Slashdot Mirror
Low Emission Cars Continue to Gain Popularity
Rio writes "A company may soon offer American motorists a new option to save on high gas prices -- vehicles powered by lithium batteries. From the article: 'Just plug in these cars for about five hours or so and you'll get about 300 miles on a single charge.' The vehicles cost about $35,000 or about double what buyers would pay for a gas-powered model." Relatedly acidrain writes to tell us The BBC is reporting that a prototype of the new "Clever car" (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) is starting to make the rounds on European test tracks. The car is one meter wide and less polluting than normal vehicles. It has a top speed of 100 km/h (60mph) and uses a novel tilting chassis to make it safe and maneuverable.
Am I the only one that sees that this car is entirely unpractical?
Sorry, for that ridiculous price I'll take the expensive gas. This car will be long gone from the market by the time it would even begin to come down in price.
C'mon, people. Invent a solution that people would actually buy.
how much pollution is created by the creation of the power used to charge this thing?
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Perhaps as simple as mandating each gas station to have electric outlet with restrictions on premium the gas station owners can take from electricity. The chicken/egg problem would be solved and the electric cars could become slowly more common.
This would solve nothing. The problem is not and never has been finding and outlet. If there was any demand at all, it wouldn't be much of a pain to simply install a plug everywhere. This isn't like hydrogen where you need a new infrastructure. The infrastructure is there, you just need to throw in an outlet for a few bucks.
The real issue is that you can't fill up one of these cars at a gas station unless you feel like stopping for 5 hours. If it takes 5 hours to fill up one of these cars, that means you have to fill it up when you have no intention of using it. Namely, parking lots would need electrical outlets and a way to charge for the fill up because that is where these cars would be fueled.
Even that isn't the real problem though. If you could have a car that goes 300 miles on a single charge, you are probably doing okay. Sure, you would be hard pressed to take this car on a road trip, but it could do almost everything else. The real issue are all the other problems that such cars have. Is this car safe? My old 1990 Honda Accord can get slammed in the rear from an SUV (or any car for that matter) and so long as the speed difference is less then 30 MPH, I will walk away with nothing worse then a headache. Most of these electric cars though are built so light that a 30 MPH hit from the rear would result in the car disintegrating. They are simply unsafe. You might as well just drive a motor cycle if you are going to throw safety to the wind.
They have other problems too. Its REAL distance tends to be a real issue. Sure, it can go 300 miles, but only if you remain at constant velocity and don't turn your heater on. What if it needs to stop and start or it is being used some place very hot or cold?
Then there is the issue of performance. Can this thing accelerate? Performance is more important then for just enjoyment of the drive. If the car takes a long time to get up to speed, or is so light that it can't turn hard without flipping, that is a safety hazard. If I need to get into a fast moving stream of traffic, I don't want a car that takes half a minute to get to 60 because I will be dead before it gets there.
Electric cars have a lot of problems. The truth is that they are NOT the solution. We simply can't make batteries big enough, safe enough, and fast charging enough to get the kind of required performance. What we really need is a way to create renewable energy that then can be converted into some other fuel.
The nice thing about CO2 is that it doesn't really matter where it is dumped. There might be some local affects going on, but it really is an issue of the net amount dumped into the world's atmosphere. Plenty of nations have CO2 markets that are much better managed then in the US. Europe in particular has a pretty hot CO2 market. As it turns out, buying up CO2 futures has become a hot commodity market in Europe.
If you really are hell bent on doing something for the environment, really are willing to drop a few thousand to do it, and won't feel bad about your lost bragging rights about your new hybrid, just pick a functional CO2 market and start buying. Hell, I would be willing to wager an arm and a leg that there is an environmentalist organization or two out there already doing this that would happily accept donations to buy up more and spare you the trouble of doing it yourself. I know for a fact that there are many environmentalist organizations that happily take donations to buy up forests to prevent them from being logged both domestically and world wide.