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Without going into too much detail, here are the results I've obtained in considering the build of an electric vehicle. Personally, I consider the return on investment to be too low. I guess it's time to start looking at diesel/biodiesel.

From the US Dept of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Site

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/resourc ... eport.html

Refer to the Alternative Fuel Price Report for March, 2005.

Annual costs are based on 12000 miles per year. Current cost of electricity per kWh is $0.11. Since application would be for around town driving only, 20 mpg is conservatively selected.


Electric Vehicle Consumption Rate (kWh/Mile): 0.4
Gasoline Vehicle Consumption Rate (Miles/Gallon): 20

Annual Mileage: 12000

Electric Vehicle

Cost per kWh/Annual Cost
$0.10/$480
$0.11/$528
$0.13/$600
$0.15/$720


Gasoline Vehicle

Cost per Gallon/Annual Cost
$2.50/$1,500
$3.00/$1,800
$3.50/$2,100
$4.00/$2,400

The cost of converting a car over to electric begins at approximately $7000. Costs can go up to as much as $20,000, depending on equipment selected. At $10,000 for a conversion, it will take over 8 years to break even (based on $3.00 gas and $0.13 electricity). At $4 gas and $0.15 electricity, it will take still take nearly 6 years to break even for the same $10,000 conversion expenses.

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“I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.” - A.J. Foyt

Kevin Butler
Mobetta Autosport Spec E30 #612
2003 C5 Z06 Corvette
AFR Miata, SM2 61, '93 w/200 SC'd RWHP - soon to be resurrected
Waaaay too many other projects....

There's a bit of a problem with biodiesel. The plant you can get the most yield out of (and can grow in our climate) is the oilseed rape. One acre of it will yield 140 gallons of biodiesel annually.

We consume 382.4 million gallons of gasoline in motor vehicles every day in the US. Annually, that's 140 billion gallons of gasoline. To produce 80% of that total in biodiesel (we'd need less because diesels are more efficient), you'd need about 800 million acres of oilseed rape.

We only have 433 million acres of arable land in the US.

It's not a particularly promising technology considering in a practical sense it can't even fill a fifth of our current demand for gasoline. We have to grow food, too, and if every square inch available is going for biodiesel production that's a lot of potential rallycross venues that won't be available. Biodiesel also does next to nothing to lower greenhouse gas production. I suspect we'll all eventually wind up with plug-in hybrids (hybrids that have a decent sized electric motor and a real battery pack that can be charged from the wall, drive on that charge, and only use fossil fuels for highway driving) or straight electric vehicles. The really neat thing about electrics is that compared to internal combustion engines they are vastly more simple and elegant.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant

Of course the problem with pure electric cars is range. We still have not come close to the energy density of gasoline.
Joe there is one other source for biodiesel. You can also process used vegetable oils. Super size your order of fries?

But I think the solution will be the application of multiple technologies. Right now I could commute with a pure electric car since my driving distance is short and I go through town on low speed roads. But I don't see any substitute for diesel in large trucks right now except some bio diesel.

A few years back Chrysler was working with a vehicle that broke down gasoline into hydrogen and oxygen to run a fuel cell.

Notice I did not make any jokes about anything being more elegant than a K car.

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George Bright Member # 141
One of the youngest of the old farts.
Yes I voted against you joining the club.

Kevin,

Did you have info regarding anticipated replacement time/mileage and cost for the batteries and other major components compared to gasoline powered vehicles?

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Dick Rasmussen

FS 50 2018 Mustang GT

That's fine, but his point is still valid, and that is that we don't have enough used vegetable oil available to put even a small dent in what we need overall.



I would like to see numbers on what percentage of road fuel is used by the hauling industry. Anyone know? Perhaps there's a chance we could get biodiesel production up to where it could at least approach a big chunk of this need.

Of course, going to electric power for vehicles means either we figure out how to better harness solar energy -or- we're creating a lot more nuclear waste that we also don't seem to have a good plan on how to deal with...


--Donnie

I wonder if the same rule applies to electric conversion that generally applies to race cars. It is much more expensive to build your own than it is to buy someone elses completed (or nearly complete) project. What is the market like for used/project electric cars?

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.

The family truckster for the new age of high gas!!

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

^^^^No kidding. That'd be a GEM, owned by DaimerChrysler. They also own Smart, so I'd expect they'll go the plug-in hybrid or all-electric route instead of gas only.
Well, there's always more efficiency to be wrung out of diesel. The rail industry has been using diesel electric for decades. Biodiesel-blend hybrid electric--multiple technologies, like you said.

Problem with vegetable oil isn't just that we don't produce that much of it (a little over 4 billion gallons a year) and that the initial production, distribution, collection, cleaning, refining, and redistribution make it very energy inefficient.

Battery tech still getting better, so charge densities are going up pretty dramatically, and more importantly, the number of cycles the batteries can go through is also increasing dramatically.
Hey, that's not just innovation--that's a core competency.

It's pretty tiny-- the figure I've heard is 12% of petroleum consumption. What I quoted above was gasoline consumption, which is somewhere around 60 percent of petroleum consumption.
Oh, we've got a great plan to deal with it. Hell, we've got several great plans. The problem is people are worried that ATOMS are going to make their kids grow an extra pair of arms. These same folks are curiously willing to strap their kids into the back seat and rocket around at 70mph with said kids separated from a tank filled with 20 gallons of a highly inflammable carcinogen by less than 2mm of steel and some foam...

If some magic happens and everyone were to use electric vehicles to travel the annual
average 12,000 miles, the power generation capacity of the US would need to roughly triple.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant

Some of us would need more style.

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George Bright Member # 141
One of the youngest of the old farts.
Yes I voted against you joining the club.

And how much of our current gasoline useage is currently produced domestically???

Doesn't fuel efficiency, and I believe diesels are more than a 20% efficiency improvement over petrols BTW, contribute to the reduction in greenhouse gases???

Long-term, there are really only 2 options for alternate energy that I can come up with:

1. Solar via PV or some other direct-to-electricity method
2. Wind

Once these are invested in heavily and built up, they can power our cars. For now though, any electric car is going to be expensive to operate.

The price of electricity, heating fuels, natural gas, and all other energy will be tracking up, up, up with the cost of gas. It makes sense if you think about it. Any one energy source looking "cheaper" than any other is ALWAYS a short-term trend.

My money (and hope for the future) is on massive solar and wind infrastructure. If there is one positive light on the whole growing global energy consumption / Katrina problems, it is this: In the next decade more and more progress will be made on true alternate energy sources.

(PS - when thinking about energy, keep in mind that every single solitary Joule of energy you use or buy or create has one source: The Sun)

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Im sure the same thing was said in the 70's and you see things havent changed much at all.

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

Actually things have changed a great deal since the 70's.

Solar cells of all sorts are about 1/10th the cost to produce that they were then. I'd call that progress. Now truthfully their costs neeed to come down more, but as other energy sources will continue to increase the two will meet at a point, in the not too far future.

At this point electric cars simply shift the energy and pollution burden, not lessen it. And hybrids are a novelty. Their extra costs and gigantic negative environmental impact of their short life batteries far out weight their shorterm "glory".

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91 Jetta GLI STS/DSP 111
85 Porsche 944 ASP 11
http://www.blackforestindustries.com

Japanese electric prototype called the "Eliica". Watch the video at the top of this page....

http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/view.asp?date=3/22/2005

Car has 8 wheels. One version is shown doing 180+ on test track. Another is shown doing 0-60 runs in about 4 seconds. Not practical, but interesting to watch.

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.

We produce about 40% of our petroleum domestically. I don't know how much of that goes to gasoline production.
Not necessarily. If you're measuring fuel efficiency by the gallon per distance moved, you can still wind up with more greenhouse gases by volume even if you burn fewer gallons of one fuel as opposed to another. The byproducts of complete combustion are CO2 and H2O, and those hydrocarbons we burn are usually strings of C and H, and the O is supplied by air. If you've got a couple of extra C's on your hydrocarbon, you can wind up with a greater volume of CO2 produced per gallon burned, since liquids don't exactly have the equivalent of the ideal gas law governing their volume. Diesel motors do produce more CO2 per gallon than gasoline (by about 8%), but that still makes diesels produce 12% less CO2 per mile travelled than do gasoline.

That is, of course, petroleum-based diesel. Biodiesel is less efficient than petroleum diesel, to the point that you're pumping out the same amount of CO2 per gallon as gasoline. However, since biodiesel is produced from plants that pull most of their carbon out of the atmosphere, in theory you're not adding to the greenhouse gas problem because you're not putting extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Unfortunately every acre you put toward biodiesel production is an acre of plant life that is no longer sequestering carbon, so while you're not adding much extra carbon to the atmosphere you're lowering the capacity of the planet to sequester excess atmospheric CO2 by an equivalent amount. It winds up being a wash.
The sun does not and did not produce the Uranium from which we get a fifth of our domestic electricity (or that fuels our carrier and sub fleets).
If they're shifting energy production from small, inefficient internal combustion engines to hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, and wind production, that's a win since those sources produce negligible pollution. I agree that the current crop of hybrids is gimmicky, but the batteries aren't really their problem. The batteries are recyclable and big enough that people won't just pitch them in the trash like they do smaller NiCad and NiMHs.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant