Paris Launches World's First Electric Car Share Program 136
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Paris took a big step towards clean transportation as it launched the world's first electric car share program. Created by Vincent Bollore, the Autolib electric car-share is modeled off the city's popular bike share system, and it will be the largest program of its kind in the world. By December the program will include 250 electric vehicles, and it's planned to expand in 2012 if the first leg of the project is successful."
Re:Aha! The French! I know that one. (Score:5, Funny)
As Slashdot's only French poster on this site I'm really starting to get tired of all these stupid insults against our country! Every single day I try to cure you of your ignorance of history. For example, we didn't.... *sigh* Oh forget it.
I give up.
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I saw this eBay auction once, it was for a French rifle, never fired, but dropped twice.
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Probably the car is made with a small part, say, the left indicator light cover, that is French, so to the French, this car is French: a great victory for the republic! Vive la France! Vive la voiture Francais! (sounds of Marseillaise in the background)...
Why is this probable?
You do know France has quite a large car and truck industry?
(Although this case is a bit odd - The "Blue Car" is made by a paper manufacturer, mostly as a demo of their battery technology).
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The same way Americans say buy Ford,GM or Chyrsler when 90% of the cars built by those companies come from Mexico.
Never trust that a brand is made in the same country as the parent corp.
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My Toyota was made in Kentucky, your point? Cars are one of those odd things which have parts that come from all over the world, and are assembled, then sold as American cars...
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The drivetrain is "a small part, say, the left indicator light cover, "?
Importantly, he makes the battery (Score:2)
Just about anyone can make a drivetrain, especially an electric drivetrain. But he's making a promising type of batteries, and those represent the bulk of the cost and difficulty in making a viable electric car.
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the French did invent the automobile! Just like they invented the microchip, the airplane, rock and roll, the cotton gin, and Chinese food
The main point of TFA is not who invented the concept.
Electric cars rental could be a revolution in Paris:
- less polluted city
- convenient for parisians, businessmen and tourists
- smaller cars
- people don't own the car, and thus may be more likely to share it (and the price) with someone going to the same place (less cars in Paris)
- future will tell, but such shared cars will likely to be easier to control in order to reduce traffic jams
All in all, it is a pretty good initiative.
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I mean, you get in..and first thing...someones changed the radio station.
Someone before you was sweaty and/or smelly...
No one has emptied out the ashtray in forever...
And..where do you keep your stuff? I carry a lot of myself around with me in my car...I don't wanna have to cram all of that into a backpack and carry it all everytime I change cars (mp3 player/CD's, radar detector, darts [soft time and steels] in case I go hit a bar with a board, my lottery tix, various
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Worse than that: if the ashtray has anything in it at all, that means someone's been smoking in the car, and there's no way I can drive around in a car that smells like smoke. That's utterly disgusting.
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There is a car sharing program in the city I live in (in Germany) that has electric cars. Maybe it doesn't count because I don't think they have electric-only cars, but they do have plug-in hybrids i.e. cars that can be charged from external sources and will run on electrical power for the first 20 km or so.
Amsterdam did that (Score:3, Informative)
Amsterdam 1974:
The sharecar named "Witkar" small electric car , A'dam been there done that and got the T shirt..back in 1974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witkar
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Amsterdam 1974:
The sharecar named "Witkar" small electric car , A'dam been there done that and got the T shirt..back in 1974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witkar
Amsterdam did that, and the "witte fietsen" (white bikes) as well, and both failed. Last summer I was in Paris, and the Velib (the bike rental system) worked really well. You rent a bike for less than 2 euros a day (less if you take a subscription). If you take a bike, you can use it for half an hour for free, then you pay one euro, and the rate per half hour goes up to 4 euros. That seems absurd, but the goal is that people put the bikes back in half an hour, as that is probably enough for 90% of the rides
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London uses the same charging scheme (access fee + rising rental rate starting with a free first 30 mins). It encourages churn and availability, and if you want a bike for longer, then there are real rental companies.
The lack of helmets is daft, and TfL encourages people to where one. The system wouldn't work in a casual or convenient way if helmets were required, which rather defeats the purpose of the scheme. I wear one when I'm on my own bike. I guess the rental bikes (from Montreal no less) are not
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The lack of helmets is daft, and TfL encourages people to where one. The system wouldn't work in a casual or convenient way if helmets were required, which rather defeats the purpose of the scheme.
So the lack of helmets is not daft.
I guess the rental bikes (from Montreal no less) are not designed to go very quickly anyway.
I think collision between your head and a concrete kerb stone can be pretty bad no matter what velocity in the horizontal direction you had prior to falling off your bike.
Take your own life in to your own hands... funny though that the US would be more of a nanny state in this regard.
I think "taking your life into your hands" is overdramatising it a bit. It wasn't that long ago that nobody in Britain wore helmets to cycle in. I don't recall there being carnage of cyclists dying of head injuries. It did happen occasionally, of course, which is why it is a good idea to wear a helmet,
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Why is the lack of helmets daft? There is little evidence that helmet wearing has a meaningful reduction of the injury rate to on-road cyclists. The compulsion of helmets would be a lot more daft.
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There is little evidence that helmet wearing has a meaningful reduction of the injury rate to on-road cyclists.
I'm willing to bet that wearing a helmet actually increases the number of cyclists treated for head injuries.
Evidence? (Score:2)
Looking forward to a link to a decent scientific reference on this...
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...as opposed to simply being killed.
still waiting for that reference... and seatbelts. (Score:2)
Nope... your opinion doesn't count as a decent scientific reference, if you could link to something that would be great, thanks.
Funny you mention seatbelts, as this is a pretty bad comparison. Three months ago me/my girlfriend/another friend were the first people to arrive at a four-car pile up on a long straight country road, turns out the guy who overtook us at speed a couple of minutes before then tried to overtake a van and went straight into a car coming the other way, and another car behind this crash
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Nope... your opinion doesn't count as a decent scientific reference, if you could link to something that would be great, thanks.
I detect just a small amount of sarcasm [jt.org] there, which means you must be at least familiar with the stuff. I'd like you to turn that sarcasm detector [psychcentral.com] up a notch or two, reread the posts, and then see what you think. Here, I'll help (without sarcasm, I promise):
We're actually in agreement. My original post references the sample bias that can lead to counterintuitive statistical trends when you look at the introduction of protective gear. There are plenty of examples of this: helmets and head injuries in
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Please read all the way to his last sentence.
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Of course it does. Because without the helmets, those people would mostly be dead.
ERs saw a similar phenomenon 20 years ago when airbags starting becoming common on cars. They had more trauma patients from auto accidents than before. It was because, with non-airbag cars, those people usually died, so they never went to the ER, they went straight to the morgue.
I'm guessing you anti-helmet people would prefer to go straight to the morgue.
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Why is that? Evidence clearly shows helmets save lives and reduce injury in just about everything, including motorcycles.
Why? Selection bias. Without the helmet, there's no opportunity for treatment. Sorta like Abraham Wald's bomber armor.
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It's probably twisted statistics. Anyone who falls off their bike hard enough to make their helmet use worthwhile will probably become injured in some other way as well, as their whole body is getting thrown onto the pavement. They might get a broken bone or two (in their arm or leg), they might get something twisted in their leg if it gets tangled in the bike, they might get road rash, etc.
So whatever crappy statistics the parent is referring to is probably grouping all these together, i.e., injured vs.
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"Anyone who falls off their bike hard enough to make their helmet use worthwhile will probably become injured in some other way as well, as their whole body is getting thrown onto the pavement. They might get a broken bone or two"
I fell off my bike, broke my arm, and my helmet had a huge dent in the front - that would have been a huge dent in my skull without the helmet.
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Because you were still injured, you got grouped into the "injured" category even though you avoided a massive brain injury, and these statistics show that wearing a helmet didn't reduce the injury rate. So according to the parent poster, you might as well have not bothered with the helmet.
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I've had a bicycle accident where my helmet use saved me, at the least, a trip to the emergency room. I had a bit of road rash, but nothing requring medical attention.
Of course, I landed on my helmeted head, putting a big dent in it, while sliding enough to wear a hole in the hard plastic shell, into the styrofoam padding. By the time the rest of my body hit, most of the energy had been absorbed...
As you say, twisted statistics. Dead isn't going to go into the 'injured' category unless you survive long e
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We're seeing it with the military - we've actually given soldiers so much armor, and it's effective enough, that we're seeing lots of injuries, many of them severe, where previously the soldier would have died. More survivors with lost limbs - the armor keeps them alive, but their arms/legs still end up shredded.
Exactly. I see returned soldiers all the time now with missing legs. Also, tons of soldiers are returning now with brain injuries; this is something pretty new, and they probably mostly used to ju
hitting people on the head with blocks of concrete (Score:2)
Let's take two people, and hit them both on the head with a block of concrete at 12mph. One is wearing a cycle helmet, and one is not. Which person do you think will take more damage?
I'd welcome links to documents on comparative head damage to cyclists wearing and not wearing helments, but if I am going to fall off a bike and hit my head on the road while travelling at a reasonable cycling pace (12 mph) I think I'll go for hitting that road with my helmet rather than my head directly. I'll take a less-than-
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Wait, I was with you until... you think helmets are stupid?
Look, everyone! Darwinism at work! The brain that doesn't protect itself...
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This is actually quite a healthy debate in the cycling community that ranges from nut-jobs who think wearing a helmet will make you "take more risks" and get hurt worse, to nanny-staters who think that no-one should ever be allowed on a bike without a helmet.
The healthy middle ground says that making helmets mandatory will cause less people to ride bikes ("fuck it, I'll just take the car"), so to get people on bikes you need to let them do it without wearing a helmet.
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Hey, I'm not trying to tell anyone what they must or must not do. I'm just amazed that people will take on a reasonably high risk of being involved in a collision with a car while wearing no protection whatsoever, even for the single most important organ in their body.
I think smoking is stupid too, but I don't advocate criminalizing it.
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You remind me of the guy here in the US a few months ago who was protesting his state's law requiring helmets for motorcycles; while he was driving around in his protest, he fell, hit his head, and died.
Any time your head hits concrete, you're likely to have either a brain injury or die. No, it's somewhat rare for bicyclists to have a fall resulting in hitting their head, but when it does, it means disaster. Similarly, it's somewhat rare for car drivers to have an accident, but when it does, if they're no
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Yep - I may regret my comment one day, I know. The fact is that I drive a bike for about 35 years now, without ever wearing a helmet, and nobody around here does. We're used to biking, and to bikes being on the road in between cars and trucks. It's in our blood. I bike more than I walk, and not for fun, just for practical reasons, and I'm not the only one.
I wonder what will be next. When will there be a law in the US requiring you to wear a helmet when walking outside?
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We used to be like that here in the US too: no one wanted to wear seat belts, because it wasn't "cool" and because we never wore them before and were still alive, so why should we wear them now? Then we realized that if we didn't start wearing them, we'd be like our many friends and family members who had been in auto accidents and were either maimed or killed, and we could avoid that by wearing our seat belts. The per-capita injury and death numbers are much better now than they were in decades past; acc
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A helmet is a simple and easy way to massively improve safety. You just put it on when you're on your 2-wheeled vehicle. It's a lot simpler than exercise, which is a pretty complex process (should you do strength-building or cardio exercises? how long (don't exercise too much because you'll over-exert yourself)?). It's also simple to enforce: either you're wearing your helmet or you're not, there's no middle ground. You can't enforce "requiring regular exercise"; what if someone has a home gym? What i
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And no stupid helmets like in the US.
Try sitting around in an ER for a week; you'll change your mind about helmets before the week is out!
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The first was: the witkar in Amsterdam (Score:3)
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The first was the Witkar [wikipedia.org] in Amsterdam more than 35 years ago.
Didn't you read TFS? It said "world's first electric car share program" !!! It also says the "largest", but since it's the first, I think it's a given.
So stop spreading FUD and surrender to your great robotic slashdot overlord.
Have a nice day.
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The first was the Witkar [wikipedia.org] in Amsterdam more than 35 years ago.
Didn't you read TFS? It said "world's first electric car share program"
Click on the link, read the Dutch version, and even if you don't understand Dutch, "24 volt elektromotor van 2000 watt" implies that the car wasn't fueled by petrol, diesel, uranium, or banana peels.
Even the English version says "These were specially designed electric vehicles", and goes on about recharging problems
Twit.
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And looking at a more recent example I've been seeing Zen Cars [sustainable-mobility.org] around Brussels recently too.
This is definitely not a "World's First"...
-- Pete.
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Brussels: 29 cars.
Paris: 250 cars to start, adding each month, up to 3000 in june 2012.
Can you really compare?
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They're both electric car sharing efforts, and just because the one is Paris is bigger, that doesn't make it "first".
Or are you one of those people who also think that the iPod was the "first" portable mp3 player?
-- Pete.
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No, they're right (I'm American BTW). The Wright Brothers did NOT invent the airplane by any means; there were lots of previous attempts that were quite successful in flying. Many of these were also French. The problem was, they would take off, fly partway across a field, and then crash.
The Wright Brothers' plane was different: it would take off, fly partway across a field, and then turn, fly around some more, and then land. The previous plane inventors hadn't figured out how to do that turning part yet
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They also look awfully slow to actually be useful to go to places which are too far to cycle to
I don't know much about the public transit systems of Paris or Amsterdam, but even if the car is really slow, it may still be faster than taking a bus, after you factor in all the stops a bus makes.
It'd be a lot better if they'd invest their money instead into SkyTran [wikipedia.org] or some similar personal rapid transit system.
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Petrol car has 400km range? What happens if it's all hilly?
The petrol car doesn't even get to recover lost power through regenerative braking!!!
The energy expended to get a car from point A to point B does not change just because the drivetrain is electric.
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Firstly, dividing watts by volts gives an answer in amps, not amp-hours. Using your figures, one hour's charging from the solar cells would give you 5 Ah in your best scenario.
The starter motor on my car is the best part of 1 kW. That means your 5 Ah is enough to keep the starter motor turning over for a little under 4 minutes. Granted, that's enough to start the main engine several times over, but the main engine is 132 kW. That means, if I put my foot down hard on an equivalently powerful electric mot
A big step towards clean transportation (Score:2)
I wash my M3 every week!
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And you have to! With that matte finish paint job (a £1750 extra) you can't let it get dirty, or take it in a car wash, or let any bird crap get on there for more than a few minutes or you'll ruin it completely!
BMW are *forcing* you towards clean transportation!
Could make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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The question is what to do about them if they are driven until the battery is drained, which is not an issue for bicycles. If that becomes prevalent it will increase costs.
Yep, it's like people driving a rented car until the fuel tank is completely empty, or like people returning a rented car with less fuel than the rental place asked them to return with. It does increase the cost, but it increases that cost only to the person who doesn't bother.
Yeah, this could work. (Score:3)
With reserved spots, the infrastructure for charging becomes simpler for this sort of thing. My sister lives in Chicago, she doesnt own a car and bikes most places, but for things like bulk grocery buying and other shopping, that sorta thing, she has a zip car membership. If the charging stations are prevalent enough, i could see zipcar going electric. And after a minute of research it seems theyre already testing it in san francisco with plug in hybrids.
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The question is what to do about them if they are driven until the battery is drained, which is not an issue for bicycles. If that becomes prevalent it will increase costs.
The payment system is an incentive to put back the car for use for someone else: if the driver want to reduce his costs, he has to use the car only for short rides and park the car in a station instead of keeping it for himself and continuing to pay.
And as the car station is the recharging station, the more often the car goes to a station the more time it spends recharging.
Once again... follow the money... (Score:2)
This car share program seems to have been designed just to line the pocket of Bollore big friend of Sarkozy...
Problem... it absolutely ignore the needs of other electric cars drivers...
Renault have a full lineup from micro city cars to full size sedan and utility pro vehicles...
Something done to help those user in the city...
NOPE...
Re:Once again... follow the money... (Score:4, Informative)
World's first electric car share program (Score:3)
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!
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I heard that Paris was the first city!
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Whether it is original or not, as long as it works it won't matter. Hopefully in a few years time a more attractive headline would be 'world's first SUCCESSFUL electric car share programme".
I'm no tree hugger but particulate-free air is rather nice in major cities. Or less pollution at any rate...
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We've had this in Nice for a long time already.
Phillip.
Not first by a long shot (Score:2)
This is definitely not the first electric car sharing program, see the comment about Witkar. But it also isn't the first commercially successful or anything. The German railway association (Deutsche Bahn) has their Flinkster program, which includes electric and "normal" cars, depending on what you need. In my opinion a perfect fit for the current generation.
Not the first (Score:2)
the article contains a few mistakes (Score:1)
the article mentions this program is unique as it only uses electrical cars.
The autolib website has a lists of cars you can rent. It contains many cars, none of which are electrical.
The article mentions this is 12 euro a month. The website mentions 12 euro a month, plus an hourly price and a price per kilometer.
(and the thing about them not being the first, but i think this may have been mentioned in other posts :))
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Yeah, that link is the Lyon Autolib. The Paris Autolib is all electric, using a single model called the Bluecar. It's 12 EURO per month + a half hourly change.
5 EUROs the first half hour.
4 EUROs the second half hour.
6 EUROs the third half hour.
There's no distance or fuel charge.
Not really the first (Score:1)
Australia just started one before Paris (Score:1)
http://enews-evtrials.transport.vic.gov.au/link/id/zzzz4e64020eed6d4725/page.html [vic.gov.au]
Nice was first, not Paris (Score:1)
Nice (on the riviera) has had such a system since march 2010, and it has been quite well received. You can read more here: http://www.nice.fr/Zoom-sur/Auto-partage [www.nice.fr] (google translate, people).
It is a very common issue in france that something is actually talked about only when it happens in Paris. We had the same with shared bikes, that were implemented
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Nice has already an electric tramway, all the buses have been running on natural gas for over a decade, it has a communal bike rental system, and for the past few months you can just pick up an electric car and use it for something like €5 per hour. Last month they celebrated over 1,000 regular subscribers to the car scheme.
Phillip.
The first internationaly *visible* car-pool (Score:2)
A lot of people are commenting that this is not "the first". Who cares?
It is not the first but, for one, it will be the first that will be heard of by people living far from it. Folks get over this: there are more international reporters in Paris than in all of the other quoted cities I've seen so far combined.
More importantly, given the monthly price, it seems to be a lot more geared to the occasional short trip. We (me+wife) used a car pool system in The Netherlands for a couple of years. The trick with i
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Well, there are a multitude of car sharing companies in every major German city. So I think this is much more a case of reporters believing the marketing than anything else.
The one I use has a monthly fee of 5 Euros, the other one I use has no monthly fee.
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Are the stations of these dense enough, that you can just go somewhere else and drop the car? Instead of having to (more or less) be forced into a round-trip?
One thing I hope this system will provide is a high density of stations to allow that. IIRC the system we used in the NL actually required us to return the car to the same spot. But then, it also allowed us to reserve a car at a given location and given time.
Baidu Sim-City like map (Score:1)
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Wrong thread....
Or more probably a long-time /. bug...
they should have called it (Score:2)
bzzzut alors!
Electric cars shared in Quebec since mid august (Score:2)
http://www.communauto.com/electrique/index_ENG.html [communauto.com]
nuclear, not electric... (Score:1)
Because that's the case : every country wants to get rid of nuclear energy, but in the same time push for electric devices, cars, and so on
Anybody actually sees the paradox ?
La Rochelle city: 12 years of electric cars rental (Score:1)
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Clean how so?
It actually is less efficient to generate power far away, send it over the wire and charge that car than it is for it to be self powered.
All this does is move the pollution out of the sight of the privileged elites in the city.
All in the name of the religion of environmentalism.
Paris is in France.
You know, the country where 80% of the electricity is generated by nuclear reactors.
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Yes, most electricity in France is nuclear. And therefore the electric cars are indeed better for the environment, both because of less particulate pollution and because of less contribution to global warming producing CO2.
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Can you back that claim up with numbers? No, because it's not true. If you mean a car "self-powered" by fossil fuel, you're lucky to see 20% of that energy appear at the wheels. If you look at well-to-wheel efficiency, it's even worse. If you meant "self-powered" by on-board batteries, where did the energy come from that was put into those batteries? Power transmission
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He's probably an American.
It's actually more efficient (Score:2)
Internal combustion engines have about 25% efficiency at best.
Large scale thermal power plants achieve twice as much. You have some transmission loss, but since batteries, their chargers, electric motors and power electronics each have nearly 95% efficiency, you still come out ahead. Plus electricity can come from renewable sources, and on top of that battery charging can be deprioritized to accomodate for their intermittent nature.
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250 to start, adding each month, up to 3000 in june.
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subscription based program make it pretty expansive about 200€ for a single day
The point of the system is like the Velib bike sharing system: you are not expected to use it only for yourself for a whole day. This is a sharing system. Use it only for a ride, and put it in a station once you are near your destination. Take another car for the way back.
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+1
autolib-paris.fr [autolib-paris.fr]
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And without proper charging stations they may not be so popular outside Paris.
The map [autolib-paris.fr] of the cities where stations will be available: this is not only Paris.
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Sadly, a public car here would sound to the masses like "public bathroom", "free lodging" and most surely "getaway vehicle"
I'm not sure one of these would work well as a getaway vehicle... although I can see the 60mph chase down the interstate... being filmed live...
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It sounds like Zipcar, but with all-electric cars. Zipcar doesn't seem to have the problems you mention, so I don't see why it would be an issue just because the car is electric instead of gas or hybrid.