There is a reason why we don't have electric cars, but few people wish to admit it. The reason is there is a lot of energy packed and fossil fuels, and they are readily available. We have a ton of natural gas, and lots of oil despite the "peak oil theory" and now with new fracking technologies it appears that we are good to go for quite a few more years using oil and natural gas. If everyone had electric car and they were busy charging their car up, we wouldn't be able to produce all the electricity needed for all of those batteries and all of those cars because we don't have enough electrical generation stations.
Further, the fuel taxes we have on diesel fuel and gasoline could not be collected, therefore we would have to tax everyone for how many miles they drive in their electric car and this in turn would increase the cost savings that electrical cars have today. The increased infrastructure needed to be built to support all this would be a rather huge cost which would have to be amortized over the life of the use of these technologies.
Eventually we might usher in an era of using hydrogen or H2 as fuel, so if we built all those electrical generation stations, in the future they may not be needed and therefore we couldn't achieve any return on our investment for building all the infrastructure to support all those electric cars.
There was an interesting piece in the Engineer online news titled; "The Engineer's first podcast: electric motor racing and HS2," published on 31 January 2013. The article came along with a 37-minute pod cast, where the speaker discussed the potential of leasing those Hybrid car batteries rather than owning them.
Well, this may be one way to do it, you could own a vehicle and within the engine compartment they would own batteries - when the batteries ran out, you could trade them back in for new refurbished batteries, thus keeping the recycle chain open preventing these batteries from entering a landfill. That would be a good thing, and you would still have the engine compartment if you decided later to switch to natural gas, or in the far-off future two or three decades from now perhaps H2 fuel.
These are all potential strategies. Batteries are not a very good technology because you lose energy in the conversion process, and currently way too much, and today's batteries often take exotic materials or use costly manufacturing processes and expensive materials.
No, it doesn't have to be that way and there are other technologies on the rise which might change all that, but we don't have those technologies yet today in the market place, nor have we retooled to make use of them even if we did. Nevertheless, it is good to keep all of our options open and know what we are looking at as we decide how to proceed forward.
The most important thing is that we don't turn our propulsion systems for our modern automobiles into some sort of environmental religion, and run off and do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons because that would just promote the law of unintended consequences. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Further, the fuel taxes we have on diesel fuel and gasoline could not be collected, therefore we would have to tax everyone for how many miles they drive in their electric car and this in turn would increase the cost savings that electrical cars have today. The increased infrastructure needed to be built to support all this would be a rather huge cost which would have to be amortized over the life of the use of these technologies.
Eventually we might usher in an era of using hydrogen or H2 as fuel, so if we built all those electrical generation stations, in the future they may not be needed and therefore we couldn't achieve any return on our investment for building all the infrastructure to support all those electric cars.
There was an interesting piece in the Engineer online news titled; "The Engineer's first podcast: electric motor racing and HS2," published on 31 January 2013. The article came along with a 37-minute pod cast, where the speaker discussed the potential of leasing those Hybrid car batteries rather than owning them.
Well, this may be one way to do it, you could own a vehicle and within the engine compartment they would own batteries - when the batteries ran out, you could trade them back in for new refurbished batteries, thus keeping the recycle chain open preventing these batteries from entering a landfill. That would be a good thing, and you would still have the engine compartment if you decided later to switch to natural gas, or in the far-off future two or three decades from now perhaps H2 fuel.
These are all potential strategies. Batteries are not a very good technology because you lose energy in the conversion process, and currently way too much, and today's batteries often take exotic materials or use costly manufacturing processes and expensive materials.
No, it doesn't have to be that way and there are other technologies on the rise which might change all that, but we don't have those technologies yet today in the market place, nor have we retooled to make use of them even if we did. Nevertheless, it is good to keep all of our options open and know what we are looking at as we decide how to proceed forward.
The most important thing is that we don't turn our propulsion systems for our modern automobiles into some sort of environmental religion, and run off and do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons because that would just promote the law of unintended consequences. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new series of eBooks on the Mobile Auto Services Business. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a The Oil Change Guys, a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow
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