My friends and I went to the Greenwood Car Show on Saturday (Greenwood is a neighborhood in Seattle). Some 700 vintage cars were on display as well as a handful of the newest electric/ hybrid cars. I picked just a few of my pictures and I’ll try my best to get the vintage cars correct from top to bottom. Here goes : 1955 Nash, 1960s(?) Chevy Truck, Dodge Truck, 1958 Cadillac Eldorado, Volkswagen like the one my mom had, 1963 Mercedes-benz 300 SL Gullwing, 1939 Studebaker L5 Coupe-Express. There was a lot of nostalgia going around .. as the one car website says ‘For those of us who can remember these cars, can we ever forget them?’.
The sight of some electric cars fast forwarded us to 2011. The red Tesla Roadster Sport (see teslamotors.com and the Wikipedia entry for Tesla Roadster) has a base price of US$109,000 and is billed as the first highway-capable all-electric vehicle in serial productionavailable in the United States. Construction of the car needs no rare-earth metals whatsoever and is based on the cheap and rugged alternating-current (AC) induction motor patented by Nikola Tesla; get this – back in 1888. In the past the main problem with asynchronous induction motors was the difficulty of varying their speed, but the speed of these motors can now be controlled with modern semiconductors.
Finally, some pictures of a 2011 Chevy Volt with a white diamond tri-coat of paint. It goes for US$42,000. It has a Li-ion battery (8 year, 100,000 mile warranty) as well as a 1.4l internal combustion engine). And of course it is loaded with electronics for audio, video and navigation.
