from north reports television this is your october edition and tonight we're going to have a show called our electronic vehicles ready for prime time my guest is going to be our trusty truth reporter michael below ski and i believe lou is going to be calling in remotely so we will wait for him call in mike you recently wrote an article about the problems with the battery technology you know what tronic vehicles well that's the biggest problem there's other problems but a lot of it and i want to go into that before i go into that i want to touch make a distinction between the concept of electronic vehicles in principle and in reality i think the personally i think the concept itself is eventually go out but i think if the politicians leave it alone and what i think a lot of the things you picked up on are symptoms of a technology just not ready yet so what's happening what's happening is you've got political social engineers tryin to they're strangling the goose before he has a chance elaine to go next and you could say they're going to end up destroying what is i believe a promise in technology and actually it's part of a bigger ideally they believe you know the next step in the global positioning system is you don't just program to thing to tell you where to go but it's keyed into the car and it'll tell the car where to go and you can maybe read a book in the car i've got my own opinions about that but  i know that's where they're trying to push things it's possible to do that in have but the question is there are well there's a lot of questions regarding how it gets controlled and  but the question is do you grab onto a technology and see that you have a lot of emerging technologies by themself that pros and cons but is part of a larger trend and you have a tendency for people to get overexcited and want to that post that's what i see and push it and that makes a backlash in the backlash is against gets people tune turned off that my background is engineering so i'm a technophile i'm very much into the new technology but historically new developments like this turn off the public if people start using it as a control device to control people's behavior or the automation certainly the automation the automation has support has a potential to do the opposite has a potential to allow people to gain more control you know social media for one example and it has a potential to free up people but it also has potential both ways you have you have there is when when there's a lot of change there's a black backlash anyway because people don't like new things but if the new things if they see that their freedom to be an appendage to pawn and they see something forced upon them that doesn't make sense they're going to reject and you're going to destroy the market for and that's what i want to go into it first because i believe in principle when you go electronic vehicles ok if the technology was there you would have lower maintenance costs because you want there is a lot of her haps the batteries if they were to break down are pricey to say i mean i'm saying if if that the problem with that is because it took the battery technology it's not the also the energy production system is you got the ratio of input output ideally would be a lot better that's why they consider it green you've got the no emissions the reason why it's not is because the reality is about our technology is not right and that battery has to be charged by electricity which you know comes from all different sources i think the last numbers i had from a couple years back  wind and solar combined in the united states account for i think it's like three or four percent of our electricity usage and that i know there's other energies that they consider renewable but if that's going to be the benchmark then well that brings another issue it's not just electro trying cars you've got all kinds of gadgets connecting to the internet so you have you portion of our economy that runs on electricity is growing and so the portion of the economy that runs on traditional fuels is shrinking and might not be shrinking in absolute sense because the economy as a whole is growing but in terms of percentage portion of our economy  some portion of our economy depends upon fossil fuels is shrinking that is a trend that is happening because of technological developments not social things and this is been happening the computer revolution had a lot to do it the computer the computer silicon valley is one of the most deregulated parts of the economy and so this is this is coming about through most portion of the economy this highly deregulated so my if people want to see this happen then they might want to encourage our political want to be saviors to get out of the way so money that's another  up the the electric car issue into two parts we're talking about how in principle is a good idea but there they're forcing it before it's ready so they're going to we're going to probably electric grid that produces power whether you're using it or not in other words it's always being produced it's any fission to shut down gas and coal in nuclear power plants at night when people are sleeping just there crank them up again in the morning they don't do it like that so a lot of the power goes to waste so in an ideal scenario you would want to let your cars to be charging at night because then it's using power that would otherwise go to waste obviously that's not always when they're going to be charged people have to use  running the day but the other this goes back to issue that we were car of the old the smart grid idea and the story around the storing of electricity and being able to switch it for one is usable but that's that's another issue what i like to talk about i'd like to bring up this video here this is the chairman of toyota and he's all four letter like to cars but he doesn't think that we're ready for it and he doesn't think it's a good idea for the political sector of our society to be forced in upon us because now the car car manufacturers are forced into building something that the technology is not ready for national market for so they're going to he believes are going to screw up the market and he's he's course he's speaking ok we apologize murphy's law we had a video cued up and it just did not as the viewers we thank you for putting up with that but obviously you cannot hear we could hear here but they were told that it wasn't first owner of the car traded it in that the end i guess was a three year lease so as far as cost goes i thought it was a really good deal i did a fair amount of reading about the various vehicles before we purchased it and i like the volt i like the technology i mean i certainly can't speak on the infrastructure aspect i know michael's done a lot of research and reporting on that but i can certainly speak from the car owners perspective and it's well between i drive every day a gasoline vehicle my wife uses the volt and primarily drives around town i live here in middlebury and you know she goes to meetings shopping whatever using the volt and she primarily runs it on the battery the volt is kind of the platform of it is a little different from the prius in fact i i prefer it to the prius because it's not an automatic you know switching back and forth between the combustion engine and the battery it's it's up to the driver to decide what mode you want to drive and so general motors designed a couple of different driving modes in which you either drive all gas there is a setting for you know sort of more high speed interstate driving and also you know mountain driving which really comes in handy here in vermont which is why the volt is a really good vehicle for for months or years the other thing is it does have you know regenerative braking as a lot of these cars do where coasting and breaking downhill travel kind of puts energy back into the battery pack so it's got a lot of neat features i got the question go ahead did i understand you to say that you can switch it back and forth from gasoline power to   is a hybrid you're describing you know it's a it's not a true hybrid in the sense that it's automatic in that sense but yes it is a hybrid you can choose it's got a four cylinder gasoline down the battery and this is what's called a first generation volt the second generation came out i think in two thousand and fifteen and they have a much longer range i have about a forty mile range on it fully charged but if you run out  that battery you can just go to a gas station i know a while if the battery runs down i mean i've driven the car to pennsylvania three hundred fifty miles one way trip from vermont and you can run it on the battery until the battery runs out and then it automatically switches to gas so it's not like i think early perceptions of people was that oh i'm not going to drive a volt because you know when the battery runs out i'm stranded well that's not true  cars that is true though not this one that's that's what the distinction that sorry when no one can hear it but the the chairman of toyota was talking about the hybrids made and how it was enhanced to drive an experience for the customers and he was making a distinction between hybrids and all electric cars and of course chevrolet has a new vehicle called the bolt which is all electric and that  has around a two hundred fifty mile range on its batteries so that's a pretty significant increase in battery range again that wouldn't get me to pennsylvania one way completely it would probably get me down to around the newburgh new york area from from vermont and how long does it take you to charge a battery for the volt it's well i can't say because it's always plugged quite a bit only if i wanted to run it on the battery otherwise i would i mean i'm saying hypothetically if this was an all battery yes correct correct yeah you'd have to because you wouldn't have a gasoline backup which is why personally i wouldn't go all electric yet unless it was a second car that i might use as a town car or you know you just even you know driving from middlebury to burlington or or to montpelier you could easily do it and duty electric vehicles you know what how's this apply to say trucking electric trucks you know i i really don't know much about it but i should say that general motors had originally designed the the gasoline to have a fuel cell and general motors i guess it wasn't quite ready to introduce a fuel cell but from what i've heard is it is down the road so the car could likely  if i want to hang onto it that long or the next owner of it could could conceivably retrofit retrofit the gas engine and put a fuel cell in the course people cells are kind of a battery they were really pioneered by nasa project gemini program some of those long duration gemini flights sixty's used to fuel cells and it basically provides you know it does a kind of a catalytic conversion of water breaks down the and toyota i know they pioneered hydrogen vehicles but there's no infrastructure for hydrogen that would be my personal ideal it was worse rather than electric you're describing what you think would be the best use for and that's letting the market in the customer decide what we're in which i agree with i think you know eventually if we get all the technology technological issues straight now i think this is going to go that way but what we're concerned about when there's a push by some politicians you know vermont to be first in everything to move us all towards electric cars and we don't know when it's going to be ready so you can have a politicians five year plan and say look we're going to move them all this way because it's going to turn a lot of people off and then people the argument that you're making is going to be lost  to say eleven or twelve thousand dollars now the problem with that is it's a thirty thousand dollars car so if you do the math that's like almost a two thirds subsidy or rebate or combination anyway financial assistance one way or another and well yes i mean chevy was a get there subsidized somewhat i don't know where the current state is but again i bought the car used so it was a one with mark cuban and the folks who listen to different business plans and business models and they either embrace it and give you money or they tell you to run for the door and i can imagine standing in front of mark cuban in those folks and saying i've got this brilliant product that's going to save the world oh and by the way in order to make it more marketable it needs to be thirty or sixty percent subsidized i think they would laugh you out the door before you even got to finish given your spiel and i know that the technology is getting better all the time but it's clearly not there yet and probably not going to get there as quick if you cut the process off  in one of the articles i was reading one of the subsidies they wanted to make can look like the only cars available to the poor as to why is another car not good enough for them you know we're using them we're using this in the name of the poor this is going to was one of these you know g m approved used cars where they you know they check it out so there was some warranty on the vehicle already but i wanted a little extra insurance on the example a lot of times and your early computers were monolithic huge beast with very little power and they cost a fortune now most people for very little amount of money relatively can have something far better and far more powerful than the most expensive the early early computers as robin or just admit it is a computer geek i like the tech not i'm not an applications geek i understand you're a hardware guy no i understand this the engineering theory an apple behind the hardware and software and so on because i was a study mathematics an engineer in nearing so i can i can probably but what we're going through now is the equivalent of going out of the early days trying to force the i b m mainframe and everybody you know i find it interesting that really the first sort of practical electric cars appeared as early teenage yes and they didn't certainly take off but gosh i remember my father passed away at the age of one hundred two years ago f the guy drove it a couple of blocks and took it out every sunday or something but and that was an old timer you know from yes probably the late teens still driving if there is something i can interject here we talk about forcing this product onto the market that is actually quite literally happening if i just read an excerpt from an article vermont is one of the states that requires automakers to meet the california vehicle emissions requirements often called a zero emission vehicle or zev program those regulations require automakers to have a certain number of credits associated with the sale of plug in vehicles so it's not just the financial incentives in the form of rebates and tax credits there is also a mandate to sell the cars by the state which i did not know about until i wrote this article well i wanted to mention that i think michael you  vermont relies on a gasoline tax for i believe it's roadways for filling potholes and whatnot and obviously that would have to be mitigated in some way if we were to go you know full forward with this electric car thing so that is another thing to think about but my big takeaway from writing this article was that i my father owns a hybrid he owns one of the prius is and i think it's a neat technology i think the hybrids are pretty much there because yes you're paying thirty thousand dollars for a car but you're not paying as much money for gas i don't know how much you would save the simming you'd have to drive the car at least for several years to get most  your money back but if you buy a hybrid today and use it for seventy nine years spending what do you think you spend on gas for hybrid yours is technically a hybrid so what do you think i couldn't tell you say you know i'm not i'm not a numbers guy so i don't know and it depends on where you live and who's driving in all these different variables but i know i spend about one hundred dollars a month on gas but well i can tell you actually although i don't have it at my fingertips is m has a very nice because our uploads data to get this through their general motors on star program where you get an e mail basically a monthly status report on your vehicle it'll tell you you know what your are p g is it will tell you whether or not you're you know front right tire is needs to be in pla because it's a low it's pretty amazing i guess you know i look at them and read them but i should pay more attention to it analytically which i'm not doing but i'm pretty impressed with on a hundred and fifty mpg getting back to zero emissions and goes back to something that we have talked about before when they're talking about nonpolluting they're talking simply about emissions and they're not talking about the whole process you've got the conversion process you've got the disposal process disposing of these batteries is not environmentally pristine to begin about a heavy metal yes i mean you get a solid state personally i mean i i have always been an advocate personally of of a hydrogen economy and you know if you already have an infrastructure of gasoline stations it's you know i guess of course there's a be i think there's there is a lot of work that still has to be done and electric vehicles and i personally don't like central authority telling me what i should or should  well we've got the five four three two one going on over there so thank you for watching see you next month