I want to update my integra! It is a sweet car that I like to drive, but gas has got to go! Gotta be a leader to make a change!
If this is your reason to go electric then I don't agree. I believe the real change has not come yet and no need to suffer with inferior products meanwhile. By the real change, I mean that has not evolved as yet and a car that can't get out of it's own way and can only go if you are lucky that day, maybe 70 miles before it needs a charge is a poor excuse for a product. I believe that if someone is interested in "green" and being part of that movement, then huge cargo ships spewing 3/4 burned bunker oil cruising all over the world to deliver battery parts to be assembled in some location unknown to me because no one country wants to be the sole party involved in the manufacture of large scale lithium batteries is something that needs to change long before I give up my petroleum powered cars. Not to mention putting the same batteries to death. Cradle to grave impact finacially and to the environment on those things is possibly far more rediculous than anything petroleum powered.
Get a more efficient car, certainly, that's great. We breath the air that cars exhaust into. I work for a large company that has a fleet of 2200 vehicles between 17 locations. A couple of things have happened lately with them. They came and left with Toyota Prius Hybrids to go back to Ford Focus cars for sales staff. The tax break did not offset the added cost in vehicle purchase and the gas savings weren't there in that kind of business. The New Focus is rated at just under 40MPG highway, close enough considering the lower purchase price and less costly repairs ( incidentally the Mazda 3 is basically the same car and gets better mileage). Electric is just plain out of the picture, the sales staff could never finish a days work in one of those.
Another thing happening, is carbon monoxide detectors will not go off in the shops or warehouses with running vehicles in them. I took a monoxide detector and placed it right against the tailpipe of a Saturn Hybrid with the engine running and it did not go off. A propane power forktruck though will still set one off with fairly high numbers. It's OSHA LAW to have monoxide detectors thorughout all these commercial locations.
New diesel trucks are having a hard time passing inspection on emissions standards, not because they run with too much soot output but not enough to set the sniff machines to get a reading. All diesel trucks by law have to be sniffed for exhaust output ( emissions) to pass DOT inspection in this state and I suspect in the US, since DOT is federal. The way that is done is by running a snap test. A wand is put in the trucks exhaust with the engine idling. Traditionally, in the last 6 or 7 years or so there has never been a problem with emissions at idle, it's when the engine revs up off idle that the output comes and that has had to be within a certain standard. It's why you don't see newer diesel trucks spewing the black cloud you used to see. Well the new breed of diesels in the big trucks today produce not enough change in emissions from idle to off idle for the machine to detect the change, which is read as no change. So no snap to higher emissions is detected and it's an automatic fail as if the snap never occured= same result, failed.. They can fail on too high an emission reading or no snap ( if you get all that ).
For the time being, IMO, petroleum is still the best we have out there and we are not putting much at all for emissions out of todays petroleum powered vehicles, you would be hard pressed to snuff yourself in the garage with todays cars, in fact I'd wager that you could not if the garage is at all loose and breathing. I remember not so long ago you could approach the city of Boston from the north in August and see a huge brownish cloud hanging there downtown. When you got there it smelled discusting and it burned your eyes. Today you don't see that. The cars and trucks are cleaned up that much. You may see a humid summer haze but that brown cloud is gone.
All that said, long ago I stated to co workers that we are long overdue for the reciprocating internal combustion engine to go away. When something truely viable comes along as that replacement I hope it runs and stops the car as well because I think friction brakes are totally rediculous too. Magnetic field braking is a dream of mine , I hope it comes along in my lifetime. Magnetic field propultion would be a neat thing, probably questionable if that might happen in my lifetime but neat.. Ships spewing crap all over the world delivering battery parts to some place, then not being able to dispose of the battery efficiently, to me is rediculous. Running power plants to charge electric car batteries that can't get very far down the road and that same powerplant has to charge the battery again, to me is rediculous as well.
So that's my green rant.
On another note, take a look at the VW Diesel Passat and the Mazda 3. Both with stick shifts, they produce good mileage ratings. In fact over seas from the US where FYI, emission standards are lower than here, the VW Passat has shown nearly 70 MPG. It drives like a gas engine , is clean burning, with the stick it's peppy and just fun to drive. The Jetta is good too but less mileage for some reason. There are 7+ billion people in the world and a few thousand buying electric cars. I'm telling you it has not evolved yet. I wouldn't even consider buying one unless they were viable and the masses thought so as well.
Topic: Any car nerds on here?