shakran

No, and I'm kind of confused as to why you would immediately jump to that conclusion. The "conspiracy" is not hiding the technology, but failing utterly to develop it in the first place. Rather than do R&D on how to make cars more efficient, Detroit concentrated on making them more powerful. Efficiency gains in engines were eaten up by then making the engines bigger, and making the cars into SUV's.

Is it all Detroit's fault? No. The idiot American consumer who just had to have that giant SUV even though they didn't need a vehicle that size is just as, if not more, to blame. The overall American attitude regarding vehicles has been "I want what I want and anyone hurt by it can fuck off."

We saw that attitude at least twice with the SUV crowd - They didn't care that they were getting single digit to low teens mileage, even though that meant they were using up the limited resource of oil much faster than necessary, and they didn't care that buying a vehicle half the size of a semi put everyone in smaller cars in greater danger if they wreck.



The Honda CRV Diesel 4x4 gets 36 combined mpg. and it will seat you, your wife, and your three kids. But it's not available stateside. Why?



Bullshit. Look harder. The Tesla Roadster will go over 200 miles on a charge. LiIon batteries would have given the EV-1 a 300 mile range.

the Zap Zebra sedan goes something like 40 miles on a charge, and you can still buy and legally drive it here. This range issue is a load of bunk.

Yes, and we already have batteries that passed that test. You can even buy them at Sears. The electro-hybrid battery packs passed the test. The Zap cars passed the test. Tesla passed the test. Why can't GM manage to pass the test? Sure, they want to get the technology /now,/ once everyone's finally figured out that, hey, gas prices can go really high. But why weren't they researching that in the 80's, 90's, and most of this decade? Simple. They didn't want to. They wanted to go for maximizing profits today rather than worrying about what the demand would be in 20 years.





Well it'd be nice if the automakers could do more with NiMH batteries, but the oil companies bought the patents to them as applied in vehicles specifically so that they can't. Further, there are several homegrown electric cars out there that use laptop batteries.

As far as the batteries potentially exploding. . Please. The battery technology has been thoroughly researched and tested, and is in use every day by millions of Americans. It's called power wheelchairs. A series of several of those batteries would easily be enough to power a car.

At any rate, I find it highly interesting that there's such fervor over "oh my god! We can't do an electric vehicle until it's fully ready to be a long range and efficient mode of transportation!" when we're eagerly shoving ethanol, which lowers our vehicles' efficiencies, raises the price of food and gas, and requires siginficant government kickbacks in order to stay afloat, down people's throats.

As it stands now, ethanol is not a viable fuel source, especially since we'd have to convert a large portion of arable land (including leveling every structure in the US to make room for corn fields) to farmland in order to fuel the whole fleet. Yet the government is not only requiring that ethanol be blended into gasoline (and some states are getting ready to require that it be blended into gasoline at a level that will damage engines), but it's also providing over 50 cents per gallon as a tax credit for using ethanol (which explains why ethanol isn't a good deal more expensive than gas at the pump - you've already paid for it every April).

Detroit can whine and bitch about all the horrible things standing against the electric car all it wants. The fact is that until recently very little research was done on them, what research /was/ done was squelched, and for the past 3 decades we've frittered away time that could have been going into solving all the problems you bring up.