http://gigaom.com/cleantech/bright-automotive-to-hawk-the-anti-chevy-volt-but-wheres-the-money/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:27:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://gigaom.com/cleantech/bright-automotive-to-hawk-the-anti-chevy-volt-but-wheres-the-money/#comment-20798 Fri, 29 May 2009 16:52:26 +0000 http://earth2tech.com/?p=25639#comment-20798 [...] and government fleets in less than five years. Bright CEO John Waters told us in March that the company needs to secure $400 million in Department of Energy loans or raise capital from private equity markets ($400 million over three [...]

]]> http://gigaom.com/cleantech/bright-automotive-to-hawk-the-anti-chevy-volt-but-wheres-the-money/#comment-20797 Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:33:09 +0000 http://earth2tech.com/?p=25639#comment-20797 [...] we spoke with Bright CEO John Waters last month, the IDEA was slated to debut at Norway’s Electric Vehicle Symposium in May. But it makes sense [...]

]]> http://gigaom.com/cleantech/bright-automotive-to-hawk-the-anti-chevy-volt-but-wheres-the-money/#comment-20796 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:12:13 +0000 http://earth2tech.com/?p=25639#comment-20796 RMI, of wence Waters comes, is well known as a phoney pseudo scientific organization. It’s ‘Chief scientist” (they never bother to mention which scientific discipline he pretends to represent) is a bozo named Lovins, who publishes very unscientific
types of rants against nuclear power and in favor of wind. His arguments are pretty embarrassing and can be amusing because of the irrelevance and obsolescence of most of their claims. With the world embarked on the planning/building stages for almost 400 nuclear plants, Lovins has apparently moved on to greener pastures, hawking that really crappy alternative energy called wind, 5 times more expensive, when properly costed by NOT using invalid “rated capacities” as a metric and NOT forgetting that nuclear plants last three to four
times longer than soalr panels or windmills. And produce reliable (even peak load) power, easilly worth two to three times more than intermittant and unreliable power from solar PV/wind.
So now we have someone who claims that GM “forgot” how to build an electric (this is all part of the technique for grabbing venture capital – show that the surefire technology (the Volt) is crappy compared to mine. Unfortunately, when Waters speaks of the reasons for his advantage he makes several absurd claims – one, that GM forgot what it learned with the EV-1 and then talks about HOW HEAVY the Volt is , which he claims signifies “inefficiency.” We all know from GM redesign of the Volt for aero effects (which , for some reason, Waters apparently is unaware) that weight in an EV don’t reallymean much – aero effects and tire rolling resistence (which the Volt reduced via design by a tire manufacturer) are more important than weight. You see, an EV (like a hybrid) can recover almost all that energy that is required to get that weighty car up to speed. So weight isn’t the factor here as it is in a regular gas car. Apparently GM isn’t the only one who forgot a lot of what they once knew.

]]> http://gigaom.com/cleantech/bright-automotive-to-hawk-the-anti-chevy-volt-but-wheres-the-money/#comment-20795 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:17:46 +0000 http://earth2tech.com/?p=25639#comment-20795 Will be interesting to watch this company; clearly they’re on a different path than Telsa and others like them. Coming out of RMI, they’ve got great people backing them.

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