All-Electric Fisker Karma gets worse mileage than many SUVs

[Captain Awesome]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenme...e-than-an-suv/

Whoopsie!

[RiCorvette]

Whoopsie X 2:

Car Company Gets U.S. Loan, Builds Cars In Finland


ABC NEWS and iWATCH NEWS
Oct. 20, 2011

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.
Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars-finland/story?id=14770875

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by Ricamaro

Whoopsie X 2:

Car Company Gets U.S. Loan, Builds Cars In Finland


ABC NEWS and iWATCH NEWS
Oct. 20, 2011

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.
Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars-finland/story?id=14770875

#OCCUPYFINLAND ?

[a_Username]

For being a luxury vehicle it's kind of... ugly.

[DGthe3]

Except that the Fisker Karma isn't an all electric, its a hybrid like the Volt. And regardless of what he thinks about MPGe, you can't just create a correction factor to make EV's less efficient. Why? Well where I live, nearly all the electricity is either hydro-electric or nuclear. In other places, wind plays a significant role. Yes, coal is the most popular form of electrical generation in the US but there is also oil and natural gas. Each form of production has its own efficiency rates. Plus, the mix of these different powerplants fluctuates in an area throughout the day. For example, around here at night most of the electricity comes from Niagara Falls. But during the day time, more water is sent over the falls and other sources are used to make up for the shortfall. Then of course, there is the source of gasoline. Light sweet crude from the middle east? Offshore drilling in the Gulf? Athabasca's tar sands? Algae? Coal gasification? Yet again, each has its own extraction, transportation, and refinement costs. Because of all this, it is absolutely impossible to generate one single number to say 'yup this is the correction factor you must use'.

This is why MPGe is done at the consumer level, comparing a kilowatt-hour to a gallon of gasoline ... because it is next impossible for an individual to know the actual well to wheel energy cost for a vehicle in his or her local area.

[CamaroSkooter]

Originally Posted by Captain Awesome

http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenme...e-than-an-suv/

Whoopsie!

The guy that wrote that article is a moron. If he's going to take fossil fuel use into consideration for the "efficiency" of the electric car, then he's still not comparing apples to apples.

If he truly wanted to compare apples to apples, he would adjust the MPG rating of a normal combustion engine vehicle to account for the energy required to produce each gallon of gas that vehicle uses.

But that doesn't support his argument, so he ignores it

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by CamaroSkooter

The guy that wrote that article is a moron. If he's going to take fossil fuel use into consideration for the "efficiency" of the electric car, then he's still not comparing apples to apples.

If he truly wanted to compare apples to apples, he would adjust the MPG rating of a normal combustion engine vehicle to account for the energy required to produce each gallon of gas that vehicle uses.

But that doesn't support his argument, so he ignores it

I wash to make a correction to my previous comment. The original information stated that the car was an electric. I read this morning that the car is actually a plug-in hybrid.

However, Fisker communications director Roger Ormisher revealed that the gasoline engine itself only performs at 20 mpg.

That's pitiful even for a luxury car these days.

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by CamaroSkooter

The guy that wrote that article is a moron. If he's going to take fossil fuel use into consideration for the "efficiency" of the electric car, then he's still not comparing apples to apples.

If he truly wanted to compare apples to apples, he would adjust the MPG rating of a normal combustion engine vehicle to account for the energy required to produce each gallon of gas that vehicle uses.

But that doesn't support his argument, so he ignores it

By the way, you would need to then take into account the amount of energy required to haul mine, transport, and consume the coal in the power plants making electricity for this car. Plus the energy required to build the coal mines and the coal power plants. Not to mention the energy required to keep the people working there alive as well as the energy required to build the trucks and trains that move the coal.

Your argument has no merit because you or I can go back one step farther in the production process earlier and claim it matters. The point is to use the fossil fuel MPG as a benchmark that could be compared equally across both platforms.

Face facts, if electric cars were better, they wouldn't have been obsoleted by gasoline cars about 100 years ago.

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

Except that the Fisker Karma isn't an all electric, its a hybrid like the Volt. And regardless of what he thinks about MPGe, you can't just create a correction factor to make EV's less efficient. Why? Well where I live, nearly all the electricity is either hydro-electric or nuclear. In other places, wind plays a significant role. Yes, coal is the most popular form of electrical generation in the US but there is also oil and natural gas. Each form of production has its own efficiency rates. Plus, the mix of these different powerplants fluctuates in an area throughout the day. For example, around here at night most of the electricity comes from Niagara Falls. But during the day time, more water is sent over the falls and other sources are used to make up for the shortfall. Then of course, there is the source of gasoline. Light sweet crude from the middle east? Offshore drilling in the Gulf? Athabasca's tar sands? Algae? Coal gasification? Yet again, each has its own extraction, transportation, and refinement costs. Because of all this, it is absolutely impossible to generate one single number to say 'yup this is the correction factor you must use'.

This is why MPGe is done at the consumer level, comparing a kilowatt-hour to a gallon of gasoline ... because it is next impossible for an individual to know the actual well to wheel energy cost for a vehicle in his or her local area.

No one can know the actual cost of a gallon of gasoline either. That fluctuates depending on all sorts of factors and is broadly obscured by a cornucopia of local, state, and federal taxes. Depending on where you live and the time of day you can pay more or less....

So for the sake of clarity we can just compare the MPG equivalencies calculated by people who do this for a living, not armchair economists.