OK - why NOT an electric Pickup?????

[jwgary]

want to eliminate the engine fom the entire equation - COMPLETELY - No PONY engine - No $$$ and maintenance associated with owing an internal combustion engine - can you imagine No Oil/Fuel Filter Changes - No Fuel - well you get the picture and OPEC and Big Oil could KMA!!!!

I don't know that it will reduce petroleum consumption all that much. An internal combustion engine is normally around 35% efficient at turning fuel into usable power. A large-scale power plant can operate nearly twice that if it is designed properly (the co-generation plant on the UT Austin campus is in the 60-65% range). But then you have transmission line losses and inefficiencies in turning AC power into DC to charge the batteries and then the efficiencies of the motors. The efficiency will probably be better than with an onboard IC engine, but will you really gain all that much in the grand scheme of things.



I hadn't though about the aspect of no oil changes. There are still other maintenance issues, namely batteries. That's pretty ugly to me. I love the concept though.

 

[Gary - K7GLD]

I did a little research on a recently marketed electric vehicle a month or so ago, and while the short term usage in regards to cost per mile looked good, the factoring in of battery replacement at recommended intervals greatly eroded the running expense advantage - and that added to the short operating radius and overall size limitation of that vehicle, greatly reduced it's appeal - besides, it was expen$ive!



The reason most folks buy pickups, is to HAUL stuff - which requires more power and range than the typical commute vehicle - and that in turn will require more power, more batteries, and a radical upward adjustment of vehicle cost. And of course, all the related downsides related to range, speed and power still must be dealt with.



With current technical manufacturing capabilities, and at a cost anywhere NEAR reason for common folks, I just don't see it happening on anything near a large scale...

 

[Jim Smith]

Chrysler also I think. I also remember from days at work that a constant running small diesel engine could power an electric type vehicle very efficiently.

 

[DJW]

I am not into engine design, but I was told owing to the method of introducing fuel into the cylinders of a gasoline engine, if the compression is say 10 to 1 that's only when it's at full throttle, otherwise the running compression is much lower, there has been engine designs of constant compression ratios, but wether they were successful or not I was not told. If fuel is cheap extreme engineering is off the list, but it has been debated for years. It's claimed why diesel engines are so efficient is because cylinders open to maximum amount of air, and not Throttled.

 

[EKlem]

Electric vehicles do actually use much less energy than internal combustion vehicles. An internal combustion is somewhere around 25% efficient at peak efficiency which it almost never runs at. If you want a good comparison of energy usage, most electric vehicle competitions give you a score for mpg equivalence which is a conversion for how much energy the car is using. On the EV ranger that I converted, the mpg equivalence has been between 60 and 70mpg for its whole life as compared to about 20mpg when it had the gas engine. The beauty of an electric is that you can power it with green power either by buying green-E from the grid or producing your own through solar or wind.

Gary brought up the issue of cost which is often a hot topic in electric vehicles. The component that makes or breaks the cost is the batteries. Two of the electrics that I have built run lead acids and the entire battery pack cost approximately $3000 dollars and lasts 50,000miles. Some of the more exotic battery packs can be up around $20,000 which is very hard to stomach every 100,000miles or however often they need to be replaced. Even though the cost of batteries more than makes up for the cost saved in oil changes, the electric is still cheaper to operate. The electricity to power the our ranger 100 miles costs about $3. 50 while gasoline would be around $15 for the same trip. Just to give everyone an idea of the cost of components, a small pickup like an s-10 can be converted for $10k including batteries. Remember, this is not using mass produced items so the costs would decrease if there was a larger market.

 

[tgordon]

For me the truck is used for towing and hence an electric one would be of little advantage. If we could get the people in power to realize I would think a diesel/electric hybrid would be advantageous. Given the advantage diesels have over gas and what the gasoline gained from becoming a hybrid, if that could be translateed into a diesel imagine what sort of milage we could be getting.