McDonald's to EV Drivers: Do You Want Fries With that Power?

Didn't know the biggest market for plugin hybrids was North Carolina. It would make more sense for this to be in southern California. I like the idea though. Its amazing how Mcdonalds has expanded to include WIFI, Coffee, Movie Rentals, and now refueling station. Love the direction the company is taking. Though WIFI should be free.

http://prosportnutrition.net/?a=633808700294218750

Don't know if this is a good fit. Ronald doesn't like folks lingering too long. I could see this working better in city parking lots.

this is a good idea.. its just sad that McDonalds was the company that decided to run with this.

Probably not equivalent, but in more northerly parts of the world (central Canada), most parking lots have power sockets at each parking spot so that peoples cars don't freeze. And its usually free... though I'm sure if people started charging their electric vehicles, then that would change :P

kickstand27:

It's not as if McDonald's is the first to consider this. In southern California, there are already lots of public charging stations for EVs, some of which are free. There are about 20 of them... sorry, I can't give you an exact number... in a parking lot adjacent to the Santa Monica City Hall. The city itself has a small fleet of old, very well-maintained Toyota RAV-4 EVs that use them to charge up, but anyone can charge there. (Those RAV-4s have an impressive record-- some have over 100,000 miles, with virtually no maintenance, and with the original NiMh batteries.) A large canopy over those charging stations holds hundreds of square feet (again, I don't have an exact figure for you) of solar panels that are used to charge the cars; any electricity that is not used to charge cars is back-fed onto the electric grid to reduce the load on the utility company, thereby reducing the city's "carbon footprint".

When driving around Southern California, you'll see many blue signs by the roadside saying "CHARGING STATION", with directional arrows that are supposed to show you where you can charge up-- unfortunately, many of them lead nowhere. Those signs are vestiges of the battle fought more than a dozen years ago to force the auto manufacturers, most notably GM, to produce 1% of their vehicles as electric cars-- it was this battle you may have seen in Chris Paine's documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?". That film won awards at the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals.

EV activists are working to get those dormant charging stations back in order to help spur the use of electric cars. One of the best reasons to use EVs is that we spend 600 billion dollars a year on foreign oil, and the sooner we can stop using gasoline as our primary source of energy for cars, the sooner we can begin to use that same money to pay off our crippling national debt, reestablish our educational and health care systems, and rebuild our crumbling transportation system and bridges.

I have heard there is a Ralph's Supermarket on Wilshire Boulevard here in L.A. that has a public charging station, as well as others that are in (or will soon be in) Costco Markets and Starbucks, but I need to verify this. There are charging stations at the Museum of Natural History and USC, but I have not checked them out yet. All fast food restaurants and markets have an incentive to provide public charging-- it gives them a "green" image, and helps lure in customers.

The more we reduce our gasoline use, the lower the price will drop at the pump for those people still using gasoline cars, so even those people that have no interest in driving EVs have a vested interest in promoting the switch to electric transportation.

One of the biggest criticisms of EVs has been that the batteries cannot hold enough energy to give much range between charges, but if you google "St. Andrews air battery"
(or "STAIR battery"), and "Micro Bubble Battery" (and there are other such high-capacity breakthrough batteries being tested as well), you'll see that there are several technologies that may extend the range of an EV dramatically-- imagine being able to drive an electric vehicle more than 500 miles, and with a battery pack that is only half as big as the ones used today in an EV. Since the batteries would be smaller, they'd be cheaper, and the cars would be lighter, have better performance, cost less to operate, and provide greater cargo space.

Even if all of these new exciting batteries fail to live up to expectations except for one, that's all we'd need to spark a revolution in transportation.

Regarding the comment from billdale, the transition from fossil-fuel autos to electric autos isn't quite the slam-dunk it appears. Our nation's electrical infrastructure could no more handle a surge of electric cars than we could handle a large increase in cars powered by cotton candy. You gotta get the energy from somewhere, and it's got to be ready to go before you convert all our cars over to the new paradigm. If everyone started driving the Tesla tomorrow, the cost of electricity would likely surpass the cost of gasoline virtually overnight due to the issue of supply and demand. We'd also suffer continual brownouts from lack of supply.

The only solution to this isn't glamorous or "green". We already use virtually all the electricity we produce, and if you add a fleet of EVs you need a whole lot more. You also need an immediate overhaul of the nation's energy grid, where close to 90% of the energy generated is lost in distribution over long distances. Obama had that last issue right-on (but the Stimulus bill spends only $11B on that- I feel it should have been 5x to 10x that much) - the less you lose, the less you need to produce.

Generating more electricity inescapably mean burning more coal. Wind and all the other renewable sources combined probably won't replace 10% of conventional production methods in our lifetime, and it takes a decade or more to bring new nuclear plants online.

The unavoidable issue here is that producing lots of energy costs a lot, in all respects including environmental. Using electricity is not all that different, in those terms, from using fossil fuels. I'm certainly not advocating going back to the stone age- we just need to understand the issues involved to discuss and resolve them intelligently.

Even if all of these new exciting batteries fail to live up to expectations except for one, that's all we'd need to spark a revolution in transportation.
http://www.hedefnakliyat.com