Frequent commenter guest pointed out that electric cars will win because soon they will be selling them at Walmart for $5,000.
We just got one step closer – Ford is selling an electric motor for $3500. It will be available in their own new truck – with the retro body of a 1978 F-100 – but also for the aftermarket, which could be really quite interesting. Got a classic car? Just put an electric motor in it.
They used to do this with Volkswagens. If you had a Beetle or a Bush, you could mail order a knock off air-cooled motor from aftermarket mail order sellings for quite cheap. Being that it was air-cooled, they were dirt cheap and simpler than a coolant based engine.
The custom pickup also provides some hype for the automaker, as it prepares to launch its electric F-150 Lightning pickup during the first half of next year. Many view the pickup as a barometer for whether pickup truck customers — which dominate annual U.S. sales charts — are ready to switch to electric vehicles.
I would totally buy one.
The concept pickup can produce 480 horsepower and 634 foot-pounds of torque, Ford said. It was designed and created by Ford Performance and built-in collaboration with aftermarket companies such as MLe Racecars and Roadster Shop.
That’s pretty damn good for an electric, and in a truck no less. Sure, it is terrible for the earth because those lithium mines are awful. But I ain’t no hippie dippie liberal tree-hugger!
The Ford F-100 Eluminator was unveiled Tuesday in Las Vegas for SEMA Show, an annual conference for the automotive specialty and aftermarket industries.
The aftermarket business is extremely important to the automotive industry. Automakers annually unveil unique vehicles at the show to gauge consumer interest and showcase new aftermarket products such as Ford’s e-crate motor.
A huge, huge win for electric is just how dirt-simple electric motors are. Only 20% of the parts of an ICE. If they had any sort of major breakthrough in battery technology – not at all a sure thing – it would happen immediately afterward.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/ford-unveils-a-custom-electric-pickup-ahead-of-f-150-lightning-.html
Banned Hipster 
I remember sharing an idea like this a few years back on a car forum about how it would be akin to those Tamiya RC cars where you just change the outer shell, but it got down-voted out of existence.
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Been wondering when this was going to go mainstream for about 20 years now. Big question on resto-mods is where to locate the battery, which makes up the largest cost and weight of electrics. Plausible that distributing the battery cells in the engine compartment and the trunk would balance the weight and provide sufficient space.
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Yea, now Tesla opt to implement the chassis with battery cells built in to distribute the weight, idk if you can even attempt that on a car that isn’t designed for it. However it also looks more expensive to replace.
https://electrek.co/2021/10/10/tesla-unveils-new-structural-battery-pack-with-4680-cells-gigafactory-berlin/
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SEMA is the land of automotive vaporware. Never going to happen. They want to restrict travel.
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Biden wants to tax the peasants for each mile they drive. The picture of that Ford looks like it was taken in a place far from civilization. How will people charge their cars out there? Will the government build power stations in the desert? Don’t think so. That is how they will restrict travel.
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@Anon
> Biden wants to tax the peasants for each mile they drive.
They already do that via the gas tax.
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Before I got my ICE Honda Nighthawk, I used to fantasize about owning a deadly-silent electric motorbike that came out of the mist like death for you …
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How long to charge that thing? How far can you drive with something in tow? Is it going to be constantly relaying data about you to the meta verse data masters? What if they decide to cut your electricity? It sounds like another control move and one I don’t trust. With mods, you can run a sessile on cooking oil – no way they can control that!
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@ Fríend Of Pacepa
> Is it going to be constantly relaying data about you to the meta verse data masters?
That is one of the benefits of the the crate motor – it is mostly dumb. Besides, that happens on all new cars regardless of the engine type.
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In a gas powered car, the most expensive and heaviest part is the motor. The cheapest part is the fuel tank.
In an electric car, the motor is cheaper, while the fuel cell is very expensive, and heavy. Unlike the fuel tank, the max charge a battery can hold reduces every year.
“With mods, you can run a sessile on cooking oil – no way they can control that!”
What is a sessile? Is that a car? A bike?
You reminded me of a movie from the 1980s, where the government banned cars. One of the characters commented they could make fuel out of shit if need be. This movie was made because the usual suspects were trying to ban cars in the 1970s. Instead of Global Warming, they predicted an Ice Age.
This is it:
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/251595/post-apocalyptic-movie-where-gasoline-was-very-scarce
I don’t think it was that great. The only thing I remember about it was the line about making fuel, and living free.
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@Anon
Brazil, being tropical, can easily grow sugarcane, and sugarcane is easy to turn into alcohol, so Brazil made their entire car fleet run on alcohol so they are reliant on foreign oil.
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Where are the batteries? Where is the computer to control all of this?
Ain’t gonna happen. At least, not in terms of you being able to drive this thing to work.
I would guess you will see in wheel hybrid electric units before you see this. Essentially adding front electric drive wheels to your rear wheel drive muscle car with minimal management do dads.
Cars are going the way of guns. Practical applications will be increasingly discouraged but you will be able to operate the most ridiculous, over the top contraptions under controlled circumstances.
So, like shooting at the gun range, driving will increasingly be a sanctioned event. Rural roads will be closed for rich guys to do “tours”.
Golf carts and weird 4 wheelers are going to keep getting bigger and likely be used for local rural travel.
Why would you drive your car to work when you can take the Uber self driving pod bus?
The wheels on a skate with a changeable “top hat” has been proposed for at least 15 years. Take off the SUV hat and drop on a sports car body.
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Nice chat on the topic:
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“In China, the most popular electric vehicle right now is the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, a tiny, boxy car just under 10 feet long. Its low price and cutesy look has made it a hit among Chinese millennials, who have taken to personalizing their car with Hello Kitty decor and Pokemon decals. Here’s why young people in China love it so much. ”
Pokemon decals? Perfect for the alt right too!
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First let me state that I’m not against fossil fuels but they are run by large monopolies. The recent rise in gas prices should tell something about the supply. It can be manipulated.
Solar, batteries etc. are going to get cheaper. Batteries are the real hang up for solar. There’s all kinds of advances rapidly squeezing though the pipelines of invention. They’re not going to happen tomorrow but likely far faster then you think. The guy who invented the modern lithium battery says he has a solid state battery that can be lithium or potassium or Sodium. We’re not going to run out of sodium and the price is cheap. Some other guys have recently come up with
“A new redox flow battery system based on iron sulfate and anthraquinone disulfonic acid (AQDS)”
search for that and you will get papers. The good thing about it is they can be refueled with the charged material. It’s based on iron so it could eventually be super cheap. The lab results are very good.
I think there’s also huge potential in flywheels. Flywheel potential is totally based on specific strength which is the strength of a material in tension before it breaks depending on it’s weight. So lighter with more strength is very good. We have some new cheap plastics that would be very good for this. You can use specific strength to get the Wh/kg of various materials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1996/ph162/l10a.html
Here’s some typical numbers from flywheel books and papers, Wh/kg=watt hours per kilogram
batteries for reference
Lithium ion battery 100-265 Wh/kg
Lead-Acid 30 Wh/kg
flywheels
Aluminum 28 Wh/kg
Composite carbon fiber – 40% epoxy 52 Wh/kg
Glass fiber E-Glass 180 Wh/kg
Vectran 286 Wh/kg
now some more exotic
Silicon, monocrystalline (m-Si) 414 Wh/kg
Toray T1000G fiber 491 Wh/kg
Dyneema or Spectra (UHMWPE) 512 Wh/kg
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes(low end) 793 Wh/kg
Boron nitride nanotube 1,747 Wh/kg
Multi-walled carbon Nnanotubes(high end) 4,761 Wh/kg
Single wall carbon nanotube(low end) 5,341 Wh/kg
Colossal carbon tube 8252 Wh/kg
Graphene 17,944 Wh/kg
Single wall carbon nanotube(high end) 53,418 Wh/kg
If you look at the very high end materials they are mostly carbon and they have so damn much headroom to work with that even if they are not perfect they have huge Wh/kg potential. If the cost of processing could be lowered it would be akin to a new industrial revolution. It would be big deal. A lot of cost of advanced materials for manufacturing eventually reach down to near the cost of the material itself and carbon cost are next to nothing.
I believe with a few changes flywheels could be made cost effective. Look at the energy storage for Dyneema or Spectra (UHMWPE) 512 Wh/kg I quoted. That’s not a bad figure. Let’s say we cut it in half for a containment structure and safety then cut that by 30% we still have 180 Wh/kg which is not bad at all. Now let’s look at the price of UHMWPE with a fast search and we get,
Best Price UHMWPE Synthetic Ice for Ice Rink
FOB Price: US $ 3-4.9 / kg
Min. Order: 10 kg
So at 180 Wh/kg and this price per kg and 100 kW-hr, (larger Tesla model S battery),we get $1,666.66 so even if you double that to around $3,333.33 that’s some damn cheap batteries.
Present cost of batteries are somewhere around $15,000 to $20,000. If you could cut $15,000 off the price of an electric car what do you think that would portend for the sale of electric cars?
I bet the price of UHMWPE could be brought down it’s, if I’m not mistaken, polyethylene with super long chains that has the molecules stretched and aligned as it’s being made. Polyethylene is not that damn expensive and if enough of this equipment was made it could lower the cost even more.
“… In 2020, the average global price of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) shorter chains than UHMWPE but mostly the same stuff] stood at 815 U.S. dollars per metric ton…”
So $0.82 a kg and if the processing is most of the cost then there’s a long way to go in reducing prices and we haven’t even talked about graphene which has obscenely higher strengths and the cost is plummeting as we speak.
There is clear cut, right now, engineered ways to drastically cut the cost of living if we could get the Oligarchs(Jews) off our backs. There’s a vast room for improvement.
My main point is that with solar even at the cost of panels right now and a cheap battery you could unhook yourself from the grid and have all the power you needed for less than power company prices.
I’m not against nuclear but due to regulation? offsets? taxes? whatever? it’s high as hell. I’ve heard plants cost $6,000 USD per KiloWatt hour. That’s high. Solar is cheaper than that right now and if you can make a cheap battery it will sink it.
The main thing holding us back in terms of health, welfare, energy and cost of living is the Jew banksters and their monopolistic hold over the cost of living, health care, etc.. The cost of living which is big time related to energy is being artificially inflated to financially rape us and let’s not even get started on the vax and what seem to be many cancer cures that when holistic doctors use them they mysteriously commit suicide or are straight out murdered.
A simple proven example is the Germans. They went from starving, being flat on their ass in a Jew controlled economy to everyone having jobs and food to eat a few years after Hitler came to power and cut off the bankers. When farmers were hanging themselves in their barns in the US during the depression German workers were going on paid vacations.
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