I own and drive a Prius. I love the thing. I'm constantly defending it from FUD. But there's a difference between defending something you like based on facts and just becoming a credulous sucker - and that line is crossed with the plug-in hybrid, being pushed disproportionately by a group connected with our local electric utility. The following is a comment I made to a post at my favorite car blog, Cars Cars Cars:
The metric to help people cut through the plug-in hybrid fog is this:Toyota had to figure out this "keep the charge on the battery between 30 and 70%" strategy to make the thing last longer than the "few years" the anti-hybrid FUDders like to claim it will.
So figure out how much more battery you're going to need to drive on all electric for a lot longer than the Prius (several times larger than existing Prius battery). Then double it, so you can keep the charge in that band. Then figure out how much that weighs and costs.
Or, wait for a magic new battery which can fully deplete and fully charge while still lasting 15 years.
Either way, it ain't happening soon.
Nobody ever raises this "charge band" issue specifically when talking about plug-ins, but it's clearly the biggest obstacle to surmount. Either you need to haul around batteries ten or twenty times the size and weight of the already big Prius battery, or you're going to be stuck in cell-phone hell where, like the incorrect FUD spewed about the Prius by hybrid haters, the battery really WILL die after just a few years or a few tens of thousands of miles.
The summary is this: without a radical, not merely evolutionary, improvement in battery technology, the plug-in hybrid is a non-starter. Period.
Keep in mind, while digesting these arguments, that the electric utility has a demonstrable incentive to push plug-in cars even when the technology isn't really ready - the intention is that people will charge these vehicles mainly overnight, when the utility is literally swimming in energy it can't really sell. It's a boon to the utility to be able to get any money for that night-time electricity; otherwise they need to run some of their plants in less efficient modes (raising overall costs) or resort to costly energy storage schemes. They're not idealistic crusaders here; they stand to seriously improve their finances.
References:
Do not upgrade from itunes 6 to itunes 7; not even itunes 7.0.1. The machine on which I'm composing this crackplog is used only for email, non-work web-browsing, and playing music; and itunes 7 skips terribly whenever I load a new page in firefox - and this is not an underpowered machine. The 7.0.1 update actually made it worse!.
This is what I get for being a slave to apple's music library management stuff. Sigh.
Chris Mooney has moved here (a much more palatable host) and I've added Tim Lambert.
Both often cover the distortion of science perpetrated by the current sorry crop of right-wingers. And don't fall for bogus claims of balance by shysters trying to convince you both sides are equally bad. They're just not. This is almost entirely a Republican problem, and it's not going anywhere. The mostly non-religious but very-rabid right-wingers at my last job were, despite being a highly educated and self-described moderate bunch, falling for most of the denial science pushed for profit by the GOP's pseudoscience shills. If those people are unwilling to use their critical thinking skills when their political party tells them not to, I fear for our future. I ain't kidding.
For instance: There isn't really any lack of consensus on global warming, people. The scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly speaking in one voice. The few skeptics who remain are largely shills funded by the oil companies. Yes, for real.
I note in passing that my buddies at Hit and Run are still curiously silent on the global warming news of the day.
This is pretty much how I feel about what Microsoft's done to the computer software industry. Unfortunately, the site for which Julian writes pretty much takes Microsoft at their word and buys the "statists envious of successful corporation" version of the story.
It's even remarkably timely.
So please imagine a world in which:
And, no, open source can't save us, with the trivial exception of browsers (which just aren't all that complicated compared to the other things above). I've been using linux, on server and desktop, at my last three jobs. I even prefer it for work. That doesn't make it a competitor serious enough to do much good, even though Microsoft has to say it does so they look good for the media. (In 2005, I couldn't get sound working on a friggin' mass-market HP-Compaq box running Red Hat Linux (and later, same problem with Debian) - and I was far from the only one).
The third-grade libertarians out there replied at the time: "the market will save us" - pointing to the transition to the internet, which would supposedly make operating system monopolies a non-issue. Problem is - Microsoft knew that was a threat and fairly effectively (and obnoxiously) killed it.