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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5003)	11/5/2006 9:35:35 AM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 24206

Even electric vehicles... use solar to charge them during the day, and run some of that back into the grid at night. i was actually thinking about electric cars as a way to handle absorbing power from the grid when there is too much. i hadn't thought so much about having power run back into the grid though. however, i have read some stuff about kinds of sensors that are being used to communicate remotely from things like...oh... oil tanks to let an oil company know when to deliver more oil, etc... seems that such things could be rigged up... wired into the system... so that electric cars (and other things) could begin charging whenever there are power production peaks, and cut out immediately as power falls off. with computers and remote sensing becoming pretty sophisticated, i can see a lot of this technology being used to coordinate power draw from systems. the other advantage to this would be to encourage the use of more electric vehicles. btw, sort of OT to the above, but it sure as hell seems that there are a lot more SUVs & large pick-up trucks down there than up here. At first, i thought maybe i was imagining it, but was pretty sure i wasn't. Then, the first day after Mr. Croc arrived, we're traveling along a highway, and he suddenly says, "The percentage of SUVs & trucks seems a lot higher on the roads down here!" (He would notice this kind of thing as he works in the auto biz). This morning, i was looking around for stats on vehicles, but couldn't actually find anything. Did find this though... Kinda scary. From an A. C. Nielsen report entitled "Asia Leads Global Car Ownership Aspirations" (contains some interesting stuff): In the US, the "intention to buy" for SUVs is 36%, and it's going up in Asia as well -- intention to buy an SUV is now 19%. www2.acnielsen.com I find it weird how the SUVs are becoming so popular. Up here, it's been compacts, sub-compacts and mini-vans, and you still see plenty of vans on the road. Based on my own casual vehicle counts in the local grocery store parking lot, mini-vans still rule over SUVs as the larger family vehicles. However, Mr. Croc tells me that a lot of the automakers are dropping or going to drop van production this year as they're switching over to SUV production due to consumer demand (our market share up here is not enough to influence production trends, so this would be based on US product demand). I guess at the scaled down end of things, SUV crossovers might be what replaces minivans, although I think there are some major differences -- for example, we can haul one helluva lot of stuff in our mini-van that i don't think we could cram into a crossover or even a full-sized SUV). Anyhow, all that to say that it does seem that there are some differences in vehicle demographics between here and the places i traveled while in the west this time. ~croc