Sunday, November 6, 2011

Fisker Karma Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV

Government should not be allowed to pick winners and losers. It can't be trusted to be honest about it. This article from Forbes illustrates the problem:
The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).
Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place [by assuming perfect conversion of the potential energy in the fuel to electricity, the EPA is actually breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics]. (Continue reading...)
The free market works on the principle of natural selection. It has no agenda. Politicians, statists and bureaucrats always have an agenda. They cannot abide allowing citizens to make their own choices. There's always the risk that We the People might make choices that the illiberal control freaks might not agree with.

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