General Discussion and BS thread -Safe Haven

Cut it all off.....There are so many "delete" options out there. When I personally think of diesel, I don't think of VW or Mercedes, and high MPG. I think of pulling really heavy shit down the road at the same speed as those VW and Mercs.....

Edit: Sorry, I forgot to think about emission tests that people are required to do...


Not here! lol.

 

Enjoy the new truck. Just because I didn't like it and neither did my wife, we ended up with an F150 after test driving a few trucks including a 2015 Colorado V6, doesn't mean it won't work for others. It will be interesting to see if the diesel has any issues in it's first few years.

 

I agree with all of that.

In another decade or two, I doubt many new vehicles will be using diesel or even gasoline engines anymore. At this point they are a compromise between convenience (there is a gas station at every corner) and pollution. As soon as the infrastructure for one of the electric vehicle technologies is made available on a large scale, there is really no reason why anyone would want to drive a vehicle that runs on gasoline or diesel. Electric is more efficient, the energy is cheaper (whether by charging a battery or using hydrogen fuel cells), and if used with renewable energy it produces no pollution. And there is far less required maintenance for an electric motor compared to an internal combustion engine.

Anyone who loves the low end torque of a diesel will absolutely love an electric motor.

 

They've been saying that for years. My dad said when he was a kid in the late sixties/early seventies everyone was talking about how in twenty years we would all be in electric cars.

 

I'm sure your dad will also tell you that if 40 years ago you had told someone that in 2015 we would have not sent a man to any other planet in the solar system and would have not gone back to the moon in over 40 years, he would have said you were crazy.

Unfortunately big business does what is best for profit and not what is best for mankind. If they had put the same effort into automobile engines that they put into cell phones and computers, we would all be driving electric cars that get 1000 miles to a charge and have 2000 horsepower electric motors.

How is it that my cell phone from 1995 had about 60 minutes of talk time on a charge and then took 5 hours to recharge, yet my current cell phone is 10% the thickness, has 12+ hours of talk time, and can recharge in under an hour. Yet a brand new Nissan Leaf barely gets any more range than the GM EV1 from 20 years ago, and does not charge any faster either??

The difference now is that we have Tesla. Without Tesla I'd bet there would be no electric cars on the road today. Their existence has scared the other car companies to start developing the technology they should have had 20+ years ago. Over the next 20 years you are going to see progress in electric vehicles the way you have seen progress in cell phones and laptop computers over the past 20 years.

 

What I think a lot of people forget when it comes to battery powered vehicle's though is the pollution may not be coming out of the tail pipe but the pollution caused by mining all the copper is a lot. Also the electricity going into it is most likely coming from a coal burning power plant which is still causing pollution, just not out of the tail pipe. Also batteries need to charge, its not "gas and go". Until the US starts using more efficient less polluting nuclear power instead of coal and natural gas either way you're making some type of pollution some where.

 

As we have seen, nuclear power has managed to cause quite a bit of pollution. How about solar, wind, hydro??

But yes you are correct that using energy from a coal burning power plant to charge your electric car is still causing pollution. However, electric motors are much more efficient than gasoline motors, so even still there is less pollution with an electric car. The rating they give electric cars in MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) is a good indicator of that.

 

The main reason for the phone situation you referred to is due to phone manufacturers reducing the amount of power the phone uses in order to complete tasks. The major problem is that we haven't really progressed the technology in batteries.

 

You still produce half the emissions from an electric car per mile over an internal combustion engine. Alot of the anti electric car talk isn't well based on facts. Your current car has about the same amount of wiring as an electric car. The extra labour from mining usually has to do with the lithium or NiMH batteries, which to be honest is not as bad if done properly as some of our current oil retrieval processes.

 

If everyone would just run a heavy water or liquid metal reactor neither the Chernobyl accident nor the one in Japan would of happened. Instead most countries build the cheaper light water reactors which have less safety features built in by design.

 

To be honest, I don't know a whole lot about nuclear energy, but from what I have read the same system used in Japan is currently used in a number of reactors in the United States. Apparently the way the French do nuclear energy is the safest.

 

Thats another problem that we face is that the money to power ratio when it comes to wind and solar isnt enough to be worth it yet. Unless you have acres of land or put down solar panels or windmills it just doesnt justify the cause. Like the people putting solar panels on their roof I feel are generally wasting money because they'll never earn back the money it cost to put them up not to mention the complications now if you need to repared your roof. If they could progress solar technology to the point where one of those large panels could be shrunk down to the size of a shingle and create the same amount of power then we'd be able to put them on every roof and really create a decent amount of power where you'd only be using grid power at night. Also nuclear power is extremely efficient and safe when done correctly, its amazing how much power one small piece of material can make.

 

I'm not sure where you get this information from, but here in New Jersey it doesn't actually cost anything to put solar panels on your roof. You pay nothing down, and you lease the panels for a monthly fee. And instead of you paying the power company for power, they send you a check each month for the surplus power that you put back into the system. In the end you get a net savings as the difference in the power bill is less than the monthly lease cost of the solar panels.

About 25% of the homes in my neighborhood have solar panels now, and every few months I see another one adding them. The only downside I have heard is that some people think they are ugly and therefore they may lower the value of the home.

 

Nope, the Candu design and the new liquid metal thorium reactor technology are by far the safest. Look into them and it's easy to see why they are safer but they are 20-40 percent more expensive per reactor. The USA, Japan, Russia etc all use cheap old light water reactors which are prone to accidents if the control rods fail to stop the reaction.

 

Most likely if thats the case where you are it because the company is getting a tax break or something since in the end nothing it free. If solar power was really that effient as a power to cost ration you would see solar power pants that just have thousands of panels that sell power to power company's but you dont because a power plant can make more money burning coal.

 

Yes, they can make more money by burning coal. But they could still be profitable if they did solar. But they don't bother because they want to maximize profit. But you don't need power plants. You can just get these solar panels on your roof and like I said, there is no cost. You just lease them and pay monthly and you will save more on your power bill than the monthly payment for the panels will be.

And yes, the solar companies do receive tax breaks. But that is not something unique to the solar industry. For decades oil companies received the biggest tax break any industry ever had which was called the Oil Depletion Allowance.

 

Or they could even burn natural gas, which is plentiful and has lower emissions than coal. Like you said though, it's all about profit.

 

And ignored