Horace Heffner wrote:
The majority of people can't or won't afford a $40,000 EV.
That price is ridiculous. I am sure GM can make them much cheaper, if
they try. Toyota makes lots of money selling the Prius at $22,000.
The Prius is one small mod away from being a plug-in hybrid. (Or
$6,000 away, if you do it yourself.)
Some great designers are forced to 3 wheel designs in order to fall
under motorcycle rules. India will be, or are, way ahead of us in
vehicle cost and energy conservation simply because their safety
standards are lower.
As far as I know, US energy efficiency is far above India and China.
Of course our cars use more energy because they are ridiculously
oversized and inefficient, but our other industries, space heating
and the like is ahead of the third world. Overall energy consumption
is much higher because we consume more goods, but the individual
goods are more efficiently produced.
Plus, to put it bluntly, in India they do not value human lives as
much as we do -- in dollar terms, that is. In the US it would be
false economy to produce unsafe cars. The money you save in equipment
would be lost to increased medical costs and lost income from lives
cut short. In the US, automobile accidents cost roughly $230 billion
per year in medical bills, as I pointed out in Chapter 17 of my book.
The medical costs would show up as increased auto insurance cost.
Most of the cost of automobile insurance already goes to pay medical
bills, not replacement equipment. That is why my Prius insurance is
almost as cheap as the Geo Metro, even though the Prius is worth
~$18,000 and Metro is officially worth nothing. That is to say, I
have no collision coverage for it; only injury and liability. (In
case I cause an accident I gotta pay for the other guy's car.) The
Metro is an unsafe tin can on wheels, whereas the Prius has every
known safety feature.
Meanwhile some people here, especially women, are switching to
motor scooters which are way less safe than even motorcycles.
But I have to admit they look like fun! No worse than bicycles. I
assume they can only be used on surface roads under 45 mph. That's
the only sane use for a Geo Metro, by the way.
There should be a special class of lightweight 4 wheel vehicle that
is treated like a motorcycle.
Well, you are talking about a vehicle limited to 45 mph surface roads
only, that makes some sense, but I doubt it would be much of a market
that in the US.
Rather than do that they should make a short-range electric car.
Short-range in the U.S. being ~100 miles. In Japan ~50 to ~80 miles
would suffice. (It is a smaller country.) Many short-range Japanese
all-electric cars are expected to go on sale in 2009. They have been
showing them on NHK national news for months. The Mitsubishi i MiEV
is a good example. It will cost $27,000 in limited production, and go
into mass production soon. Specs:
"The i-MiEV is powered by a compact 47 kW motor that develops 180 Nm
(133 lb-ft) of torque and a 330V, 16 kWh or 20 kWh lithium-ion
battery pack. Top speed is 130 kph (81 mph), with a range of up to
130 km (81 miles) for the 16 kWh pack or 160 km (99 miles) for the 20
kWh pack. The motor is coupled to a reduction gear and differential
to drive both rear wheels."
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/mitsubishi_i_miev_electric_car.php
Cars generally cost more in Japan than in the U.S., so $27,000 is
quite reasonable.
The auto industry is in the tank anyway. Now is the time to put a
low cost high production high milage option into the market place as
quickly as possible.
Amen. But no quicker than possible. Let's see if they can do it 15
years after Toyota began selling the Prius, and 5 years after they
sold a million Priuses. Can they do at least as well as Mitsubishi, a
company that has been on the ropes for years? Is that a challenge
they cannot meet? In that case they deserve to go bankrupt.
- Jed
