrains, etc) At least they still don't have Butterworth valves or sleeve valves. lol
You can drill all you want but you'll never change the price. You can drill all you want but you won't even make a dent in the supply. You can drill all you want but you'll still have millions more cars in the world raising the price. You can drill all you want but you'll only be discovering more, not making more. Oil is a finite resource and we're past the peak. Drill baby drill and I'll laugh baby laugh.
You can try to make engines more efficient, too. But they'll still only use about 1/3 of the power to make the car go. But let's assume that there's a huge breakthrough and you double the efficiency of an ICE in the next five years (note: billions of people have tried this for a century). That still won't mean a thing if that breakthrough engine is in an overweight brick-shaped SUV.
Originally Posted by BiggestBest
I think that's the best way to get the message across.
