Obama building a better tomorrow...tomorrow.

Let's Get Serious!

 

Wow, with all the Volt bashing, which is really about Obama bashing with a subtext of anti-green stupidity, I thought these batteries were spontaneously erupting in flames. Good thing I looked it for myself....


"So far, no fires have been reported in Volts involved in roadway crashes, NHTSA said. More than 5,000 of the vehicles have been sold."


and the only batteries that caught fire were ones after being subjected to crash tests and only after they sat for months afterward. How many people are going to leave crashed batteries lying around for months after the crash?

After the first battery fire, GM officials complained that NHTSA did not drain the battery of energy as called for under the automaker's crash procedures. NHTSA normally drains fuel from gasoline-powered cars after crash tests, they said.

Lithium-ion batteries, which are rechargeable, have been the subject of several recalls of consumer electronics. Millions of laptop batteries made by Sony Corp. for Apple Inc., Dell Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and other PC makers were recalled in 2006 and 2007 after it was discovered that they could overheat and ignite."

So the problem isn't really with the Volt at all, it's with lithium ion batteries in general.

But the rabid righties will keep yelling it through each other's ears without a care about the facts involved.

 

How do you get fired as a mod , was he a failed mod or what ?

 

Apparently you were so deeply engaged in your research, that you somehow missed the fact that GM halted production of the Volt and laid off 1300 of the workers who used to make the car...

You also seem to have glossed over the fact that GM cant even sell the car with 7500 dollars worth of subsidies, and several other bonuses the government is handing out.....

Would you care to explain to us why VOLT sales are so pathetic when they are being subsidized to the tune of 8k+ per car?

I guess that must also be a part of the right wing conspiracy against Obama......

 

This article pretty much sums up the left's fight against reality when it comes to green energy......

This article is a fantastic read!!




Electric cars and liberals’ refusal to accept science

By Charles Lane, Published: March 5

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.”

Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory.


Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate.

GM fell 2,300 units short of its sales target (10,000) for 2011. It is not on pace to hit 2012’s goal of 45,000 units.

So much for Obama’s goal of 1 million all-electrics and plug-ins on the road by 2015.

A123 Systems, a maker of electric-car batteries that has received $374 million in state and federal loans, announced 125 layoffs last fall. The cause: problems at its main customer, Fisker Automotive, which builds expensive plug-in electric cars. Fisker got a half-billion in loans from the Energy Department, though the money was recently frozen because of the company’s failure to meet production targets.

These events confirm the wasteful folly of allocating capital according to the dictates of politicians, such as when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared in November 2008: “A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable. We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”

The electric vehicle flop also illuminates a point about science — or the politics of science.

Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries “anti-science.” To the extent that the right espouses “creation science,” or disputes established facts about environmental degradation, it’s an appropriate label.

But progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy — limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.

Stubborn Scientific Fact No. 1: Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.

By contrast, even state-of-the-art batteries deliver far less energy than gas, in a far bigger package. A Volt can go 35 miles on a single charge of its 435-pound battery. This sounds like a big deal until you realize that a gas-engine Chevy Cruze gets 42 miles per gallon — and costs half as much as a Volt.

It costs a fortune to pump, refine and ship crude oil. Yet even accounting for all that, gas-powered cars are a better value than electric vehicles and will be for some time. Gas savings on the Volt would take nine years at $5 per gallon to offset its higher price over the Cruze, an Edmunds.com analysis found last month.

Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place.

Oh, and how are you supposed to resell your electric vehicle once you’ve driven it five years and the battery is depleted?

Advocates insist that the government should help them crank up mass production of electric vehicles. Once economies of scale kick in, they argue, electric vehicles can compete.

Four decades after the 1973 oil crisis, this logic is wearing thin. Any company that figured out how to build a practical mass-market electric car would be swimming in cash. That no one has done so suggests we are bumping up against the limits of nature, not just politics or economics.

Certainly the many hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.S. government, GM and GM’s competitors have poured into the effort might have been better spent on more plausible energy-efficiency efforts, such as advanced internal combustion engines.

Instead, Big Government and Big Business have focused on the Volt, the Fisker Karma or the Tesla Roadster, none of which is remotely affordable for the “99 percent” of Americans. And yet in his 2013 budget, Obama proposes to boost the tax credit for electric vehicle buyers to $10,000.

What’s “progressive” about that, I’ll never understand.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...with-science/2012/03/05/gIQA7SpYtR_story.html

 

Ok . . . . . here's a trivia 101 question for you , how many rockets blew up without even leaving the ground and at what cost, before we got the technology right ?

 

Wow, with all the Volt bashing, which is really about Obama bashing with a subtext of anti-green stupidity, I thought these batteries were spontaneously erupting in flames. Good thing I looked it up for myself....


"So far, no fires have been reported in Volts involved in roadway crashes, NHTSA said. More than 5,000 of the vehicles have been sold."


and the only batteries that caught fire were ones after being subjected to crash tests and only after they sat for months afterward. How many people are going to leave crashed batteries lying around for months after the crash?

After the first battery fire, GM officials complained that NHTSA did not drain the battery of energy as called for under the automaker's crash procedures. NHTSA normally drains fuel from gasoline-powered cars after crash tests, they said.

Lithium-ion batteries, which are rechargeable, have been the subject of several recalls of consumer electronics. Millions of laptop batteries made by Sony Corp. for Apple Inc., Dell Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and other PC makers were recalled in 2006 and 2007 after it was discovered that they could overheat and ignite."

So the problem isn't really with the Volt at all, it's with lithium ion batteries in general.

But the rabid righties will keep yelling it through each other's ears without a care about the facts involved.

 

from the above article

"Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place."

Yes,the future cost of carbon emissions are not reflected in it's price. GW is one of the most serious threats to all of mankind that we face today. The electric grid is not all fossil fuel fed and can be made less so if we wanted. I say we have to go with more nuclear. Yucca mtn must be opened.

In the US about 70% comes from fossil fuels. In France 80% comes from nuclear.

 

Here you go. Dependence of fossil fuels must end. We can do it on terms and ground of our choosing, or we can let the planet do it for us. Either way, it will end.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
—
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)