Are Electric Run Cars the way Forward or a Conspiracy?

John
#1. April 18th, 2008, at 10:25 AM.

Great post, I agree - the government make far too much off the oil industry to be able to just wipe it out in favor of an environmentally friendly alternative.

liam
#2. April 18th, 2008, at 11:11 AM.

I’m not a green person at all (im sorry to admit) but one thing I do think we could all be doing is using electric cars. I think it sounds like a great idea, and the truth is the technology is there! But what is the gain for the government by introducing electric cars? Nothing, they will loose out on so much money, so they won’t have a big push for electric powered cars until they find a way to make money out of it.

One of the main selling points of an electric car would be cost, it would be cheaper to run, but as i mentioned before the government will find some way to get their money back, which means eventually you’l be paying the same for your electronic car as you are your petrol now, so are we really going to be any better off?

The technology is not the issue here, or the deployment of it. Its just a matter of money. So many things in this country are funded by motorists, and getting rid of it too soon would mean they’d need to get their money from somewhere.

Ben
#3. April 21st, 2008, at 7:58 PM.

The company who made the car, BOC, are one of the evil fossil fuel companies themselves. Where does that leave your conspiracy theory?

Probably the reverse vampires got to them first.

Steve
#4. April 21st, 2008, at 8:26 PM.

Seems like a very miss-informed piece. Firstly 25W is an instantaneous measure of energy use, so the phrase “With only 25w the car can do 25,000 miles.” is totally meaningless. Its worth noting that an average adults legs will output considerably more that 25 watts of power, so you are never going to get a car that will get you around very quickly with that amount of power input. If 25W was applied to electrolyse water over a number of hours it could produce enough hydrogen to power a car for a short while with water being the only combustion product. But then you have to be concerned about how is the electricity being produced and distributed.

pip
#5. April 22nd, 2008, at 11:27 PM.

I’ll agree with Steve in the #4 spot and add to it…. the definition of watt is 1 joule per second of energy. Thus you would need to create over 625,000 joules of energy… and that’s at a perfect transfer rate. Since most mediums of energy production and storing are at best 75% efficient on this large of a scale, that’s closer to 840,000 joules assuming there is none lost due to storage. Still, that’s better than gasoline. 1hp = 745 watts

Jerry
#6. May 24th, 2008, at 2:07 PM.

No matter how much money they throw at developing it, I’m not going to drive a car with 1/29th of a horsepower! How does it climb a sleeping-policeman? In any vehicle that does things like move people and keep passengers safe, 1/29hp isn’t enough power to operate the ventilation system. Keep in mind that the Peel 50 was propelled by about 2kw, how driveable do you think a .025kw engine will be? Power is still the ability to do work, regardless of the source.

Do the world a favor: drop the conspiracy theories and just get on with it!