🚀 go-pugleaf

David L. Jones wrote:
> "Eeyore" <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:482FA872.804C42A9@hotmail.com...
>>
>> "David L. Jones" wrote:
>>
>>> I just saw the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?:
>>> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
>>>
>>> Fantastic!
>> It completely misses the point.
> 
> Sounds like it's you who missed the point of the movie.
> 
>>> Everyone should watch this one.
>>> The IMDB user comment is spot on - " This film WILL frustrate you 
>>> greatly"
>>> In fact, it's enough to make you want to cry.
>>>
>>> Can't believe I had never heard of the movie before the other day.
>> http://gm-volt.com/2008/05/11/the-ev-1-wasnt-killed-it-was-dead-on-arrival/
>>
>> Required to do so, GM went on to make the EV-1. It used lead acid 
>> batteries
>> which held 0.4% as much energy as the same weight of gasoline.
> 
> Irrelevant.
> 
>> Thus the EV-1
>> weighed 2970 lbs, 1175 lbs of which were the batteries.
> 
> Also irrelevant.
> 
>> The resulting range
>> was 90/70 miles hwy/city.
> 
> Plenty enough for the majority of people. Especially when you can 
> conveniently recharge at home, at work, or at a shopping centre etc.
> 
>> To achieve this, the tiny two-seater also had to
>> have the record lowest CD, the most advanced powertrain of the day, and a 
>> cost
>> of $80,000 (they were only leased to consumers).
> 
> So what? price would come down in time.
> Thousands of people buy $80,00 cars every day.
> 
> No excuse for GM to go to ridiculous lengths to get back every one of the 
> cars and then crush them literally out of existence. Especially when there 
> were thousands who would have taken them off their hands and waived all 
> rights to support.
> GM did an evil thing, just evil.
> 
>> The article concludes:
>>
>> "In the end, though, the price wasn't an issue. The reality is the EV1 was
>> hostage to a technology the engineers knew from the get-go just wasn't 
>> able to
>> do the job Roger Smith and the California Air Resources Board believed it
>> could. That's what killed the electric car."
> 
> Everyone had better rush and get one of those Humvees with the $100,000 Bush 
> government tax rebate before the new government gets in. Or has that 
> fire-sale finished already?
> 
> Dave. 
> 
> 

A lot of assets get crushed on account of the corporate tax code and 
accounting rules.  I vividly remember 1992, when IBM got into the glue 
really badly--we crushed a whole lot of brand new equipment, all paid 
for and everything, because our budgets were being slashed and it was 
either keep the people or keep the equipment--which had to have the 
depreciation paid.  The waste was astronomical, but the management was 
in a bind and did their best with the choices available.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs