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The Tesla Roadster electric car
Who’s Resuscitating the Electric Car?
by
Liz Colville
An electric car in Britain is making headway in the fight against fuel. Will it take off, and is the electric car really good for the environment?
30-Second Summary
The Tesla sports car, a U.S.-made battery-operated car debuting on the U.K. market this year, is the latest in purely electric engine technology, a sector that comprises only 0.02 percent of the British auto market, according to The Guardian.
The Tesla, made by the California-based Tesla Motors, travels 225 miles before its battery needs to be recharged, and can reach 60 miles an hour in four seconds. Like the G-Wiz, another electric car released in the U.K. last year, the Tesla appeals to consumers with a bigger budget who want to invest in the next wave of auto technology.
But the electric car is still in its early days a decade after General Motors and others temporarily abandoned their models in the late 1990s. But as companies like Toyota and Honda achieve success with hybrids, American companies like General Motors and Ford are following suit—and returning to the electric car.
Because electric cars are still a rare sight on the road, it has been a challenge to record their energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions. But what is most appealing to drivers is being able to eschew gasoline in an era of sky-high fuel prices.
General Motors and many others are working on diesel-electric, gas-electric, and fully electric cars that will trickle onto the market before the end of the decade. These models hope to overcome the issues of first-generation electric cars, like inefficient batteries.
The Tesla, made by the California-based Tesla Motors, travels 225 miles before its battery needs to be recharged, and can reach 60 miles an hour in four seconds. Like the G-Wiz, another electric car released in the U.K. last year, the Tesla appeals to consumers with a bigger budget who want to invest in the next wave of auto technology.
But the electric car is still in its early days a decade after General Motors and others temporarily abandoned their models in the late 1990s. But as companies like Toyota and Honda achieve success with hybrids, American companies like General Motors and Ford are following suit—and returning to the electric car.
Because electric cars are still a rare sight on the road, it has been a challenge to record their energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions. But what is most appealing to drivers is being able to eschew gasoline in an era of sky-high fuel prices.
General Motors and many others are working on diesel-electric, gas-electric, and fully electric cars that will trickle onto the market before the end of the decade. These models hope to overcome the issues of first-generation electric cars, like inefficient batteries.
Headline Links: Battery-operated car poised to make a comeback
Tim Webb writes in The Guardian that, although sports cars like the Tesla are stirring hope for widespread electric car ownership, “[E]lectric cars also need a network of charging points, which doesn’t yet exist on any large scale.” Still, “soaring costs and swinging regulations” by European governments are intimidating drivers into more environmentally friendly models. The electric car is one of the youngest trends, next to hydrogen fuel cell technology.
Source: The Guardian
EVWorld, a 10-year-old site devoted to electric vehicles, recently wrote an article on General Motors’ efforts to revive the electric car. The Volt, a model the company hopes to release in 2010, aims to overcome the unsustainable features of the EV1 and other electric cars. The article adds, “Virtually all of the major and mid-tier carmakers have electric car programs in development, with most slated to begin appearing in showrooms in the next several years.”
Source: EVWorld
Background: Alternative fuels
The electric car has existed for more than a century, pioneered in America by the Standard Electric Car Company in 1911. The company sold two electric models—the Model M and the Runabout—for four years, but the company “never took off because gasoline-powered engines surged to the top of the fledgling industry,” notes the blog of the Jackson Citizen Patriot, a Michigan newspaper.
Source: Jackson Citizen Patriot (Michigan)
The history of the electric car was the subject of the 2005 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” written by Chris Paine. Paine owned General Motors’ electric car, the EV1, for five years before the company confiscated it. He continues to drive an electric car from Toyota, also briefly on the market. The documentary ponders General Motors’ decision to halt electric car production and the future of alternative vehicle fuels. The film’s interactive Web site provides information about alternative fuels and the electric car.
Source: Sony Pictures Classics
Opinion & Analysis: The pros and cons of the electric car
China View reported June 2 on Wassim Al-Khozendar, an electrical engineer from Gaza who converted his French-made Peugeot to battery operation after Israel’s blockade a year ago caused fuel shortages. “When the fuel crisis worsened, drivers of diesel vehicles turned to cooking oil,” but Al-Khozendar notes that his car “has no environmental dangers ... it prevents the atmosphere from the pollution that the cooking oil causes.”
Source: China View
Blogger CarWale wrote this May that he believes electric cars have been “introduced too early. … The batteries do not have enough energy density just yet, the technology is hideously expensive, and that affects everything else—the styling, ergonomics, everything else.” CarWale contends that hybrids are still the ideal because they mean a compromise in lieu of choosing one energy type.
Source: CarWale
A 2005 article by the International Herald Tribune noted that the electric car industry still “has a pulse.” What most companies were working on then—and still are—is a “high-efficiency, high-performance battery,” according to a spokesman for the company that owns Subaru. But the article notes that if generators that use fossil fuels are providing the electricity to power the car’s battery, carbon dioxide is still being produced. And, although electric cars might be energy-efficient in the long term, “higher manufacturing costs have wiped out cost advantages” of driving without a combustion engine.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Hydrogen fuel cell technology is seen as one method to combat having to recharge car batteries, but a 2003 study by UC Berkeley found that, for each benefit of fuel cells, “there is something else you could do that would probably work better, work faster and be cheaper.” The study supported earlier work by MIT, which found that “a hybrid with a diesel engine could yield a 2020 vehicle that is twice as efficient and half as polluting as the “evolved” technology of the hydrogen fuel cell.
Source: FuturePundit
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