I don't know if anyone knows about this, but after watching the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?", which is about how we had the solution to out of sight gas prices back in the late 90's and then abandoned it. It's a must see if you're angry about fuel prices and our dependence on foreign fuel.

Anyways, I did a little research about electric cars and found this "eBox", which is a Gen 1 xB that you can plug into your house or any outlet to power it, giving it 125-150 miles of driving capability, a top speed of 95 MPH, and ZERO emission.

The only downside this car isn't being mass produced by Scion obviously, it's a company that does conversions for manual xB's and it cost about 55,000$ to convert one on top of the price of the car itself.

If only car companies would work towards producing affordable EV vehicles...








More details available here
http://www.acpropulsion.com/ebox/ebox.pdf

also more pics available here at the bottom of the page
http://www.stefanoparis.com/piaev/ac...eBox/ebox.html

 

Yup... this has been around for a while now.

 

as seemingly good of an idea as this is. it will never become mainstream in america. there is no market for electric cars here. hello...america... EGO. look at all the people you know around you that insist on driving huge SUVs or full size trucks for no reason other than "thats what i like" or "i need it for towing" the once every 6 months that they tow something. or the best "im safer in it", so that when they cause an accident driving on their cellphone they kill everyone else in the economy car but they walk away from the incident.

an example, the other day i was talking with a guy i know about the future of hydrogen power in automobiles and the cars we all have now becoming obsolete by the cost of gas price. kind of like assuming that gas prices will be raised so high that the majority have no other option but to ditch our cars now and get hydrogen power vehicles. he is a diehard muscle car manly man and he INSISTED he will never get rid of his no matter how much it costs to have and will keep driving it, laughing at everybody as "he smokes them on the road" because his car will be faster than the possibly slow, future hydrogen powered vehicles aimed towards economy, not acceleration.

i am actually very curious as to how we are all going to make the switch from gasoline to whatever alternative power engine vehicles.

is it going to be a gradual change over? are they just going to slowly keep raising gas prices higher and higher making it impossible to afford a gasoline engine car and us needing to get into the new alternatively fueled vehicle to be able to afford transporation?

i wonder...

 

It's baller too...rockin' TE37's!!

 

no, looking at how they are currently raising gas prices, they will quickly get it so high no one can afford to ride even a scooter to work

 

wow, never knew that there was an electric box....how does it ride?

 

nice friggin wheels

 

Nice find, I saw this awhile back in a magazine and on tv. I thought the price was ridiculous, but then rethought the idea, and figured that R&D would be a boat load seeing that they are a small industry with limited consumers.

^^^ Yeah I was expecting them to pull out some airride and underglow after I saw those ballin rims hahaha.

 

High gas prices are a lifestyle changing event.

 

I have the documentary on DVD and is interesting and at the same time a shame to what was done to most of the electric vehicles. What made me kinda mad was when automaker reps and electric car supporters were at the meeting with the CARB and all were promised 10 minutes talk time, but when electric car supporters were up to talk they were quickly shut down and their time to talk to 3 minutes. At the meeting Alan Lloyd said he wasn't biased, and his actions just contradicted his statement. Now the focus is using Hydrogen as fuel for the future, yet to mass market that and to have affordable vehicles i think it'll be epic fail because of astronomical costs. The electric car is here, now, it should have stayed but GM destroyed(literally) something that helped out the world, rather California, having the worst air quality in the naton. Even Hpnda destroyed their EV Plus and also Toyota with the RAV4 EV. After seeing this film i'd have to say CARB FTL. I recommend the DVD to everybody, we all drive cars/trucks/SUVs or most on this forum.

 

Sweet. I think I've seen this before. Like curtislo9 pointed out, their overhead has to be horrific. I'd like to see how the economies of scale apply to something like this.

I hope Nissan goes ahead with the electric version of the next-gen Cube, because that would mean I might actually have a viable replacement for the xB.

As for the jackasses who are clearly compensating for other inadequacy, they clearly forget that electric motors make their peak torque at zero rpm. As such, here's an electric car that does 11s in the quarter: http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/whitezombie.php

 

I agree there are some people out there who don't want to give up gasoline engines based on silly and impractical reasons, but I think with rising oil prices that the majority of people are ready for a change.


As for hydrogen vehicles, while it would be better than a gasoline engine it still has many limits, such as limited range like electric vehicles (although some now can go 300 miles on a single charge), but it also has problems with cold weather and could be broken from everyday bumps or jolts from the road. And hydrogen vehicles won't be available commercially for many years.


Here's one of the latest EV's in production by GM again, the makers of the successful EV1, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevy_Volt
It will likely cost 30-40k, and has an electric-only range of 40 miles. After that 40 miles a gasoline based generator can kick in to give a range of 640 miles on the highway, or 53MPG. While the electric-only range is enough for most American's daily driving, their original EV1 used lead batteries and could get a range over 100+ miles, so some things just don't make sense. And also, it won't be available until late 2010 at the earliest.

 

You would be surprised. People, as a whole, are absolutely awful with their money. They buy houses they can't afford on 50 year payments to put their 2.2 kids (which they just had to spawn) into so they could spend money they don't have on their growth while buying a huge SUV they also can't afford on 25 year payments to tote around those kids and putting $75 worth of gas into it every week... which, yep, they can't afford.

As long as this keeps happening, gas prices are going to keep going up. You can speculate reasons all you like, but I can sum it up for you much easier: they raise the prices because we'll keep paying them. Not just we econocar drivers, who spend $50 at the pump... but the generic American family who spends twice that to go half as far. They will keep buying large, inefficient vehicles and keep putting in outrageous amounts of gasoline into them until the TV tells them to do otherwise. It's no wonder the oil companies are making windfall profits.

 

Hey, if you can drop 55k to plug it in, you'd better get some nice wheels on it.

I wonder how much you'd have to drive it to break even on the cost as far as gas consumption.

 

[quote="burstaneurysm"]At $4.00 a gallon for gas and the average xB getting around 30 MPG you would need to put 425,000 miles on that electric xB to break even with the conversion cost. This does not include the fact that your monthly electric bill will be higher as a result of charging the car up.

 

They should make H2 Hummers and other oversized vehicles solely electric. They're the ones taking all the fuel..

 

great points. it sucks and frustrates me but oh well. guess we'll see how it pans out.

 

the only problem is that it costs 70k... thats... a lot

 

yep

 

These cars are not every where for the same reason a car the could driver from NY to Detroit on One tank of gas never came to be mass produced. Oil companies don't want it. They make money by selling oil. Sure the could still be making alot of money by keeping gas to 99 cent a gallon. But why not make 4 times that. Americans are willing to pay it. Car companies don't realy do anything about cause why should they people keep buy the cars they make. When people stop buying a car they stop making it. So if we stopped buying new Gas cars they would stop making them. all it would take would be 6 months of no new gas powered cause being sold.

Think about it (i'll keep it more home based) Toyota stopped making the celica because it didn't see well. and but not selling they sold like 20 percent less of them. Now you make a car companies loss 100 percent of their total sells, and we the consumers tell them we want an electric car that gets at least 500miles to the charge and take no more then 4 hours to charge from empty to full. We would have that car with in 12 months.

The Oil companies would hate it cause they would lose so much on Gas. but they would make up their money on other oil based products, tires. plastic. etc etc..