Electric cars

[Lancer]

I watched a show on electric cars the other day. It was about who killed the electric car. Very disturbing, it made me really dislike GM and glad I own a Toyota. I hope Toy comes out with a car I can plug into my wall socket and gives me a couple hundred miles on a charge. They do this, and I'll buy one!

Anyone else heard of the demise of the electric car in Cali? How the state gov said that by...I don't know when...1/10th of all cars sold in Cali had to have no emitions. So GM made an electric car, leased a bunch of them, then got the law changed and repoed and crushed every one of them. Heard about that? Criminal! Horific! UnAmerican! Blah!

[Lancer]

Besides that, US made hybrids get 1/3 less mpg than Japanese made hybrids! The car and oil Co's in bed together! I hope the Japanese eat their lunch, AGAIN!

[VetLegion]

I've heard about that. It's that incident that has been widely reported as "killing of the electric car". There is also a documentary about it I think. I am sceptical about GM killing it for sheer pleasure of killing, but not interested enough to research the facts.

[SlowwHand]

Go Toyota.

[Lancer]

Really? Those people who leased the things were not allowed to buy the cars. They held mass rallies at which they had an oversized check made out to GM for over a million $ to buy the last of the cars before they were destroyed. Amazingly, these cars were taken from people against their will who had the $ to buy them outright. When the leases were up the cars were taken using the force of law.

The cars themselves were taken to a GM wrecking facilty in Arizona which is off limits to the public. A plane flying over got some pics of the process of the distruction of perfectly good cars that never used a drop of gas.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Go Toyota.

Damn right!

[VetLegion]

Whoever makes the first fully economically viable electric car that can be mass produced will make a killing on it (OK this is a bit of a tautology but you get the point). Toyota et al are going for hybrids because they can't get good enough autonomy from the batteries yet.

[Lancer]

Hogwash! I forget the details explained on the show, but you can get 200 to 300 miles on a charge using current battery tech. Even the hybrids are being retrofitted to charge at night and can then get 200 mpg or something, and they don't have alot of batterys.

[VetLegion]

Wasn't that GM car a smallish sports cabrio? It was probably very light. Perhaps there were safety issues or something (patent protection?) that made them want to destroy every last one.

But it was probably far simpler - they were losing money on it.

I'm guessing. As I said, I'm not interested enough to seek Links and Articles

[Odin]

Originally posted by Lancer
Hogwash! I forget the details explained on the show, but you can get 200 to 300 miles on a charge using current battery tech. Even the hybrids are being retrofitted to charge at night and can then get 200 mpg or something, and they don't have alot of batterys.

Aren't there a few hybrid models already out there that are on electric exclusively for the first, like, 50 miles before the engine starts up?

[VetLegion]

That's some lousy engine if it needs 50 miles to start up

[Spec]

Go toyota

Go Mazda

100% Hydrogen rotary engines in stock Mazda cars in 2010.



Spec.

[Nostromo]

Go toyota

Go Mazda

Too bad they can't design cool looking cars.

[Spec]

Originally posted by nostromo


Too bad they can't design cool looking cars.

Spec.

[snoopy369]

Why precisely would GM repo them? I'm confused. Unless they really are teh evil etc. etc., which just doesn't make sense for me - maybe I don't have enough tin foil or something, but it doesn't make business sense to not take the money.

Electric Cars