I see you got the Charlie Sheen package. Winning! :tup:

On the price front, there's about 2-3 more years worth of work before supercaps are a viable primary storage device, and then we are probably 5-6 years of regulation away from things being more economical to make the switch.

This thread has forced Rush's "Red Barchetta" song into my brain.

Not my favorite Rush song. Please get it out.

*goes to wikipedia to look up supercapacitors*

Did the same. Didn't understand much of it outside of there are pros and cons.

Funny, I've been playing Tom Sawyer in my head ever since I woke up this morning. :bowrofl:

I did get most of it, it definitely shared a lot in common with what I learned in my Batteries and Fuel Cells class last semester. I would love to get a job working with this stuff :tup:

They will make KERS systems much more efficient due to the ability to charge nearly instantly (limited by RC time constant, but relative to a battery, almost instant). The ability to pull so much more energy from KERS will dramatically increase the range, which has always been a sore spot for EVs. The instant charging will also alleviate the "plug in overnight" problem....caps are also MUCH less volatile than a battery.

The problem we now run into is the distribution system...we don't currently have the infrastructure to bring power to all these cars....

Pfft. Greenie Prius drivers will tell you that the coal fired electric plants are far better on the environment than a ultra low emissions gas powered Civic/Corolla/Sentra/5.0h/etc.

:icon18: THIS

Well obviously they're right, they drive a Prius! :rolleyes:

Prius the 5.0 of the gods.

I assume you are talking about the electrical grid and I would agree. Our power grid is antiquated at best. I keep wondering if/when we will ever modernize our national power distribution system. I would think this would be an easy sell to the power that be, but who knows...

On a related note, my biggest concerns with swapping to pure EV (many years/decades from now) would be what it does to the price of electricity in general and whether or not we would have the constant throughput to handle all these cars being plugged in to the power grid without going over capacity.

In the meantime, I expect to see gasoline hybrids and natural gas (insert alternative type fuel) hybrids becoming the norm. I would really like to see a push for natural gas since it is cleaner than gasoline, we have lots of it here, is easily on tap, and would not require to much change from our normal combustion engines. I want hybrids to get a bigger foothold first. We don't need to go gas -> gas/hybrid -> nat gas -> nat gas/hybrid because then we are back to where we started from only X number of years down the road. I also think (and I could be wrong) that our infrastructure for gasonline distribution can be easily repurposed for natural gas distribution. My thoughts anyway...

But CLEAN coal sir, you forgot about the new and improved clean coal.

Part of me throws up evertime I see one of those commercials...

All we gotta do is chop the tops of mountains to get it!