Originally
posted by
Detmer:
1) Electric cars are the future for all sorts of reasons, but in the interim
You pulled your BP card, I am pulling my car business card.
Electric cars are fluff and will be for the foreseeable future. The batteries are made from rare earth metals, the mining process is more polluting than anything else you can think of, the "disposal problem" is the elephant in the room. The returns on the price premium take hundreds of thousands of miles over IC engines. By the time you are getting to the black on the transaction (vs a comparable IC car) you will have to replace your battery. At today's prices that's another $8k. There's a reason nobody is buying these things. They suck, they are unreliable, and most of us need more than 40 miles of reliability. For model year 2010 the US government bought more than 90% of the hybrid vehicles sold in America. I shudder to think what the government's take rate is on the electric vehicles available. As they are all 2011 models, data isn't available yet.
Hydrogen cells are the way of the future. I know this not because of Mercedes' ballyhooed hydrogen world tour (although it's pretty cool too), but because Honda and Toyota are both pushing it. They have been the bellwethers for too long to ignore. The mid size sedan is the best selling segment in this country because of them. Toyota has a fleet of hydrogen powered Higlanders on the ground in livery service in Tokyo (or did, before the disaster anyway) and the Honda Clarity FCX has been around for a while. Couple that with the breakthroughs the Swedes appear to be making the storage of hydrogen and extraction of energy, and there is no contest.
Originally posted by ponderer:
I would also point out that as the world oil supply shrinks, having our oil resources will be a major plus for this country. Let the middle east and south america tap themselves out.
That is maybe the only good argument I've heard against drilling, it's a fantastic one actually.
Originally posted by Klown:
People love to demonize the oil companies because their profits are so high. That's wrong. Oil company profit margins are actually much lower than the S&P 500 average. They are so profitable because of their extremely high inventory turnover rates (people buy a fluff load of gas).
It's amazing who people rail against making money. The retail car business had, in FY 2009, an average return on investment of 2.7%, according to Automotive News. That placed them in the bottom ten businesses in the country. Still, everyone thinks we're raping them. The banks are the ones who consistently, year in and year out, make the most money. How come we never freak out about their mid30% returns?
