Electric cars and your thoughts on them

i bought this up on a another survival website and it became nightmare post with everyone not staying on the subect about the basic electric vehicle for you personal use if something like peak oil did happen and you where forced to go to something like a small electric vehicle for personal transport for you and the family ..

plus i know everyone says to get a bike also but the idea behind this one is for just in case ..

part of the idea i have had is that somewhere down the line gas is going to go through the roof and iam not going to be able to afford it even with a small smart car as basic daily driver if i need to go someplace..

as part of the plan i would like to have on the land as a electric vehicle chargeing station that is part car garage or port and battery stowage area and solar panel on the roof style like the one guy post here about his set up with the roof mounted panels ..

the system would have a six to ten large wattage panel set up to charge the one set of batterys need to recharge the electric vehicle over night and then let the sun recharge the batties for next time the car is need to be charge ..

as a single person who does not go more than about 20 miles round trip from the house inless it for work ..i was looking at the future and wondering if a small electric vehicle stashed at the house would be a good idea

also i understand that a family would need a larger car or vehicle but as a single person and no one to have to haul around but myself in the car i was looking at something like this as a daily driver for trips into town for supplies or just get out of the house and go and vist friends in the area . ..

 

do you have a massive solar array to recharge it post SHRF? If not, what good is it.

 

the solar array seems to me to be a higher priority than the car itself. JMHO

 

I've been thinking about a Zap electric car, it might be useful for going to the little village, about 10 miles round trip. My main concern is the lack of ground clearance to handle snow and deep muddy ruts when Spring comes here in the PNW.

 

Not to derail tye discussion but i've contemplated trying to match a old 650 motor cycle with a 4 seat sand rail.... remove the rear end and modify it to a three wheeler... i figure low cost and pretty good gas milage.... any thoughts?

 

the power need to recharge the car battery system is basic 12 volt to recharge the system battery bank and it should be a saight charge system from the bank systen and and the large sized wattage solar panel system should recharge the batties of the bank without a problem for it over will need to be charge once or twice a week for a full charge

plus the way the new electric cars are beening design for the socalled future they are going to be runned off a home solar power system and not a electrical power grid system

two of the cars i seen so far can be powered by a standard six 185 wattage solar panel system with a sized battery bank of 8 battery in the bank and power charge station to plug the car into at a home off grid power station and that will power the car three times in one week ..

they are bringing out the next series of the cars here in the middle of the year and next couple of years on those cars and there batties system ..

so maybe in the next two years we will see more info how much it

the military is also workiing on a four wheel drive ATV for use in snow and muddy type areas and i guess the propler tires and gound clearance is going to be a must on the unit and not getting into those areas where a it could get a vehicle stuck or have problems ..

the reason behind not haveing a another gas powered vehicle is going to be the raiseing price of gas because of liveing on a fixed income ..

 

a update on this post..

there is a gentlemen from the Neveda area is going to be useing solar only as a way to recharge the socalled electric car set up in the next couple of months when is all electric car is bought home from the dealership ..

 

Agreed. A lot of people don't understand the limitations of an all electric car, which are actually rather severe.

F'rinstance, if you live in a cold climate you need heat for your feeties and for the defroster. Without internal combustion to generate the heat, you're powering elements with your battteries. There goes your range. Second is the problem you have with recharge time, which is measured in hours. Third is the issue of when to recharge - there's a lot of excess capacity in the grid at night, but charging during the day would become a real burden if very many people bought these things Fourth is the weight issue - with all those batteries on board, how much capacity is left for people and cargo? Next is range, and you're spending a lot on a car that's useless for road trips. Finally, charging one of these with a solar array requires 1) a large array, and 2) being home to keep it plugged in during the day.

I prefer the idea of a plug-in hybrid. There are aftermarket "tuners" putting NiMH battery packs in the Prius. You charge them at night and they get over 100 MPG in around town commuting, which is fabulous. If you need to go somewhere, they still get around 40 on the highway, and you can drive as many hours as your back and caffeine can handle. When you can have all that for the same price as an all-electric, the choice is obvious.

 

wouldn't an EMP make this car worthless ?

 

at this point, it's not really about wasting energy. It's about finding a sideways move into electric cars. If we cared about energy "that much", we wouldn't be burning fuel to power our cars at such a horrendous loss of efficiency as it is.

I just want to clear that up. We're not, nor were we ever, looking for a 1:1 conversion or even close to it, no matter how nice it would be. We've been looking for a replacement for our current system that pulls us off oil and allows for an easy or easier transition from our current infrastructure to the new one. Having better efficiency than fuel is just a value add at this point.

I think once people get past the notion that we're in the game with an extremely low conversion rate, then we might see some faster progress. ****, how much energy do we lose refining and then transporting fuel just so we can pump it in our cars. It's not about conversion, it about just getting something to power our vehicles.

 

yes it will and it destory the socalled electrical system that the car use ..but as a person looking to get off the socalled grid and maybe the electric car or a combo of both maybe the wave of the future

iam basically looking at the diff modes of transport that is now comeing to light as we get farther down the road ..

 

From where and from what was never my point. I don't know how else to explain it other than "take item x, and turn it into fuel to run my car". There will always be a cost associated, so I'm not sure what your point is there. I just think people are too wrapped up in some unrealistic conversion rate. Of course if it's a ridiculously low rate, it probably won't make it to market, but that's also market factors driving that.

 

I would look into it very carefully before I bought an all electric car for shtf reasons, Even a 10 hp motor would take around 10kw to run, I haven't looked into the actual requirements but I would guess that what ever the car manufacture states would be under ideal conditions ( I have never seen a battery powered anything last as long as what is stated). I have thought about a hybrid though mainly because it would be the perfect power station and could run just about anything you needed with a little ingenuity. Seem like most people on these survival sites put a lot of faith in solar systems as if they will last forever, They start downgrading as soon as light starts hitting them and after a few years they will not be putting out there rated capacity (this seem like a dirty little secrete that the solar panel companies don't want to talk about). When ever the government tell people what a good thing something is, its time to do your own research. Another thing to think about on an all electric car is they may have a very bad resell value after a few years because nobody will want to be stuck with the price of replacing the battery (I believe over 2000 dollars).

 

#1....Can you repair the gas powered vehicle you own now? If not, do you think Joe Shadetree is going to be any help? How about parts? How about Mark Autotech around the corner? Does he have the Tech support and experence to trouble shoot the complex modules and sensors on an all electric car let alone a hybrid? Not trying to be mean but these are things that have to be thunked over. I am an automotive tech and I even worry that when TSHF that I will even be able to repair less than 25% of the current vehicles out there without computer and tech support!

 

Robryan - only the cheap PV modules from places like Harbor Freight degrade rapidly in the sun. The name brand modules are an entirely different technology that performs consistently for decades. I say that with confidence because they already have performed consistently for decades. (You might want to look into their guarantees, and talk to actual users...)

My criticism of PV solar is this: in terms of embedded energy (the energy it takes to manufacture them) the energy they return over two or three decades is not much greater than what it took to build them. In essence, all you're doing is putting a bunch of today's energy into a savings account and withdrawing the interest in a different form over the years.

And you are correct that they will wear out. Someday. Eventually. Decades from now. Since they don't grow back on their own, they're not an energy source I can call renewable. For the future of an entire society, they don't offer much hope, particularly since we are rapidly running out of the liquid energy we need to manufacture them. (Somehow, people manage to think and talk about "energy" as if it were all the same. Idiots.)

I've had this argument with the 'crats at NREL, which is near me. They're chasing the wrong holy grail. Being government funded, they research ever more exotic materials and chase higher and higher efficiencies. (Sadly, this is what people always do with government money, because there are no market forces demanding a marketable return.) That's interesting stuff, for sure, but it does nothing to further implementation.

What they should be pursuing is PV module technology that can be manufactured using the most abundant and least expensive materials, with the least amount of embedded energy and at very low cost. (These all go hand in hand.)

Give me PV modules that I can retail for a buck a watt, and I'll cover every suitable roof in metro Denver, and for that matter, everywhere else in the country. If I could pull that off, I'd be responsible for megawatts of affordable electricity. Who cares if it's only 10% efficient?

Anyway, for the individual survivalist, the whole solar equation is very different. PV offers survivalists the opportunity to leverage today's relatively cheap energy forward, decades into a future where distributed energy will likely become a scarce and expensive luxury, if not entirely unavailable. Those who do not position themselves now to be grid-independent have a far dimmer hope of surviving the chaotic collapse that looks more and more likely every hour. (A certainty, in my book.) Among the eventual survivors, we, the prepared, will have a shot at better lives and a higher degree of independence than the rest of the "society" that grows out of this mess - whatever that looks like.

 

energy is energy and it takes a certain amount to move a car. A smaller, lighter car will take less energy to move and be less safe to operate.

Electricity is not a replacement for fossil fuels, it is not energy- it is a method of moving energy from place to place and storing it. Gasoline is another method. The energy still has to be produced somewhere using some chemical, mechanical or thermal conversion. Even if you had an electric car you'd be burning electricity that had been created in a power plant that very likely runs on coal. And you won't be getting the full energy, as some is lost getting it to you. And your immature technology vehicle won't use it to it's best advantage. AND you'll be uncomfortable and inconvenienced, the greatest assets of these deathtraps so you can feel like you're sacrificing to do your part.

What's the disaster in recycling dinosaurs? The earth needs them? Gimme a break.

When it's what you want, because it's the best choice, that's when you should buy an electric car. Not until.

 

polaris makes a utv that is totally electric and does 25mph it's 4x4 and has i think 12" of ground cleaRANCE. I THINK THEY CALL IT THE EV OR EUV. sorry for the caps my button got stuck