SAmadei

I've advocated the use of efficient turbines as a range extender, over the typical internal combustion engine ever since playing with my friend's turbine generator/mule. Its also nice to finally see a manufacturer use in-wheel motors. I also find the design pretty sweet, for a "3 door sedan". Shame we'll never likely see one built.

More at http://blog.caranddriver.com/pininfarina-cambiano-sports-sedan-concept-revealed-geneva-auto-show/

The $10K car gets farther and farther away with every new law. Airbags required. ABS required. Intelligent Airbags required. TC required. Now there was an article on Jalopnik that rear facing cameras will be required starting in 2014... http://jalopnik.com/5889007/the-government-will-soon-mandate-a-camera-on-every-cars-ass ...which requires a screen and other upgrades.

I do, because I invest my limited time in learning how to repair and modify a particular company's cars. Since most car companies share parts and build techniques from Spark-end to Corvette-end of the spectrum. OTOH, if I just bought car appliances and rotated them in and out every few years, I wouldn't care either... but I don't. I keep them forever.

Done within economic reason... its still too expensive to pack high range into an EV. Nobody is paying six figures for a PML electric Mini that can barely outrange a gasoline one. And done in a format that isn't only suitable to move small payloads... The Electrovair II's Silver Zinc batteries are actually fairly lightweight as batteries go and modern Silver Zinc batteries provide 40 percent more run time than Li Ion batteries, according to Wiki. Overall, Silver Zinc energy density tops out at 500Wh/L, as opposed to Li Ion at 625Wh/L... which demonstrates that Li Ion is not light years ahead of other battery technologies. Again, you guys act like Li Ion batteries have suddenly become awesome in the last couple years. They haven't. They've been around for 30 years and commercially available for 20. Will they continue to get better, sure... but at a slow rate... and due to lithium being the lightest solid, we've run out of potential light elements to use as a base. 'High tech powertrain'... LOL.

The Electrovair II from its specs is within a magnitude of the Leaf, except it seats 5 people comfortably. And GM developed it FOUR decades before the Leaf. Stand by your post... you said little has been invested on electrics since the Detroit and Baker Electrics. GM didn't build these cars on a shoestring. Plenty has been invested... decade after decade, because just as electrics had a place in 1910, they also could have carved out a foothold in 1945, 1960, 1973, 1979 and 1991... _IF_ they could be made compelling. Nobody said it was. But it is very slow... and its severely constrained by certain limits imposed by physics. Hasn't anyone stayed awake during an advanced physics class? Its also 6 years old. I love the PML powertrains... they seem to have a nice solution... by moving the motors into the wheels, you can free up more space for batteries... but that only solves so much... and these PML units are REAL pricy... and the OEMs so far have offered up a collective 'Yawn'.

Slurp! Mmmm... Flavor-Aid. I can tell them little was invested since the Baker Electric... even when OcnBlu has posted in another thread the Electrovair II. Sorry, you are full of it, Hyper. There has been billions invested since the Baker Electric... so you think companies like Baker Electric and Detroit Electric didn't invest large sums to try to extend their businesses? GM and Studebaker also had large slices of the electric pie, which I'm sure they would have liked to preserve. Do you think General Electric spent nothing to get all these Deisel Electric trains? GM built the Electrovair I, Electrovair II, an Electric Greenbriar, and a Electrovan, the Urban Electric Car, the 512 series, Electrovette, Sunraycer, EV-1, S-10 Electric. Ford made the Ranger EV. AMC worked on a Lithium-based battery in 1967 and had a NiCd electric '69 Rambler wagon, the Amitron, the Electron. The '50 Henney Kilowatt. The 1980 ComutaCar. Then there are GEM and Zap, who have been been building cars for about 20 years each. Then there is all the forklift and golf cart companies. All the laptop and cellular phone battery research which scales up... Oh... and the Lunar Rover. You're right... little money or effort was put into electric cars since the Baker... yeah. Horses are stubborn and require space and maintenance. Autos surpassed the horse for economics, in reliability and in ease of maintenance in less than 10 years. Electrics have been around for almost 120 years of drivetrain and battery advancements. Sure... to the tune of 5-15% improvement per decade, its going to be a slow trip. Using this logic, regular gasoline powered cars should get cheaper. They don't. Effort? It takes about twice as long to fuel with CNG as gasoline. BFD. Hydrogen does have some issues filling, storage and combustion... but with CNG being created at every landfill and working as a retrofit on every gasoline engine ever made, I don't see why anyone invests in hydrogen. Great. Let me know when you put a 1000 Amp outlet in so that you can refill at something closer to the rate of the CNG.

Then put 600 watts of skin blistering power on the front of your car and hope that the newly-blinded oncoming traffic don't kill you. Seriously, though, there has to be a tradeoff. Regardless of how much light you put forward, there will be dark areas at the edges. When the lit areas are too bright, your eyes are unable to see the small amounts of contrast in the dark areas. I want to see whats going on in the dark areas. Of course, all that extra light is still glare to other drivers.

lol. probably more hideous actually. Luckily, it was dark, the car was dark and I was still blinded by the bright blues coming up behind me as I got off the BQE... so I was somewhat saved from its full hideousness... but I knew exactly what it was. *Shiver*

Great move. They should have tried getting in on the NYC taxicab biz, too.

I no longer blindly like any company in business except Lamborghini. From GM (I only like GM vehicles built before April 27, 2009.), Camaro... but its still an ergonomic nightmare for me. From Dodge, the Charger and Challenger. From Infiniti, the G37 Coupe. The microcar coupes...from FIAT, 500... from Smart, ForTwo and from Mini, the Mini. BMW, I like the 6 series... and the Mercedes CL series.

Thats right... I also saw a Juke recently... but all blinged/riced out... dropped, tinted and will blue lights all around. Still hideous.

+1000 Post of the month for putting it together correctly. Of course, many here will poo-poo it because somehow science will somehow save us... next year... or the year after that. But several of these problems, cannot be fixed... Unless a giant asteroid of copper crashes into Earth, we do not have the copper to upgrade our grid, even if we wanted to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper And aluminum is also in short supply, as well.

Saw a brand new Alpina B7... making a northbound turn from the southbound-only exit of the Staten Island Mall... which, if you are familar with the entrance, takes one across traffic that has a green light, and can get you creamed. Whoops. Having a expensive car does not make one a good driver, for sure... Speaking of new cars... saw a brand new 2012 Charger get creamed front and rear in front of the GF's apartment.

Its not a matter of how soon you adapt. Most electrics are cars that have been impossible to nearly impossible for me to get into, let alone drive. [Note: I have not actually sat in a Volt yet, but I suspect it will be tight.] Unless the electrics lead to a resurgence of REAL fullsize cars, I'm going to be forced to drive larger trucks... and I'm skeptical about any all electric trucks... And with the average American BMI soaring into the stratosphere, small cars and fat Americans are not a good combo. We are all aware of Tesla and so far is way expensive and bordering on vaporware. 500 mile battery that charges in 3 min? You would have a better chance hoping for Mr. Fusion. Physics aren't going to allow for such a refill for at least a century, unless the actual battery pack is swapped... which IS a technology/business model that has been investigated. Don't blindly trusty science to fix this. We don't have a cure for cancer, we don't live forever, we don't have cheap flying cars/rocket packs and we don't have virtually instant recharging batteries because some problems are HARD and will thwart us for a long time. We will have near immortality due to nanobots correcting the genetic errors in our bodies and Mr. Fusion before we have a 500 mile battery pack that recharges in 3 minutes because the latter problem runs into severe physic limitations and we have a finite number of chemical compounds to throw at the problem. It does to me. Many of the foreign markets are selling until the walls are bare... and the 1% in the US that own all the oil reserves know this. Why sell oil now at $110 a barrel when you can outlast the competition and sell oil for $1100 a barrel in 2040? For now, just sell the minmum to keep the US 1% up to their necks in coke, prostitutes and fast cars. Plus, for all we know, that same 1% own (and have buried) all the patents on the techniques needed to turn water into synthetic gasoline for pennies a gallon. Wouldn't work... in general. Its pretty easy to make a big charger, but the chokepoint is the heat generated in the batteries. Assuming you can have a temp sensor for each battery, you could charge each battery at its fastest, limited by the individual battery temperature, but this would likely only save less than ten percent in time. It would be great from a battery equalization point of view... but the next problem is the number of batteries... Tesla uses 6831 cells... that would require 6831 chargers. Hope you have 1.21 gigawatt service. Of course, heat is the number one reason I don't foresee fullmoon97's 500 mile battery pack recharging in 3 minutes, but its not just inside the battery pack... its the entire circuit. I suppose we can do some rough math... Tesla claims a battery-to-wheel efficiency of 17.7kWh/100 mi. Ignoring charging losses, that is 88.5kWh that needs to be stuffed into a battery... in 3 minutes... 1770kW... 1.77 MW... This is the amount of power an electric locomotive generates at peak. This would vaporize solid 4/0 AWG wire... I can't spec out the size wire required, but it would be at least a foot thick. Your house has 200 Amp service (4/0 AWG)? Well, to charge a 500 mile battery in 3 minutes, you need 8045 Amp (at 220V) service. You would need to build a nuclear power plant for each 250 cars concurrently being charged.

This is only a problem (from my understanding) for shops doing the conversions. You can convert your own cars/trucks without such licensing. However, the next issue is that this guy is claiming the conversions can be done for "hundreds"... unfortunately, in my research, you would need to bundle about 10-20 "hundreds" together minimum... in other words, at least a "thousand" or two. Generally, one needs a complete kit, $500-$800. Tanks will run about $700 for 10 GGE (gasoline gallon equivilant), so for a 20 gallon, you need 2 tanks. Thats about $1900~2200 minimum. This is a price for 2014 dated tanks... it is not clear to me if dated tanks are a real issue... I see people selling tanks dated 2010, which would seem useless to me... but I don't know. Some tanks have no dating. If anyone knows the story on the legality of tank dating and/or expiration, I'd love to hear it.

Again, I have maintained that electric batteries, motors have not increased dramatically for decades... range of 40-80 miles... 6 hour charge time... EV-1 80-140 miles, 8 hour charge time... Leaf... 70~100 miles, 8 hour charge time (on board charger). It would have been much more interesting if GM could have built a hybrid Electrovair III or something... then we could compare it to the Volt.

I have yet to see a Scion iQ in the NYC area.

Agreed, however, this is Long Island, New York, not Long Island, Tennessee. ;-) A nice example, like this will find a decent home. Its the scrappers squashing the unloved $500 versions that make the nice ones hard to restore, due to the destruction of perfectly good parts.

I agree with Camino. While the 500 has been around since March, it was severely limited... it wasn't until recently that it seems FIAT has gotten its shipments going, and considering the market, it won't take much of an increase in sales for it to be a segment leader. Again, considering that I only saw 2 up until Feb... during Feb, I've seen them EVERYWHERE. I've lost count somewhere north of 50-60.

This is why I recommend the $750~1000 Grandma-fresh 180K Olds Cieras/Buick Centurys that pop up every so often. Conveniently none online right now, but there is a Lumina... http://lexington.craigslist.org/cto/2847839665.html You even have a decent RWD cars for sale nearby... http://lexington.craigslist.org/cto/2862081817.html http://lexington.craigslist.org/cto/2865708759.html And for low mileage... 82K, http://lexington.craigslist.org/cto/2852034744.html I see lots of sub-1500 Jeeps, too.

It seems to me that donking has pretty much ran its course, especially with the economy reeling, the drug dealers and pimps have had to tighten their purse straps.

Got my first good, long look at a Ford Fiesta... wow they are narrow from the rear.

Rear is OK. I like the color. Front is atrocious. The Sable headlights would be interesting if they didn't ruin the front with the huge, boring grill treatment. Also, the gap below the hood is not impressive for a "world famous" builder.

Who actually collects the $250 fine?