K, > ICE : 6 dollars, 3 gallons, 85.5 Kbtu available energy. > ELECTRIC : 6 dollars, 35 kwh, 128 Kbtu available energy
But this is basing gasoline at $2/gallon when it is already much closer to $3 in many places ($2.65 here) and I was basing my comparison on using $3 per gallon, which obviously makes it look far more advantageous to use electric. Do you think the price of gasoline will drop, rather than rise? It seem pretty certain to me that it will get to $3 just in time for the summer driving season, but who knows?. > So it is somewhat advantageous to plug in the car now, more so if you are city driving and can keep the electric motor in gear most of the time. My point was that if you kept the car below 25mpg.... In the Times article they are not staying below 25 mph, but adding more/better batteries and hacking the control system. If you get twice the bang-for-the buck using electricity from the grid, then every one is better off ... excepting OPEC and the "seven sisters", that is ;-) Does this mean that you are taking the "Daily News" instead of the Times? And as Horace mentioned there does seem to be an added synergy in adding solar panels to the roof. Keeping the batteries topped off with solar extends their life, means fewer batteries needed for an average trip, and there is also some evidence of an anomaly previously mentioned, about the high frequency trickle charge - so perhaps even when driving, if you can add a reverse HF trickle charge back to the battery from solar, this could be advantageous but that could be only for lead-acid "desulferization", or whatever they call it. All and all, with the new battery technology coming in as well, this is pretty exciting stuff. I see some real indications of seemingly unrelated things coming together on top of the Prius theme, giving us the possibility (in the near term) for an "emergent" automotive drive system, not requiring hydrogen, which can have a big impact on extending oil supplies and curtailing the price increase - maybe even reverse the price of oil. For instance, I would not want to be an investor in fuel cells, given what might be happening now with hybrid systems, as fuel cells demand a much greater change to the infrastructure. Jones
