Electric Vehicles
Electric vehicles have two main components: a battery pack to store electricity, and an electric motor to turn the wheels (and power the stereo, of course). Electric vehicles may seem like a mystical new technology, but they've actually been around way longer than gas-powered cars. In the early 1900s they were simply much easier to use than gas-powered cars. For one, gasoline was incredibly expensive. Gasoline engines were also a big hassle: they were hard to start (instead of simply turning a key, you had to turn a crank on the front of the car to get it going!), they were very noisy (no mufflers), and they belched huge clouds of smoke wherever they went.
Electric vehicles (EVs) by comparison were quiet, clean, and easy to start. By 1913 there were more than 50,000 electric vehicles being driven in the U.S.
Trouble for the EV, however, was looming on the horizon. As more people experimented with making gasoline, it became cheaper. Then the electric starter for gas engines was invented, which introduced the now-familiar ignition key. And, finally, gas-powered cars could travel much farther than EVs. Pollution wasn't really on people's minds at the early part of the 20th century, so no one worried so much about those huge clouds of exhaust.
Modern Models Today EVs make up less than 5 percent of the global motor pool. But the 5 percent of people who own them are a vocal minority. They have begun to catch people's attention again with the benefits of electrics:
EVs:
- are low maintenance (significantly fewer moving parts than an internal combustion engine),
- are fast! - you just step on the accelerator and WHOOSH! you're outta there - no gears to wait through, no lag time for a bunch of moving parts to align with each other,
- can be built with all of the typical modern car amenities (A/C, stereo, heater, etc.),
- don't need to make trips to the gas station, ever,
- have no tailpipe emissions, and
- are eerily quiet - in fact, most people can't tell when the car is "on" the first time they climb into an EV.
And EV technology is not limited simply to cars. There are also electric trains, buses, subways, motorcycles, bicycles, scooters - even planes and airships! Many cities already have electric mass transit vehicles - like the light rail in San Jose, California, in the video.
Pros and Cons: Range, Cost, Safety, Power Plant Emissions
Sounds great, you say, but is there a downside?
Range? Get Real(istic)
The main concern most people cite is the limited range of a vehicle that needs to plug in occasionally to recharge its batteries. This is a valid concern - everyone wants reliable transportation. However, most people don't realize two important things: 1 - today's EVs have much greater range than in the past (an average of 60 miles, to a max of about 240 miles), and 2 - the majority of trips by car taken in the U.S. are significantly less than 60 miles. So for longer trips (i.e., a cross-country drive), an EV might create a hindrance for some, but for more than 90 percent of U.S. auto travel, EVs would have no range problems at all.
Supply and Demand
Another inhibiting factor is cost - which poses problems for any new technology. Until enough of a market demand is created for EVs, the price will still be over $20,000 for most models. Of course, the tradeoff is that you don't ever have to buy gas, and EV motors last for twenty years or more. Batteries do wear out, however, so EV owners need to buy new batteries about once every 20,000 miles - and they can get pricey. Again, mass-producing things makes them cheaper, so if manufacturers can increase the demand, they can lower the price.
EV Racecars?
A third factor is safety. The smaller and lighter a vehicle is (especially an EV), the more efficiently it uses energy. That's why many (although not all) EVs are quite small - some, like the Corbin Sparrow, are one-person cars. With all small, very light cars, there is a concern that if that car is involved in an accident with a larger vehicle, the car won't be able to protect the passengers from harm. Unfortunately, in the U.S., that concern has inspired a sort of race to get the biggest, "safest" car you can buy. And then, of course, someone makes a bigger vehicle and people buy that one. And so on, until you have a country full of large trucks and sport utility vehicles.
EV manufacturers have responded to safety concerns by modeling their designs on racecars. Racecars are very lightweight to make them fast, but they also have a well-constructed 'cage' which protects the driver in the event of a crash. The racecar-style body will crumple under the impact to absorb the energy of the crash, while the heavier car transfers the energy of that impact to the driver, often causing internal injuries as a result. The safety debate, as you can see, is far from resolved, but the prevalence of small cars in countries outside the U.S. is starting to win favor for smaller, lighter, more efficient vehicles.
Pollution Comparison
And finally, as Wanesha says in the video, "Zero emissions, yeah, but you've still gotta plug them in. So what about pollution from power plants?" Converting every car on the planet to an EV would definitely boost power plant pollution levels, especially in areas with lots of coal-burning power plants. There are two counter-arguments for this, however:
- Electric cars do contribute to pollution from power plants, but it doesn't take a lot of power to charge an electric, so the increased power plant pollution is still a lot less than what cars produce today. Also, some people use windmills or arrays of solar panels on their homes or outside buildings to generate the power to charge their vehicles - and that's totally clean power.
- Power plants are stationary sources of pollution (they stay in one place), as opposed to mobile sources of pollution like cars. It's much easier to filter and control pollution from one stationary source, i.e., a power plant, than it is to try and control pollution from a bunch of smaller, separate, moving sources, i.e., the tailpipes of cars and trucks.
The future of EVs
So, can electric vehicle proponents muster enough support amongst their "dead dinosaur"-consuming counterparts? EVs definitely have a lot going for them, not the least of which is zero tailpipe emissions. But the future of these technologies really relies on us as we decide what transportation methods we'll choose, and what factors on which we'll base that decision.
More information
To learn more about EV engineering, performance, and the future of EVs, here are some good places to start:
HowStuffWorks.com tells you how the electric car works: http://www.howstuffworks.com/electric-car.htm
Read about a pioneering EV owner, Michael Hackleman, on the Easy Breathers Web site.
Ford Motor Company is in on the act, too. They have a useful EV education page at http://www.thinkmobility.com/eveducation.asp.
You'll find the most electric vehicles in the U.S. in the state of California. So it's not surprising that the California Commission of Energy created this web page detailing the history of the EV: http://energy.ca.gov/afvs/vehicle_fact_sheets/ev.html.
Want to see some of the electric vehicles on the road today? Check out the Electric Auto Association Web site: http://www.eaaev.org/eaachapters.html.
