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.

Comments

Buy carbon credits instead

[btempleton]

Instead of buying this, you could buy a regular car and take the $18,000 you saved and buy carbon credits. $18,000 of carbon credits in the USA, which has an underpriced market because laws don't create demand, would offset the burning of, I kid you not, close to one MILLION gallons of gasoline. Yup, enough to take an 8mpg hummer and drive it around the Earth over 300 times!

So buying one of these is like driving a Hummer almost 8 million miles. Doesn't seem so good.

At the more expensive price for European credits ($13 per metric tonne CO2) it's still like driving the Hummer for a million miles.

How can it be that dramatic? The genius of pollution credits is they move the money spent on emissions reduction to where it can be done most efficiently. You can cut emissions by buying an expensive electric car, sure, but somebody else can do it far more cheaply by improving the output of a factory, or putting up a wind farm, or planting a grove of trees -- which are all things that allow people to sell these credits.

Now you may not like the credits, or think the numbers should be different, but the numbers in this case are so off the scale that there's no way that you will do a better job of helping the environment, at least today, with this sort of tech. At best you can feel good while being a gross polluter, and hope you're encouraging a market so that they eventually become cheaper and a thus more efficient way to reduce emissions.

Re:Done before (20 years ago!)

[arivanov]

That is already installed.

The Hummer chassis is incapable of absorbing its own impact energy after a crash. Making a car very big does not necessarily make it safe and vice versa. The Hummer has not been formally tested to EURONCAP, but it is likely to have a lower safety score than nearly all cars on the EU market. I have seen a hummer smashed at 30mph into a rock wall and it looks pretty much like this: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/det ails.php?id1=1&id2=73 (classic example of bodyshell colapse).

A selfrespecting moderately safe car should look at least like this: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/det ails.php?id1=1&id2=67 (Note the lack of chassis deformation)

or like this:http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_rating s/details.php?id1=9&id2=210 (for a vehicle in the same class as the Hummer)