The Electric Mustang

[JEWC_Motorsports]

A 2014 Mustang has 700lb payload capacity. A crate engine Coyote 5.0 weighs 445 lb. So I guess from that standpoint that makes a 2014 Mustang a truck...

Does the mustang have a bed and a tailgate?

 

[Mach2burnout]

Does the mustang have a bed and a tailgate?

James, I think we went off talking about the Maverick and others didn’t follow.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Greg D]

A great read - copied from online postings:

What is a battery? I think Tesla said it best when he called it an Energy Storage System. That's important.

Rechargeable batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an electric vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered. It takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries to be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging. That means that even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly. But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery.

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

If this had been titled… "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," I doubt that many would you have read it.

If this article is fairly accurate, might it imply that we are "barking up the wrong tree", energy-wise?

 

[DieHarder]

Just had a neighbor's garage down the street burn last week that was car related. Can't say for sure if the car parked inside was being charged at the time or not. Can only say the house is destroyed and uninhabitable. All electric cars in the neighborhood are now parked at the end of the owners driveways or on the street with 75 - 100ft cords to charge them. IMHO having an electric just doesn't make sense when it has a built in propensity to burn my house down. Owned cars for over 50 years; none of them or anyone else I've ever known ever caught fire or blew up sitting in a garage or while being fueled. Getting up there in age so likely I'll never own an electric and will not regret ever driving one. They kind of remind me of overgrown golf carts anyway. Had to laugh when some manufacturers said they could play engine sounds thru the car speakers if the driver wanted.... pitiful.

 

[Juice]

eY

Nuclear energy is the cleanest and most efficient process to satisfy a rational thinking conservationist minded person. Sadly, people still live in the 20th century with regard to this option. France, who could not wipe their own butt with instructions from a youtube video and having instructions written on the wall above the toilet paper roll seem to have the nuclear energy option well in hand. This would be a move in the right direction rather than all of the wasted incentives and handouts given to create these stupid wind farms and solar fields that are not only an eyesore for miles but killing birds galore and costing tax payers millions wile giving back little.

If you read studies on this topic produced by "open minded" professors (Stanford University Study) with no real life wisdom, they show that wind farms can produce enough energy when stored to last for up to 72 hours, between what they call dead air wind patterns (estimated 3 day average in which no winds are present to spin the unit). They do not specify how large an area this stored energy can sustain power to, nor do they speak of the cost to maintain the storage devices needed, the maintenance on the wind turbines, the fact that the blades have to be replaced on a routine basis - assuming nothing flied into them and damages them before their life span is exhausted - and the cost to reclaim batteries storage devices when they have been depleted and/or failed short of avg life expectancy.

Palm Springs, CA has had a wind form in place for decades. Yet their cost of electrical power is 69% more than the national average at 23.83 cents per KWhr. The national average is 14.11 cents per KWhr according to a 2021 study. This is with the use of alternative wind and solar energy sources and the area being one of the higher solar producing climates. You can see their wind farm for miles as you drive out I-10. I've been there.

EV's would be much more accepted IMHO if they were not a political tool of the super elite. It would be nice if electric vehicles could drive 350-400 miles and be recharged in as little time as filling up the average sized vehicle with similar range. But they can't. A tesla even on the pure DC charge option offered only at select locations takes 20-30 minutes to charge FULLY. The fastest 120VAC station option can only perform this in 8-12 hours according to a TESLA website I found on the topic.

My uncle has owned hybrids for years. On his bumper are NRA stickers, Trump stickers, etc. On occasion he is confronted by some left whack accusing him of being a hypocrite for supporting the right while owning a hybrid. He then asks them calmly each time (he is 6'4" and ways about 260) when did the left form a monopoly on conservation? He points out that he believes in conservation and saving money while doing it but that it is not his religion. He stresses the rational approach such as how hunters are some of the largest conservationists in the country and learned from reading about the near extinction of the buffalo in the 19th century that to hunt something to extinction is not logical (he uses the phrase from Star Trek IV). To this they have little rebut and he bids them a nice day and continues on with his.

You forgot how clean and safe it is to store spent nuclear fuel.

 

[Pentalab]

eY

You forgot how clean and safe it is to store spent nuclear fuel.

IF the space shuttle was still around, it could be taken to space, then sent to the Sun.

 

[Juice]

IF the space shuttle was still around, it could be taken to space, then sent to the Sun.

While burning tons of fuel and adding tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

 

[Pentalab]

While burning tons of fuel and adding tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Ok, well how about just tossing it in the nearest volcano...in the south pacific.

 

[Juice]

That old salt mine in Utah......IIRC.

 

[Greg D]

Watch how FAST this fire spreads from electric vehicle to electric vehicle:

You can imagine how fast your house can catch fire.

 

[DieHarder]

Yep, looks like the neighbors house. The front and top of the garage looked like it was burned with a giant blow torch. That's gonna be expensive.