7 Responses

1. I think its a case of better, not best! Not until our knowledge is better will be come up with a truly workable every day car which is not dependant on fossil or nuclear fuels.

2. electric cars CAN use electricity that you can produce on your own…ie solar panels, thus enabling you to be energy independent! ..Same with hydrogen! There are facilities actually extracting hydrogen from tap water using solar electricity ….think independent! Not Exxon!

3. Rather than allowing pollution to be spread out via many individual small polluters (ICE powered cars), electric cars or hydrogen cars would allow society to concentrate the source of pollution to fewer, concentrated points of pollution. Pollution controls and technological advances can target smaller numbers of large polluters more easily. If, for example, we got a large percentage of cars to depend on the electrical grid, via batteries or hydrogen, we could regulate those few dozen electricity providers to derive that electricity from more renewable sources and/or getting their coal powerplants to reduce emissions.

   Concentration of pollution sources is the key here. Concentrated polluters can be more easily regulated.

4. 1.For a chargeable electric car, electricity from plants is more efficient (less fossil fuel burned for the electric charge & less expensive) per mile than a gas vehicle.
   2.Most hybrids recapture energy & do not have to be plugged in & get 2-3 times the mpg.
   3. Hybrids & alt fuels are simply steps in the right direction until hydrogen technology is ready, probably 20 plus years.
   4.Hyrogen at this point can be produced by solar or wind or geo thermal energy as they are doing now in Iceland, but is not at this point economically feasible worldwide. In the future hydrogen might be produced cheaper by using chemical enzymes or other new tech that is being developed, at some point we should be able to simply pore water into the tank & the vehicle would simply separate the H from the O2 to run its’ fuel cell, but any steps that we take to extend or reduce the need for fossil fuels helps the environment & reduces the economic & political problems related to oil dependence.

5. Your initial statement that electric cars use just as much fossil fuel as a conventional car is incorrect. Mile for mile compared to conventional 100% gasoline powered vehicles Hybrids and Full Electric vehicles use significantly less fossil fuel and are much more environmentally friendly.

   Yes if it’s a plug-in it still uses fossil fuel via power plants. It has been calculated however that the mileage equivalent (taking into account power plant demand) for a 100% electic car is about 130 mpg.

   The hybrid vehicles on the market today (I own 2 of them) are currently at the top of the list of the cleanest production vehicles available.

   I believe that most gasoline sold in the US is actually 10% ethanol. There is some debate over the use of Ethanol and Biodiesel in terms of the impact on overall air quality.

6. Hybrid cars DO NOT use nearly as much fossil fuel as a conventional car. I have a Honda Civic Hybrid and it doesn’t even have a spot to plug it in. It uses inertia caused by braking and coasting to charge the electric battery. In standard driving (an approximate 10 gallon tank) i get between 380 and 450 miles per tank. The variation is caused by the combination on city and highway driving that I do. Seriously check your sources before complaining about that we haven’t made any progress toward reducing our dependency on fossil fuels.

7. Incorrect. An electric car can travel much further on a smaller amount of fuel, because of vast improvements in energy efficiency.
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   The easiest way to demonstrate this is by fuel cost. After all, you will wind up paying for fuel, no matter how it gets to you, right? First, let’s look at gasoline. The typical driver puts about 15,000 miles per year on his car. This works out to 1250 miles per month.
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   If this driver’s car gets 20 miles per gallon, this represents 62.5 gallons of gasoline. Using $3.20/gallon (about the price we paid this past summer, and I think it will get back there), our typical driver spends about $200 on gasoline every month.
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   An electric car uses kilowatt-hours (KWH) of electricity instead of gasoline. Typically our EV might get from 3 to 7 miles per KWH. So, for this example, we’ll use 4 miles/KWH. In my city, there is a special EV electric rate of just 3 cents/KWH. But in other places, the electric rate could be 10 cents or higher per KWH. So let’s use 6 cents.
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   Using these numbers, the same 1250 miles per month – that cost our typical driver $200 for gasoline – only costs $18.75 in electricity for our electric car. The electric “fuel” only costs about 10% of what gasoline does!
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   So, using this method, we can approximate that miles driven on electricity are worth 10 times the mileage of miles driven on gasoline, or we could also say it takes one-tenth the amount of fuel for an EV to travel the same distance. (There are other ways to calculate this, but EV mileage is at least 5 times better, and from a money standpoint, as we have seen, up to 10 times better.)
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   Why is electric power so much cheaper than gasoline? There are two reasons. The first is that electric motors are far more efficient than gasoline engines, so EVs can drive much further on less fuel. The second reason is fuel transportation costs. The electric car fuels by wire (the electric grid is 95% efficient.) By contrast, your gas car requires a vast fuel transportation infrastructure that ships, pipes, trucks, and retails gasoline around the country (creating additional pollution in the process). The price of this infrastructure is built in to the price of gasoline.
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   This is also the reason electric cars pollute much less. Even when dirty fuel is burned at the powerplant, the vast improvement in energy efficiency of electric vehicles means far less pollution per mile.
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   SEE REFERENCES BELOW FOR THE NUMBERS I USED.