BMW says has 10,000 i3 (electric) orders - i8 (plugin hybrid) already sold out

[kristopher]

BMW has orders for nearly 10,000 of its i3 electric cars, the first of which were delivered in Germany last week, the company's global sales chief, Ian Robertson, said at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

Robertson also said the BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car due to be introduced in mid-2014 has sold out for its first year of availability. He did not say how many the company will sell in that first year.

http://www.electric-vehiclenews.com/2013/11/bmw-says-has-10000-i3-orders-i8-already.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FpEcq+%28Electric+Vehicle+News%29

[NNadir]

1. And this impacts the 2.4 billion people WHO reports have no sanitation facilities at all...

...how exactly?

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/en/

Are the billionaires and the millionaires who buy this piece of toxic crap going to donate 0.005% of each purchase to buy a public latrine in Mumbai?

It's amazing how narrow, how provincial, how oblivious, the focus of rich boy fantasies are.

They neither know of nor care for humanity and the world.

There are about a billion cars on the planet, all of which, including the electric versions are toxic nightmares.

This is one of the most unsurprising posts from the avatar of the grand, expensive, failed "renewables will save us" fantasy that I've seen, since it obviates the focus of these parochial fantasies.

[LouisvilleDem]

2. It harms them immensely

Given that Germany is producing more and more of its electricity from coal these days, its not exactly a good time to be switching over to electric cars...

[kristopher]

3. It is the perfect time to be switching to EVs

They are a key element of grid modernization; mass storage for variable generation that's a byproduct of capital investments already being made for transportation.

...from 2010 to 2012, a two-year period encompassing the March, 2011 Fukushima catastrophe and Germany’s subsequent decision to turn off 29% of its nuclear power production (reducing reactor output from 140.6 terrawatt-hours in 2010 to 99.5 TWh in 2012), Germany actually held constant its use of fossil fuels to make electricity.

How did German society make up for the 41.1 TWh drop in reactors’ electricity generation? Numerically, it was simple:

German solar-photovoltaic generation grew from 11.7 TWh to 28.0 TWh (a rise of 16.3 TWh).
Wind generation grew from 37.8 TWh to 46.0 TWh (a rise of 8.2 TWh).
Total consumption of electricity fell by 16.4 TWh (from 610.9 TWh to 594.5 TWh), despite GDP growth.
(Figures are based on data from Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, Statistisches Bundesamt, Arbeitsgruppe Erneuerbare Energien-Statistik (AGEE-Stat).)

Why “Official” Nuke Plant Cost Estimates Are Like Campaign Promises
11/21/2013 by Charles Komanoff
http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-official-nuke-plant-cost-estimates-are-like-campaign-promises/

[NNadir]

4. Wonderfully characteristic cut and paste. This has no bearing on the $137,500 cost...

of the BMW i8 that rich boys are pushing here along with the stupid fantasy that these cars will be powered by the failed, expensive and frankly delusional coal and gas fig leaf that calls itself "the renewable energy" industry.

There are no countries on this planet - which apparently some people are only interested in pretending to save one billionaire at a time - that has a per capita income of $137,500 per year.

Zero.

http://www.bmwusa.com/standard/content/vehicles/2014/bmwi/bmwi_i8redirect.aspx

As for the electric car fantasy:

Germany will bring more than 7 GW of new coal plants on line before the end of 2014.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/steag-starts-germany-s-first-coal-fired-power-plant-in-8-years.html

Unlike the so called "renewable" trash - which is lucky to operate at 30% of capacity utilization and which cannot function without expensive dangerous fossil fuel powered redundancies - coal plants are designed to run at 70-90% capacity utilization and if they don't run at these levels, the laws of thermodynamics require that their environmental and economic costs, already the worst in the world, will be even worse.

A systematic study of electric vehicles in China, where 100 million of them already function, published in one of the world's most prestigious environmental journals, Environmental Science and Technology showed that electric cars (as opposed to scooters) are worse than gasoline cars and almost as bad as diesels in terms of the cost to human health.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es202347q

Let's be clear. Germany isn't building coal plants to operate them for a few "transitional" years, or decades. The plants are being built to operate for a huge fraction of a century, long after - I predict - these disgusting billionaire toys will be leaching heavy metals into landfills in an impoverished future.

But the oblivious billionaires and millionaires pushing the rich boy fantasy that their coal powered electric sports cars will be powered by wind and solar energy, neither care about human health nor the environment.

They're mindless provincials living in a "let them eat cake" empire of oblivion.

[kristopher]

5. So your dishonest response is to pretend LIon batteries are the same as lead acid batteries

Some things never change. The consistency with which some nuclear advocates use trickery, subterfuge and outright falsehoods as a foundation for their arguments is actually pretty amazing.

[quadrature]

6. will tend to lower the price of crude oil...

the price of food and crude oil are related.