A Spark Of Ingenuity - Powering The Future On Batteries
July 29, 2008
The idea of electric cars has not been developed recently, and in fact successful electric vehicles were being developed and manufactured back in the 1830s, with projects in the Netherlands, and in Scotland, achieving great success, with vehicles reaching speeds of up to 65 miles per hour. Mostly popular with ladies, the typical town vehicle was clean, quiet, needed no cranking to get started, and cruised at a comfortable 20 miles an hour. The gas powered cars were being outsold quite dramatically.
Perceptions of electric vehicles today tend to lurch from rickety old golf carts to the slightly absurd milk flats, but the truth is that electric cars today can easily out perform their gas powered counterparts. Not only can they outperform them, but they can do so at a fraction of the cost to both the consumer, and more importantly, the environment. For example, the new Tesla Roadster can leave the Ferrari Spider standing at the lights whilst gliding effortlessly past the Mercedes SL550, whilst costing about a cent per mile in the process. With a top speed of about 130 miles per hour and with a three hour charge sustaining a full 250 mile trip, this is anything but a milk float.
It isn’t just the fact that these electric vehicles produce lower gas emissions, they also produce far less noise pollution too - an often forgotten element of our gas powered vehicles. Some people who have lid comfortably into the driving seat of a sport electric car are shocked by the lack of noise, vibration and raw growl - and it has jokingly been suggested that speakers be installed in some of these models to simulate the growl of a familiar engine. On the flip side of the coin, some people have expressed concern that with almost silent cars nipping around town, there may be an increase in the number of children and elderly people injured on the roads, since the familiar clues of oncoming traffic will no longer be available.
It isn’t only the fact that those who buy and use electric powered vehicles can sleep easy at night knowing that they are doing their bit for the environment. To really be appealing to the average consumer it has to make financial sense as well as environmental sense, and in this regard electric vehicles can score very highly. For example, for a mere fraction of the cost of the average car you can purchase a G-Wiz, which sits snugly in the lowest bracket for road insurance, and is also exempt from road tax. With two hundred recharging stations across the UK, keeping it running is easy, and if you live in London there’s a huge advantage because you are allowed to park for free, as well as being exempt from the congestion charges. This alone can represent a saving of over 5,000 per year, which is more than the cost of the car!
On a larger scale, Israel has launched a scheme called Project Better Place and it is the intention of this scheme to make Israel completely oil free within just ten years. With half a million re-charging points across the country, and with top distances for vehicles between charges reaching two hundred kilometres - easily enough to travel from any point of Israel to any other within the country, this is a practical reality. The model being put forward is not unlike that for mobile phones, with the suggestion that the vehicles are given away free, and that instead of paying for fuel and tax in the normal way, drivers can choose various plans, such as pay-as-you-go options for recharging costs, to buying credit for unlimited mileage for a certain period of time, and so on.
As with any major change to long established consumer habits, there has to be enough demand to make the whole idea of replacing gas powered vehicles with electric ones, otherwise the finance is simply not going to be sufficient to enable change on any real scale. Most people are now aware that milk floats are not the be all and end all to such vehicles, and with films such as Minority Report showing Tom cruise tearing up the road in a sporty little electric Lexus, many people are starting to see that there are multiple advantages to the idea of switching over, and that there is no need whatever to sacrifice style for efficiency or even for the environment.
Many people have raised concerns regarding the apparent green option which electric vehicles represent, citing the fact that they still need to be charged, and that this electricity comes from power companies burning fossil fuels. This is not entirely true, as there are an increasing number of companies and facilities generating green energy, either partly or in full. However, even if the power does come from burning fossil fuels, there is still an advantage, since it’s all about the conversion ratio of fuel to energy. Burning fossil fuel in a car is highly inefficient, whereas using fossil fuel to generate electricity which is used for electric vehicles is a far more efficient use of that energy, and therefore will result in far less fossil fuel being required.
Picture a future that is smoke free, with no stinky gasses being belched from the back of cars driving past your street, and with no concerns regarding the waste of fuel whilst you sit idly at traffic lights or in a road jam. Although concerns have been raised that if we all arrived home at tea time and plugged our cars in we’d overload the grid, that has been demonstrated to be untrue, since at night the grid is very underused, and if we all turned to electric vehicles, the amount of energy used would be far less overall. Perhaps we can even foresee a time when the solar panels on our roof allow us to store energy through the day to re-charge our batteries at night.
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