Mike Carrell writes: > MC: To which I add, yes, of course, if they had to.
When gasoline hits $5 per gallon they will have to. Many people cannot afford that. > Battery cars were used > locally in the 30s. They had a huge problem: they were much slower than gasoline cars. I think their max speed was 25 to 30 mph. They could not be used on the highways. There are no similar "make or break" limitations with today's electric cars except range, and that is only a problem for a fraction of the driving public. A traveling salesmen who drives hundreds of miles a day could not use today's electric car, obviously. But someone like me, who drives to Washington or Virginia three or four times a year, could easily adapt to owning one. I would simply rent a gasoline car (or hybrid) for those trips. I do not own a truck or an SUV, even though from time to time I need to move large, heavy objects. I can rent a truck or van at Lowes for $20, a mile away from my house. It is no harder than renting a rug shampoo machine. Most of the "problems" people imagine they would encounter with electric cars would probably turn out to be trivial. Some would turn out to advantages. People tend to see the drawbacks of alternative technology, but they are blind to problems with the technology they have now and are used to. Imagine if the U.S. were like France, and we generated 80% of our electricity with nuclear fission. Now imagine someone comes along and suggests we build thousands of coal fired plants to generate half our electricity, even thought this will kill 20,000 people, blight the air over half the country, and the mines will destroy millions of acres of spectacularly beautiful mountain country. Every citizen would rise up in outraged protest. The environmental movement would declare war. There would be demonstrations in the streets. > But as a transition from today's expectations, battery-only cars will find > only a niche market . . . That is because the marketing has been so abysmally bad. Computers would still be selling ~40,000 units a year today (as they did circa 1975) if personal computer manufacturers were as inept as today's automakers. > and will not solve the oil problem. Electric cars, hybrid cars, wind power and other conventional technology could have solved the "oil problem," the pollution problem, and all of our other energy quandaries any time after 1945. A new system could have been built in 10 or 20 years back then, and it could be built in 10 or 20 years now. Hybrid cars were first patented in 1906. The solutions to these problems have been at out fingertips for nearly a century. We lack only the will and the intelligence to use them. I will grant, it would cost a lot of money at first, but it would save far more money once the job is done. - Jed
