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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (380)	12/30/2001 5:07:27 PM
From: WTMHouston	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1003

OT <<. I'd LOVE to have an electric car. But the cost of entry is way too high.>> Me too, on both counts. 30 years ago, when I was almost a teenager, I was at my uncle's house in Florida. They had been given an experimental electric vehicle to use for the summer. It was a four passenger acid battery vehicle that could run for about an hour before needing to be recharged -- plugged in. As I recall, it topped out at around 30 m.p.h. They used it primarily to scoot around the small Florida island where they had their beach house. It was one of the first "vehicles" that I was ever allowed to drive on a real road. We quickly learned the relationship of time v. distance v. battery life. Pushing it a half-mile in the Florida heat was not much fun. I have always had a kind of nostalgic soft-spot for electric vehicles since then. Of course, the current price combined with my 30 mile, 45-90 minute, one-way daily commute makes it impractical. Someday it will be cost efficient, but only because the relative cost of operating a gasoline powered vehicle will have climbed to the point of making it so. Perhaps by then I won't care about the cost and can add to the demand (my way of getting this post somewhat on topic). I have never fully understood why alternators (generators) could not be used on electric vehicles to recharge to a substantial extent on the fly. I understand why they cannot recharge 100+ percent (some crazy law of physics), but have wondered why efficient generators could not or would not significantly lengthen useful battery life between power-off charges. I suspect that the answer is probably rooted in some very basic physics principal; otherwise, we would have efficient, low priced electric vehicles. I suppose that is why I chose law and not engineering. Troy

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (380)	12/31/2001 1:21:46 AM
From: marcos	Respond to of 1003

Bob, i knew a guy with an electric light truck design, very practical-looking thing, it was a basic cab/chassis/battery pack unit that could be adapted with anything built on top of it, cab-over style, deck was great majority of length ... all professionally drawn up, he was looking for financing for prototypes ... the batteries were in sliding drawers that pulled out the sides and under the tailgate, the top of the whole unit was not much more than two feet high [city truck, not much clearance needed] .... batteries this guy had no problem with, a friend ran a battery rebuild shop where we used to take heavy equipment batteries to get them rebuilt for about a quarter or a third of the price of new ones [also they could make you up anything out of solid used casing and new plates and juice etc, really lead-acid doesn't need to be expensive because the lead is almost totally recyclable, sulphuric acid is cheap by the barrel] ... but, last i heard he was having a problem getting the right motors for the wheels ... which is where he wanted the motors, like the old Le Tourneau machines, with regenerative braking and all just like them ... nothing was made at the time in the appropriate size and quality so he was going to have to make his own, then patent infringement fears kept him from doing that in one of the ways he first liked ... he used to fool around with golf carts, and got together with another guy to design an all-terrain motorised wheelchair [seriously, their plan was it would have stair-climbing capability] ... don't know what became of any of this, lost touch SI can't be that dead if we can get going an off-topic wheels 'n motors conversation on its obituary thread -g-