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Are electric cars worth getting excited about yet?
Don't get me wrong, I'm as militant a tree-hugging greenie as you could hope to meet and am enthusiastically supportive of anything and everything that will reduce automobile emissions and reduce our wasteful consumption of fossil fuels. But I'm struck by a few points that would seem to call into question the relative impact of electric cars.
One, we do not yet have a cost effective battery that will allow an electric car to have the range of a gas-fueled vehicle. Coupled with the fact that we lack the infrastructure of electric filling stations, electric cars cannot yet replace a gas vehicle as an all around vehicle that will meet all of a consumer's transportation needs, which, for most people, will include needing to make occasional road trips. So the people who will buy electric cars will be those people who can afford to buy, maintain, and pay insurance for an extra vehicle in addition to their gas-powered vehicle.
Secondly, the electric car itself may consume no gas and produce no emissions, but it does still need power, and the electricity it needs is being generated by private energy companies interested more in maximizing profits than in producing clean energy. So our energy companies use cheapie gas turbines that operate at very low very efficiency, generating far less electricity and produce substantially more emissions per unit of fuel than the more modern - but more expensive - turbines employed in Europe. So although the electric car is clean, the energy it's using isn't really all that clean.
These observations lead me to wonder whether our efforts wouldn't perhaps be better directed to increasing the market share of hybrid vehicles. No, they aren't quite as low emission as an electric car, but they are generally ULEV vehicles, which is a very great deal more than can be said for most of the vehicles on the road today. Yes, they consume some fossil fuel, but vehicles like the Prius and the Insight use about a third as much fuel as the average American vehicle. And the main thing: they're capable of handling everyone's transportation needs and are commercially viable right now. Americans can even buy their precious SUVs in hybrid versions now.
No argument, they are not as great as electric cars, but, from a macro point of view, if every American traded in their SUV or their luxury sedan for a hybrid equivalent today, we would have cut fuel consumption by at least half and emissions by god only knows how much. And it wouldn't involve American consumers having to make any of the compromises that they are so loath to make. And they could buy those vehicles immediately. Hopefully, one of these days, we will have electric filling stations and it will be cost effective to equip electric cars with batteries that go hundreds of miles on a charge, but, since we aren't there yet, nor, at least as far as I can tell, are we anywhere close to being there, how much impact can electric cars have right now? The planet is dying beneath us, friends. We can't wait another decade, not another year, not another day for cleaner energy. Do electric cars offer the kind of potential reduction in emissions and fuel consumption right now that hybrid vehicles can offer immediately? Any thoughts?
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