Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

I really enjoyed your editorial about how you killed the electric car (DN 01.08.07, “I Killed the Electric Car,”). For some time now, I've been expecting some service stations to start offering an electric car battery swap so that you would only have to wait a few minutes instead of hours for a re-charge. But, then again, the electric cars were probably not designed for a quick battery swap and in any case it may be the problem of the chicken and the egg.

Clifford Kelley
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

EV Failed Because of Poor Marketing

The demise of the electric car was more a failure of marketing than of technology. At its state of development and the available infrastructure, it could not serve as a general purpose automobile to do both daily commuting and the annual vacation tour. The effort to imitate a general purpose automobile by extending the range and the performance added greatly to the cost and still didn't solve the problem. It should have been leased in a package that included easy access to the alternative vehicles that make up the other 10 percent of our needs. If the lease included 21 days of access to minivans, pickup trucks and other vehicles, most people could have used it successfully. The cost savings from cutting the range to 50 miles could have offset the cost of making the other vehicles available. The marketing team failed to change the rules of the game by accepting its limitations and countering with a different ownership model. We can argue if GM truly did not have a will to succeed, and therefore were not motivated to come up with a solution, but we will never really know.

Having said all that, we are still waiting for the diesel hybrid that burns bio-diesel and very little of it. That could really make us energy independent without any huge leaps of technology. Imagine the economical car that also serves as a practical emergency generator when the power goes out. Maybe you park this beside your otherwise solar-powered house and it solves the rainy day problems that make a solar home a 90 percent but not 100 percent solution.

Wayne E. Kelsoe, PE
Bellingham, WA

38 Years Old and Still Running

I was reading the 12.11.06 Design News and read about the refrigerator in the letters. (DN 10.23.06, “Mike's Hard Lemonade, Rust and Bad Product Design,”).

In 1968 my dad was sent to Saigon and purchased a then unknown brand name (Hitachi) apartment size refridge for his BOQ room. He brought it back with him in 1969 and used it the basement for a while. My brother took it with him when he joined the state police. He was drafted and I ended up with it and drug it back and forth to college for six semesters, used it in pop up campers, etc. To make a long story short, this little refridge has many miles and moves on it and in 38 years has had no repair work on it and still works very well. The white shell is scratched and has rust streaks in the scratches but nowhere else.

Bruce Neumann
Hagerstown, MD

Nothing goes to the landfill

I loved reading the mail bag about the short lives of appliances. I live by the motto of “Fix Everything”... at least I try before I trash it.

My wife has a 20-year-old Black-n-Decker mixer that quit as she was making cookies. It quit responding to inputs. The digital display worked, but the buttons for Speed and Timer didn't. Found out that the wafer thin membrane was cracked going from the main printed circuit board to the buttons. There was no way to fix this membrane as it is so thin and it just has copper traces coated onto the plastic. So, I made my own switches and wiring and carried it outside the machine. It works like a champ and allowed her to finish her baking.

By day, I am a Flight Test Instrumentation Engineer on the F22 Raptor for Lockheed Martin. By night, I fix TVs, VCRs, Stereos or anything electronic as a hobby in my basement laboratory.

I am always amazed at how a bad solder joint, a cracked PCB, or a simple component failure will render a perfectly good piece of equipment useless. From years of repairs, I estimate that 85 percent of my fixes are simply bad solder joints .... so why not tear it open and give it a look?

Nothing goes to the landfill unless I say it can't be fixed!

Lenny Haney
Powder Springs, GA