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Originally Posted by Deltona Couple
I COMPLETELY idsagree with you on your statment of "we'll ignore the inconvenient fact that charging the Volt requires the coal plant to produce the electricity for it, and therefore causes the emissions directly related to the car to be about on-parity with conventional cars - - at least we aren't wasting gas with it." You can't be further than the truth.
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A UK study determined that a volt charged with power provided by non-nuclear/wind/hydro/solar power plants will result in the plant emitting 124.2 g/km of carbon dioxide for electric-only driving. that's more than the BMW 118d emits. So, really, I'm not very far from the truth at all,
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The cost of the electricity for charging it will come nowhere NEAR the output of a conventional car. I have done the research on this. the plants yes will be used to charge the system, but the carbon fooprint will be MUCH lower than a conventional car puts out.
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Assuming the power comes from a nuclear plant, yes, you're right, the environmental impact will be lessened (ignoring of course the niggling problem of storing radioactive waste that won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's a topic for another thread), but it's important that we not run around claiming, as some have, that an electric car is a zero emissions vehicle. It's not. Moving the source of the emissions doesn't make the emissions magically disappear.
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But I still believe that we are heading atleast NOW in the right general direction.
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sort of, but not really. When you look at the overall energy plan in the auto industry it's 1) ADD because they're fooling around with multiple technologies at once and 2) rather annoyingly bad, because they're pushing ethanol and hydrogen, both of which cost more in either dollars or energy (or both) to make than you get out of them, neither of which is viable as a fuel.
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I almost get the impression that you MIGHT be thinking that we should just scrap the whole company?...lol
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Scrap GM? Might not be such a bad idea in the long run. They haven't made decent cars in decades, by their own admission, with the rare exception of a limited production vehicle like the Corvette. They poured R&D into making ultra powerful SUV's, rather than figuring out how to make efficient cars. And don't say they had no way of knowing an energy crisis was coming - we've known for decades that we are at the mercy of OPEC, ever since they pulled the first oil embargo in the 70's. We've known they could do it again any time they want, and we've known that we are entirely hostage to the gasoline industry if we only use gasoline to run our cars, and insist on using far more than necessary to run them. They did it out of short-term profit desires, and for no other reason. Now it's coming back to bite them.