What steps will Big Oil companies take to ensure that very few people buy electric cars?

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Byakuya

Now that electric cars are finally starting to become available, the Big Oil companies will undoubtedly be plotting and planning how to keep people from buying them. What strategies do you think they'll use to keep us dependent upon gas?

Answer
Same thing they did for the EV-1... petition government to keep oil standards low, wage a media war against them as being weak, unsafe, bad for business, and even un-American.

(Or say stupid stuff like Greed above - especially when the energy that it does take to charge a car is a fraction of the amount of energy that goes into an automotive gas combustion engine for the same amount of mileage... Not to mention that even with the US's "dirty" power grid, electric car's secondary emissions would still be less then half of of the total emissions by a conventional US gasoline auto.

But then again, which industry would have the most to lose if the US did upgrade our power grids??? So, who can we expect to put up obstacles to that as well?)

Determining the probability of an electric car charging station being available?

John

Hi there,

I'm just wondering if anybody would know of a way of determining the probability of an event.

I trying to figure out how I could calculate the probability of a charging station for an electric car being available when a person arrives at their destination.

I have the travel data for cars in terms of the number of journeys, journey start and end times and dates etc.

Say there is 50,000 charging stations in a country also.

Is there anyway of working out a rough estimate of this?

Thank you

John

Answer
Since electric cars can charge from regular electric outlets - in addition to charging stations - I think the odds of an electric outlet being available just about anywhere are pretty good.
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As for the mathematics of figuring the average availability of charging stations - the challenge is that charging stations are not evenly distributed geographically. If a given state has 200 charging stations, they are likely to all be concentrated in a few urban areas.
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The real solution is to examine a map of charging stations before traveling, like this one:
http://www.chargepoint.net/find-stations.php
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Also some electric cars - like the Leaf - have charging locations in their GPS map database, so the car can direct you to one if you need it.
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I'm an old EV hobbyist, we've been driving electric cars since before there were charging stations. If you are a nice person, and offer to do business with a store or restaurant, you can usually work out permission to charge from an outdoor outlet (most buildings have one somewhere.)

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