Who Killed the Electric Car?

What killed the electric car?

Inefficiency, short driving distances, constant recharging every night. Or basically that it needed more work to be practical. It would have been great if it could go further and longer without recharging. Plus the size of the thing isn't good. That is why the Prius beat the Insight, because it is more practical.

Sorry,

I didn't mean the car itself is inefficient (I don't know for sure), but I meant that it was inefficient for practical use and it would be hard to take on those weekend trips, etc.

I understand what you meant kart1. I am pretty sure some time ago (10+ years) all manufacturere selling in California were required to make some sort of electric car, or something similar. Obviously back then batteries were weak. Today it is probably much better. But then again, if everysingle car on the road would become electric, we wouldn't have enough electricity, and the price of electricity would go up ten fold.

Ok boys and girls, I'm going to get on my podium and do my best "tree hugger" imitation now. Just a warning!

I really think we missed the boat on this one. Once again, we have been short changed by all of the companies that profit from the auto industry. Let's go one step further into the future shall we.........

There has been a lot of attention lately from and by those Hollywood types about green everything. Lets just combine green houses and green cars and see what could have been.

Right now, there is technology available to run most houses on purely solar power. You can buy a 5KW system now for about $15K installed which will come with enough incentives to cost you about $3500 total out of pocket. With these systems, any access power produced can be sold back to the "grid" for future credit, which can then be used on days when you need more power than what your system can provide. Remember, these systems are making power any time the sun is up at no cost to you. 5kw systems can power everything in a house except for the HVAC sytems. The fridge, computers, TVs, all of the lights, etc. can be handled by these systems. Lets say we bump it up to a 10kw array. With todays technology, you'd be looking at a fairly large solar array on the roof of your house but it would still provide you enough power to add the A/C units and would cost about $12K more at todays prices. Like anything else, the more something is mass produced, the less it tends to cost. Unless we're talking about oil of course.

If you plugged in your electric car at night and used the grid to charge the batteries during low peak time, your house would then pay back the "grid" during the day when the need for power is at it's highest point and companies tend to charge the most for it.

With a little improvement in battery technology which could have given the cars more range, just think of the impact this could have had. Free energy for a vehicle that needs very little if any maintenance in return. Great for the environment, bad for the economy. If either technology would ever really take off in mass, just think of what the middle east would look like. Just another desert!

Some more food for thought..............

Right now the US sells about 17M new vehicles per year. As a result we are one of the largest producers of greenhouse gasses in the world, however we are at least working on ways to reduce that. Right now China is developing a middle class. Last year they bought over 1 million vehicles. That middle class is growing at an extremely rapid pace. Within 10 years, we could see China producing and selling over 30M cars/year to itself. Think of what an additional 300M cars could do to the environment, especially if they are more concerned with making money than anything else. How long do you think it will take for China to pass smog laws or to develope something equivalant to the EPA?

This is just some things to think about. You

Neverfollow

That could work, but only in perfect conditions. Also, most cars on the road today have at least 100kw engines, for electric cars to function like normal cars, they would also need about 100kw motors, that number looks a little bigger than you calculated.

In addition to my previous comments: If you think the price of oil is high now, just wait until China comes on line with a strong economy and new found thirst for the stuff. This will have an even more devastating effect on the world economy as well as ecology.

In response to Chewy:

An electric car's motors will indeed take some juice to run, and it may take a little longer for the batteries to charge using strictly solar energy from a home but a solar home system as a suppliment to conventional "grid" energy is a sound argument as a way to offset the tremdous demands that would be placed on our current electrical supply. The idea is to prevent, as much as possible, the need to add additional nuclear, coal, or oil power plants due to the increased demand of millions of electric cars being charged at the same time. As demand for electrical energy would surely skyrocket, so would the cost of that energy furthering the value argument of a self sufficient energy source. I am sure that that this argument would not hold water in many areas of the world but places like Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida where sunshine is a cheap commodity and millions of cars are driven every day, this would seem to be a logical place to start. In Arizona, many parking lots at office complexes are covered with carports to shade cars from the sun. Why not put solar panels on top of them to supplement a building's energy expenses and/or provide future charging stations for employees who drive electric cars?

If we took any of this seriously enough, I'm sure that many of our country's brightest could come up with creative solutions for the many obsticals that are sure to arrise.

Neverfollow

I understand, I have nothing against solar energy. Right now they are to expensive to put on all possible homes. Also, I think that there is a limit to how much a solar cell can extract. I don't think that it would be possible to be able to achieve much change with solar, but something IS better than nothing.

solaer will not work in nucular winter :)

The electric car killed the electric car. The prius plug in will do well but it still requires power and electricity is not free or that much better on the enviroment.

the other problem the electric car has is that every one requires that you are at least 47% gay to drive one