Canon PowerShot S100
ƒ/2
5.2 mm
1/1
80
A friend just got one of the first ones, and she loves it.
Toyota had an electric RAV4 SUV several years ago but it ran on NiMH batteries. Now they are LiIon.
5 responses to “New Electric Toyota RAV4”
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Somebody that works for an oil company told me that in the long run getting the lithium for batteries is more damaging to the environment than the diesel fumes his product produces. Sounds fishy to me, is there any truth in it?
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Nope. Localized lithium mining in a few places, versus global climate change and the air we breathe. Really? And the newest process extracts Lithium from geothermal brine with no pollution.
But it is a fascinating peek into the mind of someone desperately seeking solace for what would otherwise be a cognitive fracture of career guilt.
Think of the cigarette company executives. Despite many years of definitive data, guilt was slow to set in. Cognitive dissonance easily dismisses data in a time of debate. A shred of defensibility, no matter how unlikely is embraced and spread without critical inquiry. My guess is that it took a shift in public opinion before the insiders finally started to crack.
More on Lithium. Maybe he was thinking of rare earth metals, as they are a reasonable concern to discuss regarding hybrid cars’ environmental footprint (pure EVs like the one above with a Tesla drive train, do not use rare earth minerals in LiIon battery or AC induction motor). Lithium is the third most abundant element in the universe (a cool but irrelevant detail), and it’s not one of the 17 rare earth minerals. In contrast, every Toyota Prius and similar hybrid vehicle on the road uses one kilogram of neodymium and nearly 30 pounds of lanthanum. Hybrid cars tend to have DC motors with permanent magnets and battery chemistries optimized for power density (not energy density as in an EV).
I recently learned another disturbing data point about fuel-burning cars, in this case about the motor oil (which you don’t have in an EV at all):
"Americans spill 180 million gallons of used motor oil every year into our waters. This is 16 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska."
— Water Quality Consortium, 2011 -
@Steve Jurvetson Now that you mention it, I think he was talking about the Prius. The rare earth thing has so many sinister ramifications (I’m thinking about the war in the Congo).
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