Phoebe Vet It doesn't stop when the charge is exhausted. It just starts the gasoline engine to run the generator. The Volt continues on. If you work and shop within 20 miles of home, plug it in when you get home each night and you will seldom have to buy gasoline. If you work on the road, it is not for you.
It doesn't stop when the charge is exhausted. It just starts the gasoline engine to run the generator. The Volt continues on. If you work and shop within 20 miles of home, plug it in when you get home each night and you will seldom have to buy gasoline. If you work on the road, it is not for you.
Well then I'm sure its not for me, sometimes I travel for work, sometimes I work from home. When I do travel for work I need a pickup truck.
But more importantly, where we live, it would be very hard to even just do daily and weekly shopping and errands and stay under 38 miles per trip. It's seven miles to "town" and not everything is in "town" - a lot of stuff is 7 miles on the other side of town. Heck, our favorite restaurant is 21 miles from home.
When I was just a teen, many years ago, and still drove one of the family cars, I remember one night at dinner, after being out on a double date with the Checker Station Wagon the night before, my father asked if I knew how many miles I had driven last evening. I tried to quickly add it up, and replied that I suspected it might have been 50-60 miles. He laughed - and replied "try more like 110 miles".
The nearest movie was 20 miles away, the nearest sub shop was12 miles away, the girls we dated lived about 10 miles in the other direction, heck, it was three miles from our house to the nearest State highway.
So welcome to the rural suburbs.
I'm all in for an electric car - a soon as it will meet my needs - but I'm not holding my breath. My needs include space for seven people, comfort - especially for long trips, easy entry/exit, good cargo ablity, good power and drivablity, all wheel drive - oh, that's right, I already own that car - my 2012 FORD FLEX LIMITED AWD - a 360 HP, 7 passenger station wagon that gets 25 MPG.
Back to trains.
Direct Radio is already here in every scale larger than HO. And direct radio with batteries is the prefered method of operation by most serious large scale/garden railroaders.
Direct radio has a number of advantages over DCC. The primary one is less under layout infrastructure. Others include greatly reduced issues with dirty track - even if track power is used for propulsion. Sending the control signal directly to the loco results in less chance for signals to be corrupted or lost, or delayed by other "traffic" on the buss.
To the person who commented that direct radio still needs addresses - well of course it does, just like only your cell phone rings when someone calls you - not a problem.
Me, I'm still happy with my DC radio throttles that talk to the track - but a fully comprehensive onboard direct radio system would get my attention.
Sheldon
I found the info on Crests system, decoders are really too large at this point for HO but they do everything. I suspect the real conversion away fromm DCC will not happen for arround three years as that is when the new batteries are due to hit the market. They make a safe Lipo battery and slow charger now but Lipo has a bad rep so for general acceptance we need the new batteries, however the groundwork is being done now. Saw one discusion asking id DCC is a future Betamax?
Thousands of people who fly RC planes, helicopters, and quadcopters with LiPo batteries woudl disagree with that - there's nothign inherently wrong with them, just just have to use the proper charger with them.
There's already been a huge buy-in with DCC, it's too widely used to be considered a 'betamax' sort of thing. If anything, DCC is the VHS in this horse race at the moment - it's a standard so you can buy from multiple manufactureres and it works together. Each of the radio systems is currently proprietary SO you can't use say a Ring receiver in a loco and control it with a Stanton throttle.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
You were obviously not there at the start of betamax vs vhs. Next DCC does not have as wide a following as you would like to believe, probably around 20% but yes that is still a huge number and the sales are increasing but their numbers will only go up untill the next big thing. As far as the batteries are concerned, running outdoors or in your house are two different things, perceived dangers inhibit sales! Last DCC was proprietary in the begining too!
OK.
DCC was NEVER proprietary! The proprietary system BEFORE the NMRA standards was NOT DCC. It was SIMILAR - the Lenz patents were given to the NMRA to develop a standard, but any system out prior to the adoption of those standards (ok, technically most manufacturers released things based on EXPECTED adoption) was NOT DCC. The Lenz system and not many of the other early systems used anythign even remotely like DCC, most of the pre-DCC systems, which were all incompatible with each other and indeed were not widely adopted, often used a fixed DC track power with an AC control signal superimposed. The big breakthrough with Lenz's design was that the power was also the signal, no chance for the signal to get 'eaten up' in noise. I believe the old Hornby Zero 1 system may have also done something similar, I'd have to dig out the old MR articles on it. At any rate, DCC has been a standard since being adopted by the NMRA, it's not a free for all like existed before it, with Dynatrol, Railcommand, Keller OnBoard, CTC-16, Hornby, etc.
I don;t see this perception of LiPo batteries...if people were that afraid of them, no one would buy many of the new cell phones, tablets, and even laptops that use them. Yes, LiPo, not Li-ion.
rrinker OK. DCC was NEVER proprietary! The proprietary system BEFORE the NMRA standards was NOT DCC. It was SIMILAR - the Lenz patents were given to the NMRA to develop a standard, but any system out prior to the adoption of those standards (ok, technically most manufacturers released things based on EXPECTED adoption) was NOT DCC. The Lenz system and not many of the other early systems used anythign even remotely like DCC, most of the pre-DCC systems, which were all incompatible with each other and indeed were not widely adopted, often used a fixed DC track power with an AC control signal superimposed. The big breakthrough with Lenz's design was that the power was also the signal, no chance for the signal to get 'eaten up' in noise. I believe the old Hornby Zero 1 system may have also done something similar, I'd have to dig out the old MR articles on it. At any rate, DCC has been a standard since being adopted by the NMRA, it's not a free for all like existed before it, with Dynatrol, Railcommand, Keller OnBoard, CTC-16, Hornby, etc. I don;t see this perception of LiPo batteries...if people were that afraid of them, no one would buy many of the new cell phones, tablets, and even laptops that use them. Yes, LiPo, not Li-ion. --Randy