Archive for the 'Transportation' Category

EV rally

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

I dropped by the The Silicon Valley EAA Rally this past Saturday. It had a mix of homebrew and manufactured cars including the Tesla Roadster. There were some people driving around the parking lot (the “rally” part of the event) but for me the interesting bit was seeing all the cars.
Sadly, the experience didn’t do much [...]

Plug-in Hybrids

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

Erik pointed out in response to my post about Electric Vehicles that plug-in hybrids already exist in prototype/tinkerer form. They’re not the larger win of a pure EV with a long range, but they’re buildable right now and might serve as a nice intermediate step.  In a plug-in hybrid the gas engine is essentially there as a [...]

Tesla Motors blog opened my eyes to EVs

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

The Tesla Motors Blog is an interesting read.  Among other interesting posts, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” has a table of energy-efficiency that spells out what I hadn’t put together.  Electric cars are a net pollution/efficiency win because our electricity generation technology is much more efficient than internal combustion engines.   I knew power generation was more efficient [...]