I saw those guys at the Vancouver Autoshow last year and I was pretty pumped up about their truck because I was shopping for a new one.
They buy the stock truck without a motor or tranny and missing a few other pieces.. then they do their magic and sell the truck as a hybrid. So it runs on electricity only for something like 40miles.. after that the smaller motor kicks on and charges the battery and runs the electric motor. I remember them saying it idles at something like 1000rpm, so it's real quiet at any speed.
A cool feature is it has plugs on the side of the truck for portable power at worksites, out in the wilderness, or even using as an inverter/generator to power your home during an outage.
I was ready to put a down payment on one.. but I couldn't get over the $80k price tag, the truck wound up buying was less than half the price...that's a massive difference. If my business was bigger right now, I would totally capitalize on having an "Electric Truck".. people would eat that up!
Now I'm excited about that Tesla ModelX as a replacement for our family minivan!
How do you stay warm in the winter in an electric car? If they have heaters, won't that kill the batteries really fast? Just a question because I don't know.
There must be some good examples of cold weather use coming out of Iceland and Norway.. I recall reading about how sales of the Tesla Model S in those countries are huge.
The technology is definitely at it's infancy.. so I suspect some owners will be less than thrilled with mileage after the battery capacity depletes a bit. But technology has to start somewhere!
Give it 10 years and they'll probably be decent vehicles... like a 1990's computer. Give it another 10 years and they'll be as great as an iPad today, compared to the original computers.
What do you mean Frunk? Electric cars have been around for years. The biggest advance will probably be in batteries as we have seen in the cordless tool field. The bottom line is that any method other than fossil fuels takes electricity that is quite possibly generated by fossil fuels. The only way the hydrogen system is going to pan out is to find a cheap source of electrical power. Not going to happen. If the initial cost of equipment has to be subsidized and doesn't see a payback for years, it's not realistic. People will do just like you, especially people that aren't green like you, and they'll buy the conventional vehicle.
I'm no expert on this.. but doesn't the hydrogen fuel cell just create electricity which runs an electric motor? Basically instead of a battery, the battery is hydrogen fuel? :blink:
The big problem with hydrogen is it takes a shít ton of electricity to make it in the first place, then transport it, then convert it back from hydrogen to electricity.. it's not the most efficient process.. but it's not a bad one, depending how the electricity is created in the first place.
Yes, you would fill the vehicle with hydrogen. Getting the hydrogen is usually done via using lots of energy to convert natural gas.
The infrastructure to setup refueling stations would be a huge undertaking. In the end we would be back at zero and probably better off focusing more on more fuel efficient gasoline or diesel vehicles.
I'm no expert on this.. but doesn't the hydrogen fuel cell just create electricity which runs an electric motor? Basically instead of a battery, the battery is hydrogen fuel? :blink:
You could be right, I never thought of it like that.
I thought it was a process that separated the water molecules to extract hydrogen, then, because it was a highly volatile gas, it would be used in a combustion engine....similar to a natural gas engine
But just the name "fuel cell" sounds like a battery
We put maybe 10,000km on our minivan.. almost all our trips are less than 45mins of driving. We could totally get away with an electric vehicle. I just don't want to spend double the price on a vehicle just to have electric.
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