I never understood where all that energy is coming from when recharging all those EVs... Free air? Wind? Nuclear?
Or good ol' petrol?
And coal.
Electric cars are insanely expensive. An ordinary electric car cost as much as 10 to 20 times that of a gasoline-run car. On top of that, there are other issues. A gasoline-run car can be refueled in less than 2 minutes. But it takes up to 6 hours to fully charge an electric run car. Another thing is that, once charged, the electric cars can travel only 200 to 250 km. By then they needs recharged again.
And the batteries only last a few years. Replacing the battery will cost more than the used car is worth.
One reason why electric cars are so expensive is that the technology is still new and being developed. Internal combustion engines have been around a lot longer. New technologies like electric and other will get cheaper.
It's been "new" and "will get cheaper and better" for the past 20 years.
Sometimes newer technologies need to be subsidized in order to keep the price down while it's in development.
Successful technologies pay for themselves. Hybrids are a dead end. "Cash for Clunkers" destroyed wealth.
And it costs nothing to recharge doesn't pollute and doesn't make any sound.
It costs just as much to recharge, or more. And power plants do pollute.
I'd gladly drive an electric car if it worked for my needs, and I expect that eventually they will. I have a truck which I use when I need to, but drive my small car when I can. A self-driving car would be even better. This has nothing to do with the phony-baloney global warming fraud, peak oil fear-mongering, or the idea that it 'costs nothing' (which means that someone else is picking up the tab to subsidize your own lazy ass.)
I would rather the necessary R&D happened organically rather than through coercive and cronyist taxes on fuel and what-not. If it takes longer for developments to occur without this extra money (which politicians and their sponsors inevitably use as a giant slush-fund) that just means that there is no really significant need for a solution in the near term. In the mean time, internal combustion engines are totally fine with me to.
Exactly! Anytime someone tries to sell you something because it's "green" or "good for the planet", it means you're paying too much for an inferior product. Like water bottles with plastic so thin that the bottle doesn't stand up straight "because they're using less plastic" - they're saving 50% on the cost of materials, but they're still charging you the same price for the bottle of water. If it was cheaper, that would be a reason to buy it. But they want you to pay more for less.
Because soon there won't be any fossil fuels left and electric cars will be the future.
Soon? Before we run out of coal and petroleum and propane,
we'll run out of lithium for the batteries,
and uranium for nuclear power plants.
Then we'll still have to burn fossil fuels to run our cars.
There’s just one problem: Our electrical grids might not be ready.
...
The collision couldn’t be clearer than Moura’s example of a supercharging Tesla coming online, which he says would “feel” to the grid as if 120 houses came online for only half an hour. “It’s like an entire neighborhood popping up in the middle of a city, and then disappearing,” he says.
Even when electric-vehicle owners charge their cars at a much slower rate of 6 or 7 kilowatts per hour overnight, that can still be a problem. The demand for energy is spiking each evening just as electric vehicles typically roll in to charge, and just when the source of solar power is setting. If demand spikes too high in an EV-smitten zip code (cough, Silicon Valley), its transformers, built to handle modest residential loads, may blow out.
So it's still impossible for everyone to drive electric cars, even if they were given the cars for free.
Tesla claims to be the fastest on the planet, but BMW touts that it can go from 0 to 80 in less than half an hour. The electric car makers aren’t bragging about miles per hour—they’re touting percent battery charge.
The race for fast-charging stations is on
And the race towards exploding car batteries.
People have already died from exploding cellphone batteries, so imagine a battery 1,000 larger.
When an electric golf car gets reasonably good, we can talk about electric cars.
Electric cars are the horseless carriages of hell itself.
Good point - cars failed at being "a carriage without a horse".
They had to be something much better before they were successful.
If people wanted to keep driving something slow and smelly, they kept their horses.
The world doesn't throw away everything and replace it with something new, just because it's there.
Electric cars have failed at being "a gas-powered car without gas".
We already have gas-powered cars.
Even if electric cars become equal in every way,
why would we switch to something that just does the same thing as what we already have?
Electric cars will have to be much better than the cars we already have, or they will fail.
My Smartcar charges with gasoline. In 3 minutes.
And why in the world would anyone want to take a car that gets some 35 miles per gallon and turn it electric?
This destroys the good points of the Smartcar. It takes a low cost commuter vehicle, (less than 20k USD) with a couple hundred miles range and extremely good gas mileage, and turns it into an expensive commuter vehicle with terrible range.
Isn't the Smartcar smaller (less useful) and more expensive, with worse mileage, than other vehicles that already exist but aren't marketed as "smart"?
They cut the size and weight of a car in half without improving the mileage at all, so the Smartcar is actually less efficient and has worse technology.
Smartcar might be perfect for someone who drives alone and likes to park easily anywhere at all. And it's safer than a motorcycle. But it's not going to save the world from fossil fuels.
Just like the Prius, they want to sell people on a lie. They think if people will buy a car because it's "smart", then they'll buy even faster if it's "smarter with electric".
