Update to Post #1
Electric Car Progress - The News Hour
RICK WAGONER (GM Ceo): “We've watched with admiration as to what Tesla is doing. It's fine if you're making 1,000 or 2,000 of an electric car, but it's not going to have a big dent in oil consumption in the country or CO-2 emissions. What's going to have a big dent is if you can do 100,000, 200,000, 500,000, a million units.
. . .
“We had about 100 years of an auto industry in which 98 percent of the energy to power the vehicles has come from oil. We're really going to change that over the next time period, things like battery development and applying batteries to cars, as we're planning on doing with the Volt, is an important step, kind of, in the next 100 years of the auto industry.”
GM Volt - Reuters
GM Volt - The Seattle Times
“Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a prominent Boston consultancy, estimates that if the entire U.S. vehicle fleet suddenly became electric, gas consumption would drop 70 percent, and electric-power consumption would jump about 17 percent.
“‘It's not that big a hit for the electric-power industry’, said CERA consultant Patricia DiOrio.”
. . .
Robert Lutz, GM's vice chairman and head of product development, said “‘If the U.S. is going to electrify its car fleet in a clean manner, without burning much more coal, windmills and solar farms are not enough’.
“‘The only real option is nuclear energy’, he said. However, not a single nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. in decades.”
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I helped to build the last US nuke. I’m pleased to say it is still putting megawatts on the grid 20 years later.
By the way, the diesel-electric locomotives of Dagny fame have their axels turned by electric traction motors, which is what moves the GM Volt.
(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 6/26, 5:27am)
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