| Re: About six times as expensive....
Ron Ruff wrote:
> Provided that they are quiet and produce less polution, I'd say fine.
> They can be reasonably quiet if well muffled, but I doubt very much
> that they would be less polluting than an electric... especially if the
> electricity is produced in a non-polluting way.
What kind of power are you talking about here? Nuclear?
> Even if not,
> powerplants are much cleaner than car engines. Plus, batteries are
> recycled.
Well firstly--I explained that when you operate an electric vehicle over
the long-term, the MAIN cost is not the electricity itself, but in
disposing and buying new batteries as they expire.
Secondly--I am not too informed on the battery issue, so I don't have
much of an argument on that. It's even more complex because various
countries have different laws about the matter--but as I understood
it--lead-acid battery recycling (vehicle batteries, that is) in the USA
was not based on financial market principles, but it was made a
/legislative/ principle just to prevent lead from entering the
environment. If this is true, then there is money being lost on every
battery that is "recycled", because it would be more energy-efficient to
just toss the old battery in a trash dump and make a new battery than it
is to bother with expending the energy to recycle the old battery.
One perspective we could look at is what are long-term lead prices
doing? Over the last thirty years and adjusted for inflation--have lead
prices gone up, stayed steady or gone down? Because if they have gone
down, then most-certainly we are losing money by recycling lead at all.
> The huge industry that has developed around the IC engine for 100 years
> is what keeps their cost low, plus the low cost of the highly
> subsidized fuel.
And you think electricity production and distribution isn't subsidized?
> Electrics are inherently much simpler and less
> expensive... even if the present prices of the low-volume offerings
> does not support that.
>
How would you know this to be true, if no current or past evidence
supports it?
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