Who is holding back my electric car? The electric car that I should be able to buy at reasonable cost is no challenge to produce with todays technology.

The car has two banks of light weight battery on either side of the centered motor under the front hood.

The roof mounted high output solar panels charge the battery opposite the battery under drain.

There could be a small propane bottle fueled motor for emergency side of the road battery refresh, but efficiency advances would soon make that requirement obsolete.

I want to plug my car in at night and get clear of the noise, the poison stink, the volatility of gas, the cost of gas, the need to find a gas seller, muffler and exhaust problems, fuel mix problems, anti-freeze problems, radiator problems, water pump problems, air filter problems, oil filter problems, gasket leaks and faulty seals. Failing rubber hoses and clamps.

Have you ever seen the excellent performance of the electric bus?
The ideal electric car looks like this:
http://TonyGuitar.blogspot.com

Crude oil is for making plastics and paints, not for burning. We are no longer cave dwellers.

Where is my modern trouble free electric car? Seniors who run about on their electric carts with that smug look have an unfair monopoly! TG

I thought the sniper on the grassy knoll made his getaway in an electric car.

No wonder he got away with it. Electric car in his day? Eat your heart out 007. TG

personally I support ethanol

and what's with all the * ?

I personally don't care for all-electric vehicles. It's not so bad for small ugly cars, but I just don't see how you can get the power out of it for more muscle cars and heavier vehicles.
Ethanol is ok except for finding the fuel. Probably just end up using regular gas anyway cause it's more convenient.
I don't care for hybrid cars either cause then it just seems like you have two engines and twice the failure chance that one function or the other will go out.

Surely there is something better on the horizon.

I am still waiting for the flying cars we were all supposed to have overr 30 years ago.

Hey guess what dude, I probably have about as good of insight into this industry with what I do at work as almost anyone on these forums, but I'm not even going to consider reading your post until you can make it something decent.

I am not goign to read crap that uses * for spaces. When you decide to be a little mature with whatever you were trying to say, then by all means say it. And say it in Meeting Spot not Other Hardware.

Was it mature to promptly appoint yoursef investigator, policeman and judge and jury?

The asterisks are an oddity of HTML code translation relating to the new Opera brower used to make the post.

Would it not have been more mature to learn whether the asterisks are an immiture attempt to gain attention or the results of a technical error?

If you go back and read carefully, with your temper impulses under control, you will discover where I was about to erase the text and then decided to leave it for the benifit of local tech gurus.

This seems to be an add occurance and It seems not to happen on following comments, so there must be a unique key in the one place that it did occur.

By the way, someone did send me several pics of a sleek modern converable that is equally at home hydroplaning on the lake. Thanks for the excellent and amazing Email, Duke, TG

That was done for us when we got out moderatorship. We are here to make sure posts do not offend anyone or break any rules but at the same time we are asked to keep "fluff" threads to a minimum. People come to TS for quality threads, not quantity.

& it's odd that the one you're talking happens to use Opera as his main borwser yet he never once got your "technical problem" with it.

SNGX is moderator? I didn't know that. You guys have a list of people who "work" for TS somewhere?

Hi Vig.

Take a look at this full list of moderators etc.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/showgroups.php

Hope this helps.

Regards Howard

It*s a mystery that real TS special forces will have to solve.

I have no idea how the asterisk thing happened, yet, I bet if I studied it carefully, something would come to mind.

In the first place, scrutinize more closely and notice that the asterisk is a trailing character and not a space substitute at all....

oh honourable guru. Your humble, but not humourless servant, TG

Thanks for that link Howard. Always wondered whom ALL the mod gods were. Knew who some were from years ago when I was a member, never knew all of them.

more and more ethanol stations are opening up. HEB and Kroger grocery chains are going to offer ethnol in Texas soon. I have a flex-fuel truck and can't wait.
Ethanol - a true American fuel made from corn samplin's and other goodies..... heh heh

Heck a country liberated for booze (and other stuff) running on booze! I love it!

I see you removed the asterisks, interesting problem, but apparently not doing it anymore, so, ok.

Howard, thanks, I see you are the only one on the whole list who is online right now, lol.

Tedster, get a new license plate called "BZZ MBL". I think you know what it stands for, lol

1. of course the technology is here to make electric cars. but as far as I have read, they are still not a practical gasoline powered replacement.

2. you will never see flying cars for simple saftey reasons. most people don't know how to drive on the ground, you want those fools up in the air to crash into your house???

3. ethanol engines are not the future, the technology is as old as gasoline engines. and E85 costs more than gas!

I find it odd that nobody has mentioned hydrogen? hydrogen power is the future.

The reason that we are "addicted to oil" (as dubya puts it) is simply due to politics and economics. there is way too much money invested in the oil industry.

the technology exists to make a car run on tap water, but you will never see it in mass production. if we could run our cars on tap water then the entire oil infrustructure would collapse. everybody involved in the oil infrustructure industry would not make any money from water-fueled cars.

what you will see in the not so far future, is hydrogen powered cars... but with a hydrogen fueling station infrustructure behind it. this way we get virtually pollution-free cars and a revenue producing infrustructure.

But with hydrogen power you need power in the first place to seperate the hydrogen and the oxygen from the water so that they can combust and recombine in the engine to produce the energy that drives the car forward.

So for this process to help save the environment you also need an environmentally-friendly electricity supply. Which im not sure we quite yet have here across the waters. (Too many gas, oil and coal powered stations).

I agree with KingCody on the flying car point, its a bit hard to put up bollards in the sky!

Corn likker in Newfoundland and PEI is referred to as screech. Seems odd because it*s a smooth clear slightly syrupy beverage one can only nip at and too much will put you in a coma.

So we all like ethanol for several reasons, but, sadly, I recently read where it is only one third as efficient as petrol and thus will always be an additive rather than a fuel.

Young fellar above is correct about hydrogen. We need a tech break-through because the ratio of electricity to hydrogen needs help.

That*s why I say we need to get those featherweight batteries, super efficient soalr cells and power thrust motors working together and selling off the car lots. Once started, the electric car will go from the grocery getter to the silent muscle car in no time.

Governments are afraid of this getting out of the bag though. As mentioned above, the employment dislocation will be rough for some time.

We have to let buggy-whips go sooner or later. Let*s do it now! TG

That's complete rubbish. Don't believe it. They are already running vehicles on it in Brazil. A Top Gear stunt on british TV also demonstrated that ethanol is just as good as petrol as a fuel. It is alchohol after all. Or, we could all use bio-diesel. A little stickier than real deisel, but it does the job well enough.

There is a Hydrogen highway being built in europe (hydrogen supplying gas stations at set intervals along the roads across europe). Bush has even made repeated references to it.

The initial burst of power needed to create the hydrogen from water can be collected through renewable means. It acts only as a catalyst to free up the potential energy that is held in water, which is to be converted to heat energy, in the process creating water and electricity - and there's a lot of energy in water. All it needs really is hydro-electrolysis.

The first commercial hydrogen filleing station opend in Iceland, april 24th, 2003, in the nations capital.

First off, there aren't any featherweight batteries that are even remotely close to having the power/capacity to power a car.

The amount of solar panels needed currently would be far bigger than the car itself. Just look at the World Solar Challenge races where universities compete. That is some of the most advanced solar technology in the world and those cars run into problems during rainstorms. And the cars are super light and only hold 1 person uncomfortably.

Hydrogen may be the future, but its still a long time away, because as mentioned above you have to get the hydrogen from somewhere, and unless the energy to split water comes from solar/wind/wave power you are doing just as much damage to the environment (coal).

Biodiesel and ethanol are the more near term future, problem is E85 won't work in non flex fuel vechiles, well it will work just not for very long. Another problem is the availability of crops to produce the amount of fuel needed to replace oil, its not feasable now to get completely off oil from ethanol and biodiesel.

Spike is right about saying the ethanol is 1/3 as efficient as gasoline being rubbish. That statement is wrong on several levels. Efficiency depends on the engine not the fuel. Ethanol inherently has less BTU/gal than gasoline, but saying its 1/3 is absolutely wrong. It has about 80-85% of the energy as gasoline (off the top of my head), which will require you to use15-20% more of it to get the same performance as gasoline.

Biodiesel is a better option than ethanol for several reasons I can get into later if anyone cares.