I worked at GM 25 years ago, and upper management couldn't make good business decisions then. Why should now be any different.
And, really, the only thing wrong with electric vehicles is that they still can't think outside the same box they've been stuck in for the last 50 years. That's not just GM, that's the entire auto industry.
The way they should be building electric cars is to put an electric motor in each wheel. That gets rid of most of the drive train: transmission, clutch, driveshaft, differential, u-joints, all of the stuff they're used to, plus gives you AWD and regenerative braking. Put in enough batteries to handle acceleration and hills, with maybe a 40 mile range on battery power. Then put a small engine under the hood, using gas or CNG or alcohol or whatever, matched to a generator large enough to keep that vehicle moving at a constant 70 mph, + maybe 10%. That engine would be optimized to run at constant speed, constant load. That would make it a lot easier to get good fuel economy.
But they're stuck with the idea that all the motive force comes from under the hood, and has to be distributed through the same mechanical interface we've been using for decades.
Naperlou. Thanks for a voice of sanity on the education issue. Most parents don't really have a clue how the public education system operates. Having spent four years on the local school board in a high-performing public school district I can safely say that just about everybody has an opinion on how to fix the school system. The fact of the matter is that schools have about 35 hours per week with our children over nine months each year. Parental involvement in the education process has a bigger effect, by far, than individual teachers in promoting educational engagement. We need to educate parents as well as kids that reading, discussing social issues, demonstrating critical thinking and showing an interest in learning are all good things. Communities, more than big industrial companies probably have a bigger role to play in making this happen.
Antarctica is also having massive melt off and calving of huge sections of what used to be the stable ice shelves. It is true that the total amount of ice in Antarctica is increasing instead of decreasing, but that is only because there is so much more snow fall on the insulated land mass. Which also is proof of global warming.
There is no warming cycle. We are supposed to be entering another cooling cycle according to the historical records, hundreds of years ago.
Yes there was concern over global cooling at one time, but that was because of particulates and aerosols that were blocking sunlight. We used catalytic converters to reduce the dimming problems, and thus accelerated the warming problems. There can be no doubt it is a fact. No one is getting any money off global warming.
The Northwest Passage has not been open for thousands of years until now. Take your head out of the sand.
That's correct, I don't believe it. I have not drank the cool aid. Antarctica has record amounts of ice build and several sources have sited that the warming cycle ended 10 years ago and are driven predominately by the sun, you know that hot ball in the sky that provides all our heat. When I was in the government public indoctrination center 40 years ago they were preaching a new ice age coming or global cooling. We are being conned to separate us tax payers from more of our money. Be a fool if you like.
GM's private CEO was fired by the current and I hope soon former President of the United States and the company in essence is now ran by a political hack. They can not make good business decisions because of the bondage involved with bailout funding and continued union obligations bought with that funding. The list of failed "green" energy companies is getting longer each day and the closer GM stays tied to this go-electric mantra, they are also doomed to failure and this time there will be no public funding support. The once great company was bailed out by politics and now is managed by the same so it is a political corporation. I don't buy into the "Global Warming" hoopla and the CO2 malarkey. CO2 is green the more there is the better things grow. We were lied to. We were lied to about the fossil fuels supply and the false hyper environmental effects by the likes of Al Gore and James Hanson, who are two more political hacks. Lets please return to a real free market and allow the consumers choose what they want and allow the manufactures to provide without centralized government interference. I want you all to read the posts of how we must somehow force people into these areas of education. Does this not sound like a communist management style of a people? Certainly is not how we were founded.
No, one rarely drives to the mountains and forests, so that has nothing to do with what we need in our daily driver cars. There are lots of other solutions to the weekend car. It could be rented, have a temporary generator trailer attached, have batter exchanges, have highway overhead cables, or dozens of other possible solutions.
The point being that we should not be trying to replace current gasoline cars with an identical electric car. We should be optimizing much more, and not try to make one car be such a multipurpose vehicle. We can't afford to do that because oil is not going to be available eventually. For example, most cars are occupied by only one person, so then most cars should be built for a single occupant.
The problem is not students or education. We know how to make good electric cars. We don't have to import talent, because we already have more than enough excellent talent in the US. The problem is that manufacturers refuse to make good cars. They refuse to address the problems with the current electric vehicle designs.
The batteries are too expensive and risky, so should be rented and exchanged instead. The cars are too heavy, and should be all aluminum, kevlar or carbon fiber. There are no standards, so batteries and other parts can not be exchanged or stocked. There is no infrastructure for extending range, such as battery exchanges, overhead cables on the highways, or rentable generator trailers.
The problems are all easily fixed, so clearly the real problem is the manufacturers don't want to fix them, and are just trying to maximize profits on their old technologies.
By experimenting with the photovoltaic reaction in solar cells, researchers at MIT have made a breakthrough in energy efficiency that significantly pushes the boundaries of current commercial cells on the market.
In a world that's going green, industrial operations have a problem: Their processes involve materials that are potentially toxic, flammable, corrosive, or reactive. If improperly managed, this can precipitate dangerous health and environmental consequences.
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