To the surprise of many people, the concept of vehicles powered by electricity is not a new one. Although there has been much widespread publicity in recent years about the new age of greener and more environmentally friendly vehicles powered by electricity rather than gas, the first successful electric vehicles were actually being developed nearly two hundred years ago, back in the 1830s. Robert Anderson in Scotland created a successful electric carriage capable of speeds up to 65 miles per hour, and by the 1900s electric cars were more popular than gas powered ones, and were certainly quieter, cleaner and easier to start.
Although common misconceptions today still prevail, with suggestions that the future of electric vehicles is a world where the motorways are jammed pack full of milk floats and golf carts, this is starting to sound very dated, and increasingly people are aware that electric vehicles today, just as a hundred years ago, are outperforming gas powered alternatives. The recent unveiling of the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car, demonstrated that it could leave a Ferrari Spider standing at the traffic lights, and glide easily past a Mercedes SL550 without any trouble. With a top speed of 130 miles per hour and a 250 mile distance capability between charges, this blows away any dusty old ideas about milk floats.
Often it is forgotten or ignored that there is another side to the use of electric vehicles to be kinder to the environment. It’s not all about the smoke and fumes that will be saved, but also the noise factor. Electric cars are almost silent, the only sound from within the sporty models being a vague impression of having a hairdryer in the boot. Noise pollution is a forgotten attribute of gas powered cars, but imagine a world of near silence. Some people have expressed concerns that with nippy little cars silently dashing about that children and the elderly may find it difficult to anticipate or seen these coming, and that road calming measures or extra noise making speaker need to be fitted.
Besides the greener conscience that road users will have through purchasing an electric vehicle, there are many other benefits and incentives on offer which help to make the whole idea of ditching a gas powered car a much easier decision. For example, if you were to purchase the popular little G-Wiz at under 5,000, you will receive a number of benefits in the UK alone. There are now over two hundred fuelling stations across the UK - so maintaining it is much easier than before, and if you drive round London you’ll benefit from free parking, itself worth 5,00 a year! There’s also no road tax to pay, and the car sits happily in the lowest insurance category, so is a far cheaper option all round.
On a larger scale, Israel has launched a new initiative called Project Better Place, and this is a focus on electric vehicles in such a grand way that it is the ultimate intention to rid Israel of its need and reliance on oil by completely abandoning the gas powered vehicles within just ten years. With half a million charging points, the country is well equipped to support electric vehicles, and with most electric cars able to achieve a 200 kilometre journey on a single charge, Israel is an ideal place to launch the scheme since this distance allows you to travel from any part of the country to any other location in Israel. The model being suggested is similar to the one used by mobile phone companies, with cars being given away free, and consumers paying for the re-charging costs through a number of alternative schemes - either by buying into a scheme that allows unlimited mileage over a certain period of time, or by using a pay-as-you-charge alternative.
As with any major change to long established consumer habits, there has to be enough demand to make the whole idea of replacing gas powered vehicles with electric ones, otherwise the finance is simply not going to be sufficient to enable change on any real scale. Most people are now aware that milk floats are not the be all and end all to such vehicles, and with films such as Minority Report showing Tom cruise tearing up the road in a sporty little electric Lexus, many people are starting to see that there are multiple advantages to the idea of switching over, and that there is no need whatever to sacrifice style for efficiency or even for the environment.
An issue that those sceptics raise concerning electric vehicles is that although eh car itself might not be giving off fumes and harming the environment by burning up fossil fuels, the energy for the batteries has to come from somewhere, and this is likely to be through the main electricity grid, itself powered through the burning of fossil fuels, so that ultimately the whole scheme simply shifts the focus away from the end consumer and back to the big industries. In fact this argument is not entirely valid, since more and more power companies are turning to renewable sources of energy, and this is likely to continue. The other argument is that of the fuel consumption ratio. Gas powered cars burn the fossil fuel in a very wasteful way, whereas electric cars use energy in a much more efficient manner. In this way, the actual amount of energy used, and therefore the amount of fossil fuel burned, is far less.
Picture a future that is smoke free, with no stinky gasses being belched from the back of cars driving past your street, and with no concerns regarding the waste of fuel whilst you sit idly at traffic lights or in a road jam. Although concerns have been raised that if we all arrived home at tea time and plugged our cars in we’d overload the grid, that has been demonstrated to be untrue, since at night the grid is very underused, and if we all turned to electric vehicles, the amount of energy used would be far less overall. Perhaps we can even foresee a time when the solar panels on our roof allow us to store energy through the day to re-charge our batteries at night.
