The CEO of Fiat Chrysler said he hopes that people don’t buy his company’s
electric car, the Fiat 500e, which he is forced to sell at a loss
because of state and federal mandates.
“I hope you don’t buy it because every time I sell one it costs me
$14,000,” Sergio Marchionne told the audience at the Brookings Institute
during a discussion of the auto bailout.
As head of Fiat in 2009, Marchionne stepped in to help guide Chrysler through the auto-bailout and out of bankruptcy.
“I’m honest enough to tell you that I will make the car, I’ll make it
available which is my requirement but I will sell the limit of what I
need to sell and not one more,” said Marchionne.
Fiat Chrysler produces two Fiat 500s. The gas-powered Fiat 500 has a
base price of $17,300. The electric Fiat 500e runs $32,650, according to Reuters.
In his candid remarks, Marchionne blamed regulations set in place in California and by President Obama.
“Because of California and there’s mandates which keep on moving the
impositions back on car makers to produce cars that are zero-emission
vehicles,” said Marchionne.
“The other one is because of the initiative that was put in place by
Obama back in 2011 with the new emission rules which are effectively
binding the industry until 2025.”
Thanks: The Daily Caller
Testing by AAA
has found that how far an electric vehicle can travel on one charge
varies widely depending on the weather. Frigid temperatures can reduce
that distance by 57%.
The research is important
to the Automobile Club of Southern California because it maintains
mobile recharging trucks for people who misjudge how far they can go in
their electric car.
“EV drivers need to carefully monitor range in hot and cold weather,”
said Steve Mazor, the engineer who manages the Southern California
club’s Automotive Research Center.
The center conducted tests on a 2013 Nissan Leaf, a 2012 Mitsubishi iMiEV and the electric version of a 2014 Ford Focus.
The cars were tested for city driving to mimic stop-and-go traffic and to better compare with Environmental Protection Agency ratings listed on the window sticker, AAA said.
The average EV battery range in AAA’s test was 105 miles at 75
degrees but dropped 57% to just 43 miles at 20 degrees. Heat also sliced
the cars' ranges but by not as much: The cars averaged 69 miles per
full charge at 95 degrees, 33% less than in 75-degree weather.
The research center tested the cars following the same EPA drive
cycles that provide the data for the mileage window stickers on new
cars. The vehicles were charged up and then driven on a machine with
rollers called a dynamometer in a climate-controlled room until the
battery was exhausted.
Watch the Video at: The LA Times
According to a newly released study, electric cars are no more
“environmentally friendly” than are gasoline-powered vehicles. In fact,
with everything considered, they may even be worse on the environment. Confused?
In an article entitled “Unclean at Any Speed”
in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric
cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. From UPI.com:
Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one
place to another, he wrote, and “most electric-car assessments analyze
only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a
more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impact over the
vehicle’s entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation
and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard.”
Political priorities and corporate influence have created a flawed
impression that electric cars significantly reduce transportation
impacts, he said.
“Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to
electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of
cigarettes to another,” Zehner, a visiting scholar at the University of
California, Berkeley, said.
This, of course, should come as no shock to anyone who has followed the similarly ridiculous (political) story of ethanol.
As is the case with the electric car, the idea of ethanol was (is – to politicians and environmentalists) appealing. We could reduce our dependence on oil – foreign oil
in particular – and stop spewing megatons of carbon into the
atmosphere. All by replacing oil with clean, home-grown, all-American
corn! It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It is.
As reported in Popular Mechanics, corn farming isn’t cheap. In fact, it’s damn expensive.
It requires heavy inputs of nitrogen fertilizer (made
with natural gas), applications of herbicides and other chemicals (made
mostly from oil), heavy machinery (which runs on diesel fuel) and
transportation (diesel fuel again). Converting the corn into fuel
requires still more energy (gas, oil, diesel fuel). The ratio of how
much energy is used to make ethanol versus how much it delivers is known
as the energy balance, and calculating it is surprisingly complex.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory states that, “Today, 1 Btu
of fossil energy consumed in producing and delivering corn ethanol
results in 1.3 Btu of usable energy in your fuel tank.” Even that modest
payback may be overstated. Skeptics cite the research of Cornell
University professor David Pimentel, who estimates that it takes approximately 1.3 gal. of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol.
The pros and cons of both electric cars and ethanol will be debated
for years. As will the pros and cons of wind and solar power. The
question is, what should be the government’s role – if any – in the
meantime?
Should the federal government mandate and support (prop up) specific
technologies (See: Barack Obama: wind and solar energy) and spend (lose)
billions of tax-payer dollars on those (politically-selected)
technologies? Or, should it allow the free market to choose the best
alternatives? (Let’s go with “B”, shall we?)
Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between.
Read More: Independent Journal
