Chevy Volt is impressive but far too expensive.

Chevy Volt gets an average of 60mpg starting from a full charge and has about a 380 mile range. It would be perfect for pretty much anything other than long drives and even there it's not bad. The problem is that it's $41,000 dollars for a small car and it's a GM car. Given how badly the fucked up the EV-1 and the Saturn line once it was absorbed back into the parent company, I really can't feel good about buying a GM car. Especially since they already got a shitload of my money against my will when the government bailed them out. But this is an innovative design...one I thought of and of course had no way of capitalizing on many years before GM.

For most people they would be able to do all their commuting and most of their in-city driving purely on electricity (assuming they install a charger in their house or have access to one for over night charging). The EPA says the all-electric equivalent mpg is 93. That's pretty damned good.

Let's compare a drive I do a few times a year in my Saturn SL1 to the drive in the Volt.
The trip is ~1000 miles and my Saturn averages about 37mpg on the interstate. I'll pick an arbitrary gas price of $3/gallon. So the trip costs me roughly $81 in the Saturn.

In the Volt assuming a full charge when leaving for the trip and the rest all the same I'd get 60mpg for the first 300 miles and then because I couldn't recharge the battery I'd get 37mpg for the rest of the trip. So that's $15 for the first 300 and $56 for the last 700 miles for a total of $71. My Saturn cost $13,000 or so and the Volt costs $41,000 (but you get a $7500 tax credit). So if all I was doing was driving long distance and all I was considering is the cost of driving that far, the Volt isn't worth it at all. Driving all interstate mileage I'd have to drive over 2,000,000 miles to make up for the difference in cost.

But of course there are many other factors involved so it's not that simple and of course if you use it as a commute car most of the time like most people would and if you have access to a plug each day then the volt only costs you on your electrical bill at an equivalent of 93mpg according to the EPA. And I only get about 30mpg in my Saturn when driving in the city. So there it would only take 300,000 miles or so of just gas costs to make up the difference in cost.

Of course, in my case I have solar panels. So the car isn't going to cost me anything in energy costs to drive on average over a year. But then any EV that is cheaper than the volt would be a better choice even if I have to rent a car every time I travel more than the range of the car. And most plugin hybrids (if they ever start making them) that is cheaper is likely to be a better deal.

So to me, while the design is cool and all, the Volt just isn't worth the money. I'd rather get a plugin hybrid toyota where I can tell it to just use electric for my commute, get almost as good mpg on a long trip as the volt and get a car brand that is radically more reliable in the long run.

What I really want is an EV that I can drive long distance, but I don't think we'll have those for a while yet. I'd certainly settle for an old style Saturn plugin hybrid, from the version of Saturn back when they first formed so that the cars were good quality relatively inexpensive cars that you could buy without dealing with sleazy sales people and get worked on without dealing with mechanics who were trying to get sell you the idea of getting a bunch of work done on your car that wasn't required, basically not having to deal with the cheating bastards I've mostly run into in car dealerships everywhere other than the old original Saturn dealerships.

But that certainly isn't going to happen...GM absorbed Saturn, Saturns sales dropped every year after that and their cars got shittier and shittier. They have possible the worst hybrid on the market and now the Saturn brand doesn't even exist anymore.

So if I'm lucky I'll end up with a Nissan Leaf or a Toyota Rav4 EV or some even better car when I have the money for a new car or when I'm forced to buy a new one when my 10 year old Saturn finally gives out.

I won't even speculate on when I'll be able to get a nice EV motorcycle like the Honda ST1300. At least some companies are making EV motorcycles so I have some hope.

(There's always a chance I'll make mistakes in basic math...if you see one let me know.)

Evolution

It's certainly a great example of evolution driving diversity to fill environmental niches, and there's no denying that it's likely to be the only reason that we few humans still exist, but I still find it creepy and weird to watch the ghouls hunting down and eating the zombies. Ghouls were just a myth and a part of popular roleplaying games as far as I knew before, but then so were zombies. Now it turns out we've got a thriving ecology pretty much world wide based on humans becoming zombies and ghouls eating zombies.

It's true ghouls will generally only eat zombies that are less than a week old or so, although they become considerably less picky when they get hungry, but since ghouls move almost as fast as humans and even fresh zombies can't out run healthy humans that means all we've got to do is cull the old slow zombies. Easy enough as long as you don't get cornered by a horde of them.

So now there are a few pockets of us humans. We encourage the ghouls to cull the zombies, and we apply a very strong evolutionary pressure to any ghouls that try to eat humans. There have even been some rudimentary attempts at domesticating ghouls but most people don't find that very appealing for long. If nothing else, the smell is...discouraging.

2012 Toyota RAV4 EV

Toyota RAV4 EV

I'm really happy to see all these EVs and hybrids hitting the market. Hopefully my excellent Saturn SL1 will survive long enough for me to be able to afford whichever EV/Hybrid I can fit in most comfortably.

like a solar hydrogen fuel cell

Lonnie Johnson appears to have invented a source of Solar Heat Electric Power. If it works it seems like it would be pretty amazingly efficient and this article makes it clear it works. I can't wait to see what kind of end product they produce. And if I'm reading this right the only part of it that is hard to make is the ceramic membrane so depending on the pressures involved it might not be difficult to just build one of those if you had the membrane.

6 minute charge delivers 375 mile drive

http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1050863_electric-car-drives-375-miles-at-55-mph-recharges-in-6-minutes