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Have you seen this NYT article on electric cars?
"The designers of electric passenger carrying vehicles have made great advances in the past few years, and these machines have retained all their early popularity and are steadily growing in favor with both men and women. They are very handy for use in the cities, and numbers of the best known and most prominent makers of gasoline cars in this country use electric cars for driving between their homes and their offices.
"The enthusiastic interest recently shown by the electric power companies all over the country in furthering the cause of the electric passenger vehicle assures a still greater use of these machines. In the past it was sometimes difficult to make arraignments to have electrics charged unless the vehicles were stored in a garage where owners of electrics were catered to, but this state of affairs has been changed. Now it is possible for an owner of an electric to install his own charging plant in his stable and the electric power companies are anxious to connect their feed wires to these individual charging plants."
Pretty encouraging, except that it was published in 1911. Kinda looks like electric cars are the vehicles of the future, and always will be.
Well, unfortunately, the problems haven't been solved. You still can't pack enough energy into a battery to make a useful vehicle in most cases. The other consideration is that passenger cars use only about 42 percent of petro fuels (as of 2008, per Federal Highway Administration). Trucks, buses, and so on are far too heavy to be converted to electric. Therefore, if we got to the point of having 10 percent of the car fleet powered by electricity, that would only decrease fuel consumption by 4.2 percent. And, of course, that electricity would have to come from somewhere--coal, gas, nuclear, or whatever. Electric cars not going to be a significant part of the solution.
3 Answers
- apeweekLv 69 years agoFavorite Answer
Of course 1911 was a long time ago. Gas was more practical at that time because there were many technological challenges to be solved for electric cars. Most of those problems have been solved now.
In 1905, just six years earlier, this is what was published in Farm Journal, page 312:
"Those who engage in automobiling are, of course, subject to accident and disease from the excessive speed attained and the excitement produced upon the mental powers."
So perhaps we should all return to horses?
- ivan kLv 59 years ago
"Electric cars not going to be a significant part of the solution."
You're already 2 steps ahead of most electric haters:
1) you admit there is a solution, which has to imply the discontinued use of fossil fuels because:
2) There must be a problem if there is a solution.
But don't be so quick to dismiss electric cars. It's the batteries, just recently developed for cell phones and laptops, that could have been developed 50 years ago for cars if that's where the r and d had gone. 100 miles in 2 hours of charging is not bad, and it's going to get better now that there's an unstopable force (the consumer electronics industry) driving battery technology forward.
Where is the energy going to come from? That's the other half of the solution. And it is also the other half of any other solution you could possibly imagine. Think about it.