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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (346970)	8/15/2007 11:25:19 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575289

" there was a lot of snickering on the AMD thread when AMD and Dell jointly announced initiative to plant trees. I think it is a great idea." I stayed out of it. Sure, it was PR. But PR isn't always bad. I'd like to see more companies do that sort of thing. "the GM concept (Volt car, I believe)." The Volt isn't all electric, but is the next best thing. You can charge the battery with a plug, but when the battery runs low, it fires up a small gasoline engine to charge the battery. A gasoline engine can be very efficient when run at a constant speed under a constant load. Which it can be when used this way. This is very different from the way most hybrids are built. Trains, for example, have used a similar system for decades because it is more efficient than anything else. If combined with regenerative braking, which converts the braking energy to electricity, cars can be extremely efficient. Without sacrificing size or performance. And, if volume were high enough, there is no reason why the vehicles should be more expensive that what we have today. They might even be less expensive since the drive train would be a lot less complex with a lot fewer parts. And reliability would be a lot higher too. The big unknown is how far it is to travel on battery alone. Personally, I'd rather GM come out with one that can travel 10 miles on battery and do it sooner, than gamble on the battery tech. they need being ready later. But GM management is not know for their ability to make smart decisions.