I want to know when people will realize that EV's are NOT "zero" emissions (electricty takes coal combustion ,read more Carbon, and/or nuclear power to make, it's not emissions free)and what about PZEVs which produce the same emissions as the power plant would generate to produce the same amount of electricty?

80% of my electricity comes from hydro sources. The remainder is slowly being partitioned more and more towards wind power. Seems like if I used an EV the only emissions would be those used to originally create it.

What emissions come from nuclear? The emitted radiation from a nuclear facility is less than the background radiation we are hit with all day long (and the effects of radiation on the human body follows an exponential curve where up until a specific point there are absolutely NO effects of radiation exposure...above that level though, it becomes detrimental quite fast). Nuclear waste can be processed...or we can shove it in that mountain in Nevada; no one lives there anyways!!

Eric

Did you even rtfa? Toyota has been crushing the Rav4EV, They only quit crushing them when DontCrush.com twisted their arm. Which makes Toyota kinda worse than GM since they have the advantage of hindsight.

GM is not the police, they can't jail people. If you breach a contract, such as keeping posession of a rented car that you're no longer paying for, or a leased car after the lease is up and you're no longer paying for it, that's called stealing. You don't own it, somebody else does and you're refusing to give it back. If GM notified the authorities that they had cars stolen, then perhaps the police decided to enforce the law.

Patrick:
Strange to hear this in post-Chernobyl world. Radiation effects have very many different implications on human health with quite different triggering mechanism and threshold levels, and it determines probability of health implications, not necessity. It is way more complicated than primitive exponential analogy.

For example, the most dangerous are two human made isotopes: Sr90 and Cs137, with half life of 30 and 29 years (means that half of atoms of any initial quantity undergo radioactive decomposition in 30 and 29 years respectively). They are chemically identical to K and Ca, and first is bio accumulated in bone marrow, second – in bones. Their concentration in bones and bone marrow could be hundreds times higher then in background.. Accumulation through food chain, especially milk and milk products, lead to even higher rate of concentration (naturally occurring trans-uranium radioactive isotopes are generally rejected by human body). Note, then these isotopes are produced in nuclear reactors and at nuclear explosion only, because naturally occurring they disintegrated long time ago. Main health effect is leukemia.

With higher rates of cancer.

http://www.chernobyl-international.com/home/default.asp

Patrick:
At the beginning at my career I worked at university envirolab in Ukraine exactly after Chernobyl disaster. I have friends died and have ruined health after they spent couple of months on “clean-up”. It is terrible thing, radiation, and until now millions of people in Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia have impaired health and thousands continue to die prematurely every year from on first glance unrelated causes. Statistical analysis is proving it quite conclusively.

Plants are thousand times more resistant to radiation then humans (animals, if you want). Insects are hundreds times more resistant to radiation then humans. The general rule is that the lower organism is staying on evolution ladder, the higher rate of tissue regeneration it has and hence have higher resistance to radiation. To plants and some lower forms of life like dew worms and spiders no-men 30 km Chernobyl zone is heaven. For animals and people it is hell.

Talk about cockroaches in nuclear reactors…

actually, people weren't jailed for not returning their cars; the cars were just seized. the arrests came as a result of the protests in burbank when the EV1s were hauled off to the crusher.

Electric powered shovel:

http://www.phmining.com/equipment/shovels.html

Similar equipment is available. Trust me, the MSHA prefers that you DON'T use gasoline/diesel powered equipment when working a mine. In fact I don't think you can get gasoline or diesel powered equipment MSHA certified very easily at all.

BTW- The problems of getting raw materials and transport of finished product affects every type of renewable resource as well...so if they don't have electric powered equipment along the entire chain does that mean you won't develop any technology?

Chernobyl is what happens when you don't follow safety protocols and use faulty reactor design. How many reactor incidents have we had in the world in the last 30 years?

Nuclear is a viable and safe method to provide electricity in the interim for electric vehicles while we develop renewable resources.

If you removed every coal fired plant in the US and replaced it with an equal capacity of nuclear plants you would reduce radiation emissions in the US to 1/10 of what they are due to coal power plants.

The only reason people are happier with hybrids are because it is the only cleaner choice. If the EV came back, I predict that people would buy them. It makes me angry that something very good was taken off the the market so oil companies and after market auto parts supply companies can keep us hostages.

The crash test thing got zero mention in the movie. I'd say, if the above quote about an exception is true, that part was a done deal. Unless there is better documentation on that angle, I think I'll take it as a urban (or GM) myth.

http://www.carfax.com/car_safety/ratings/srr.cfm/year/1997/make/GM That shows that the EV1 didn't do crash tests.
You think cos and anti GM movie didn't mention it, it can't be true?