On Thu, 01 Aug 2013 12:39:52 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:

> On 8/1/13 12:05 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> If we've learned anything at the shop it's that people can't be bothered
>> with the facts. They seriously don't care if you have studies backing up
>> the environmental damage, they believe they are green and will take
>> those beliefs to their graves. Ideology is funny that way. :-)
>
> You betcha. Related, you destroyed the myth that engine braking is any bad, but I bet money nobody changed opinions.
>

Indeed. :-)

> About green driving, Prius, and Tesla - it's all about what industry you want to sustain. Everything that stands behind the Hummer as a road car is an abomination, pure and simple. Of course I'd agree plenty of Prius drivers are as snooty as it gets in a different way. Yet the reality remains that the Hummer is an evolutionary dead end, and hybrids are a stepping stone to a better future.
>

The most efficient/effective method would be to power the roads and then have cars draw energy from that. With battery storage for where the roads are unpowered. That way you could draw on the power generation capacities of Fission or Fusion devices without needing to stick one in every car. That would greatly reduce the amount of battery capacity needed for the average trips.

> My current car is a nice and economic Honda Fit. It is the very last internal combustion engine I'll ever own - I hope my next car will be a Tesla (regardless of what anyone thinks about it being a status symbol). Buying a dinosaur juice-based engine at this point is as much fail as buying a carriage with horses in 1915. I predict that internal combustion engines will be seen in less than a hundred years as weird inefficient contraptions, like we think of steam engines today.
>

Personally, I am hoping for Zero-Point Energy powered cars, or if not that, then at least a Mr. Fusion (apologies to all who don't get the somewhat dated cultural reference).

> Also, there is a beauty about electrical engines - their theoretical efficiency is 100%, they are simple, principled, entropy-neutral, and work on conservative laws. (Batteries are more unwieldy though.)
>
>
> Andrei


-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/

On 8/1/13 1:29 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2013 12:39 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> (regardless of what anyone thinks about it being a status symbol).
>
> Nobody admits that they select a car based on its status signals, even
> the people who pick anti-status symbols, as that's its own status signal!

Good point.

Andrei

On Thu, 01 Aug 2013 14:11:03 -0700, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 8/1/2013 1:53 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> You did forget to mention that you piss off everyone behind though... ;-P
>
> I do pay attention to what's behind me when doing it. I'll hypermile much more aggressively when there's nobody behind me.
>

That just makes you a very rare person. ;-)

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/

On Thu, Aug 01, 2013 at 01:17:51PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote: [...]
> There's an inherent efficiency in gas cars in that the energy is generated on site. For electric cars, the energy is generated elsewhere (at the power plant), and then you're faced with all the losses from transmitting the energy, storing it, and recovering it. It's a tough hill to climb. Gasoline is pretty remarkable in its energy density and portability.
[...]

Your comparison isn't totally accurate. Gasoline stores energy in the form of chemical bonds, and batteries store energy in the form of electrical charge.  Both release the energy on site.

The advantage of gasoline is that chemical bonds in gasoline are far more persistent than the electrical charge in batteries, and they are also denser in terms of units of energy per volume than batteries made with current technology. That's why gasoline is so much easier to store, transport, and have very high efficiency.

The disadvantage of gasoline is that in a sense we're "cheating", because the energy stored in it was built up over millions of years by ancient organisms that have long decayed, and we're only now discharging all that build-up. We didn't pay anything to put that energy there, that's why it's so economical. If we had to live on synthetic gasoline, it'd be a totally different story (it *is* possible to synthesize this stuff, y'know, and attain the same efficiency, if not better; the problem is that this costs far too much to compete with the stuff we "stole" from ancient organisms).


T

-- 
People tell me that I'm skeptical, but I don't believe it.

On 8/1/2013 2:30 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> The disadvantage of gasoline is that in a sense we're "cheating",
> because the energy stored in it was built up over millions of years by
> ancient organisms that have long decayed, and we're only now discharging
> all that build-up. We didn't pay anything to put that energy there,
> that's why it's so economical.

Yet the electric power to charge the batteries comes from burning coal and natural gas :-)

Yeah, I know, solar, wind, etc. But that's still way off in providing base power.

Like I said, it ain't easy being green. It's hard to do a "dust to dust" analysis, and most of the time people simply choose to ignore costs that are hard to calculate.

On Thu, Aug 01, 2013 at 02:40:57PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2013 2:30 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >The disadvantage of gasoline is that in a sense we're "cheating", because the energy stored in it was built up over millions of years by ancient organisms that have long decayed, and we're only now discharging all that build-up. We didn't pay anything to put that energy there, that's why it's so economical.
> 
> Yet the electric power to charge the batteries comes from burning coal and natural gas :-)
> 
> Yeah, I know, solar, wind, etc. But that's still way off in providing base power.

The ancient organisms conveniently collected all that solar energy for us in a convenient, easy-to-use, highly efficient form. We're still "cheating" if we're merely diverting some of that pre-collected energy into another form just so we can make convincing presentations about being green.


> Like I said, it ain't easy being green. It's hard to do a "dust to dust" analysis, and most of the time people simply choose to ignore costs that are hard to calculate.

The bottom line is that to be truly green, we have to spend millions of years building up reservoirs of fuel built from solar energy. The rate at which we're burning up energy in today's society is simply untenable in the long run. (Well, there's always nuclear energy, of which there is plenty to go around, but it comes with other disadvantages. :-P  Some days you win, most days you lose.)


T

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth

On 08/01/2013 12:39 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> you destroyed the myth that engine braking is any bad, but I bet money
> nobody changed opinions.

You owe Adam a dollar! :)

I have been engine braking since the day I started driving. Then I started following the AudiWorld forums, where I learned that "brakes were for stopping and the engine was for going." There were a lot of anecdotes told.

Anyway, I am consciously readjusting to engine braking again after reading this thread.

Ali

[OT OT] While I have the microphone, let me rant about automatic transmissions: They are undrivable for me because they are not responsive and because they never know that the imminent road condition requires shifting down, now. Every time I have to drive an automatic I have to try to soothe myself. :)

On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 21:52:19 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> The bottom line is that to be truly green, we have to spend millions of
> years building up reservoirs of fuel built from solar energy.
> The rate
> at which we're burning up energy in today's society is simply untenable
> in the long run.

I don't believe this is true. It's a technological hurdle, but I don't see any reason that it's an insurmountable one.

> (Well, there's always nuclear energy, of which there is
> plenty to go around, but it comes with other disadvantages. :-P
>  Some
> days you win, most days you lose.)
>
>
> T

Surely you mean most days you win, some days you lose? Nuclear is great 99.9% of the time, the someone doesn't do their job properly and wooops....

My hopes are with fusion. Specifically ITER. My research is on diagnostics/data analysis for tokamaks, working with the guys at Culham, UK (MAST and JET). They are cautiously optimistic.

On 08/01/2013 02:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> "as long as the hybrid remains a symbol of a driver’s commitment to the
> environment, especially among the nation’s wealthiest, the future of the
> Prius should be secure."
>
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2012/08/09/is-the-toyota-prius-the-latest-status-symbol-of-the-wealthy/

I wonder how old most of those cars are, because these days there are lots of alternative hybrids, with the Prius being one of the cheaper ones. I think this meme has an expiration date, and is already starting to taste sour.

> The Prius isn't very green, either:
>
> "When you factor in all the energy it takes to drive and build a Prius
> it takes almost 50% more energy than a Hummer. In a study by CNW
> Marketing called "Dust to Dust", researchers discovered that the Prius
> costs and average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000
> miles (the expected lifespan of a hybrid). On the other hand the Hummer
> costs $1.95 per mile over an expected 300,000 miles. Which means that
> the Hummer will last three times as long and use less energy than the
> Prius."
>
> http://www.thetorquereport.com/2007/03/toyotas_prius_is_less_efficien.html
>
>
> It's not easy being green :-)

http://google.com/search?q=prius+hummer
--> http://www.thecarconnection.com/tips-article/1010861_prius-versus-hummer-exploding-the-myth

"But Toyota also says that the study uses an unrealistically low estimated lifetime for hybrids, and that there's no data to support its assumptions in this. For instance, according to the study the average Prius is expected to go 109,000 miles over its lifetime, while a Hummer H1 would go 379,000 miles. CNW says about hybrids: “…these are generally secondary vehicles in a household OR they are driven in restricted or short range environments such as college campuses or retirement neighborhoods.”"

So even assuming CNW is correct about the buyer and usage, if that same buyer had bought a Hummer instead it would have been driven the same miles as the Prius. There are a lot of other disputes pointed out in the article. The CNW study looks like a hit piece.

On 8/1/2013 5:17 PM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 08/01/2013 02:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2012/08/09/is-the-toyota-prius-the-latest-status-symbol-of-the-wealthy/
>
> I think this
> meme has an expiration date, and is already starting to taste sour.

The article is a year old, not that ancient. It's far from the only one on the topic. Google "prius status symbol". Even South Park famously did an episode on it.


> "But Toyota also says that the study uses an unrealistically low estimated
> lifetime for hybrids, and that there's no data to support its assumptions in
> this. For instance, according to the study the average Prius is expected to go
> 109,000 miles over its lifetime, while a Hummer H1 would go 379,000 miles. CNW
> says about hybrids: “…these are generally secondary vehicles in a household OR
> they are driven in restricted or short range environments such as college
> campuses or retirement neighborhoods.”"

So the prius is more cost effective because you drive it less?


> So even assuming CNW is correct about the buyer and usage, if that same buyer
> had bought a Hummer instead it would have been driven the same miles as the
> Prius. There are a lot of other disputes pointed out in the article. The CNW
> study looks like a hit piece.

The Hummer is the poster boy for polluting Americans, and the Prius the poster boy for enlightened environmental consciousness. The truth is a lot harder to get at than that.

What does work is, of course, orienting your life so you drive less. Like living closer to work, combining errands into one trip, carpooling, biking, using Amazon instead of going to the mall, etc.