Dear '3 Auto making Companies' I need a good electric car!!!

[Rosa Luxemburg]

To the 3 CEOs who head the major auto companies in this country - Hello!

I need an electric car that will go at least 55 miles an hour on the Beltway and only cost me a few cents to run.

I need electric facilities so I can keep the car on the road.

By the end of 2009 I will expect that you will have even better versions.

By the end of 2009 the gasoline driven cars will become obsolete (just like the leaded gas - remember those days?)

YES WE CAN!!!!

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. I also need those 3 CEOs, the rest of the executives, and the boards of directors to fire themselves

and show some fucking honor.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

12. 3 private planes

the cost to run and staff them?

[Jack Bone]

2. Can the power grid sustain everyone plugging their cars in?

There are reasons why these things have not seen the market yet.

[napoleon_in_rags]

4. Interesting question. But that's why we need tiny "around town" cars.

like zapcars. The power grid won't sustain people moving their 120 pound asses around in 5 ton steel cages as they have been doing, that much is clear.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

13. well we need equivalents 'en electric' to those nasty gasoline cars

[Sebastian Doyle]

7. Self contained wind and/or solar powered charging stations

Seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to put something like that together, plug your car into it at night, and not impact the grid.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

8. Exactly

why haven't they come up with rechargable engines?

We are still in the dinosaur age!!!!

[TheWraith]

14. Sure. At night, a lot of our grid production goes unused.

You can't easily turn off a power plant, so we generate more or less the same energy at night that we do during the daytime peak, even though we're using less. It's enough to charge tens of millions of electric cars.

[Rabrrrrrr]

15. I would seriously doubt we could do it at this point.

However, not everyone is gonna get electric cars on the same day - by the time it evolves throughout America, I imagine the power grid will have also have been improved and enlarged along with it.

Hard to say, though - on the sad side, there are also a lot of liberals who fight the construction of new power plants, especially nuclear ones.

While I agree that power plants shouldn't be created willy nilly, and need some standards and whatnot, we should also be honest with ourselves that moving all vehicles to electric creates its own environmental issues and problems that we need to deal with.

Ideally, we would also be funding - and funding with SHITLOADS of dollars - research into new sources of energy, to make solar actually economically feasible, for instance, and wind power and, I suggest, forms of energy yet undreamed of.

It's time for this country to pump shitloads of dollars into alternative energy sources and let American ingenuity, know how, entrepreneurship, crazy ideas, and all around inventiveness have a go at the problem. I believe that if any country can do it in ten years, it's America. All we need is the will, the funding, and the reward.

[napoleon_in_rags]

3. I need an electric car I can afford. No freeway capability necessary.

I mean some little bubble that seats 2, goes 40 mph and gets me around town in place of my bike. I will rent a nice car or take train for long commutes on freeway. I want it to cost less than $4000. Transportation for this new economy where nobody is going to be able to afford anything.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

9. well they have to make something

it would be tragic to our auto workers - how many thousand to just say to them well sorry folks we're not making vehicles any more!!!

I mean, why can't we diverge also and perfect batteries. I want a battery like a watch battery that will drive a car or a trolley bus. Get working on it!

[napoleon_in_rags]

16. Agreed. But I hope they look at this bailout as an opportunity.

I don't mean to gripe about their bailout, as its 1/28th the banking bailout yet receives equal complaints...But we do need to make a quantum leap here. I think we've got to step beyond "car culture" as we've known it and embrace some strange things, like collaborative transportation(maybe rental maybe public) for long trips and hauling and light vehicles for around town. But I have a feeling that the resource crunch is here to stay, so the sooner we accept this kind of sweeping change the better. Basic physics dictates that the mass of the vehicle should be appropriate for the mass of its payload which rules out so many big cars and trucks. GM needs to look at competing with the $2300 Tata Nano right now.
http://tatanano.inservices.tatamotors.com/tatamotors/
And new efficient offerings for public tranport, special rental needs, logistics etc.

Once we are set up for the new infrastructure better batteries will follow.

[TheWraith]

5. The Chevy Volt looks fairly good.

The pure-electric range is only 40 miles, but that's enough for most people's commutes. Of course it's not coming out for another year.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

10. That's not good enough!

they need to get their act together and have a 500 mile range version out by next June.

What's keeping them?

[Sebastian Doyle]

6. You can get that right now...... but.....

It ain't from the big three, and it ain't cheap....



http://www.teslamotors.com/

[Rosa Luxemburg]

11. but that's our problem dear energy secretary to be......

we need to be ahead of the game!