Every time you change the battery in an electric car, you have a relatively large backward step (increase in carbon footprint). Batteries are expensive because they consume a lot of energy to manufacture. The longer that battery lasts, the smaller your carbon footprint so take care of your battery if you want to minimize your carbon footprint. As technology marches forward, especially battery technology, the smaller the overall carbon footprint for electric cars will get. Gasoline engines have been continually developed for the last 120+ years and have a lot of infrastructure in place (gas stations etc.). Electric car technology kind of ground to a halt ~100 years ago and only in the last 20 or so has really picked back up. The electric cars 20 years from now will be way, way better than the ones they have now. The current Chevy Bolt (238 mile range) already makes the current Nissan Leaf (151 mile range) look stone age by comparison. The technology gets better every year. Once there are more recharging stations, it will be easier to travel intercity by electric car. One interesting aspect of commuting by electric car and charging at night is that the extra load on the electric grid at night usually helps the electric grid be more efficient. Generators are more efficient when fully loaded than partially loaded.
The other day when I parked in the low emitting and fuel efficient parking spot at work, there was a guy parking a Harley in another one of the spots. Being the annoying engineer that I am, I had to point out that he did not qualify, he was fuel efficient, but not low emitting. He predictably got very annoyed and claimed that fuel efficient and low emitting were the same thing, but they are not, at least not in Florida. Motorcycles do not have catalytic converters or evaporative emissions controls in Florida, not sure about other states, especially California. Motorcycles and scooters pollute all day and all night even when they are not running by letting their hydrocarbon fuels evaporate directly into the air. I read somewhere that a motorcycle puts out ten times the pollution of a modern car. Due to the small number of motorcycles and scooters, they are not a big part of the overall air pollution, so they have almost no regulations. So, while you may feel holier than thou sitting beside the SUV on your Vespa - you do have a smaller carbon foot print, there is a good chance that you are polluting the air more. Bicycles put all kind of cars and motorcycles and scooters to shame, but unless you exhale through a carbon capture device, your carbon foot print is still not zero. Geeking out on technology again. Owning ten Rivs is probably not all that green. Laing On Friday, June 22, 2018 at 12:55:22 PM UTC-4, masmojo wrote: > I read somewhere that the Prius is now the #1 car for owner retention. At > the time I read that the average Prius owner was going in 11 years & > counting! > Now, I realize that Prius are technically hybirds, but the fact is that > mechanically there's far less involved with an electric car then a petrol > powered car or even a hybrid. So, long term electric car owners should be > able to get massive numbers of miles out of their vehicles and aside from > the eventual battery change, service should be cheaper as well. > Point being, that while you might make a case for a negative environmental > impact initially, over the long hual electric should overcome it's gasoline > brother and surpass it by a healthy margin. > My major worry with electric cars is fire issues & water encroachment over > time or in flood situations. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.