Submitted on October 29th, 2007 by InterestedReader
This scheme has so many obstacles, I'm amazed that
someone was able to get investors to cough up $200 million. The only obstacle to all-electric cars is not, as this startup thinks, the limitations of driving range.
Its also the cost of batteries, which this scheme actually makes worse, by throwing in the massive overhead costs here of maintaining all these stations and battery packs. This is not reducing the costs of ownership of EVs, but increasing them. At best it simply
removes the cost of the batteries from the EV's purchase price, and makes the user pay as they go (whether they go anywhere or not). GM has already floated this idea for their range extended EV, but it's really not necessary, except possibly for the lowest economic groups. The other bad assumption here is that unless the fleet's power is all-electric (from the grid), there is a great loss by driving plug-ins (with 40 mile electric ranges instead). That's totally false - plug-ins with ranges of at least 40 miles can accomplish over 90% of the goals of an all-electric fleet, in terms of both emission and crude oil reduction. Most of the liquid fuel required can be supplied by biofuels at their current levels of production, making arguments in favor of all-electrics even less convincing.
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Lousy Idea for a business
Submitted on October 29th, 2007 by InterestedReaderThis scheme has so many obstacles, I'm amazed that
someone was able to get investors to cough up $200 million. The only obstacle to all-electric cars is not, as this startup thinks, the limitations of driving range.
Its also the cost of batteries, which this scheme actually makes worse, by throwing in the massive overhead costs here of maintaining all these stations and battery packs. This is not reducing the costs of ownership of EVs, but increasing them. At best it simply
removes the cost of the batteries from the EV's purchase price, and makes the user pay as they go (whether they go anywhere or not). GM has already floated this idea for their range extended EV, but it's really not necessary, except possibly for the lowest economic groups. The other bad assumption here is that unless the fleet's power is all-electric (from the grid), there is a great loss by driving plug-ins (with 40 mile electric ranges instead). That's totally false - plug-ins with ranges of at least 40 miles can accomplish over 90% of the goals of an all-electric fleet, in terms of both emission and crude oil reduction. Most of the liquid fuel required can be supplied by biofuels at their current levels of production, making arguments in favor of all-electrics even less convincing.