A Grown-up Electric Car?
Until recently I quite disliked electric cars. This isn’t to say that I prefer the sort that run on fossil fuels, rather that, out of all the technologies available to power cars in a sustainable way, I thought battery-powered electric cars to be a pretty poor choice.
I had two main reasons for this. First is the range issue. I’m quite unapologetic about the fact that I can and do (only occasionally) drive a car; but when I drive, it is for essential trips where public transport or a bicycle wouldn’t suffice. Most commonly, this means going up and down the M6 with a car full of stuff that I need to move from my flat in Manchester to my home in Edinburgh. While it is certainly possible to take quite a lot on a train, I don’t think TransPennine Express would be too pleased with me trying to take furniture or large boxes of books on their trains.
Could I do this sort of trip in an electric car? Possibly yes, but only if I could find a full sized one (more on that in a moment), and only if I had a very long time to recharge the car along the way (in a G•Wiz I estimate the whole trip to take about 40 hours, which incidentally is roughly the time it would take to go from Edinburgh to Barcelona and back by train). Second is the image of electric cars. Would greens be seen driving this?
I suspect the answer is yes. Ordinary people, that great mass of people who need to be won round to the idea of green motoring if it is to have any success, probably aren’t willing to sacrifice a ‘proper’ car for something with a top speed of 80 km/h, a 80 km range, and the appearance of an oversized toy (that is possibly the only time “oversized” will be used in relation to the G•Wiz).
So, what caused me to use the past tense at the start of this post? The Better Place battery swapping station is the answer. The idea is simple, you drive along in a full-sized and normal feeling electric car (complete with space for a disassembled IKEA armchair or desk), when you start to run out of charge, simply pull into a swapping station and the empty is taken out, with a full battery put in its place. Israel and Denmark already have plans for deploying the necessary infrastructure. It isn’t even particularly expensive. Engadget are reporting that deployment of the stations in Israel or Denmark should only cost around about €184 million. Could this, combined with a general reduction in car usage (do you really need to drive to the shops so much that you’ll willingly sit in traffic for ages?), be a significant part of the answer to greenhouse-gas emissions from transport?
G•Wiz photo from joanamary on Flickr, and is used under an Attribution-Non-Commercial Creative Commons license.
And, as Monbiot pointed out in the excellent “Heat”, since you're pumping electricity into batteries, you can use irregular supply energy, such as wind. Wins all round!