Electric cars are not a recent invention; they existed as early as 1899, but were never able to attack the market share of petroleum-fueled cars. Now there’s a new trend to revive and mass-produce the electric car for the population at large. So far, it seems that hybrid cars have been the popular compromise for the general public; it turns out that building electric cars that can fulfill the demands of modern citizens requires extensive research. For this reason, true electric cars that can drive over 100 km/h are luxury sedans and sports cars. The most notable of the former category is the Tesla Model S. In the class of sports coupes, we have the Tesla Roadster and the upcoming Mercedes SLS AMG E-Cell.
First shown last month in a bright blue paint scheme, the SLS comes with four electric motors: one engine to each wheel delivers a combined gargantuan 750 horsepower. That’s quite surprisingly 200 more than the good-old gasoline-fueled counterpart. With a top speed of 250 km/h and a range of 155 miles, it’s an impressive feat by the carmaker from Stuttgart. Too bad that it will cost a whopping $500,000. This price indicates the very problem with electric cars: Without an astronomical price tag, the industry can’t deliver acceptable performance… yet. It might take a couple of years more to produce a fully electric city car with a practical range, and at a price that many people will be able to afford.
The next difficulty at the moment is the scarcity of charging stations. Many countries are investing in this technology, though. Here in Sweden, for instance, Göteborg Energi has begun a program to create more charging stations in the city of Gothenburg. It hopes that between ten and twenty thousand electric cars will roll on the city’s streets before 2022. So far, 90 charging stations have been built, with many more to come. Halmstad has always been busy and setting up charging stations in public parking lots (as seen in the photos included in this post).
In an initiative to increase interest in electric cars, Göteborg Energi started the “Ladda nu” program. On its website, anyone living in and around Gothenburg can apply for the opportunity of driving a Volvo C30 Electric during one month. It hopes to gain more feedback from the experience, and through the feedback from these test drivers, learn about the requirements for a future charging station infrastructure. The momentum is there already, but give it a couple more years for the technology to ripen completely.
There are quite a few issues with the electric car:
For one, they’re simply too expensive. Even “regular-people” cars like the Volt ($40,140) and the Nissan Leaf ($27,300) are too expensive compared to even the hybrid cars like the Prius. Secondly and more importantly, until we switch to alternative resources for electricity in our homes, it’s still not helping with the environment by using more electricity (more than likely coming from coal as the resource) to charge the cars… so the point seems kind of moot, especially with the high up-front price of the car itself.
Perhaps the AMG example you site is not ideal, most of us everyday folk don’t drive German supercars
A better example might be the Renault FLUENCE Z.E., this is a much more realistic proposition at a much more realistic price. It is about the same price as the Prius, and arguably better looking. And thanks to a £5,000 a government grant it actually works out fairly affordable compared to petrol cars its size. Its about the same size as the current Mondeo and with the grant it works out considerably cheaper than a similarly equipped one. From a pricing perspective, the electric car is already competitive! Even without the government grant! Renault has cracked the price thing.
As to when will they be viable from a usability perspective, well it depends entirely on the use. The range is only 115 miles, and you can’t top up quickly like you can with a petrol or diesel car, so that is still its main drawback. However, 115 miles already makes it ideal for commuting, hardly anyone needs to drive longer than that to work. So you won’t be touring accross Europe in your FLUENCE Z.E, but you could be driving one every day to work if you wanted
We have been perfecting petrol engines for a very long time now, it will still take a little while for electric cars to catch up and become acceptable competition. There is plenty of incentive for companies to research electric cars however: electric cars have a certain “cool factor” for early adopters, and as the world pushes towards using renewable every sources an electric car will also be saving the planet.
Natural Gas is the next best alternative in the U.S followed in a few years by hydrogen cells. Travel distances once people leave cities makes all electric cars cost ineficient.
Get the cost below $14K, have a range of at least 100 miles, and a power train that doesn’t have to be completely replaced every 5K to10K miles (well, not needed to be replaced but once every 100K) and you may convince more then a few to go on the grid. Personally, you are not going to replace fossil fuel any time soon. I do like some of the things about the Air Car but even that doesn’t have its quirks (like catching fire). I still say a combination of the Air car supplemented with compressed air can give you an equivallent of 500 miles/gallon and it is the way to go. Fuel cell cars are just too much a lost caused imo.
I recall a news item on one of the local stations in Los Angeles about 1973 or ’74, a mechanic in Santa Monica was converting standard gasoline driven cars to a sort of hybrid electric. He had a relatively large electric motor and a small gasoline engine. The gasoline engine, not unlike a lawn mower motor, would charge the battery that would keep the car running. He said he was able to get freeway speeds out of it (and anyone who has been on the L.A. freeways knows that can be considerable). After this item was broadcast it was never heard of again. Why not an all electric car that that would run off of the battery that would charge while the car was moving? This would give it an unlimited range.
The one issue no one ever mentions is that most people do NOT have garages, and, thus, do NOT have any way to charge a blankety-blankin’ electric car no matter what the purchase price. In areas of high density housing (Multi-story condominiums and apartments) where parking is a multi-vehicle lot or parking garage, there is simply no conceivable way to charge an electric car. Some might say that these lots and multi-level garages will have to be retrofitted with charging stations, and perhaps in new buildings charging stations will be built in from scratch, but for now, you’re simply not going to mass-market a vehicle that only those in single-family homes with attached garages will be able to use. Think of it: in areas that see considerable snowfall in the winter, imagine parking lots with charging stations that are frozen, buried under mounds of plowed snow, or otherwise made inaccessible… yet, until some way is found for ANYONE to charge an electric vehicle, the sales volume and demand that is necessary to bring prices DOWN just is not gonna happen. It is just my opinion, but electric is not the way to go. Solar power IS, at least in the main 48 states and Hawaii. Alaska, not so much, at least in Winter. At least a solar-powered vehicle can be charged just about anywhere the sun shines. And it is free… for now (but the way things are going, someone will find a way to make a buck selling sunlight)!