Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Nissan Leaf All Electric Car

http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-c...ctric-car/index




when your at work your solar pannels can be charging up batteries.

when you get home you can charge up your cars batteries with the charged batterys at your home.

no more buying gasoline at the pump , you have your own power company at home.

what a right in the nick of time idea!

Well, some of that sounds good, but what happens when I want to go visit my daughter, who lives about 300 miles from here?

Bill

Perhaps a battery exchange scheme would work. If batteries were fairly easily changeable, petrol (gas) stations might be able to swap nearly flat batteries for fully charged ones.

Of course there would have to be some way of checking the charge of the fresh battery. Imagine getting 70 miles along the road and finding your battery was flat. It would be a long walk back to complain.

I guess you could head to the gas station and give them
the $80.00 to fill up your tank in your used car that you keep for these situations.

then you could fill it up again when you come back.

another plus to this vehicle would be that electricity companies offer lower electricity rates for electric vehicle charging.

if you dont want to install a solar array to charge the
batteries for free for the next 25 years.

but you could add up all the money you spend a year on gasoline just to see if you could save any money over the next 25 years.

alot of people I have talked to say they are putting around $100.00 a week in their gas tank.

$5,200 a year x 25 years = $130,000 dollars.
that should cover the cost of the car and the solar pannel array.

and you would have apx $70,000 to spend on other stuff.

but who is counting what the real benefits would be.

How about the possibility of a solar array on the roof of the car?

that would be nice wouldnt it , I dont think there is enough room
for a array that would fully opperate the vehicle , but it could help the charging of the batteries.

drive it to work , park it in the sun while your at work and when you get home you wouldnt need much of a charge because its been charging the batteries all day already.

but think of this concept , the place where you work has a array
on top of a parking awning , you park your car plug it in , and its fully charged while you work.

a company that is interested in public approval of their greeness would leap at this.


so , theres some more jobs right there.

plus when you get off of work you get into a cooler car.

I guess you live in a warm climate. That wouldn't always be an advantage in the UK.

It is very true across the South and SouthWest of the USA. The temperature in a car that has been parked in the sun for any length of time can be around 130 to 140 degrees F (45 to 60 degrees C). The seats and steering wheel can be too hot to touch. In fact every year in the Summer we have a number of babies who are left in a car for just a few minutes who die from the heat. Covered parking is a big plus. And of course you should never leave a baby alone in a car no matter what the weather

Bill Gill

I live in a city close to jacksonville fla , and my little
car has black interior...
I parked everything else when gas prices went up so high.

I have noticed that I have been finding shaded places around town to park my car when I go inside.

if I cant find a shaded area I usually either dont go or I go somewhere else to shop for stuff.

I find myself sometimes parking a good distance from where I need to shop , because sometimes you have to buy from a store that is the only store in your area that sells certain products.


sometimes it makes me wonder why they continue to cut down all the trees when they would be a plus for shoppers who dont want to get back in a oven after they are already exhausted from shopping around.

Yea that's a pain. It'd be nice if you could have a little blower that ventilates the hot air all the time while it's parked in the sun (solar powered even!).

Maybe just rewire the existing fan so it runs while it's turned off! I think there's usually an air-exit vent by the back window where the hot air might escape through.

Just think of the good all that extra exercise does you. Although, on second thoughts, I'm not sure I would want that in the sort of heat you seem to suffer.

Yes, I used to live in Florida. If it wasn't for air conditioning the population of Florida would be much smaller than it is. As far as I am concerned there are 2 good things about Florida: Winter and beaches. Summers are horrible. The humidity is terrible and the bugs can drive you up the wall, except that the wall may be covered with bugs too. And in May the front of your car will probably be covered in love bugs, which will etch the paint.

Anyway, since this is climate change forum, to get back on track. If we stopped running the air conditioners Florida we could cut our CO2 budget in half.

Bill Gill

Many years ago, I worked with someone who maintained that the British had a sense of the ridiculous, rather than a sense of humour. Perhaps that is why your comment causes me to imagine the people of Florida shrinking as they shrivel in the sun.

unless Im wrong again , the car can automatically activate the heating and air conditioning systems using carwings.

http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-c...-features/index



that means that you could probably set the heater or airconditioner to activate and heat or cool the car to say 10-15 minutes before you are going to enter the car.


here's an article about the carwings system, looks like you can set the temperature.

http://blog.caranddriver.com/nissan-laun...l-and-rankings/




Im beginning to picture nissan becomming the major auto
producer in the world if they continue giving people the choice to be green , I mean really green where they could say that opperating their car does not have much of a carbon footpring at all.

this is the first all electric car that I know of that actually looks like a car , and has air conditioning.

Yea that looks like a nice car! I guess we have to wait for petrol prices to climb further before people will actually be using them and tolerating the inconvenience of having to plan every trip :P

I also wonder how many owners will end up carrying around a portable generator to charge it in emergencies - totally defeating the purpose.

I would think that people wondered where they would be able to buy gasoline when gasoline cars were first introduced.

didnt they have to build gasoline stations so that gasoline powered cars would work?

they will probably build quick charge stations or the current gas stations will purchase the charging equipment


you know that great big awning that covers the gas pumps so that people wont get wet in the rain?

that would be a great place to put up solar pannels
that can constantly be charging a battery array
when the sun is shinning so that people can quick charge their cars when on a trip.

I'm certain the gas stations would like this idea because they would only need to buy the solar panels once vs having to buy the gas they sell all the time.

but I guess the real money would be something like a parking meter where you put in your credit card to pay to charge up your car while your stopped to get dinner or while your shopping.

That's the serious weakness with electric. You can't do a quick charge. It's going to be at least a few hours, if not overnight.

The parking meter idea sounds great. Especially since the chargers themselves would cost nearly nothing. Unlike a petrol pump with underground tanks and all the rest.



Kind of pointless. If you're going to put solar panels on a roof, you can do it without charging electric cars. If you want to charge electric cars there's no more advantage doing it by solar vs the grid than if you used the power for any other purpose.

haven't you ever heard of a cell phone quick charger?
you put a AA batery in it , plug it into your cell phone
then suddenly (not several hours later) your cell phone has a full charge.

if theres money to be made they will find a way.




why would you say that?

is the type of electricity that is in the grid different from the type of electricity that comes out of a solar panel?

I would think that the major advantage's would be the 20-25 year lifetime span of a solar panel that eventually pays out more than it cost , and the fact that no one would be burning any fuels to make any of the electricity that you are selling to the people who bought their electric cars to lower their personal carbon footprint.

someone has to lower the pollution in the world because as it stands isn't china bringing a brand new coal fired power plant online every week?

something has to give so why not this?

its not like the air we breath is not connected to the air in china because the air has no borders.

I suppose that now you would say something like why should america be the only country that has a birthright to make pollution in the world ...

we don't , we tried to regulate pollution , then the industries moved to china taking their pollution with them.

but while they were here they were not polluting as bad as they are there because of the regulations.

which is yet another republican reason to move businesses to china.

china was just too good a deal to resist.

now look at us , because of the republicans and the elite classes and just greed in general along with certain public stupidity or misunderstanding , we along with most of the rest of the world are suffering economically.

all the while the death toll rises each year from weather related causes.

No, but a few seconds on Google tells me the model I found takes 5 minutes (not suddenly) and only charges the phone enough for 2 hours of talk time (not even close to fully charged). Do you know of one that does what you claim, or did you just make it up?



Yes, it would appeal to the environmentalist niche. But my point is there's no particular connection (apart from that important one) between solar panels and electric cars. If you could economically put solar panels on the roof of a petrol station, they'd already be doing that, and using it to power the lights and machines and whatever else.

I know there are examples of businesses (not just petrol stations) doing exactly that, but they're not widespread, probably because it's rarely economical and that they're targeting this environmentalist niche, which is much smaller than the media would have you believe. Not many people want to actually pay anything to be green!

What are you talking about? China and America both have about the same CO2 emissions. This despite China having 4 times the population. On global warming they're greener than you are!!! They have some effective pollution reducing behaviors such as workers being offered on-site accommodation, rather than driving 100 miles to work every day.

They also have long distance high speed train networks that are competing with airlines. Are trains the preferred means of travelling between states in America? Or do you guys prefer the CO2 splurging luxury of planes and cars?