Ok, so I got lazy and did not write up anything up on the speech I talked about yesterday, but here is something so I do not leave you completely hanging. There is a lot of talk from the left on electric cars and hybrids to save the environment. Makes sense, right? After all, as an engineer I know that a gas engine’s top efficiency is about 27% while an electric engine is somewhere around 98%. That is pretty good…the environment is saved. Well, there are the details. It just takes a little common sense to realize that this magical electricity has to be produced. So here is the actual breakdown of an electric car’s efficiency.
Electricity generating plant 35% (on a very good day)
Transmission lines 95%
Charging/Battery System 75%
Electric Motor 98%
So that makes the actual efficiency around 25%. Virtually the same as a gas car. This means that the same amounts of fossil fuels are used to power the car so the environment is not really being saved. Nor are we saving any money (which is what it comes down to for most people). In the hybrids case, by the time you make up the additional capital costs of buying a hybrid, you will probably need a new one. If you really want to save on monthly fuel costs, you would be better off just buying a high mpg gas car like I did. I traded in my truck for a ford focus and cut my gas bill by more than half without all the extra up front costs. By the way, the focus gets about 34 mpg combined, not the 33 highway on the sticker…that is pretty comparable to these hybrids. So now you have some ammo the next time the President or someone else starts raving about saving costs and the environment. Glenn Beck has a good chapter in his book, Arguing with Idiots, if you want some hard numbers that show the actual costs, actual profitability of these hybrids for manufactures, and the actual effect government policies (such as the one Obama raved about in his speech) have on business and society. Information is power.
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