Are Alternative Fuels Only for the Rich and Famous?

[hegemony]

http://www.motherproof.com/2008/08/are-alternative.html

[hegemony]

we looked at the Tesla roadster, but they require 5K down payment to test drive.

 

cool car:

 

www.teslamotors.com

[radi8]

There wouldn't be anywhere to refuel the Clarity around here.

 

I'm also intrigued by the Tesla. If it works as well as they claim it does, I'd also be interested in buying one.

The price is a huge stumbling block though, for most of us that's 30 year mortgage territory.

 

Unless our capacity to generate and distribute electricity is seriously upgraded though, I wonder how much a fuel price diferential there would be. Some places (see other thread in MM forum) are paying 18 cents/kWh now!

[hegemony]

There wouldn't be anywhere to refuel the Clarity around here.

 

I'm also intrigued by the Tesla. If it works as well as they claim it does, I'd also be interested in buying one.

The price is a huge stumbling block though, for most of us that's 30 year mortgage territory.

Tesla is working on a sedan. We've decided to wait to see how it is.

 

Otherwise I'll be buying the plug-in Honda that will be out in 2010.

[jayrandom]

Unless a hydrogen infrastructure is built up in this country it will only be useful for the rich and famous.

 

The idea that hydrogen cars produce zero emissions is a bit misleading, as well. It's like saying your house produces zero emissions because none of the power is generated there. Hydrogen may be a solution for the problem of a portable energy source, but in itself is not a source of energy, only a storage medium. For the rich and famous, who don't care about the price of fuel, that source can be something environmentally friendly like solar or wind. Those sources aren't ready for full scale economic implementation, so even if we all switched to hydrogen tomorrow, that energy would likely have to come from things like nuclear, natural gas, and coal.

 

It is more energy efficient, though, so that's a start.

[Kevin20]

There wouldn't be anywhere to refuel the Clarity around here.

 

I'm also intrigued by the Tesla. If it works as well as they claim it does, I'd also be interested in buying one.

The price is a huge stumbling block though, for most of us that's 30 year mortgage territory.

Tesla is working on a sedan. We've decided to wait to see how it is.

 

Otherwise I'll be buying the plug-in Honda that will be out in 2010.

 

 

 

You've got a very long wait on anything from Tesla. The Roadster will probably never be made in enough numbers to go to anyone except celebrities and Silicon Valley centimillionaires, and their supposed sedan doesn't even exist in concept-car form yet.

 

I am looking forward to plug ins from Toyota and Honda, but those will be very hard to come by for many years.

[Annuit CÅ“ptis]

Unless a hydrogen infrastructure is built up in this country it will only be useful for the rich and famous.

 

The idea that hydrogen cars produce zero emissions is a bit misleading, as well. It's like saying your house produces zero emissions because none of the power is generated there. Hydrogen may be a solution for the problem of a portable energy source, but in itself is not a source of energy, only a storage medium. For the rich and famous, who don't care about the price of fuel, that source can be something environmentally friendly like solar or wind. Those sources aren't ready for full scale economic implementation, so even if we all switched to hydrogen tomorrow, that energy would likely have to come from things like nuclear, natural gas, and coal.

 

It is more energy efficient, though, so that's a start.

Yes it is quite misleading, because hydrogen cars emit the chemical H₂0, which is the number one greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, and was responsible for over 3,500 deaths in the US in 2005.

 

Seriously though, it's not at all misleading. No one is claiming that producing hydrogen is "emission free." I think we all understand that you can't just pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and put them in your car.

 

Hydrogen is not a storage medium, unless by "storage medium" you mean fuel.

[jayrandom]

"But the cool part is that her new car is the FCX Clarity, Honda's hydrogen powered, zero-emissions sedan. I'll say it again: Zero. Emissions. Of course, that's not entirely accurate. I mean, the Clarity does emit something: water vapor..."

 

Sounds like something someone could certainly mistake for claiming zero emissions. And when I say that hydrogen is a storage medium I mean a storage medium for free energy, not a fuel. If there were vast reserves of hydrogen available on Earth we were planning to tap, then I would call it a fuel. Any proposed hydrogen "fuel" plan consists of taking something that actually contains free energy, somehow converting it in to hydrogen by breaking apart water, and then extracting the energy by converting the hydrogen back in to water in the vehicle. The hydrogen only serves as a storage medium for the original fuel's free energy. The advantage of this scheme is that it could in theory be both more efficient than directly burning fuel in a car and it could allow cars to be run off of less displeasing fuel sources (solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, depending on how you define "displeasing").

 

If you don't believe me, just look at the Wikipedia page for "hydrogen economy".

 

"In the context of a hydrogen economy, hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not a primary energy source (see nuclear fusion for an entirely separate discussion of using hydrogen isotopes as an atomic energy source)."

 

Perhaps I'm just splitting hairs with you on what constitutes a fuel and what constitutes a storage medium, but there are bound to be some out there that think hydrogen is a practical energy source. It certainly is for the sun, and with enough time and effort may be for us some day (in the form of controlled nuclear fusion), this Honda utilizes it for storage.

 

Hydrocarbons, on the other hand, are an energy source. They produce more energy than is input in to their extraction and refining.

[cljohnr]

I'm also intrigued by the Tesla. If it works as well as they claim it does, I'd also be interested in buying one.

The price is a huge stumbling block though, for most of us that's 30 year mortgage territory.

There was a feature article in Fortune within the past couple of months about Tesla, which was pretty interesting. The gist of the article was that the main venture capitalist who was investing in the company ousted the company founder, who originally thought of and designed the car, and started making changes which basically doubled the price and has added years to the development cycle. The one I specifically remember was that the founder planned to build the car around the Lotus Elise chassis, which was fully safety and crash tested, and could be bought relatively cheaply from Lotus. The investor's wife had trouble getting out of one of the prototypes while wearing a dress, so the investor insisted that they change the bodystyle, losing all the advantages of using the Elise while drawing a multimillion breach of contract type fine from Lotus. He also added custom seats, special headlights, a leather dash and special door latches adding millions more to the development costs.