Quote from: compro01 on December 16, 2011, 02:59:37 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on December 16, 2011, 08:32:15 AM

Yeah, I've seen it. The one where they talk about leasing the battery pack to the owner of the car. This is because the battery will not last as long as an average car, which is only about 7-9 years. Imagine if you had to completely rebuild your engine every two years, how well would that vehicle compete in an open market?

toyoto warranties the prius' battery for 8 years/100k miles. do you really think they would do that if they didn't think it would last at least that long?

one of the local taxi companies jumped on the original prius as soon as it came out here back in 2001. the batteries are still going strong.

The Prius isn't an electric car, it's a hybrid. The use case, for the batteries, are different. An electric car can expect to deep cycle it's battery bank daily, a hybrid generally doesn't deep cycle it's batteries except in relatively rare events.

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Quote from: MoonShadow on December 08, 2011, 10:22:16 PM

Food shortages, as a result from climate change, isn't a credible threat. Far more likely is the rapid expansion of agriculture for the above noted reasons.

only up to a point. past a certain degree of warming (+3 degrees, IIRC), the losses overtake the gains, mostly because much of the land the growing zone expands into is utterly useless for farming. permafrost just turns into a marshy mess and you're not growing anything on barren rock regardless of how warm it gets.

Taht is based upon a great number of assumptions, as far as the 3 degrees rule is concerned. That's even assumeing that it's possible to even get there. And I've literally grown tomatos in a bucket on an apartment deck without great human effort. With the right knowlege and investments, there are many ways to grow food.

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Quote from: MoonShadow on December 14, 2011, 06:40:30 PM

They contain huge amounts of poisons that would contanimate any area that a major accident occurred.

These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium.

NiMH batteries contain nickel (obviously), cobalt, magnesium ,or aluminum. and various rare earths (lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and praseodymium), which aren't particularly toxic.

MiMH batteries are less toxic than others, but as a hydride, it's still toxic if released directly into the environment.

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Quote from: MoonShadow on December 16, 2011, 08:32:15 AM

You're electric vehicle burns coal, as delayed and distant that combustion may be. And don't even bother to bring up solar power or wind power to run the American private vehicle fleet. That doesn't even come close to being realistic.

It would still be an improvement due to efficiency of scale. a car-size IC engine is about 25% efficient, at best. combined cycle coal will do 50%+.

A modern common rail desial is about 50% efficient, and can burn vegetable oil directly. There has existed a desial engine design that was nearly 50% efficent for 100 years, ist's just very heavy relative to it's power output. They are still made in India, called Listeroids after the origianl design, as Lister CS. SOme of those have ran continuously and outlived their original owners.

That's not even considering the total efficentcy of using coal to charge car batteries, because the coal plant might be 50%, which is pretty good, but then the transmission can be as low as 90%, the charging and discagiing cycles can be as low as 75% for a new battery, and less for an older one, and the transmission system (mostly the electric motor) are usually about 90-95% to the wheels. That estimate of ICE efficenies in cars is already to the wheels.

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it's also nicer for general pollution outside of CO2, as it's loads easier and cheaper to scrub the hell out of the emissions of a handful of big plants than to try to scrub tens of thousands of itty bitty engines.

This is a fair point, but does that make up for it all? I doubt it.