What do you think of electric cars?
I love it, if I could buy a car, I'd definitely get a electric one. It's the future, sooner or later we all are going to replace our fossil fuel car with electric cars.
Which brand would you choose?
I suppose when the time comes when I were able to buy a car, it'd be like pretty much every major car company already developed a electric model. But so far, well I don't know much about automotive industry, didn't pay much attention through out these years but recently I read two books about General Motor and Toyota and following these leads I searched and learned something about cars.
When people talk about electric car first brand comes to mind of course is Tesla, it's focused on that one thing and it's doing great I think. But I know more about Chevrolet Volt, the half electric half fuel auto. Volt first came out as a concept car designed by GM on 2007's North American International Auto show, it immediately caught people's eyes because it had very futuristic exterior design, you look at the car model you know it's electric, it's different. But when the car really put into production it turned out look totally different, just like an ordinary car, actually it's based on the Chevrolet Cruze's model. So many people were very disappointed by that time, because you know GM showed people "hey, look at this cool car, this is what you are gonna get soon", it raised people's appetite but delivered a different thing. But you can't do anything about it, because during developing GM found out that the futuristic exterior design made the car literally performed like a brick in the wind tunnel test, that means it got huge air resistance once it reaches certain speed(when the test team got the test result they thought they put the car into tunnel backwards lol). It's gonna significantly drag down the performance of the car, that's why they abandoned the original fantasy-ish design and came back to ordinary appearance.
I just still wonder, can't they just design something both look really cool and also doesn't get too much wind resistance? I found a car that looks really amazing, BMW i8, if I had money I would definitely buy this one, it's simply amazing, show you the picture here. totally badass. $130.000 to $300.000 baby depends on what region and what features you add on the car. On the other hand Chevy Volt is just around 40.000 dollars. You see the difference. Well Volt is not ugly, it's just when you compare it with BMW i8, you feel it obviously shorter, they are at different levels. It's very obvious if you look at their interiors, you can check some car review videos on YouTube, you see it yourself.
Well I wish I knew something about Tesla, but I don't, and I'm gonna go to research later after this episode. It's fascinating to see these cars, and compare, watch people driving them on videos, it's a cool thing that I've never laid my eyes on before.
Anyway, come back to the topic of electric cars, let's put aside how cool they are, let's think about it, are they really environmentally friendly, are they really green?
Because I saw an advertisement of BMW i3 some days ago, it says "drive BMW i3 electric car, you can save the world" something like that, I was like, how can you claim that driving a electric car could save the world? If you really want to save the world, don't drive a car, go on foot, ride a bicycle or something, take public transportation means. It's pretty funny to hear a car company saying driving their cars can save the world, to me at least I feel this way. You manufacture the car, during the process you already caused pollution and damage to the environment, and also electricity is not coming from nothing, it's mainly from fossil fuel. You consume electricity you actually are consuming fossil fuel, just in another way, which is cleaner for the users and cities of course, that's a benefit, but the pollution is still there. This leads to another thought, that is fossil energy is still the main energy we consume, not much electricity are from solar energy, wind energy or tide something. But I believe we are at the beginning of a transition stage, we are going to shift the weight onto renewable energy sooner or later, so it's good thing to have BMW i3, I don't know why I made so much fuss about it when I just saw the ad, I would definitely support a electric car, it's just the words in the ad make me butt hurt a little bit haha. Anyway, I think in the future solar and wind energy are going to be the main energy we consume. I mean, the earth is a big place, it has huge surface, and we can even create multiple surface even if there wasn't even surface, right? everything's possible in human's hands. We can extend our solar panel to the sky, to outerspace. All the energy we consume today, all the fossil energy, they were originally solar energy, even wind energy, they all come from the sun, they were stored on earth, it's like a deposit of earth bank account, we can't just sit here and spend all the deposit. We have to bring home new income in order to achieve a sustainable development. That's why we need to develop a efficient way to get energy income. So much solar energy come onto earth constantly every day, every single second, all we need to do is to collect them, like plants vs zombies, click the little sun, plant more sun flower... just kidding. but you get the idea.
Volt concept 2007
real volt
BMW i8
BMW i8
BMW i3
Tesla Model s
I'm back, I just watched a documentary on Tesla Motor, it's just so fascinating! I love it! Tesla Model s, offers you perfectly instant response whenever you wanna it to take off or brake. And you can drive the car with only one pedal! If you loose the acceleration pedal it automatically brakes and put the generated energy right back into the battery thus extend the range. This is just amazing! Also there's only automatic transmission, one gear from taking off to top speed, you don't need to bother to shift. This would be a huge selling point for people like me who has trouble to learn driving traditional manual shift car. Till today I still don't have a driver license, I can drive a car but it's always a huge torture and stress for me to shift, it gets me nervous, as if one step goes wrong I could break the car. Probably that's why I avoid going to drive school. Hopefully in the future driving experience would be totally different, I can tell one day car driving will be much simplified or even entirely automatized.(Mercedes is working on it, it's happening) Maybe one day I own a car that I don't need to drive and I'd never ever have a driver license in my life, maybe.
Some other facts:
In China, there are a lot of electric car, fully electric but not so serious car made by local small companies to provide urban citizens another way to commute. This kind of car is simple, ugly, slow, short range and un-safe, it's not required to have a car plate or driver license to drive that car, you can imagine how messy it could be. Nice try tho, hope government could provide proper regulation and support in this kind of grassroot venture.
Many people in China modify their car into natural gas and petroleum hybrid powered in order to save fuel cost. My father did that and it works very well, it's a whole industry, the natural gas supply.
About Tesla
This company didn't hurry to make profit, instead, their first goal was to create a legit electric sports car to compete with conventional fuel sports cars and proved to the world that electricity powered cars can be equally even better at performance and range. And only then the company started thinking about mass production and profit.
This is very distinct from traditional automotive business management approach, because first, it's a new high-tech company which pursues more innovation or revolution than just offering another nice car. From this point of view, Tesla is a innovator and that's their duty to take the risk at the beginning. Second, it has enough capital.
A old grandpa-like classic car company would never do things like that because of the whole bunch of bureaucracy in the management structure, and the board which only focus on the profit.
Alright that's it for today's RogerThat, see you in next episode.
listening to my blog in this video here
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