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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
This pretty much sums up my opinion of hybrid technology.
From Popular Science:
The battery that will power the Chevrolet Volt weighs approximately 400 pounds and, stood on end, reaches a height of six feet. The $10,000 plus, T-shaped monolith contains 300 individual three-volt lithium-ion cells, bundled together in groups of three, then wired in series and kept from overheating by an elaborate liquid cooling mechanism. A computerized monitoring system inside the battery pack conducts this electrical orchestra, balancing voltage, watching, above all, for any indication that a cell might be failing, shorting out, or otherwise threatening the stability of the system. This battery, one of the most advanced pieces of electrical storage ever engineered, can propel the 3500-pound Volt 40 miles before it runs out of energy. And so can a gallon of gas.
--Nick Koloterakis, "Power Struggle", _Popular Science_, November 2008
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
I suspect that government ownership of GM had something to do with that ridiculous mpg rating.
C'mon, mpg means nothing to an electric car. What they need is a yellow sticker like they place on appliances, you know the ones - this Chevy Volt will cost $5000/year to charge if you drive 12000 miles/year and your energy costs 15 cents/kwh. Gasoline is extra. This cost should include the cost to replace the $10k battery since batteries are consumables, unlike gas tanks, and also the costs to dispose of the toxic batteries without polluting the groundwater.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
I'm all for electric cars but we need to build the infrastructure first.
A few months ago in Popular Mechanics there was an article about small, sealed, self-contained and inherently safe nuclear plants that could be trucked in to a community, buried, hooked up to the local grid and power tens of thousands of homes for twenty years. At the end of its life it was to designed to get dug up, replaced with a new one, and trucked to a reprocessing facility to be refueled and shipped out again. This makes all kinds of sense - freedom from interstate grids eliminates the single point of failure and communities could easily add units as growth demands.
We'd need this type of infrastructure to support electric cars for all. Until then, drill, drill, drill.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
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Wonder if there is a way to produce energy from radio signals of sufficient amount to power anything?
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Warning, I'm not a EE so what follows is semi-educated conjecture.
In fact it is possible but not practical for a bunch of reasons. You wouldn't get much power (think micro, nano or pico watts) unless you were right next to the transmitter. Then there is the fact that if you were to produce power from the radio waves it would cause a parasitic signal loss that would weaken the signal for everyone else, so the power would need to be boosted, then more people would produce power, requiring more power input, etc, etc.
There are systems that do produce power from radio waves though, like those microchips they inject into pets or some "smart cards" that are used to control access into buildings. And those systems use special readers that transmit for the purpose of power generation so they can communicate with the device.
They are working on wireless power distribution though... I wonder how cooked we'll be when it's all working.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
My brother spent a big part of his career working on the electric vehicle program for a utility company. He said that one advantage of the Volt is that every time it runs on batteries it is using domestically produced energy instead of imported oil. Nearly all domestic energy production is coal, nuclear, hydro, or natural gas, all produced domestically. So that's a bonus. Apparently the energy cost of the volt would be 1-2 cents/mile (before cap-and-tax) when running on batteries, but of course that doesn't factor in the initial cost premium, replacement battery cost or charging station cost .. not to mention that we don't have enough domestic energy production to charge a whole bunch of cars anyway. Much of the charging would be off-peak but I'd bet 25-30% would be done on-peak.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
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It's 2030, 21 years from now - are some of us / most of us driving vehicles powered by electricity - I can see it.This kind of thinking with our reluctance to move from fossil fuel will ensure the Europeans figure it all out and we are left to purchase either their technology or Arab oil. WE have to get going on this.
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Hey, I like the idea of electric cars, they can be very fast 
But for those to work in any quantity we need to vastly increase generating capacity and the environmentalists pretty much have us hamstrung in that regard. California hasn't built any generating capacity in decades and instead steals it from the Pacific NW via the BPA and an effective beltway lobbying machine. Even socialist France gets most of their power from nukes and we can't even reprocess the fuel here. Then there is the problem that battery technology is nowhere near good enough to replace the internal combustion engine.
Since we can't seem to get those things fixed it seems that biodiesel is the most realistic alternative.
Instead of realistic solutions we throw money at stupid projects as political payola. Here they are building a $20 million solar generating facility that is expected to produce $5 million of electricity over its entire life. Yeah, that makes sense in a governmental sort of way.
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OK Murf, you and your engineer buddys have overlooked one of the most basic ways to power anything."Rubber Bands". Any of you Geezers or Geezerets my age remember buying the model airplane kit at the five and dime for fifty cents that were powwered by a rubber band. Easy to recycle, could be rewound by a squirrel in a cage running all night to wind it up for you. Get with it guy.
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The modern incarnation of rubber bands is flywheels. There are prototype cars running on flywheels which can store surprising amounts of energy.
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