Originally Posted by ZZtop

Form everything I have read, our power grid is very very fragile. I am an ME, not EE, but I would "assume" (dangerous, I know) that these cars would create a significant draw. Now, if multiple car companies were producing and selling multiple different plug in models at the same time, which could happen, then you would literally have millions of vehicles in a very short period of time, say two years.

Everything might be okay if everyone charged at off peak hours, but that could be difficult to regulate. People don't obey the speed limit, or many water restrictions, so why would they listen this time.

But everyone ignored the best part of my comment, would it really be any more "green" (God I hate that term.) With all the regulations in place, it takes a very very long time and a ridiculous amount of money to build nuclear plants in the U.S. So the extra power would come primarily from coal or fossil fuel burning plants for quite some time. Not to mention the obvious individual car aspects such as disposing of the batteries. And then of course you can get into the fact that humans contribute insignificantly to "global warming" if at all. And even if we do contribute, America does nothing compared to the unregulated polluting emerging nations of China and India for example. This environmental crap makes me sick. Ok, I rambled there, sorry

Originally Posted by bossco

I thought that was the problem with pure lectrics, the point of source pollution was moved to the power generator, and like you've indicated, we burn mostly fossil fuels to make power and from what I understand, those same fossil fuel powerplants (along I guess with industry) are the real contributors to our carbon emmisons.

Originally Posted by DvBoard

Your a fool if you think people will jump at a car just because it's all electric.

Originally Posted by jg95z28

Have you seen the waiting list for the Tesla Roadster?

Originally Posted by Todd80Z28

This is true, but the portion of carbon emissions from even a coal-fired power plant that it takes to charge your vehicle, is lower than the carbon emissions that come from the equivalent use of a gas/diesel engine. It's one of those economy of scale things- the fact that the coal plant is so large, losses are a smaller proportion of the burned fuel (and the fuels are different).

Ideally, of course, the new plants coming online over time would be of a cleaner type- nuclear, wind, solar.

Originally Posted by bossco

Is that in theory or in practice?

Originally Posted by Jim the Nomad

Theory, I suppose, since there aren't a huge amount of EVs in operation...

I'm not going to pretend to be an EE, but from what I've read, the grid has a lot of excess capacity after dark, and a large population of EVs would ultimately serve as a load leveler, basically.