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All-Electric DeLorean Car To Hit the Streets In 2013
An anonymous reader writes "The DeLorean Motor Company just announced plans to launch an all-electric version of its gull-winged Back to the Future car in 2013. While it doesn't run on fusion power (yet), it still has a top speed of 125 mph driven by a 260 horsepower electric motor."
But then people realised they sucked and switched to gasoline instead.
Gasoline: Lousy Engine, incredibly great energy storage
Electric: Great Engine, incredibly lousy energy storage
There's nothing wrong with electric cars that a battery that costs half as much for twice the life(range and longevity) wouldn't fix.
I don't read AC A human right
The fastest electric car (and fastest vehicle, period) in 1899 was La Jamais Contente, which hit 62mph on a straightaway. And wasn't exactly a 4-seat crash-rated vehicle with modern accessories, to put it lightly ;)
Rechargeable batteries have been doubling in energy density about once every 8 years, have maintained such a pattern since the 80s, and show no signs of slowing down. Don't think today's ranges are good enough? What about in a decade? Two decades? Three decades? If your car can go 800 miles per day (a whole day's drive), what need to you have for frequent fast-charge stations? You just need to be able to get your 800-miles of range charged while you settle in for the evening/eat/go to bed/wake up/get ready/eat/leave. 250Wh/mi and, say, 10 hours charge time requires 20kW (~83A). Modern houses are generally built with 200A panels nowadays (most of that being little utilized at night), and hotels far larger.
So at some point, all of those other issues just go by the wayside. 800 miles not good enough for you? Then wait for 1000. Or 1200. But at some point, you hit your mark. And low current distribution panels are increasingly a thing of the past.
The bigger question is cost. Battery cost per watt have generally declined, but not followed a very predictable path. A given tech (say, PbA, NiMH, Li-ion, etc) generally shows a predictable price decline over time, but at random intervals, a new tech comes along to continue the aforementioned energy density increase. Usually (but not always) it starts out pretty expensive, but then declines over time. In short, though, it's really hard to say how expensive those 800-mile packs of 20 years from now will be -- only that no matter what their initial price, it will drop over time.
As for history: "Fuel" powered engines have a much longer history than "electricity" powered engines. The early brushed DC motors and lead-acid batteries are the electric-car equivalent of the steam engine. The modern synchronous AC drivetrain and lithium-ion batteries are the electric car equivalent of early internal combustion engines. It's a game of catchup. There was one point where electric vehicles briefly took the lead, but only due to extreme deficiencies of the gasoline vehicles of their day (the lack of a starter, nonstandardized fuels, horrible reliability, etc). Speaking of "nonstandardized fuels" -- electric cars are just now having to get over a related problem (nonstandardized connectors).
It's simply an industry that needs time to mature.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Firstly, the inefficiency difference isn't as bad as you make it out to be since the power plants are vastly more efficient at extracting power from that fuel than the cars would be and because a lot of our power comes from non-oil sources anyway (admittedly a lot of them aren't very green, but still).
The other thing to consider is that using electric cars means that all you have to do to move away from fossil fuels is to switch your power plants over to a different energy source (admittedly no mean task) whereas if you're running all your cars of petroleum products when it gets to be impractically expensive to pull oil out of the ground (ie Peak Oil, which a number of experts believe we're hitting right now) you've still got to switch the fossil fuel burning parts of your grid to a different energy source but on top of that you've then get to either deal with the inefficiency of the Fischer–Tropsch process or replace every car on the road and all your fueling infrastructure in one go (and with no real experience in creating/using/maintaining electrics or whatever alternative you end up using because you've refused to use any out of some harebrained notion of them not being green).
Lastly, I'm what you'd probably consider a green and am a staunch supporter of Nuclear Fission in the immediate future and Beamed Orbital Solar + Nuclear Fusion in the medium to far future. Just because there are plenty of loons out there that don't realize the need for reliable baseload power capacity and spend all their time fapping over solar and wind doesn't mean that everyone that supports sustainable, environmentally friendly development is a moron.