Pretty soon the EPA will require a "nylon stocking" on every CO2 emitting engine in order to satisfy the environmentalists because it seems that is (environmentalists) who is running the EPA. Clueless!
GM should be renamed to GEM - Government Environmentalist Motors? They are such a gem! :-)
How does technology improve unless you develop it?
The petrol engine is almost 140 years old. Back when the first cars appeared, people scoffed. Why bother when a horse could run faster? Spending millions of taxpayers' dollars on building roads so the wealthy could get around? Bah. Taking jobs from hard working coachmen and coach builders, stable hands, farriers and blacksmiths? It's madness, I tells ya. Madness!
Then there's marketing. Betamax was a system with superior performance, yet it vanished in favor of VHS. Sometimes people don't buy the better option.
The point is hybrid, electric, and hydrogen powered cars are in their infancy. It's easy to look at a new technology and scoff ... oh they're not as efficient or fast or they don't provide any real benefits in emissions terms ... maybe, but what about in 150 years? Car companies are building these cars because a) there is a market for them and b) they need to start that R+D cycle at some point. Of course, people might be buying these cars thinking they're better than they are, but that's human nature (like VHS), and slick marketing. But, the days of cheap petrol are limited. And in 30, 40, 50 years time, people will be glad someone, somewhere started selling and marketing something other than a 140 year old engine design.
greenies insist on people driving and that more cars be manufactured?
"Since all of the ActiveEs were imported into the United States as "pre-production" cars, there's no way for BMW to certify them in a way that makes it legal to sell them publicly; the only way to keep them on the road is either through car sharing or re-leasing them."
what does that have to do with environmentalists?
This seems to be the fate of electric cars. Sergio Marchionne is saying that he will lose $14000 for every electric car he sells, because of the Green mandates.
This seems to be the fate of electric cars. Sergio Marchionne is saying that he will lose $14000 for every electric car he sells, because of the Green mandates.
Did you get this warped logic all your own??? What cars
The greenies own the bureaucracy. LOL
That sounds like it's a bureaucracy problem, not a "greenies" problem.
They couldn't sell the cars in the US, because of how our car safety laws work, so they instead disposed of them.
A waste of resources, probably, but not any more so than if the same thing had been done with a "test" version of an internal combustion engine car.
electric cars don't emit carbon-dioxide on the road. ... When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide ... The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. ..... Reality does matter to many of the people that purchase these vehicles
As a car guy going back to when I was a kid and the Chrysler Turbine car was in test, I've followed these development programs and stuff like one off show cars that have been recalled and destroyed with some sadness, but the fact of the matter is this is the way car makers work in the R&D process.
Crash worthiness tests are also cringeworthy, but I guess that's what it takes. The flip side of it is often motorsports, which some people bemoan as hard on the environment and wasteful use of resources...but motorsports lead to many of the technological advances we see in cars on the road today, both in terms of safety and engineering advances that lead to longer life of the drivetrains as well as operating efficiency.
The fact is, that whether test cars such as BMWs most recent program or motorsports, there are costs to everything and those costs must be weighed against the benefits. I am personally sad to see throaty V8s in the process of being replaced with electric power as much as I disliked the advent of more four and six cylinder cars in the 1970s, but when you look at how that contributed to the development of cars on the road today, it wasn't a bad thing at all-but it wasn't cheap to do. And I still have a V8 or two tucked away that I enjoy every now and again.
The article does make it clear that the program was not all for nothing in any case-the test vehicles could not be certified so they could be legally titled and were crushed after the cars they contributed research and testing to went into production.
Thank you greenies for crapping up our world over nothing!
Did you get this warped logic all your own??? What cars
I presume you are talking about the prius? Well if you were comparing it against a European car I would agree with you, the traditional hybrid variants are little better than an ultra efficient diesel with the added impact of the battery manufacture.
However compared against the average American car the prius wins hand down every time. You guys think a V6 2.5 litre engine is a green choice. . . . try a 1litre 3 cylinder doing 70 mpg.
Electric cars will not be any use, until they can develop a better battery
