Wait. On the one hand everyone here lambasts cars for getting bigger and heavier. But then people deride any lightweight efficient alternative as ludicrous. There are other solutions for transporting a 150lb person and a few pounds of their stuff than a 3,000 lb car, and not everyone is going to pedal a bicycle.
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Nope, under the current EPA testing methodology fueleconomy.gov says the 1998 3-cylinder 1-liter Geo Metro gets 36 City / 44 Highway / 40 combined. And it's two car classes smaller!
I'm looking at the state-by-state electricity generation breakdowns at [www.fueleconomy.gov] (that you get if you click on the Leaf's "To be determined" carbon footprint) and I don't see any petroleum power plants. I think you mean coal-fired, and it's only in mid-west states that coal is the majority of the…
Sorry, physics is against you. In the USA you can get at best around 1 kW·h of energy per square meter of solar panels per day. The EPA window sticker says the Leaf takes 34 kW·h to travel 100 miles, so you're only going to get a few miles additional range per day... in the middle of summer, with the car parked on a…
As @eldictator's video shows, Tesla are building the aluminum spaceframe chassis themselves, they hired former Jag aluminium [sic] expert Peter Rawlinson. Designer Franz von Holzhausen came from Mazda and GM.
No, I really don't drive a hybrid, I have an aging Subaru Outback Sport because I need AWD and even when I feel flush enough to buy a new car it's hard to find anything significantly better than the ~25 mpg combined that I get. (I toyed with unpimping a Ford Escape Hybrid AWD, but lost interest with the awful…
You have exactly one valid point, which is that so far these cars aren't for people who like to drive. Given that most people don't care about driving, blaming the symptom (a lot are buying fuel-efficient cars) for the root of the "problem" is silly. It's obvious the USA is better off in every way now some of the…
It's way too hard to make a simplistic side-by-side comparison. The Pacific Northwest gets its electricity from carbon-free hydro, California mostly from gas, Northeast a lot of coal. Go to FuelEconomy.gov, find the Leaf, click the Carbon Footprint "To Be Determined" link, and read what the EPA has to say,…
"We don’t want the West to go and find alternatives [to oil]"
The poster I want on my wall is a B&W photo of TWO silver McLaren F1s parked nose-to-tail, a medium close-up of sublime automotive curves. It was for Ralph Lauren's "Purple Label" men's clothing in the 2000s as I recall (he owned two F1s), so it was only in glossy mags like Vanity Fair. So far damn Google has failed…
Shouldn't GM focus on getting the world-saving Chevrolet Spark on the roads instead of screwing around with the 2014 Corvette?
When we need to store a higher amount of energy to go a long distance we use a tank of gasoline/diesel
Maybe. FKERS still needs a electric starter motor to start the engine when the flywheel can't get the car rolling. It still needs a regular transmission for the engine, and the details of "the flywheel's rotation is transferred to the rear wheels via a specially designed transmission" are going to be pretty complex.…
To repeat myself, did you even bother to read the title of the Treehugger article? That's particle emissions, not CO2 emissions! Shipping is actually a very efficient way to move lots of stuff around. The pollution from ships is appalling and the USA is trying to introduce maritime legislation to clean it up.
How confused can you be in one post?
You're mistaken. It takes about 1000 gallons of gasoline in embodied energy (3 tons of gasoline) to make a new car. 1984 Crown Vic gets 16 combined mpg according to FuelEconomy.gov. Over 120,000 miles a 50mpg Prius will save you 15 TONS of gasoline and 49 tons of CO2 (here's the math)
Because Aston Martin V8 Vantage ?
Sigh. Tesla has produced and sold about 1,900 Roadsters. Tesla has manufactured hundreds of battery packs for Daimler and has built mules for the electric Toyota RAV4 conversion. Tesla has completed about 20 "alpha build" Model S cars. They've yet to admit delays in the Model S production (though I'm sure they're…
Musk owns a big chunk of the company so his personal opinion on selling matters. Meanwhile the talented bunch he hired (Franz von Holzhausen & Peter Rawlinson FTMFW) are bringing innovation to the car business. What's your point again?