Subaru electric car news! Can mass production be a year away?
by
amazngdrx
on Mon 26 Jun 2006 04:13 AM CDT
Some guesses about the state of electric car progress behind the scenes at leading global automakers. Will Subaru show Honda and Toyota the way to save the planet from global climate disaster and make Detroit a ghost town?
A GM PHEV? Highly doubtful, probably more hype like flex fuel vehicles.
Meanwhile Subaru, owned by Fuji Heavy, leapfrogs GM and Toyota right to electric cars. And GM has a signifigant stake in Fuji.
Maybe Toyota is not rushing PHEVs because they have an electric car to pull out of their hat? That battery excuse from Toyota is patently lame with at least 3 different nano layer, quick charge, lithium ions at or near the manufacturing stage.
Think about it: Why produce a PHEV with thousands of moving parts and an antiquated, 14% efficient internal combustion engine, when one could produce a quick charge plugin electric car with the same performance and range.
That runs on 75 cent per gallon of gas equivalent electric power. And has only on the order of 100s of moving parts.
The profit advantage (before gas prices made a rebate eat those profits up)of trucks and SUVs for ford and GM was based upon this same principle.
Same number of parts in an SUV as in a car, but the SUV sold at a heavy premium because of the larger size. The extra steel did not add signifigantly to the manufacturing cost, so the Detroit rust belt did ok versus Toyota's economy cars.
But as gas prices rise, the same phenomenon will kill Detrot. Toyota can produce electric cars with 100s of moving parts, instead of thousands, with a corresponding drop in manufacturing costs, and consumers can save 100s of bucks per month on gas that can go towards the car payments for their new electric cars.
But now, just as Subaru poineered the all wheel drive, SUV like economy car, they are now pioneering the electric car. Honda and Toyota are following suit. Will they miss out on the electric car? Not bluudy lackly (my cockney accent, hehey).
Well Thomas I found an explanation of the manufacturing process for these new batteries. Sheet metal is rolled out on a line then sprayed with various coatings that are then baked on.
Then the sheet is rolled up for maximum surface area in the smallest space. Nothing exotic in these batteries either. The nano layer materials are made in a separate process then sprayed on just as the other materials.
The nano layer provides a low resistance, high current flow because a uniform very thin layer is possible to prevent arcing within the battery.
It appears that only mass production is lacking to bring the cost down, just as with solar cells.
Think of this process of mass production of batteries and solar panels in this effort to stop global climate change and oil wars versus the Manhattan Project during WW 2.
The technical difficulties and danger involved in the atom bomb project were orders of magnitude more challenging. And yet we still don't have the will or leadership to win this time around.
As Al Gore said, even a nuclear war would leave most of this planet inhabitable, people still live in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
But how can civilization withstand the weather volatility in evidence right now. The cleanup and economic losses will mount into the 100s of trillions very quickly as more violent storms bring flooding and drought conditions bring on catastrophic crop failure and fires.
And how do you move whole cities back from flooding coastlines? Wouldn't mass producing these renewable energy systems be much less expensive? And at the same time revive the flagging US manufacturing sector and restore the tax base?
As with the internet boom, this renewable energy boom would start to pay down the deficit and the national debt. The internet boom went bust, not everyone needed or wanted to use the net.
This energy boom will be different, decades long, powered by productivity gains built into every economic sector underlying all industrial activity.