Are electric cars really the next big step for mankind?

Elisabeth Jeffries

2 May 2009

If internal combustion is going to be superceded by battery power, says Elisabeth Jeffries, carmakers and governments need to invest on a scale akin to the Apollo space programme

Putting Lord Mandelson into an electric Mini may not seem to bear much comparison with putting a man on the moon, but there are interesting parallels.

In 1961, the US government embarked on the Apollo space programme, with the ambition of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. By 1969, it had achieved exactly what it set out to do. But it was a risky project, with no guarantee of success. To land on the moon, scientists had to solve three problems: how to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft, how to work outside a spacecraft, and how to survive prolonged periods of time in space. In total, the US government spent $20 billion on the project (about $350 billion in today’s money), driven by a desire to upstage and defeat the menace of the age — the Soviet Union.

That world has gone. A new perceived menace has emerged, greenhouse gas, and a new programme is creaking into gear to control it: low-carbon technology. Today’s challenge is to produce an electric car that can travel 200 miles without recharging its battery: a cinch compared to space travel, you might have thought.

Yet governments and vehicle producers are groping in the dark. Back in the 1920s, electric cars briefly commanded a 20 per cent share of the motor vehicle market, but the technology was sidelined as oil supplies became increasingly abundant and manufacturers concentrated on the carbon-fuelled internal combustion (IC) engine. An electric car launched by General Motors in the 1990s was quietly snuffed.

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Herbert Thornton

April 30th, 2009 5:57pm Report this comment

Elisabeth Jeffries is certainly right that a move to electric cars will reduce the world's output of carbon dioxide, and because we have not yet been able to design a good, cheap battery she may be right that a change to electric cars will - at least at the beginning - be costly.

However, the most urgent need to move away from oil is the fact that the countries of the Middle East that sell so much of it are putting their income from it for such evil purposes - in particular by supporting the expansion of religious extremism and international religious terrorism. Compared with that lamentable fact, to go on using oil because simply because it is cheap seems rather foolish.

Erasmus de Frigid

May 1st, 2009 1:08am Report this comment

Where is all of this electricity coming from to change the batteries? The conversion efficiency from oil/coal/natural gas to electricity and then the transmission to your home is very low....you may be producing more CO2 than if you were burning fossil fuels.

Herbert Thornton

May 1st, 2009 11:16pm Report this comment

Erasmus - The two most obvious sources of power to generate electricity are water power - i.e. via hydro-electric dams - and nuclear power, following the example of France.

Herbert Thornton

May 2nd, 2009 1:22am Report this comment

My earlier response seems to have gone astray. It made the point that the electricity does not have to be generated from fossil fuels. Nuclear power - following France's example - is entirely viable and so, in some countries, is hydro-electric power generation.

Erasmus

May 3rd, 2009 11:36pm Report this comment

I would heartily agree that nuclear power and wind are two of the ways to go, however, both have strong opposition in the UK and US. In California, we may have 10 giga-watts of distributed photovoltaic solar on line by 2030. Electric vehicles then become a huge energy reservoir since excess daytime energy can be stored in
their batteries. This eliminates a whole host of intermediate steps, reduces reliance on middle eastern oil and may somewhat reduce carbon consumption.

Herbert Thornton

May 4th, 2009 7:04pm Report this comment

A bit off topic, but in the heading to this topic, I notice that there is a word spelled as 'superceded'. Who, I wonder, is responcible?

Bradley Stone

June 29th, 2009 5:14am Report this comment

I believe that in the shadow of this recession, the auto industry will eventually lose its grip on the little guy with big ideas, thus bringing forth a new era of battery powered vehicles. I can see from both sides. If I owned a company I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt it either, common sense. But sense they're going in the hole alltogether, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference anymore. It is time for old, obsolete technology to move aside. They will find a way to convert to battery power. I personally prediect that we will see a huge technological boom in general by 2015, lighter and more efficient batteries and methods of recharging them being only a fraction of what I see in store for us...

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