On Oct 7, 2014, at 3:04 AM, brucedp5 via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> Kurt Neutgens worked 17 years at Ford Motor Co., including time as > engineering manager for Ford’s F-150 pickup truck, but his dream was to > someday develop an electric vehicle. > > So when Ford offered buyouts in 2006, he jumped at the opportunity. He went > on to create in his garage an electric-powered Mustang, only to discover > that the car was too expensive to make a business out of it. > > But now he believes things have fallen into place. Recently standing outside > the offices of Orange EV in Riverside, a company he co-founded, Neutgens > greeted potential customers who wanted to test drive the company’s electric > truck. Two things jump out at me. First, I'm thoroughly sold that right now is the time for large heavy-duty fleets to switch to electric. They're the ones with the long-term budgeting; municipalities, for example, pick bus models by building spreadsheets with five-, ten-, and twenty-year total-lifecycle costs. Something that costs twice as much to acquire but costs half as much over five years is going to win out unless it's actually unable to do the job. And big vehicles are going to need lots of big batteries, which will do absolute wonders for driving the whole economy of scale thing. They're still going to be looking for the best energy-to-everything-else ratios; shaving 1000 pounds off a pack for a ten-ton vehicle is going to be as important as shaving 100 pounds off a one-ton vehicle, and same with volume and price and anything else. The vehicles are just going to have ten times as many batteries -- which, in turn, means that every single big vehicle purchase is going to create as much demand from the battery manufacturers as ten econoboxes. An entire fleet of 100 big vehicles is as significant, therefore, as a thousand econoboxes -- quite the economic force multiplier! The other thing that struck me was that offhand remark about "an electric-powered Mustang." The day that the first Mustang EV rolls off the Detroit (or wherever) assembly line is the day that we can be certain that there is no more future in petroleum-powered passenger vehicles save as novelties. Anybody want to take any bets on when that'll happen? I'm thinking probably a decade at least, but probably not much more than that. Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20141007/e4f66ad8/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
