Costs and subsidies aside, electric cars have so far proved to be incredibly inconvenient. A BBC reporter drove the 484 miles from London to Edinburgh in an electric Mini and had to stop eight times to recharge, often waiting six hours or more. In total, he spent 80 hours waiting or driving, averaging just over six miles an hour — an unenviable pace even before the advent of the steam engine.
h/t Kevin B
I have a bicylce that’s faster… Greenies get special lanes for them too, and then NEVER use them. A$$ hats.
Witness the current commercials on TV for the wondrous electric car that finishes by intimating that ONE DAY you will be able to power your whole house from your cars battery pack.
Possible only if the greenies get their way and force us all to live in cardboard boxes,
So how are the baby coal sucking cars going to work when the Chimp in Chief bans the use of coal. They sure as heck can’t build enough gas/nuke plants to replace the lose for about,oh,150 years.Oh wait. Use the horses to pull them!
A BBC reporter drove the 484 miles from London to Edinburgh in an electric Mini and had to stop eight times to recharge
What a fatuous comparison. Might as well say “It took me 40 hours to scrub my floor using a toothbrush compared to 40 minutes with my scrub mop, therefore toothbrushes are useless”, or “It took me four times as long to travel from NY to LA by helicopter than by Lear Jet, therefore helicopters are useless.” or “It takes me five times as long and costs 20 times as much to heat my house by turning the oven to 600 degrees as opposed to using my furnace, therefore, ovens are useless.” Electric-only cars are not currently SUPPOSED to be used for long drives; THEY ARE MEANT FOR SHORT TRIPS (. Why so many people here take delight in using an electric-only car for purposes for which it was NOT designed and NOT suited, and then conclude that the product is useless is beyond me; this is the type of logic I associate with the loony left.
Ask yourself this: how reliable do you think Otto Diesel’s first engines were? Think many people drove them from Munich to Berlin? Think if some journo had attempted that in 1882, he’d have written about numerous breakdowns and delays, and concluded that the horse would always be a better choice? We’ve had about 140 years development on ICE powered cars; we’ve had about ten on electric only vehicles, at least in their modern incarnation. I predict there will be millions of electric only cars humming around urban centres by 2020, and if this blog is still around in 2020 (and, Kate and God willing, I hope it is – and I’m not altogether sure there’s a difference), I hope some of you have the grace to admit what fools you were.
I predict you will be incorrect about your assertion that there will be millions of electric cars in urban centres by 2020.
Who’s going to prove me wrong?
All I know is the planet has gone through many climate variations over its billions of years of existence and will be here long after human beings are gone.
So, instead of resurrecting the long-disproven pagan religion (this time the worship of Gaia), enjoy life until you’re proven wrong in eight year’s time.
Try not to be despondent. Science will once again destroy your worship of inanimate objects.
Perhaps I’m being a bit presumptious. You obviously are blinded to the latest scientific news that temperatures are not rising as fast as once PREDICTED. What have we learned from this? Predictions, for the most part are useless, much like your rant.
I don’t know about the “sparky car” owners but yesterday was a beautiful spring day so I rode my e-bike to work and do errands and just to ride in the country a bit – put on 97km and it only took a half charge. I love this bike – mind you it didn’t cost me $35000 but will never be capable of pulling the boat to the lake either, but for basic town travel it can’t be beat – and the electricity to fully charge is 1/100th of the cost of gas to travel the same distance. This is my second year with this bike and it has about 4000km on it – a good deal for a $900 investment – saved that much in gas and insurance twice over already.
Why would any sane person pay $30,000 (or whatever) for a car that can only make “short trips”? What’s the point? These things don’t “save the planet” as per the article.
That said, I for one would love to drive an electric car, once there is a breakthrough in battery technology. If the re-fueling/range is comparable to ICE, then giddy-up. Otherwise they are completely useless except for hobbyists and ideologues.
i would rather own a car that if i suddenly felt the need too i could drive 484 miles. And to stick it in the greenies face i might do it for ice cream.
Who the heck was Otto Diesel?
Oh dear tsk tsk, has someone lost a bundle on EV investments?
It is not the EV ‘per se’ that is the issue, it is politicians trying to pick winners and losers – and mostly losing, with our money as taxpayers. THAT is why many here have an issue with EVs. Take a pill.
He was Rudolph’s younger, dumber brother. Never invented anything, just sat in pubs and drank away his brother’s money while assuring the Frualeins that he was a big part of if all, “so you’d better be nice”. 😉
I’m all for electric cars. More electric cars means lower gas prices, which in turn means my annual vacation to Hawaii will cost less! It also means I can upgrade to a bigger car.
I think all pinkos should go by an electric car tomorrow. Indeed if you are a pinko it should be the law. Put your money where your mouth is. The sooner the better.
Then let the rest of us reap the benefits of lower gas prices.
Lomborg’s article is mostly correct. But attempting to drive an electric car from London to Scotland was a stupid stunt. KevinB is right to call it such.
Electric cars are short-range vehicles. Always have been, and always will be, barring some quantum jump in battery technology. So don’t tart them up with all the power-robbing bells and whistles we take for granted on gasoline cars. Make them Spartan, and light weight, and tailor them for the urban marketplace. Electric golf carts work fine, in their environment.
Consider sticking with lead-acid batteries instead of playing around with exotic battery chemistries. 100% of the components of lead-acid batteries can be recycled into new lead-acid batteries. That would greatly reduce the “carbon burden” because you save on having to smelt the lead twice. Sure your range would be reduced; big deal. The answer for that is to use interchangeable standardized battery packs. Drive into a “charge station” and automated machinery slides the battery pack out of a tunnel in your car’s floor, and slides a new one in place, and automatically debits your account for electricity used, plus demurrage. Battery packs that test bad on the charge cycle get sent to the recycling plant to be rebuilt. If your battery goes dead on the road, your car gets towed to the nearest charge station.
Such a scheme could make electric cars “work” fine in an urban environment, but it still doesn’t address the fact that we currently don’t have a huge surplus of electrical generating capacity, and putting a large part of our transportation needs onto the power grid as an additional load will not have a happy outcome.
Back in the USA:
“How the Wheels Came Off for Fisker” (WSJ)
https://www.google.ca/search?q=%22How+the+Wheels+Came+Off+for+Fisker+%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
And even the Gray Lady:
“Breaking Down on the Road to Electric Cars”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/business/fisker-broke-down-on-the-road-to-electric-cars.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130424
Mark
Ottawa
KevinB; And just when are the alarmists regarding the hole in the ozone layer and global warming going to apologize for the fear and colossal waste of money they have inflicted upon all earthlings.
My electronics teacher in 1977 converted a regular car into an electric powered car. It was really cool. Silent. But, he reiterated that while it was possible to create such a car I also realized that there were way too many batteries required to store the electricity and that it wouldn’t last long.
Where do you think the power comes from to power the electric car? Thin air? What is required to make the batteries? Heavy metals. How does this save the environment? It doesn’t.
Still waiting for the apology from those who perpetrated the ozone and global warming frauds.
But, but what about the world running out of lead! Do you not think current car batteries are recycled? Current car engines are recycled and just about everything else a car is made of is recycled.
Well, we are in no danger of running out of lead. And current car batteries ARE recycled. It’s a mature technology. And car bodies and engines are recycled, too, for that matter.
My point is that, in a futile effort to make electric cars that are acceptable to buyers as their only car, manufacturers like Fisker and Tesla have gone down the rabbit hole of exotic battery technology, vastly increasing the expense, and decreasing reliability for the sake of being able to claim longer range. And consequently, we get stories of Tesla batteries “bricking” and Fiskers catching fire.
KevinB the difference between the internal combustion engine of the early last century and the electric cars of today is that those old internal combustion engines held the promise of a vast improvement over what was then available. In other words the old internal combustion engine with all of its issues was vastly superior to horses or oxen. Thus it made economic sense to improve its performance and reliability. The same can not be said of the electric car. At best it is a leap sideways. If perfected it will do what a gas or diesel engine is already doing. If it is not perfected it is a giant leap backward. Some day when we come up with a safer, cheaper, more reliable alternative to gasoline/diesel engine those engines will be replaced. Until then the electric car as presently envisioned will be little more than a dead end on the transportation highway of life.
Columbia Automobile range in 1904: 40 miles.
Nissan Leaf rane in 2013: 75 miles.
Progress is wonderful isn’t it.
As far as being only for short trips, here’s a more cost effective solution: buy a bike or take the bus.
A “short trip” car to me, is worth $750 …. TOPS! For it’s rainshedding properties. And only if I’m in a good mood.
Otherwise I’ll walk. And that is something that would do me more good.
Electric cars are at best an incremental advancement, in some very targeted transportation applications. But they are hyped as a 10X advancement. They are not, and never will be.
The hype does not equal the reality, but that never stopped a “green” idea before.
to clarify you’re fuzzification….
The first person to build a working four stroke engine, a stationary engine using a coal gas-air mixture for fuel (a gas engine), was German engineer Nicolaus Otto. This is why the four-stroke principle today is commonly known as the Otto cycle and four-stroke engines using spark plugs often are called Otto engines.
Late 19th/early 20th century….in Europe kerosene burning “Otto engines” were very popular as small marine engines.
Safer and more efficient than gasoline engines, they were briefly adopted for German submarines….but swiftly replaced by gasoline and later diesel….they produced great quantities of white smoke…..very indiscrete….
Six miles an hour is your average walking speed. It’s like the Dark Ages but with electricity.
From what I’ve observed, the biggest problem with all full electrics is that the manufacturers all exaggerate the mileage on a charge. One seems to shine above the rest, however the Tesla’s selling price is outrageous.
More electric cars means lower gas prices
ROTFL, somebody has been drinking too much green kool-aid
“We’ve had about 140 years development on ICE powered cars; we’ve had about ten on electric only vehicles, at least in their modern incarnation.”
Actually the electric car came before the ice cars. And if you think that people haven”t been trying to develope the electric car over that time fram then you are a more naive that you let on.Bu then you are a lefty. And what do you mean by “incarnation”.EVERY new model year is an incarnation for the ice cars.
Funny how the lefties are so devoid of common sense. Wasn’t it just a few weeeks ago that some of the auto makers siad they weren’t going to do any more with the electrics as people just didn’t want them. Pretty hard to get to millions on the road that way. Again, common sense, something lefites are deficient in. Just like certain deseases are caused by a lack of certain chermicals in the body lefyism is caused by a lack of common sense, among other attributes, of course.
Clown cars for people either stupid and rich or living
at the gravy train tax trough decade after decade.
KevinB, for short distances I walk. I’d use a bicycle for longer trips but the cost in the totalitarian province of BC is far too high – I refuse to wear a helmet although have been pondering the purchase of a pickelhaube on the top of which I’d put a very sharp and long steel spike. My walking speed is 6 mph.
Electric vehicles are a nice idea but I’ll wait until the day that we have compact cold fusion batteries which would allow me to drive across the continent without stopping to refuel; then again only if it was an open source vehicle where I determined what trip data was logged.
EV batteries would need to have a higher energy density than gasoline and be priced the same as internal combustion engines for an EV to be competitive with an internal combustion engine. Until we have small cold fusion engines or low cost and collision proof H2/O2 fuel cells we’re stuck with using gasoline as our primary fuel.
It would be a lot more productive, were I a statist physician, to force people to walk for short trips. This would drastically decrease obesity levels and result in a healthier population. Also, the age at which people can first get a drivers license should be increased to at least 25 and preferably 30. This age reflects the full myelination of connections to the frontal lobes and thus results in less stupid impulsive driving errors. At 16, the age required to get a drivers license is far too low as infants should not be allowed to be in control of highly dangerous machinery on city streets. When I grew up, only a wealthy few were able to afford automobiles at 16 years of age and the vast majority of us walked or cycled to where we were going.
Given the theoretical limits on chemical batteries, it’s very unlikely that we’ll see any increase in energy density from such technologies. The future of EV’s lies in either ultracapacitors (although I haven’t looked at what the theoretical limits are for energy storage in such devices), fuel cells, H2 powered vehicles (although then every car will be a potential car bomb), or cold fusion powered vehicles. Antimatter batteries, when they’re finally constructed would be ideal as the energy density of such batteries would be such that the battery would outlast the vehicle and there would only be the intial fueling cost. However, this would be substantial as the interaction of antiprotons with protons results in 74% of the energy being released as neutrinos and it would take some major advances in physics to be able to use this energy. One can do much better than ~26% energy efficiency using an appropriately designed internal combustion engine.
My new Sportster 48 is made for short trips too, but at least I can put a jerry can on the back. I can stop in Rosetown for gas too, and it only takes five minutes and 7 bucks. The Tesla was cool, but other than that, your electric dream remains fail.