Electric Cars, What’s So Special?

What’s so special about electric cars, and why do you care?

There is a new wave of living unfolding on planet earth. Challenges that seem to overwhelm current solutions are drawing on vision and imagination.

In some ways we are returning, returning to a simpler life, meeting some needs by reducing them. In other ways we are drawing on possibilities that have existed for some time but needed a special calling …. to awaken.

The dinosaur is dead.

Fossil fuel provided a resource for an innovation that practically defined the 20th century. Suburbia, highways, and a lifestyle in many ways liberated from distance came with our automobile. But so did many other things. Fossil fuel could never be exhausted. When the automobile was first built and conceived, fossil fuel practically had no value and was the perfect solution for an energy resource that was bountiful, inexpensive, and easily accessible.

What else did we get ?

Who could have ever predicted the enormous effect on our climate and the air we breathe ? I remember taking trips when I was a child and when we entered the state of Texas we began counting countless oil wells. Who would have thought at that time that we would run out of this inexhaustible resource and commit what has been coined by T. Boone Pickens as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth’ in the history of mankind.

The dinosaur is dead and a new day is dawning.

What’s so special about electric cars and why is the United States not among the leaders in implementing this saving technology, implementing a solution that will allow us to reclaim our self-reliance, produce our energy at home, and make dramatic reductions in our environmental thumbprint?

Good question. What’s so special about electric cars is that for all the promise of clean, renewable energy, there is now a practical solution, for the special demands this kind of car does have.

Manufacturers have identified that most urban work travel is under 100 miles, that the capacity of electric car meets the needs of the typical driver in the United States and the industrial world.

Like any technology that receives the focus of the scientific economic community, the capacity and possibilities for a lithium-ion battery is growing regularly. Use of silicon instead of graphite allows much more energy to be stored because the silicon absorbs larger amounts of lithium in the charging process. If you simply look at the advances in computer size, storage, memory capacity in an industry driven by demand, it is clear that once the electric car is a viable option for the consumer, these same kind of advances will be made in response to demand and the market. A lithium-ion battery can also be recycled with minimal environmental impact. More than 95% of the battery materials can be recovered and reused.

If we picture the United States ten years from now, recharging stations will be dotted across the land because having a charge capacity for an automobile alone is not enough. For a viable solution, an owner/driver of an electric car will require the same confidence they have now, that once out on the road, ‘fill up’ stations exist. Just like our gasoline stations now, charging stations will exist where an electric car can be recharged, or have battery exchanged for stopover comparable to one now taken on a long trip when we fill up with gas.

The difference is, when we fill up with electricity, the fuel will have been resourced here, the funds for it will stay here, the manufacturing of the resource will occur here, the tax revenue for our troubled government will stay here. The dawn of a new day of perhaps our founding fathers’ most powerful inspiration, independence and self-reliance will begin.