Andy Grove, the man who led Intel to dominance, has a new cause: The Electric Car. Ken Thomas of the AP interviewed Grove on his new passion and found a true believer. Grove notes that "the beauty of electric power is its ability to be produced through multiple sources such as coal, wind and nuclear, and its 'stickiness' — it can be transported only over land." Typically the ability to transport stored energy by sea is considered an advantage for coal, oil and the like. But Grove touts the fact that electricity cannot be readily traded on the global market. Coming from the former leader of the quintessential modern multi-national, Intel, this is quite a surprise. Indeed, Grove says that the inability of the US to export electricity to voracious China means that electricity prices can be kept lower than they otherwise would be. He may have a point. Back in the 1960s a crash in US automotive sales would be paired with plunging steel prices, but not now. Grove's other hot button is the promotion of aftermarket plug-in conversion kits for hybrid cars. He sees parallels between plug-in conversion kits of today with the way hobbyists and home users got the whole personal computer industry up and running a few decades ago.
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I think you skimmed the article and didn’t notice the “conversion kits” he is fantasizing about are not for the few hybrid owners — he’s under the illusion that the owners of at least 80 million existing, conventional SUVs and trucks should be retrofitting their vehicles (somehow) to make them plug-in hybrids.
Which is easily the single most stupid thing anyone has yet suggested in this whole field of fuel economy, and proves Grove must be smoking crack nowadays.
Grove: While car makers have been developing plug-ins, Grove says the nation should consider ways of retrofitting the 80 million low-mileage pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans on the road to make them capable of running on both gasoline and electric power.
Not very realistic, practical or cost effective. Maybe he is smoking crack.
Maybe GM will start selling and aftermarket hybrid drive train for the Yukahoes. Of course you are on crack if you spend $10,000+ to have it retrofit to your SUV rather than just buy an Aveo or something way better for a few grand more.
What would make sense is to develop aftermarket kits to significantly reduce weight in those things at a moderate cost, or better yet just get something smaller.
Intel is where they are more by IBM’s error in choosing one of Intel’s chips for the PC than by any brilliance of the Intel folks. Intel has repeatedly screwed up in ways that would have sunk a company without the huge volumes handed to them by IBM. They lost billions on the merced chip that they thought would replace the X86 architecture and kill AMD. Grove and Intel do deserve credit for their fantastic manufacturing efficiencies, but my guess is that Toyota and Honda will figure out good paths for the car business.
“What would make sense is to develop aftermarket kits to significantly reduce weight in those things at a moderate cost”
In think those are called “chainsaws”.
Anyway, wow, last I heard it cost about $10,000 just to convert a regular PRIUS into a plug-in — can’t imagine what it would cost to make a freaking 2001 Tahoe into a plug-in hybrid. Probably cheaper to just buy the Volt.
People re-power older vehicles with updated drive-trains fairly often, so Grove’s idea isn’t completely unprecedented. Even so, it is pretty far fetched.
Maybe the hot rod of 2050 will be a 2008 PT Cruiser re-powered with a portable nuclear fusion driveline. That wouldn’t be much stranger than a 1941 Willys with a supercharged Chevy small block :).
Looks like we need an Andy Grove award to bookend the Lutzy. His idea is almost as stupid as a factory direct hybrid Tahoe.
Personally, I think retrofitting sails to a full-sized SUV might do the trick, with the added bonus of making the vehicle look more imposing.
The electricity grid in nearly overloaded now.
Theoretically if millions of plug in cars where added to the load, the grid would fail.
Natural gas which is used in many newer electric power plants is on the verge of peaking just as oil is doing at the moment. And the infrastructure to import it is not ready, at least on a large scale.
Opposition to nuclear power still reigns and coal is deemed so dirty that many oppose that too.
That leaves wind. Despite very fast growth especially here in Iowa and a few other states, wind is still a small percentage of electric output and insufficient in the near term to support plug-ins on a large scale.
That leaves ethanol and we know how unpopular that is at TTAC. Welcome to the Post Peak Oil world.
mel23: it’s not quite that clear cut. Yes, Intel got lucky — as did Microsoft — but — like Microsoft — they had to be in the right place at the right time. Intel was really good at marketing themselves. You’ll note that Motorola, which had a new, technically extremely superior chip, didn’t get the call from IBM. The world would look very different today if Intel hadn’t been as aggressive and Motorola hadn’t been as passive as they were.
But, yes, they screwed up on Itanium, big time, and (arguably) on the Pentium 4 to a lesser extent. And they’ve had some difficulty with other architectures .
I would be all for electric cars if more nuclear power plants were built. But unless that happens (I’m doubtful), then I can’t see wind or solar will ever produce enough electricity to ever replace oil.
Wind and solar are just green buzz words, as even Ted Kennedy opposed a wind farm near his estate on Nantucket. LOL
97Escort: the federal gov’t has done studies and they say that our existing power grid can support several million plug-in cars.
In the near future we’ll need some grid upgrades like a smarter grid that can better load shed in times of crisis for a future with mostly EVs and which can better handle input power from home solar or wind.
We also need to invest in solar and wind and nukes for example to gather up some additional power. Imagine solar on the roofs of the big box retailers and factories. If 25% of their load was powered by their solar installations then that mean there is that much more in the grid of air conditioning the rest of us. I’d much rather give out a bunch of tax credits to move solar and wind forward to business and commercial rooftops than invade Iran or another Iraq to “better position in regional politics to ensure our security” – read “grab oil” and thus get a few thousand of our boys and girls killed in war.
http://news.van.fedex.com/node/389
Fed-Ex has taken a bold step forward.
Would be wise to get some of the daytime loads off of the grid or using much less power so there would be more fossil fueled capacity at night or when weather conditions are not helping us make electricity.
I am hoping that SOMEBODY comes forward with EVs and retrofit-kits and I don’t care if it’s not Detroit who I consider to be out of date and backward thinking. Detroit is part of the establishment that has gotten us where we are now and I doubt they can lead us towards anything smarter or better b/c their method usually involves lame compact cars or SUVs and empty promises of an advanced future that never arrives.