For Six Figures, I'd like 600HP, Carbon Fiber, Lithium Batteries, No Gas and Oh: 0-60 in 3.1 Seconds!

Consumers beware: your incremental electricity bill will skyrocket when you connect your plug-in hybrid to household current. The environmental impact of plug-in hybrids should be weighed against the environmental impact of having to generate all that extra electricity. The capital cost of hybrid ownership must include a healthy reserve for the purchase of expensive replacement batteries down the road. The best long-term solution is a hydrogen infrastructure and vehicles running on hydrogen generated by electrolysis of water using nuclear and solar power. In the interim, I'll place my bets on clean diesel power. Hybrids do not optimize life-cycle cost.
Don't be alarmed at the prospect of more nuclear power plants as there is a way to dramatically reduce our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste by harnessing their energy at the same time.

But wait a minute. What if you modified your home to support solar panels. This could reduce the costs of charging-up significantly. And depending on your location, wind generators could be used.

I agree however, that Hydrogen-based propulsion may be better in the Looong run. But electric power can be used now, going forward.

It's hard to argue against the performance and relative benefits of electric.

The efficiency and environmental impact of a small car engine vs. a dedicated powerplant isn't even close. Plus if we really got our act together we would invest in inherently safe pebble-bed nuclear reactor research and eventually replace everything with that.

a plug-in electric car does precisely NOTHING for the environment.

the majority of electricity in the US is still generated by COAL FIRED plants. driving a plug-in car just pushes the environmental damage out of the consumers' sight.

prius comes much closer to doing something good for the environment (of course, there's still the toxic nickel smelting and toxic battery to dispose of).

I agree with the above comments...

Also, there was a mistake in the article: they fudged the 0-60 times for the big sedans. It's FOUR POINT FIVE (S600) to 5.5 (LS) seconds to 60!

OK, 4.5 seconds 0-60, but only 12 MPG!

Yeah, i drive a 200k car and i sure care about the fuel costs.

No airbag, rear view window, blinkers. This car is illegal. Get this off the street like NOW.

I remember when Porche couldn't bring the 959 to the US because the bumpers didn't qualify and they hadn't performed the required crash tests. But it was still a beautiful and great performing car (at the time).

Rearview mirrors, airbags, turn signals etc can be fixed. But you'll never fix high horsepower, low efficiency, high polluting, over-priced and under-performing, gas-guzzling stale technology until you become open to fresh technology.

But this car will suck with all of the creature comforts.

Bill Gates got his 959 in somehow. ;-)

Great points on the cost of power to recharge your car. The cost of gas is actually cheap.

Cars use a LOT OF ENERGY, typically a lot more than our homes use, and when you see how many kilowats of electricity will need to dump into a car, the price of gas at the pump will seem like a bargain.

Green, Please, you're missing the point. The point is, it's going to cost more to charge your car than to fuel it up. I agree, I've done the math and it looks correct to me.

The cost of energy at your house per kilowatt is more expensive than the cost per kilotwatt if generated, in your car. The utility companies are a ipoff too, just like the oil companies/opec are.

You can generate your own electricity almost as cheaply as you can pay for it from the grid. A well designed 10kw diesel generator will produce power at about 9 cents per kilowatt in fuel. Large power, turbine driven power plants derving power form steam that's generated from coal, natural gas, or nuclear can make power at less than 2 cents per kilwatt, but after all the rip offs that come along with power, transmission, distribution, wholeselling, taxes, the cost rises to around 10, which is a ripoff, and will make the cost of "refuling" your electric car no less expensive to run, even with regenerative braking.

And the other point about "doing nothing for the environment" is true too, though one could argue that, per kilowatt, a large scale power plant is more efficient, and thus introduces fewer pollutants into the atmosphere, per mile, than a less efficient car.

In the end, this makes the case for nuclear and wind power sources even more compelling.

Wind or solar power at your home would be the answer to clean power to power your car! The whole car should have a solar panel covering the body to recharge when it is parked! I want something simular but safer/ larger. I want this teck to power a hummer H-1! (hate mail please)

If you were right, we would see internal combustion engines go away now. But you're wrong.

* Your equations do not mention anything about the weight of the apparatus that holds the electricity - the battery packs to hold all this electricity are very very heavy, and the efficiencies lost by the weight are tremendous, and are not reclaimed in regenerative breaking.
* Diesel is cheaper than electricity in it's stored energy, in fact it's almost half the price.
* There are diesel engines out there today that have 50% Thermal efficiencies, and that number is climbing rapidly.
* The cost of diesel will ultimately fall once biodiesel ramps up. In the next 10 years, you will see blends of 50%-100% biodiesel or more at the pump, and the prices will be lower.

These are the reasons why you will not see the exit of the Internal Combustion Engine for a long long time, unless fuel cell technology can make transporting hydrogen or electricity lightweight and compact.

$2.85 per gallon of diesel.
139,000 btu per gallon of diesel
=40.7 kwh per gallon of energy.
At .10 per kilowatt, this would cost you $4.07 to buy the same power in one gallon of diesel, at the meter. If you stored this in a battery, it's over $5. Charging efficiencies from a 240 volt AC tap have to be transformed (10% loss), then rectified (10% loss), then another 10% loss for charging (your 5% figures aren't realistic, and that doesn't even include the top-off charging you need to do to maintain the charge). This raises the price to $5.41 to purchase and store one gallon of diesel energy from the power grid at 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

Conclusion: Disel, at the pump and after all those taxes, is 30% less expensive than electricity. If you get the tax benefits of usinng bleonds or off-road B20/disel, costs are around $2 a gallon, which makes diesel more than 50% less expensive than electricity from the power grid.

I think green is making the point that once the costs of fuel are covered, the electric motor is soooo much more efficient than an internal combustion that you make up for the price differences many times over. Try finding a 95% efficient diesel engine... Typical driving only gets you about 20% with internal combustion and the most efficient engine I've ever heard of is only 52% and makes 108K HP. This is why he compared the cost at 200 miles rather than after fill up (which is what you did).

You can't give credit to one component of a system and then say it's the solution, if the system has flaws.

Yes, the electric motor itself is very efficient, I get that. But since you cannot attach a long extension cord to your car, what good is it? It's only good if you can power it. Batteries are friggin heavy. You've got to haul around batteries and weight and after all of that, you still need a power source to charge it, which is not that cheap when you consider that electricity costs almost $5 a gallon from your house to power your "battery barge".

To get the range you need, cannot charge up enough batteries and have the car light enough to get the efficiencies you need.

Sure, if regenerative breaking was 90% efficient, that would solve this because all that weight doesn't matter when you can recover the kinetic energy to get the barge in motion. Sure, if batteries were light, then no problem.

But even so, ELECTRICITY is expensive too, and when you factor in the efficiency losses of powering a battery barge, it will cost you MORE to charge your car from home than to FUEL your car at the pump.

If Green's argument is correct, he will provide the weight of a battery power system that provides decent range (200 miles minimum). Then provide the amount of energy it takes on a typical 200 mile use of a car through stops and starts. This is easy to do by taking a gas car and reverse engineering the efficiencies from the MPG figures. Convert backwards the amount of power required to move that heavy of a car with any sized motor. Now tell me how much power that takes, multiply it by 10 cents per kilowatt and we have the REAL efficiencies of an electric car vs. the internal combustion engine.

You'll find that it's MORE expensive to power your electric car than to fuel your gas powered car.

I think you'll find that the Tesla roadster is less than 2,700 lbs. Hardly the behemoth that you claim battery powered cars need to be and remarkably less than most sports cars on the road. This car has a revised range of 200 miles and a 3.5 hour charge time. I have no idea what the power consumption is when not show-boating so determining how much a charge actually costs is a bit difficult. I'll start with my average fuel consumption to determine how much energy I use to commute. Say 20mpg is the average fuel use in one of my cars with similar horsepower (MB E430 -280ish). A gallon of gas is 36.63 kilowatt hours. Let's say I converted 25% of that energy into motion, I actually used .458 kilowatt hours for traveling 1 mile in distance. If you lose 10% in charging and 10% in the motor then it takes .565 kilowatt hours of "charge" to produce the same motion in the electric car. One gallon of gas is say $2.90, so that mile cost you $0.145 in the gas car while at $0.10 per kwh (mine is $0.06 btw), that same distance traveled would cost $0.056. The electric car is simply a clear cut winner in the per mile race. For environmental impact, my energy comes from hydro-electric and produces zero CO2 NOx, etc etc etc. I would need to investigate further into other power sources to see what the impacts are but my *guess* is they are more efficient than the internal combustion at producing energy and hence also pollute less per mile should an electric car be implemented.

I admit that there are some short comings in the electric car, namely the long charge time, but to make as sweeping a generalization to say electric cars cost more to run without actually showing the math is a bit premature. Green did no better but I understand where his argument lay. It is in fact that we *can* give immense credit to one component of the system (the motor) because the huge change in efficiencies compared to the small change in fuel costs.