Category Archives: Personal Automobiles

Fisker Appoints New CEO- Can He Save This Company?

Posted on February 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fisker has appointed Tom LaSorda CEO replacing Henrik Fisker.  Fisker, founder and co-owner of Fisker Motors, will assume the role of executive chairman.  LaSorda’s skill is said to be manufacturing.

The first model from Fisker is the Karma.  A terrific looking automobile but beauty may only be skin deep as the vehicle interior is rated a sub-compact by the EPA.  The Karma’s range is 32 miles on the battery.  It is a hybrid so the gasoline driven generator comes on when the battery is exhausted, at which point the EPA rating becomes 20 mpg.

According to a Bloomberg posting, Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of Edmunds.com, an automotive data and pricing company had this to say about the Karma: “The odds are stacked against Fisker.  The car may be an interesting toy for people who have $100,000 to spend on such a thing, but Fisker will run out of those people quickly, and how tolerant of glitches will those people be?”  He probably was referring to the recent recall to fix the battery cooling system.

The current issue for Fisker is the DOE $529 million in loans granted to Fisker in June 2009.   The first part, $169 million was for engineering of the Karma and the second part of$360 million for the development of the NINA, a mid-sized hybrid to built in the old GM plant in Wilmington, DE.  Fisker, according to Bloomberg, has used $193 million of the loans.  But Fisker stopped work at the old GM plant when the DOE blocked further access to the loan saying that Fisker had not met the required milestones.

The battery supplier for Fisker is A123.   It has had to lay off workers due to the Fisker delays.  A123 is also an investor in Fisker.  A share of A123 stock closed on the 28 Feb at $1.91.  The 52-week range is $1.51 to $9.60.  Earnings per share are   $-1.88.

A posting late last year by Discovery asked: IS FISKER A ‘GREEN CAR’ SOLYNDRA SCANDAl? The author, John Voelker, GreenCarReports.com said:   “We’d like to see three specific questions answered.

— Since Fisker backers have contributed to Democratic party causes, is there any hard evidence of improper influence over the DoE loan process by the White House?

— How did Fisker come to select a closed assembly plant located in Vice President Joe Biden’s home state, since Delaware is no longer an obvious place to build cars?

— What steps does the DoE take to monitor compliance with the loan terms–and why won’t it release the revised terms of the Fisker loans?”

Good questions.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, CAFE Standards, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Green Jobs, Personal Automobiles, Windpower

When Tesla Batteries “Brick”–They Can Not Be Fixed

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

You buy a Tesla Roadster.  Depending on your upgrades, somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 +.   Great acceleration, 0 to 60 in 3 to 4 seconds.  Looks great.  You are cool and everyone knows it.  You decide to jet off to Tahiti for a month.  When you return you go to the garage, ready to drive down Rodeo Drive to let everyone know you are back— let the good times roll.   But your car won’t start.  You check the battery charge level and it is at Zero.  Ooops, you did not plug it in after you last drove it.  Ok so you put the charger on.  It won’t take a charge.  You call the Tesla dealership and ask them to take it to their shop and fix it.  Oddly they come with a flatbed lift truck and some rolling jacks.  When you ask why they just don’t tow it to the dealership they tell you that because you have a brick, the wheels wont turn.  What is a “brick” you ask? They say that your battery is dead, dead, dead and won’t ever work again.  You ask what a replacement battery costs and they say $40,000.  You say “well, I have only had the car for about 4 months and put on less than 5,000 miles so I guess it is covered by warrantee”.  They say “no, not covered by warrantee cause you let it run down to zero charge, so we are not responsible”

Fiction?   Nope, it has happened to some Tesla owners.   The author, Michael DeGusta of the post “It’s a Brick”, whose Roadster was pronounced a Brick, learned from a Regional Tesla Service Manager that he was personally aware of at least 5 cases of Roadsters being Bricked due to battery depletion. DeGusta says the following about bricking:

A Tesla Roadster that is simply parked without being plugged in will eventually become a “brick”. The parasitic load from the car’s always-on subsystems continually drains the battery and if the battery’s charge is ever totally depleted, it is essentially destroyed. Complete discharge can happen even when the car is plugged in if it isn’t receiving sufficient current to charge, which can be caused by something as simple as using an extension cord. After battery death, the car is completely inoperable.

The amount of time it takes an unplugged Tesla to die varies. Tesla’s Roadster Owners Manual [Full Zipped PDF] states that the battery should take approximately 11 weeks of inactivity to completely discharge [Page 5-2, Column 3: PDF]. However, that is from a full 100% charge. If the car has been driven first, say to be parked at an airport for a long trip, that time can be substantially reduced. If the car is driven to nearly its maximum range and then left unplugged, it could potentially “brick” in about one week. [1] Many other scenarios are possible: for example, the car becomes unplugged by accident, or is unwittingly plugged into an extension cord that is defective or too long.

DeGusta conclusions about the problem with the battery are as follows:

The Bottom Line

Tesla Motors is a public company that’s valued at over $3.5 billion and has received $465 million in US government loans, all on the back of the promise that it can deliver a real world, all-electric car to the mainstream market. Yet today, in my opinion, Tesla seems to be knowingly selling cars that can turn into bricks without any financial protection for the customer.

Until there’s a fundamental change in Tesla’s technology, it would seem the only other option for Tesla is to help its customers insure against this problem. As consumers become aware that a Tesla is possibly just a long trip, a bad extension cord, or an accidental unplugging away from disaster, how many will choose to gamble $40,000 on that not happening? Would you?

cbdakota

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Posted in Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Personal Automobiles

Ethanol Subsidies: Not Gone, Just Hidden a Little Better

Posted on February 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Mother Jones, an organization with a very liberal viewpoint posted that the subsidies for ethanol fuel have expired but that this doesn’t trouble the ethanol fuel producers.  Kevin Drum authored the posting and I will let him tell you why.

A few years ago I called subsidies for corn ethanol “catastrophically idiotic.” And why not? Corn ethanol, it turns out, is actively worse for the environment than even gasoline. Farmers responded to the subsidies by reducing the amount of farmland used for food production, and this drove up the price of staple food worldwide.  At the end of last year, ethanol subsidies quietly expired and no one tried to extend them.

So why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let it expire without an apparent fight? The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.

The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars…[As a result] the current price of corn on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is about $6.50 per bushel—almost triple the pre-mandate level.

 You might not be aware that when the EPA does mpg ratings for new cars, they use gasoline that does not contain any ethanol.  Adding ethanol at 10% of the fuel mix, the energy in a gallon of fuel is about 96.7% of a fuel not containing ethanol.  Ethanol has less energy per gallon than normal unleaded gasoline.  So the MPG rating is probably just a bit high.    See

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, CAFE Standards, crop yields, Domestic Energy, Energy Development, Government Regulations, Green Jobs, Oil and Gas Exploration, Peak Oil, Personal Automobiles

EV January Sales—Volt and Leaf Sales go South

Posted on February 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

GM is blaming the drop in Volt sales from 1529 units in December 2011 to 603 in January 2012 on a bad publicity regarding the battery fires that occurred when crash testing the vehicles.  Probably is a factor.   But the realization that the weak performance of the batteries during winter conditions may also have had a negative effect.  More so on the Leaf than the Volt as the Leaf has no IC engine to take over when the battery runs out of juice.  Leaf sales in December were 954 dropping to 676 in January.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Electric Vehicles, Environment, Personal Automobiles

Battery Charge Anxiety Worse Than Gas Gauge Anxiety-Leaf Stops 4X For Charging!!

Posted on January 7, 2012 | 2 comments

My dear wife and I have travelled many miles by car. She is content having me do the driving.  However, I am, in her mind, careless about going by any gasoline station without filling up the tank. That is a bit of hyperbole but running out of gasoline is high on her list of things to never do.  Imagine if you will, how she would feel if we owned a Nissan Leaf and used it to drive from Knoxville Tennessee to Antioch, Tennessee, a distance of 182miles (293km).  The Nashville Tennessean reported on such a trip taken by Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, along with his wife and son.  The trip took place on a cool day, about 35F (2C), primarily on Interstate 40.  Fast (30minutes) electric vehicle chargers have been installed at the Cracker Barrel Restaurant chain and they planned to use them as needed.  The 182-mile trip took 6 hours to complete.  It included 4 stops for recharging.

Quoting from the newspaper story:

Only problem was, the Leaf’s charge dropped more rapidly than promised. In what has to be a public relations disaster for Nissan, Smith’s EV was unable to travel no farther than 55 miles on any leg of the trip – and for the most part, much less. The company, and its government backers, proclaimed [5] the Leaf was “built to go 100 miles on a charge” (large print), with a footnoted disclaimer (small print) that it travels shorter distances (like, 70 miles) if the air conditioning or the heater is used. Turns out even that was an exaggeration.   A trip that should take – according to map Web sites – less than three hours, ended up lasting six hours for the Smiths because of all the stops they had to make. The approximate intervals where they paused for recharging were as follows:

  • Knoxville to Harriman: 45 miles
  • Harriman to Crossville: 31 miles
  • Crossville to Cookeville: 31 miles
  • Cookeville to Lebanon: 50 miles

Lebanon to destination in Antioch, just south of Nashville: 22 miles

“It was a little nerve wracking,” Stephen Smith told the Nashville-based newspaper. “I’m finding the range is not 100 percent accurate.”

A further quote from the article:

The Smiths’ experience echoed that of a Consumer Reports reviewer [2] and Los Angeles columnist Rob Eshman [3], who called his Leaf his “2011 Nissan Solyndra.” Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal, experienced the same gauge inaccuracies and range anxiety that came from traversing hills and mountains and the use of his air conditioning in hot, smoggy L.A. 

“My life now revolves around a near-constant calculation of how far I can drive before I’ll have to walk,” Eshman wrote. “The Nissan Leaf, I can report, is perfect if you don’t have enough anxiety in your life.”

Bonus geography question—- How many State of Tennessee towns are named ANTIOCH?    See below.

 

 

 

 

Antioch, TN, Bedford County

Antioch, TN, Davidson County

Antioch, TN, DeKalb County

Antioch, TN, Haywood County

Antioch, TN, Henderson County

Antioch, TN, Jackson County

Antioch, TN, Knox County

Antioch, TN, Lawrence County

Antioch, TN, Loudon County

Antioch, TN, Montgomery County

Makes you wonder how that ever happened.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Domestic Energy, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Personal Automobiles

DRIVING A VOLT IN WINTER

Posted on December 28, 2011 | 1 comment

The Chevy Volt’s driving range is reduced by cold or hot weather. The EPA estimates the Chevy Volt can travel 35 miles on a fully charged battery according to an article written by Doug Wernert, Chevrolet VoltAge Community Manager.   This will vary due to the weather conditions he adds.   If it is cold, using the car heater and front window defrost will have a “high/maximum Impact” on the Volt’s range.  And of course, in hot weather the A/C unit has “high/maximum impact” on range.  (Do you have the feeling that the range estimates are often at odds with the last news release you read?)  Does the EPA account for the weather in their estimated fully charged battery range?  If not, then it would seem that 35 miles might only be good on optimal days, says 68F or something like that (no A/C, no heat) and would result in a lower figure for the rest of the time.   A chart that accompanied Wernert’s article listed some other activities that resulted in “high/maximum impact” on the range.  These are

High speeds (70+mph)

Aggressive Accelerations

Steep incline

So, no driving in the mountains with the pedal to the metal in cold weather.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, CAFE Standards, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Personal Automobiles, Windpower

Electric Car Update-YTD November

Posted on December 7, 2011 | 1 comment

Volt vs. Leaf

The Chevy Volt sales were 1139 vehicles in November bettering last month’s sales of 1108.  That brought the year-to-date Volt sales (YTD) to 6142.  Chevy had forecast Volt sales 10,000 vehicles in 2011 and it looks like they wont make that target.   Chevy is forecasting Volt sales at 45,000 in 2012 and they will export 15,000 more.  I suppose it is possible that they might make that forecast, but I have my doubts unless GE (Obama good buddy Jeffery Immelt CEO of GE) buys the 10,000 Volts they pledged that they would.  The first part of 2011, Chevy maintained that they were production, not sales, limited.  But at the end of 2011, there did not seem to be a lack of Volts for sales.  November’s sales of 1139 are the best month so far this year.

You make your estimate of 2012 sales.

The Volt’s main competitor this year has been Nissan’s Leaf.  Leaf sales dropped for the third consecutive month to 672 vehicles.  Even so, Leaf still leads in the 2011 YTD sales race with 8738 vehicles sold.

Aptera

Aptera is an all electric three wheel vehicle with an EPA rating of 200mpg equivalent.   It is a beauty but they can’t get matching loan money to continue operation.  They announced that they are going out of business.

Sorry about that.

cbdakota

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Posted in Alternative Energy, CAFE Standards, CO2, Domestic Energy, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Green Jobs, Personal Automobiles

Chevy Volt Battery Fires

Posted on November 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is conducting a “formal safety defect investigation” into the Chevy Volt’s battery.  Two fires occurred following crash tests.   GM says that the fires started long after the car and battery were crashed.  They added that this does not reflect a problem with the car but rather the protocol used to deal with batteries after a crash.

I think that GM is probably right but people need to know that if leakage from the battery occurs, there is a fire potential.  GM needs to broadcast widely how to handle the problem so as to prevent fires from occurring.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Domestic Energy, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Personal Automobiles

Fisker’s Karma Hybrid Gets Range Test

Posted on November 5, 2011 | 3 comments

The Fisker Karma hybrid is a good looking car but perhaps beauty is only skin deep, as the old saying goes.

 This baby weighs in at about 5000 pounds. It is 16.5 feet long and has a 403 hp powerplant.  It costs $96,000.  EPA uses “inside volume” to determine the class and because it has less than 100 cu.ft., it is categorized a “Subcompact”.   The EPA fuel rating is 52 mpg-equivalent combined city and highway driving and it has a range on a full battery charge of 32 miles!!!!

The gasoline driven generator come on when the battery is exhausted,  and then it is rated at 20 mpg.

Fisker is promoting the test results they got using the European regulatory body TUV.  (It is said that their ratings are typically twice the EPA ratings.)  The TUV proclaimed the range 51.6 miles equivalent on electric-only mode.

cbdakota

 

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, CAFE Standards, CO2, Electric Vehicles, Energy Development, Environment, Global Temperatures, Government Regulations, Green Jobs, Personal Automobiles

Volt Outsells Leaf in October

Posted on November 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

The October sales for the Volt were 1108 and the Leaf were 849.  The last time this year that the Volt sold more than the Leaf was March.  The year-to-date figures are: Leaf—8066 and Volt—5003.

It is reported that Nissan and GM are targeting 10,000 sales for their vehicle—-about 2000 total or 1000 each month, November and December for the Leaf.   The Volt needs to average 2500 per month to meet the GM target.  Probably not going to happen.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, CAFE Standards, CO2, Electric Vehicles, Environment, Personal Automobiles