Renault Electric Cars - 2008 link

[benld74]

It is NOT that hard to do folks! Renault left the US market years ago. These are NOT high end Telsa's, ityy bitty Smart Cars
How much additional mandated stuff would need to be added to these babies in order to make them available to US?

http://www.greencar.com/articles/innovative-mass-marketing-renault-electric-cars.php#

[frazzled]

1. Oh man, we owned a Renault station wagon once

Beautifully designed car--the worst mechanical nightmare you ever saw. It was a joke, and mechanics would literally laugh when we brought it in. We were lucky: while parked on the street one day, an 80-year-old man ran into it and totaled the hunking heap of crap. We cheered. Went out and bought a Toyota.

Renault has always been infamous for poor engineering. I wouldn't touch this car with a ten-foot pole, electric or not. Unless people drive them for at least 4 years without any problems. I am, of course, open to the idea that they have improved (especially in partnership with Nissan).

[Dogmudgeon]

2. "Green Cars" -- kind of like the "Humane Death Penalty"

There are 800 million private automobiles in North America, Australia, Japan, and Europe. The rest of the world seeks to triple this number -- or more -- in the next 20 years.

This is an unsustainable goal, even with dirt-cheap, 100% squeaky-clean energy. Even if our Space Brothers gave us magic Dilithium Crystals. There is so much that is pathological with "Car Culture" that the cars themselves are now only a minor part of the damage. Suburban sprawl, social atomism, and our particular brand of institutionalized financial stupidity are some of the bigger problems. Cars allowed us to get away with mistakes of social engineering on a colossal scale. Demonizing them is not necessary, but reducing their necessity ASAP _is_.

We ought to put our efforts into a project that will take the better part of 50+ years -- re-building the physical infrastructure of our society over that time with the purpose of human-ness, rationality and sustainability. It is going to require more than just new light bulbs, electric cars, and windmills.

No one should feel guilt or shame for driving a car today. The emphasis needs to be on our plans and investments; but we have just about nothing in the way of large-scale transition plans. And building 3 billion powered electric cars for a four-fold expansion of techno-suburbia world-wide will only be marginally less suicidal than building 3 billion internal-combustion engine powered cars for the same sad imitation of the 1950s USA.

--d!