[NatCh]

Thanks for all the links on the power symbol, y'all.

From looking through them, I've concluded that the IEC folks picked something that made sense to them, which may or may not have been based on anything concrete, and other folks have come up with ways to make it make sense to them (such as the binary thing).

This conclusion leaves me conveniently free to continue to get irate about it as I please.

Originally Posted by pilotbob

I think that show was from 2004 or so... Plus it is created in the UK.

Well, there goes that theory, and it was a fun one too!

Originally Posted by pilotbob

BUt, your right. Isn't that one of the "laws" of physics.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

I think Newton phrased it a bit differently, but yeah, that's more or less what I was thinking of.

Originally Posted by pilotbob

PS: I don't see how it will be "zero" polution either. I guess unless the fuel they talk about using to warm the air is clean burining like natural gas or propane or something... but doesn't combusion give of CO2 by definition?

It's only "zero pollution" when it's running solely on it's air tanks. It's got two modes, you see, air only, and ICE assisted air (where a small ICE compresses air for it to run on) for longer distance driving.

Of course that leaves aside the question of the pollution generated in compressing the air in the first place, or in generating the electricity to run the compressor. The nit-pickin' version of the claim would be that the car generates no pollution itself, so long as you don't use the on-board ICE to compress more air.

That's the 800 pound gorilla in the room of electric car enthusiasts: the electricity has to be generated somewhere, which mostly means fossil fuel burning, and you have energy lost at three points, generation, transmission, and actual use. You can throw storage losses into that bag too.

I'm not saying that I think it's less efficient than an ICE, I'm just saying nobody seems to even want to acknowledge that question, let alone answer it. And questions that get ignored like that often turn out to be ones who's answers are at a minimum unpleasant or worse in direct contradiction to the claim being advanced. The longer it goes unaddressed the more I wonder about it.

It's like the "'Adding ethanol makes gas burn 10% cleaner!' -- 'But you burn 20% more of it to go the same distance.' -- 'But it burns cleaner!'" thing.

I figured out mathematically some years ago that making cleaner burning gas is a losing proposition unless it keeps the same efficiency, or drops more in emissions than it does in efficiency. Work doesn't move closer to home just because you have to burn more gas to get there, and if you burn enough extra gas to more than offset the reduction in emissions, then you have a net increase in emissions. It's high-school algebra.