so who's gonna be the first to make one?

shoulda bought that rav4-ev when i had the chance......

 

ummm probally no one

 

so much for furthering the discussion

 

or just an alternate fuel source, seeing how the prez won't push for it , we the people should!!!!

 

apparently all that's needed is a really good electric forklift junkyard...anyone know any?

is there a car-parts.com equivalent for electric forklifts?

 

why not just find a way to make it run on pure ethanol, hell if brazil can do it and be completely self sufficient, why can't the U.S. do it?? i'd be willing to pay the $100-$1k to have my car converted, if it meant cheaper fuel prices and that i'll be able to drive it for years to come, i don't like the idea of electric driven cars, just makes me feel unsafe being in a transformer basically

 

i looked at alternate fuels and i suppose it depends on what ur motivations are...i'm looking for as much freedom from petrol as possible. cng's and alcohol blends still rely on petrol - i.e. engine oil, belts, hoses, tranny fluid and so.

there's plenty of E85 (85% ethyl alcohol) cars out there..i believe the biggest obstacle (one of them i should say) to retro-ing older cars is the gasket and rubber components of yore are degraded a great deal by the high alcohol content. i wonder if there's an emissions issue with ethanol or if it even puts out the same joules per volume burned as gasoline does.

in my view the electric car is as free as we can get from petrol...is it a scary transformer? sure there's lots of current but there's also a few tens of thousands of volts coming out of your alternator which is only inches away from a combustion chamber which detonates several thousands of time per minute.

i think it's a comfort level thing....we've grown used to the internal combustion engine and the idea of an electric motor - it's silence, lack of up keep - it's all just too weird to get used to...

funny note....i spoke to this guy who drove an electric geo metro. he said his biggest complaint was driving in parking lots. people get so used to the noise of a motor that they don't look where they're going if they don't hear a motor. so people would scratch and ding up his car all the time as they walked right into it....

 

well supposedly pure alcohol cars or w/e its called, do not put out hardly any fumes, a lot more enviromentally safe

the problem that hybrid cars have is that when they have a wreck, they can't just jump up there and start cutting the doors away, cause of the amount of electricity thats flowing through the car, mind you, it would be awesome, lol but what if you forgot to plug up your battery, lol

bush wants us to use hydrogen fuel cell cars, BIG PROBLEM.....ford created one in a focus, just costs $1 million per car, they said it'd be 10 years before it hit the market so they could lower prices, only thing. They've proven that they can take trash and convert it to fuel and it'll even run in our engines as is!!!!!!! why not go that route?? infinite fuel, clean up our country while we're at it, sounds like a better idea to either use ethanol or trash

 

ill tell ya gas is high but before the max i was driving a 4-wheel drive 75 chevy truck averaged 6mi/gal on a good day, so im saying my max getting 28 on the hwy is so nice. rather have the performance at 28mi/gal then some goofy electric car

 

NO ONE will convert a maxima, it's just not worth it.
have you priced out electrical conversion parts?
an electric forklift doesn't have the ability to be a suitable donor IMO.

 

I helped convert a VW to run on veg oil, used none the less. It's not too bad, a bit of drilling and some wiring. You essentially need two tanks, one for veg (fits where the spare goes) and the regular diesel. You need to start and finish the car on diesel but can run on veg the rest of the time. The guy was getting used fryer oil from a local bar weekly (about 8-10 gals for free, as it costs for disposal). He'd filter it and then just fill the tank.
50 miles a gallon on used oil, not too shabby. Though it smells like french fries everywhere he goes and probably limits engine life over time, but hey what a way to travel.
I've seen a few older chevy trucks that have dual tanks. This would seem an ideal set-up, especially with a cummings engine as I hear they're bombproof.
There are a few old max's out there w/diesel, maybe it's possible to swap one of their engines into a third gen? Just an idea.

 

General Motors has had lots of success with their Hydrogen prototypes. They even made a H2 that ran on Hydrogen. I dont want to hear you Max guys complaining about gas prices. My truck runs on Premium + Octane booster. And at about 10-12mpg it adds up really quick.

 

I get 31mpg on pure highway miles. I'm going to work on some aerodynamics mods to see if I can squeeze another 1 or 2 mpg out of it. They say that more than half the gas we use is to overcome the wind drag.

 

Mouse in a mouse wheel FTW...

 

and thats your choice to drive a gas hog

 

hydrogen is the best solution. ford modified a focus engine to run on hydrogen and didn't sacrifice much (if any) power of the car. probably the only focus i've ever been interested in. it was pretty cool though.

 

in argentina, most cab drivers have thier cars running on natural gas, the conversion is really cheap.

 

i suppose the car manufacturers must be wrong then since that's where they get most of their parts for their electric cars. feel free to expound on your opinion

 

the engine ran off of hydrogen instead of gasoline? i've heard of hydrogen fuel cells that replace the battery packs in electric cars but never a hydrogen burning combustion engine....interesting

 

yep, hell i saw a video on that auto video site of a lawn mower burning hydrogen. here's a link about the focus http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004...hows_h2_i.html

 

According the August, 1992 issue of Car and Driver, the VE 5spd was rated at 21 / 26. Considering that those numbers are next impossible to achieve in real life driving, how is it that you have increased you highway mileage by around 20%?

 

That 21/26 figure is from the EPA, so they do not represent real life conditions. If I drive locally I'll be lucky if I can get 20mpg! Consumer reports has pointed that out, and they now report their own findings usually, and its an average rating.

But, a lot of the mods that we add on for more HP can also help in fuel economy, exhaust, CAI, UDP. I haven't replaced a wheel bearing yet, but I'd like to do all 4 just to see if it can reduce frictional drag.

edit: Also wanted to mention that my eibach/tociko setup is such that the nose of my max is lower than the rear, I feel that that pitch aids in overcoming some of the aerodynamic drag.

 

A major problem with H2 powered cars is that it takes a lot of energy to make H2, its not freely floating around in the air. If you release H2 is will leave the planet, its that energetic.

So one day, we'll have a retard for a president, and he'll state "America is addicted to Hydrogen!" lol

 

well, lets at least hope that the secretary of defense won't be a lying sob

 

Ok lets not get all this started .................................................. .........


Please.........

 

max need dinosaur gas and thats all. the cost just sucks

 

that was only the first gen, which is RWD

 

Probably the only thing DIRECTLY swappable is the controller.
I have done a fair amount of research on alternative power sources and forklifts IIRC are DC powered whereas an electric car uses an AC motor for optimum efficiency.
Electric cars are not our future, our future is more likely in alchohol or other growable energy source.
Electricity pollutes as we currently produce most of it.

 

for the sake of educating others, AC and DC motors are relatively equally efficient. AC motors are typically stronger/faster/more torquey and as such require significantly larger battery packs.
from a forklift you can also swap the motor, charger and potentiometers - that's a good chunk of the system right there. if u do use the DC controller from a forklift (which is "DIRECTLY swappable") u must use a DC motor - there's no mix-n-matching

AC motors are a little more convenient in that you just have to reverse polarity to go into reverse where u typically need a transmission of some sort to do so with a DC motor - this is why most DC motor swaps use donor cars with manual trannies.

you can charge both AC and DC powered vehicles (whose range and speed are more contingent on the battery technology employed - enter hydrogen fuel cells) with a solar panel over just a few hours.

there u have freedom from big oil and the Rockefellar's coal as well.

the stability of a growable energy source is shaky because it is in fact "growable". what happens in the event of a bad crop year? what happens when a crop is sabotaged by some herbicide? what happens when the annual crop volume is exhausted and we have to wait for the next crop to be harvested? can u imagine calling out of work cause ur local refinery ran out of corn?

i just rather not rely on anyone to grow or harvest or mine or whatever....

 

according to my understanding, the OEs prefer AC motors because they are easier to do regenerative braking with.

Electric cars are not the answer. Every method we currently have for effecient electricity production pollutes.

now if we had more wind turbines up or hydroelectric dams, then it would be more logical.

I'm from the midwest, corn is life!
Personally I want to go biodiesel, but I haven't found a $500 diesel yet.

 

I havent done the research so I dont know but will throw out what I have heard a couple of people say...this is not my opinion (I dont have one yet because I havent researched it)...

From what I have heard the price to replace batteries (and the manufacturers say they have to be replaced after so many years) really doesnt justify the car. Saying you dont really save in the long run. That was on a discussion of hybrids though and not full electric motors.

I honestly dont know what the answer is and should probably look into something but right now I am lucky and my company pays for all my gas. That may stop with gas prices the way they are though...I dont know but hope not.

 

well there goes that dream

Or what happens when Monsanto owns the rights to each crops seed production?

Biodiesel and veg cars are big in Boulder, mostly VW's and old Benz's, and do quite well on mileage. But till I hit the lotto I'll just take the bus to work, yeah public transport.

Just a question, as I know little, is a hybrid diesel in our future, or is there some fact which precludes it?

 

Now let me see if I have this straight, it was explained to me but I'm not 100% sure if I have it. Hydrogen powered cars rely on the splitting of water molecules , right? With the oxygen and hydrogen getting burned? (Not sure on that) Now if this situation is correct what happens when we split all the water in the world. With 70% of the world being water I know that this will take time but I dont think that after the molecules have been spilt that they ever naturally recombine. So it is a sure bet that we would be using another "limited supply" fuel. In my own personal opinion to get away from so much petrol dependancy we should look to more long term solutions. Yes I know that solar polar is limited in how long the sun will be shining but a couple of milliion years longer is better than the last 150 that we have had fossil fuels. I believe with some well placed research and a high enough demand from the consumer that solar panels and solar power can be effectively used in the future. However we need to jump on this now and not wait around for the problem to come up again.

Most of the information presented in this article is opion and my not be true in the least. I dont know if half of it is true but it sounds about right.