I really don’t know enough about electric cars. I need to learn more. The following is a commentary from CNN.com by Alexandra Paul
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — I drive an electric car. Not a hybrid — a gasoline-powered car that gets some help from an electric motor — but a full electric vehicle. I plug it in at night and can drive 100 miles the next day and go faster than 80 mph on the highway.
So don’t think “golf cart”; these cars have power and pick-up.
While you won’t see many electric cars on the road, they’ve been around longer than you might think.
In 1900, electric cars outsold both gasoline and steam vehicles because electric cars didn’t have the vibration, noise and dirtiness associated with gas vehicles. But soon afterward — with the discovery of Texas crude oil that reduced the price of gasoline, the invention of the electric starter in 1912 that eliminated the need for a hand crank, and the mass production of internal combustion engine vehicles by Henry Ford — the electric vehicle went the way of the horse and buggy.
The energy crisis in the 1960s and 1970s revived interest briefly. There was another push in 1990, when General Motors Corp. unveiled the (ineptly named) Impact, a sporty, aerodynamic electric car prototype.
In 1998 the California Air Resources Board decided that if a car company could make such a car, it should, and mandated that 2 percent of vehicles sold in the state in 1998 must be emission-free, with that number rising to 10 percent by 2003.
Since California is a huge market, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Chrysler, Ford and GM started building electric vehicles — about 5,000 were manufactured. But by 2005 the mandate had been eviscerated because of pressure from those same car companies, and 4,000 perfectly good electric vehicles were crushed.
But did car companies really want electric cars to succeed? The success of electric vehicles would have threatened the status quo and core business models of two of the world’s biggest industries — oil and automobile. It is more expedient for these companies to give lip service to hydrogen in an attempt to appear “green.” But hydrogen is a technology that experts say is decades away. [Read more →]
Tags: Energy, Environment by ecthompson
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