Comment Yeah, Volt - no anxiety at all (Score 1) 286
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I get ~ 40 mpg on gasoline. There is no range anxiety. Further, the gasoline backup is a more efficient charger for my house (backup) than the Honda Inverter-Charger I also have (always wise to have more than one hot spare). When dumping around 600w into my home via an inverter I put on the 12v system of the Volt, hooked to a forklift charger, the engine runs ~ 90 seconds every ~15 minutes (this is about twice what my house uses "at idle" on average so I get net charge to the house system). There are serious advances in IC engines with all the ECM stuff (variable valve timing and so on, effectively, variable compression ratio - better gas gets you better efficiency).
There is no fscking way this pollutes more than my Honda Ridgeline, which gets at most 17 mpg...give me a break. I'm sorry about your illiquid investments in oil (and the useful idiots their shills have created). It's not my problem. I just go where I want, when I want. It's a great car and fun to drive.
I didn't do it to be green, it just worked out that way - just like I bought a farm and let it grow up to a nature preserve, because I'm too lazy to be a good farmer.
Yeah, the furries are cute, but that's not the reason, I like being away from the nut-cases that inhabit most cities.
The key word is "freedom" as in libre - not having to have a job to pay an electric bill. It's amazing how much money you save driving for the cost of tire wear and insurance alone. Things like oil changes - only when it gets old, not ever X thousand miles. Brakes rarely needed, that's what regen buys you. Nothing wears out.
Add those costs...or as I did, subtract them, and suddenly the wallet is too fat to sit on.
Disingenuous comparisons with just the CO2 output of fossil fuels are...stupid. Mining, EROEI, deaths, mercury, radiation (check those last two downwind of a coal plant) and so on should be added - you'll pay those costs someday, even if not in the power bill. Cost of right of ways, wire maintenance, plant maintenance - all gone with distributed solar. Yeah, it won't work in the north. Sorry guys. It works fine in Virginia.
Elon...I hope he does well. He's my only living hero. Most people would have retired to a beach after making that much money on PayPal, not "gone all in" for what they believe. Succeed or fail - the man is the man. Even Bob Lutz (always certain, sometimes wrong, as he says) admits that without the push by Elon, the Volt (which I like better, actually) would not have been done. Search on Charlie Rose's website for a very good interview with both of those people...he discourages hardlinks, but it's there.
I take the Volt whenever it isn't a truck-only job (like moving horse poop from my neighbors' hobby horse farms to my garden, or firewood). It's fun to dust off ricky rice-racer on the mountain twisties where I live - they seem to think Fast and Furious2 is how you win a race - it's fun, but nope. There's a vid on my youtube channel, with yes, a visiting GM engineer holding the cam as we hit a 15 mph hairpin at over 60mph and didn't slide to the yellow line. He needed toilet paper immediately thereafter. Lighten up and have some fun!