Electric cars still won't be fully integrated (especially in America) until they can meet the requirements for roadtripping. I could purchase an electric car for my commuting, but if I decided to go home to see my parents, it would turn a 7 hour drive into a 2-3 day drive depending on how long the car takes to charge. That or I'd have to pay to upkeep more than one vehicle which is not cost effective.

They can also set a time in advance for the heater or air conditioner to turn on. This will slow the drain on the battery from the climate control system.

I don't understand that statement. Why set it to turn on at all? Wouldn't you only want to run it when you're actually IN the car?

Southern, if you go to work at 7 every morning, the car would be cool as you got into it, versus waiting for the ac to kick in as you are driving. It would run while plugged in.

I saw on Top Gear the other day that the apparent solution to the oil problem is hydrogen powered cars. They do all the same sort of things current cars do except pollute. With electric cars, most of the power comes from nasty stuff like coal, so the clean factor with them is a bit of lie.

@Oranges w/ Cheese - now with 50% more kitty!: If this is something you only do a few times a year (or, in my case, once every few years), wouldn't a rental make more sense?

@Oranges w/ Cheese - now with 50% more kitty!: ...actually, if car insurance sold by the mile gets more popular, that might encourage folks to get in the habit of renting longer-haul vehicles for road trips anyhow.

@Oranges w/ Cheese - now with 50% more kitty!: Or if you were driving a plug-in hybrid like the Volt, you could continue as normal.

@orielbean: OK, that makes sense if you have a set schedule.

So Ford and Mitsubishi invented the programmable electric timer?

@Chmeeee: Agreed, this is the best benefit to a hybrid such as the Volt, having the choise of it being all electric or (on longer hauls) running on the generator.

Well, unless they perfect the Air Car, anyway. :)

@Southern: Maintaining the cool/heat level takes less power than actually getting the car to that temp. Also, if you get it to that temp while it is plugged in, your not draining the battery to do it, thus you can run the car longer on a charge.

Personally, I would rather get there and back than be air conditioned.

I suppose just turning off the air and rolling the windows down would have an even bigger impact on drive time.

@Southern: This is what I get for not reading the following posts before making a comment...

@LeoSolaris: Leaving the windows open increases air resistance and actually reduces mileage. I would guess that it would use more power in an electric vehicle as well.

I hope that they make charging cars as easy as the EU is making charging cellphones. One adapter. What if you had a Prius and an Escape in the same household and they were plugin? Gimme a universal plug for hybrids. Make it simple.

@Oranges w/ Cheese - now with 50% more kitty!:

The answer is fast-charge batteries (10 minutes to a 90% charge), which have already been developed and demonstrated, and are already on the market to a limited extent - the world record EV speed was recently set using fast-charge Altairnano batteries, for instance.

The high-powered chargers required won't be for home use (at home, you would still charge overnight), but would be very handy at service stations for long trips.

@Apeweek: There are some real engineering problems with those, mainly: Where do you get all that power so quickly? It's something that will develop gradually with the technology. For now, plugin hybrids look to be more practical for long trips.

However, that's not to say there is no work being done on the technology. A team at MIT is working on a mod on a Mercury Milan hybrid they're calling "elEVen," where they strip out the gas engine, add more batteries, build a rapid charging system, and manage a range of 150 miles and a full charge in eleven minutes.

Here's a blog post from the team explaining the feasibility of the technology. If you're interested in the project, go ahead and check out the rest of the blog. It's cool to see college kids building what we're used to hearing Detroit say can't be done.

[mit-evt.blogspot.com]

@Oranges w/ Cheese misses her boyfriend who's in michigan: It's been proposed that electric cars could carry trailers that have a gasoline or diesel generator on them. This is a good option, as it lets you use the car you're familiar with, and you can just rent the generator for when you need it. That way, there's no excessive upkeep. It probably wouldn't be as efficient as a dedicated hybrid, but that's not the point. The rest of the time, your car is much more efficient because it doesn't have to carry around an engine block you don't need.

@H3ion: Actually, it depends on the circumstances. It increases the drag coefficient, but that matters more at high speeds. Below about 35-45 miles in most cars, the windows are more efficient than the air conditioner. Granted, your mileage may vary.

Some luxury cars and the new Prius have solar ventilation fans on the roof that run air through the interior. Since the stagnant air heated by the sun is what gets hot and makes leather seats too hot to sit on, this is usually just enough to make the car bearable for people to get inside. It also keeps groceries cooler. The car doesn't get cold, it just reaches ambient temperatures rather than oven-like temperatures.

As for why it runs, cars that have leather seats can get very hot in the summer in some regions (that's why I cheap out and use cloth upholstery), so people want their cars cooled off before they get in. The battery packs also benefit from being kept in a certain temperature range to keep at safe operating temperatures.

@Vandelay Import Export: There's a problem with hydrogen cars. They're still pretty far off, somewhere around 10-20 years for consumer models that are still affordable, and there's many engineering issues.

There are only a handful of hydrogen stations, and hydrogen cannot be trucked as easily as gasoline. A tanker truck can hold about 40 fill-ups of gasoline, but only 10 fill-ups of hydrogen. With a range of only about 280 miles per tank in the Honda FCX Clarity, that means you need to stay within a 140 mile radius of the nearest hydrogen station. Meanwhile, we already have an electricity grid that can support 20 million electric cars with no improvements or modifications. As not everyone will switch over at once, that means there will be time to expand and adapt the grid.

There's also the major issue of where the energy comes from. It takes a lot of energy to manufacture hydrogen, and it must be made, as it is so light that it will actually float out of the atmosphere in a natural setting. So, petroleum, coal, or renewable energy must be used to electrolyze water to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. This means that hydrogen is a battery more than a fuel, and it's less efficient than existing battery technology. The theoretical limit for hydrogen efficiency will not be more efficient than current batteries, either. It'd be smarter to use that same energy to power lithium ion batteries batteries. A hydrogen car is actually dirtier than an electric car, and only a bit cleaner than a gasoline car.

Even from a 100% coal grid (the grid is actually something like 50% coal, 30% nuclear, and 20% other, IIRC), an electric car is cleaner than a gasoline car because a generator at a power plant has less design constraints and more regulations than a gasoline engine. Plus, there is the engineering reality that you can't fit a scrubber on a car's tailpipe that works nearly as good as what's at a coal plant. Considering that an electric car uses energy more efficiently than a hydrogen car, this means that by your logic, the hydrogen car is an even bigger "liar" than an electric car when it comes to green cred.

Top Gear is somewhat biased against electric cars and hybrids. In a recent review of the Honda Insight, one of the guys from Top Gear complained that the CVT didn't make manly enough engine noises because it didn't change gears.

Here's an analysis of the episode where they discussed hydrogen cars (which are more similar to electric cars than gasoline cars): [www.treehugger.com]

@TVarmy: Shoot, I didn't realize how long that was. Sorry about that. I get a bit frustrated when I see people make a case for hydrogen cars that isn't quite accurate. The oil and car companies often have used hydrogen to divert funds away from more practical green projects to uphold the status quo, which is why the Obama administration has cut back the subsidies for hydrogen cars.