Plug-In Hybrids are good for our Environment, Economy, Tax Base, and our National Security.

  

Hello, my name is James Philippi.  My family became the first family in Texas to privately own a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV).  Now I am doing Plug-in conversions here in Houston and the surrounding area to help others who would like to stop polluting so much.

“How does it work?”

Most Americans drive less than 30 miles per day.  This system simply adds a larger battery pack that gets charged from a standard extension cord every night.  Then, the electricity, instead of gas, is used to propel the car.  At times electricity is used to assist the gas engine improving the cars over all gas mileage.  When the additional battery pack is depleted for the day, the hybrid reverts back to being a normal hybrid automatically.  15 miles electric (using no gas) + 15 miles at 50mpg = 100mpg for your first 30 miles each day.  If you drive less then 15 miles each day you may never need to buy gasoline again.  On weekends when you run errands in your own neighborhood you can sometimes enjoy gasoline free weekends like me. 

“Doesn’t your electric bill go way up?”

It only goes up by about 60 cents a day.  It takes 4KWH to recharge Prius Plug-in battery pack.  I have a timer that charges after midnight and it takes about four hours to get a full charge.  The main reason I wanted to convert my car to be a Plug-in Hybrid was to reduce the amount of air pollution I was producing.  For me, it is not about how much it costs for transportation but how clean I can be while still maintaining the same mobile lifestyle.

“Aren’t you just moving the pollution to a Coal Plant Smoke Stack that produces even more pollution?” 

No, I buy Clean Domestic Texas Wind Energy to offset the amount of Dirty Foreign Oil I need to use.  Most early adopters of Plug-In cars are trying to do something good for all of us and are much more likely to know where their power comes from, and they will chose to use Clean Domestic Renewable Energy.

“If we all changed to Plug-In cars overnight, wouldn’t our power grid be so stressed that we would have to start building more Coal Power Plants?”

That is a good question, but here is a good point. We are not all going to wake up tomorrow morning suddenly driving Plug-In cars.  It will take decades and even then, they won’t work for everyone.  It would be far easer to clean a few Dirty Coal Plants then a million dirty tailpipes.  In addition, our power grid is getting cleaner all the time.  Please compare how many wind turbines, and solar roofs have gone up in this country in the past twenty years, as compared to how many new Dirty Coal Plans have come on line. 

“I like my Truck and SUV, and I will never drive a tiny car because they are not safe.”

That is your choice. I not promoting limiting any ones choices, I want more choices for all of us.  What if you could keep your Truck, SUV, or Sports Car and “plug it in” to save yourself some cash.  At the same time you would produce less air pollution.  Did you know large Plug-In cars are already on the road?

At the Austin Maker Fair 2007, I lectured while doing a live Plug-In conversion demonstration.  Here is a video of that car being driven for the first time under all electric power, followed by my family in our car.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yvMejVAEo

 Here I want to show you a 150mpg SUV.  It is bigger so it can hold more batteries and get better gas mileage in the process.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v09_uTp08zg

 Here is a video of an all electric pick-up truck.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qTjXItcJtc

 Here is a video of a very fast all electric car that I wish was mine.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qDZOBQs60w

 Still need a larger Plug-In?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icipzlaabqg

 If you have just watched all these videos, here is my point.  All of those Plug-In vehicles you just saw are on the road now, and most people do not even know they exist. 

“You sound like you hate oil.”

No, not at all, I am pro-oil.  I just don’t think burning oil and throwing it in the air for all of us, and our children, to breathe is necessarily the best thing for our health.  Nor, do I think it is the best use of this precious natural resource.  We need oil, and all the things we produce from it, like the plastics that protect our medicines and food. 

“What about taxes and how will we maintain our roads?”

You know a funny thing happened to me on the way to work.  After ten months of driving a PHEV I was not seeing the savings I though I would.  Where was the money going?  After a day of going through my receipts I figured it out.  The savings I was getting by not buying so much expensive gasoline was now being spent on my family.  We spent that savings at local shops and restaurants, getting things we wanted and in turn helping our local economy.  That money then went to pay salaries at those shops and again those employees spent that money on things like groceries.  At every point along the way that money was taxes each time it changed hands. 

On my way to work the next day I realized that if a dollar is spent on foreign oil, it is taxed once and it is gone, but if it can be saved by the consumer to be spend on what they want it cycles through our community helping to provide jobs and improving our tax base.  Plug-in cars can provide more tax revenue than taxing foreign oil ever could. 

Small business owners should be jumping up and down to have more hybrid cars, Plug-in Hybrids, and Electric cars come on line faster.  I mean what business owner would not want each customer who comes in the front door to have a few extra hundred dollars of spending cash in their pocket each month. 

As far as taxes collected for road repair…Do you think for even one minute that our government can’t come up with some new creative way to tax us?

“What about alternate fuels like Veggie oil, Ethanol, and Hydrogen.”

“Veggie oil” or used vegetable oil sounds good right now because you can still get it for free from some restaurants, strain it and put it right into a second tank on your diesel vehicle.  I see two major problems with this.  First, if it catches on, one day it will have enough value to be sold, instead of given away.   Second, you are still burning it, and throwing it into the air for us to breathe.

Ethanol sounds good until you find out its production is mostly subsidized.  It does work as a fuel, and if we ran out of oil tomorrow, we could keep running on Ethanol. However, it still has to be burned in engines and thrown in the air as pollution.  Ethanol produces less power in our engines and it fouls up carburetors, as any motorcycle repair shop can tell you.  I’m not a big fan of Ethanol.

Hydrogen, wow what can we say about a fuel that produces water vapor as exhaust, and is abundant in our planet’s air and water?  How about this?  Right now I know of two ways to extract Hydrogen.  In the first way you have to use three times the power in electricity to separate Hydrogen from water, than if you were to just put the energy in to batteries in the first place.  In the second way, scientists have discovered a way of using a strain of the very deadly Ebola virus to make Hydrogen gas. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want us driving around with Ebola virus in our cars. 

In an internal combustion engine the reaction comes from Hydrogen stored in a tank, and Air.  Our air is 80% Nitrogen.  That chemical reaction in the combustion engine is

H₂ + {Air = (80% N₂ + 20% O₂)} => H₂O + NO_x

NO_x also known as Nitric Oxide is a major contributor of smog.  One way around this is to also carry tanks of pure Oxygen as well as tanks of pure Hydrogen in the vehicle and only allow those two elements combine in the combustion chamber.  This would increase fuel weigh, expense and reduce safety.  A second way around this is using Hydrogen in a fuel cell.  The problem with this is that it takes three times the energy to separate the hydrogen as it does to just put that energy in a battery in the first place. 

I also don't want to spend billions of our tax dollars in subsidies putting in thousands of Hydrogen stations. Why would you want to go from being a slave to the gas pump to being a slave to the Hydrogen pump, or the Ethanol pump, or even the Vegetable oil pump, when electricity is already pumped directly into your home?  If you needed too, you could make that electricity on the roof of your own home using solar panels or even a small wind turbine.    

If Plug-in cars, both Hybrid and all Electric, can be made to be any Size, Speed, or Power, why it is our own government is not asking or helping our domestic auto industry to produce these cars?   These vehicles are real and on the road now, but you have to build them yourself with parts and technology readily available today. 

No single vehicle will be perfect for everyone in every situation, but if we don’t strive to do better, we will just keep polluting our neighborhoods. You can drive a cleaner vehicle and you can save money to use for church, charities, shopping, entertainment, or even to make your stock portfolio that much bigger. 

 If you would like more information on how to convert your Prius into a Plug-in Prius, please email me at;

 INFO@HYBRIDPLUGS.COM

  

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