411 Bliss

The idea of electric cars has not been developed recently, and in fact successful electric vehicles were being developed and manufactured back in the 1830s, with projects in the Netherlands, and in Scotland, achieving great success, with vehicles reaching speeds of up to 65 miles per hour. Mostly popular with ladies, the typical town vehicle was clean, quiet, needed no cranking to get started, and cruised at a comfortable 20 miles an hour. The gas powered cars were being outsold quite dramatically.

Perceptions of electric vehicles today tend to lurch from rickety old golf carts to the slightly absurd milk flats, but the truth is that electric cars today can easily out perform their gas powered counterparts. Not only can they outperform them, but they can do so at a fraction of the cost to both the consumer, and more importantly, the environment. For example, the new Tesla Roadster can leave the Ferrari Spider standing at the lights whilst gliding effortlessly past the Mercedes SL550, whilst costing about a cent per mile in the process. With a top speed of about 130 miles per hour and with a three hour charge sustaining a full 250 mile trip, this is anything but a milk float.

It isn’t just the fact that these electric vehicles produce lower gas emissions, they also produce far less noise pollution too - an often forgotten element of our gas powered vehicles. Some people who have lid comfortably into the driving seat of a sport electric car are shocked by the lack of noise, vibration and raw growl - and it has jokingly been suggested that speakers be installed in some of these models to simulate the growl of a familiar engine. On the flip side of the coin, some people have expressed concern that with almost silent cars nipping around town, there may be an increase in the number of children and elderly people injured on the roads, since the familiar clues of oncoming traffic will no longer be available.

Besides the greener conscience that road users will have through purchasing an electric vehicle, there are many other benefits and incentives on offer which help to make the whole idea of ditching a gas powered car a much easier decision. For example, if you were to purchase the popular little G-Wiz at under 5,000, you will receive a number of benefits in the UK alone. There are now over two hundred fuelling stations across the UK - so maintaining it is much easier than before, and if you drive round London you’ll benefit from free parking, itself worth 5,00 a year! There’s also no road tax to pay, and the car sits happily in the lowest insurance category, so is a far cheaper option all round.

On a larger scale, Israel has launched a scheme called Project Better Place and it is the intention of this scheme to make Israel completely oil free within just ten years. With half a million re-charging points across the country, and with top distances for vehicles between charges reaching two hundred kilometres - easily enough to travel from any point of Israel to any other within the country, this is a practical reality. The model being put forward is not unlike that for mobile phones, with the suggestion that the vehicles are given away free, and that instead of paying for fuel and tax in the normal way, drivers can choose various plans, such as pay-as-you-go options for recharging costs, to buying credit for unlimited mileage for a certain period of time, and so on.

With electric cars being such a strikingly different choice, one of the biggest problems in the past has been consumer demand. Without the demand, there can be no real investment in supply, and the whole project stagnates. However, with examples of electric cars such as Tom Cruise’s Lexus in Minority report, people are increasingly aware that moving to an electric vehicle is not to sacrifice either style or performance. In the US alone there are now almost eight million plug-in electric vehicles - most of which are recreational, and the demand from consumers is increasingly catching the attention of politicians.

An issue that those sceptics raise concerning electric vehicles is that although eh car itself might not be giving off fumes and harming the environment by burning up fossil fuels, the energy for the batteries has to come from somewhere, and this is likely to be through the main electricity grid, itself powered through the burning of fossil fuels, so that ultimately the whole scheme simply shifts the focus away from the end consumer and back to the big industries. In fact this argument is not entirely valid, since more and more power companies are turning to renewable sources of energy, and this is likely to continue. The other argument is that of the fuel consumption ratio. Gas powered cars burn the fossil fuel in a very wasteful way, whereas electric cars use energy in a much more efficient manner. In this way, the actual amount of energy used, and therefore the amount of fossil fuel burned, is far less.

Imagine a future where we can all drive around in almost virtual silence, with no fumes, no smoke, and even if we get stuck in traffic jams or sit stationery at lights, we don’t have to worry about burning fuel unnecessarily. Some people have expressed concern that in this seemingly idyllic future the power companies would fail because at night, when we all plugged in our cars to recharge, we’d overload the grid. In fact, at night this is when the grid is used far less, and estimates have been made that if we all switched to electric cars, the power grid would be able to work at almost half the capacity it does now. Perhaps we can envisage a future where we come home, plug our car into the fuel cells charged through the day by the solar panels on our roof, and sleep with a clean, and green, conscience.