![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bolsonProbably gonna buy a car between now and August. The $24000 for a new 2011 Prius is starting to sound reasonable. The pure-electric cars aren't available and have lame range*. The Chevy Volt is too expensive. Other hybrids get lesser efficiency and aren't as nice.
Also, I realize I shop for cars like I shop for gadgets. Lots of window shopping on websites and pricing out packages and features. Toyota's configuration page falls somewhere between Apple's (easy) and Dell's (way too much crap and way too long). But I'm definitely not going to be picking out a case-motherboard-cpu-etc and assembling them myself or whatever the equivalent would be in car land.
* Energy. 1 gallon of gasoline has 115000 Btu of chemical heat energy, at perfect energy conversion that would be 33.7 kilowatt-hours. We could cut that in a third as a rough estimate of energy conversion for an internal combustion engine. The Nissan Leaf and Ford Focus Electric have 21-23 kilowatt-hour batteries. If that's 2 post-conversion gallons of gasoline (a pretty small tank) and they have a range of 100 miles, they get about 50 miles per gallon. I'd call that normal for an efficient car these days. Now we just need batteries with the energy density of gasoline. Also, five miles per kilowatt-hour is about the same as my electric scooter gets.
Also, I realize I shop for cars like I shop for gadgets. Lots of window shopping on websites and pricing out packages and features. Toyota's configuration page falls somewhere between Apple's (easy) and Dell's (way too much crap and way too long). But I'm definitely not going to be picking out a case-motherboard-cpu-etc and assembling them myself or whatever the equivalent would be in car land.
* Energy. 1 gallon of gasoline has 115000 Btu of chemical heat energy, at perfect energy conversion that would be 33.7 kilowatt-hours. We could cut that in a third as a rough estimate of energy conversion for an internal combustion engine. The Nissan Leaf and Ford Focus Electric have 21-23 kilowatt-hour batteries. If that's 2 post-conversion gallons of gasoline (a pretty small tank) and they have a range of 100 miles, they get about 50 miles per gallon. I'd call that normal for an efficient car these days. Now we just need batteries with the energy density of gasoline. Also, five miles per kilowatt-hour is about the same as my electric scooter gets.
