Energy demand will increase 58% over
the next 25 years.

Scrap the electric car and junk it for recycle its the only way to make money.

Revolutionary technologies are en-route that promise to replace the need for fossil fuel.

These systems reflect new science and are currently hard to take seriously. However, as indpendent laboratory validations take place and practical products emerge, that will change.

Platforms such as the Volt and the Leaf are likely to begin to see 3rd generation versions reflect hybrid engines that can travel 1,000 miles on a gallon of water and electric cars that not only need no recharge, but can sell electricty to the local utility when suitably parked.

Eventually, such vehicles promise to pay for themselves as investments.

Ok, it is Monday in Dallas, Temp 93 deg F at Noon. You need to drive to your client's office only 5 miles away for a formal presentation in your best suit. But, you only have your electic car without airconditioning. It is 165 Deg F in the car when you get to it in the parking lot even though you left the windows cracked. When you arrive you are literally soaking wet. Your husband will hear about this and he is going to get rid of that damned electric car.

We never hear if the 'electric cars' have airconditioning or even heaters for those who live in Michigan. Probably because they do not have such 'new fangled conveniences'. Folks, a battery is not a replacement for fuel, and I am not going to be the first into the door at the dealership on this idea. Who among us will without the true test drive - in Dallas, Texas at Noon on August the 9th in your best suit???

Jeff,

I don't like your title but I like the article. Electricity is going to be our fuel of need for personal transportation because we simply won't have any other choice when push comes to shove from fossil fuel resource depletion.

That doesn't necessarily mean that electric cars are the main answer, in fact they are less than ideal, because they waste too much energy for the benefits they give us. It all has to do with weight to benefit ratios.

Once again the Chinese are cleaning our clocks on the right way to use electricity for personal transportation. They subsidize electric bikes and trikes to sell 'em at cost ($2-300). They now have over 130 million on their roads (1 in 10 Chinese folk has one), and millions more every year.

Neadless to say, it takes a lot less energy to move a person with a 100 lb. vs. 1 ton+ vehicle around and they don't have to put more busses on the intracity streets and subways under the streets. They can put their big bucks into the high speed rail between big urban centers and light rail to smaller ones, which we hear so much about.

I don't contend that this is for everyone, but with the right urban infrastructure improvements including bike highways, it could be for far more than now, far quicker, and far cheaper than trying to replace our crumbling urban mass people movers. And...it means individual choice of movement not constrained by public transport schedules and limited destinations.

I foresee families with one plug-in hybrid and several much smaller, lighter full electrics, neighborhood electric vehicles and electric bikes and trikes in our future. Smaller electric vehicles for individuals and something like ZipCars for the ocassional use that can't be covered by the small, light electric vehicle.

This makes more sense economically and spacially than simply trying to replace our current car fleet with electrics.

So, in answer to the title question, Yes, electric cars not only have a chance, they are the only chance, but...their numbers will be 1/4 to 1/3rd of current numbers/population with far smaller, lighter, energy efficient alternatives making up the difference.

Hi Jeff, Have you ever looked into the eestor battery folk in Texas. I see that Lockheed Martin have bought a share in this company. I think I understand how this battery is made up. A revolution. Zenn are or should have the battery in one of their cars? what do you know as this would tip the whole industry on battery's up side down & the USA would be back in the drivers seat as I see Lithium as a challenge for the future. I am a Kiwi NZ. I have 4 inventions 1 we are using right now & making money scanning Rail lines for Tension & compression, Aussies have us do all their work,the other 3 are involved in welding rail lines with a result that I call it the million $ weld, perfect for high axel loads, the welds well not break & a Manganesse cast process that makes the perfect casting ,no pirosity or inclusions etc.
Regards Felix.

You are living in electric La La, land. Electric cars are a waste. Won't climb mountains, won't travel 100 miles without recharging and the batteries are a MAJOR source of pollution both in production and disposal, They are a huge energy consumer that we cannot supply!

yes, the electric car does have a future however that future is limited to the rest of the world which excluds our oil guzzling leaders.
I like to frame this in a couple of different ways. One is economically. We retrieve oil from miles below the earths surface or we heat up tar sands with billions of feet of natural gas so that we can transport it to a refinery and then off to a gas station where the consumer buys the fuel and amzaingly enough the stupidity does not stop there-the efficiency of the internal combustion engine is about 23-25 percent efficient which means that 3/4 or 75% of the gas in your car leaves as a vapor and is never burned. Now think about the supply chain and logistics for moving electrons down a wire. Duh! there is no comparison. The only reason we are using oil is because the government gets a big fat paycheck every day as Americans spend one billion dollar with money that we barrow from the Chinese for a resouce that we can not afford. This is most notably the most obvious question is why is America beholden to the Middle East. We say that we would like to democratize the Middle East but when it comes right down to it-it is a freaking well orchastrasted lie by big oil.The king of Saudi Arabia has 23 wives, several cocubines and man servents yet we say nothing to him. I say, if the thieving lying CEO's of our major oil companies were loyal Americans they would be spending nearly every minute of every day getting us off of our addiction to foreign oil. They pay companies like fox noise the faux news company to claim that climate change is real and that Americans are benifiting from buring all of this carbon. The fact that 125 billion metric tons of poison is pumped into the air and water every year is of no concern to them as long as they get to sell their black death. These men are the scourage of the earth. Their little minds working overtime to keep us addicted and thinking up fabulous lies to take our focus away from the fact that we are killing the planet. Taling about Saha Palin while the planet continues around us is tatamount to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. We are a nation of wannabe intelectuals that never quite made the grade. If you think Sara Palin is presidential material-you have just answered you own level of intellect or in this care stupidity. A mindless idiot with their hand on the big red button that says destroy the earth-Who could possibly be more qualified than the dear hunter from Wasila? She is going to do some fancy pageant walking for us later in the broadcast. The big oil companies (Saudi Arabia King Faud) wants another idiot who will do what he or she is told. This one is just like the other one but this one has female anatomy. Back to the planet. The oceans are growing acidic at an alarming rate. Yes, regardless of where you stand on climate change the worlds oceans are becoming so acicic that plankton can not form this breaking down the food chain at one of its most elemental levels. Yes, the dead penguins washing up on the beaches in South America is a direct result of mankind polluting the worlds oceans and air we all share.The plankton dies or never forms so the krill can eat it and then be eaten by the fish who starve to death and then finally the penguins. Man is a little further up the food chain. As the apex predator man stands to lose the most out of the ecological catastrophe. More than a billion people depend on the sea for sustenance. We have just broken the food chain in the oceans because of our insatiable greed and stupidity. So you say what about the land. We can get all of the food that we want from the land. No! Australia is suffering through another natioanl drought. Over a half a million sheep have burned up in wild fires touched off by carless people of due to a lighting strike. If your country is sitting their starving and your neighbors will not share then what are you going to do-Eat dirt. No, and you can bet the other country has already thought out what you are now thinking in your pea brain. Yes, we do like the United States does, make up a big lie-declare an illegal war-go in and steal their resouces then leave and call it a humanitarian mission. Is this what man has evolved to? Are we really just a reflection of our Stone Age cousins. We did not exit the Stone Age because we ran out of stones! A holes who are running these multi nationals could care less and their intellectual capcity is suspect simply becuase the king of Saudia Arabia wanted a yes man. The got one with the venerable snaggle toothed idiot Lee Raymond-who incidently retired with one half a billion dollars. That is sick. Rex Tillerson is a blathering idiot. Why else would OPEC keep him around. He trumpets his goofy brand of logic like he is the only man on the planet that truly gets it! What an idiot. There is no way in hell that 125 billion metric tons of anything can not have an impact on the enviornment. Suffice it to say that as we bury our heads in the sand, the issue grows worse exponentially. We are wathching countries like Russia experiancing a total collapse of their wheat crops. We see that their are children who are 10 years old and have never seen what rain looks like. It gets much worse. This year on the continent of Africa roughly 9 million people died of draught and famine related illenesses. It will not be long before we are in the line of fire as well and if you think that it can not happen I hope that you can recall the Dust Bowl era? We are living in denial and once those fat ADD petulant kids begin starving to death you too will know what it is to suffer like so many others have had to becasue of our greed and stupidity. My guess is that the planet can not take 7 billion locusts all consuming vast quantities of natural resouces. I can only imagine God looking down on the planet saying, I did not create mankind to destroy my creation. Why is he destroying my creation. None of the churches preached that we are to be stewards of the land-not destroy it and leave it devastated. Yes, with the mega churches nobody wants to offend the slops that contribute to the 245 million dollar tabenacle that was dedicated to God-I have some bad news for you mindless idiots-God owns the whole dammmed multi verse. He does need a pile of shit you and your moron friends put together so you could see who pecker was bigger with the 26 other denominations in the neighborhood. I am truly sorry God for mankind. I pray that you will show them the light, if not I will understand that you will destroy them and start all over again. I know that I would and I dare say that each of you would also if you were being truthful with yourselves. You may have some people fooled but you are definitly not fooling God. I would hate to see the punishment that he will met out to the scum bag liars who destroyed his creation. May God have mercy on your pathetic souls. I know that I dont. You are vandals and thugs in suits vommited from the bowels of hellll.

Batteries are one of several ways to recuperate braking energy. They can also be used to allow combustion engines to run most if not all of the time only at either their most efficient, or lowest emissions operating points. Beyond that, they are an expensive boondoggle. The Volt with a much smaller battery pack makes a lot of sense. The more or less $20,000. of battery that is in the car now is insane. Toyota plans to introduce a serial hybrid like the Volt with a much smaller, more sensible battery.

Neither BEVs within any foreseeable advances, nor magic magnet free machines from perpetual snake oil salesman will help free us of the issues with fossil fuels.

RE: L White's comment:

The latest electric vehicles on the market or coming to market all have the same conveniences as conventional ICE vehicles. Air conditioning, heat, defrosters, etc. All of this stuff is available with electric cars. I also have a friend who lives in Austin, and has been driving an electric car for the past three years. It has air condition.

Thanks for reading.

i tend to think that there is a more or much more efficient engine than we presently use. It essentially dissapeared with the advent of standarized fuel that could be burned in an internal combusition engine, or this simplistic technology has been and continues to be quashed. Could that happen? Do big churches care about truth or common knowledge? Everyone believes the same common knowledge, therefore it must be true? That doesn't sound right. Big religion wants to kill Jesus or truth so they can sell tickets and memberships for a group viewing of the body.
It is even easy to describe: 2 stroke/hot pulse steam/ heat recovery after the steam is done pushing.
The reason we never see a modern steam engine is because it does not discard the residual heat but recycles it as condensed hot water. There is apparently a national leadership policy of making sure any heat from internal combustion engines is discarded into the atmosphere. It is just business and control of the market place and hence the world by constant waste of fuel by discarding the heat. Do we know this? Think about it really hard, and you will find that the nature of authority is to lie and then forcefully control the ensuing chaos.
Could this kind of thing just happen where the authorities want just lie and tell you what's real and what is not? Unhappily that is the nature of authority; to lie and pretend it is the truth so as to control you through intimidation and common knowledge. They have us running in small circuits by lying and threatening. Could that be true? How could it not be true?
Think it through, then again, then again, or just believe what you're told and bite the bullet on the topic. Is internal combustion really better or would congress and big oil collude for profit and control?
It is similar to hemp as an alternative to damaging presciption drugs. How can you get rich doing this big business efficently or providing the best solution?
i guess it is a little difficult to see beyond the "heroic" nature of status BS. Yay God, Freedom, and believe the people who would hurt you for status or money.
Almost everyone chooses status quo belief over reality, or they get kicked out of the common belief game.

A pencil & paper is the birthplace of invention. My design for dynamos situated along highways--being impacted by drafts of passing vehicles which turn blades to generate electricity--that can be stored in huge batteries is a viable concept. Drained autos can recharge at highway stations. Look at: www.QueenWindTurbine.com Please deliver some feedback. Every week the Las Vegas newspapers talk about Electric Energy problems--but reporters are too "snobbish", "resentful" or "disdainful" to write up about a local man's contribution. Queen Wind Turbine is just an idea now--but with proper engineering it can become a reality.

How much heat goes into the atmosphere when this battery/electric motor technology is used? Is it more total waste heat going away or less than the internal combustion engine? Doesn't it sound like one more scam when assembled with this logic? Are they hiding something? If you don't get your energy directly from wind or sun but get it from the power plant, it is a net total of more waste heat than before. It is just done over at the power plant and the transmission lines. It is not more efficient by any means. Throwing away the heat is simply done at the power plant and between generation and final use. Somebody tell me why this is not true.
It seems as if most of us need to take a course in thermo and power thermodynamics and how it works, to even begin to figure out that we are being "bamboozled" in this way. They will probably say something like you should really believe that there was a virgin mary and Jesus was a virgin birth but you can't figure it out and besides only guys in outfits can figure out what God wants. That's just how hierarchal power works. Be glad they don't send in the troops to wipe out your truth seeking kind.
Follow the wars. They will tell you it's terrorism but Afghanistan is for the storage battery element Lithium, and it's only a skip to move into Iran to take their energy resources. While have more energy than they could ever use, we are given some hoopla claptrap about how they want to nuke Ireal and seal their thermonuclear fate.
Although we have at our disposal all the resources we need (including intelligence and craft) we will end up succumbing to status quo and extremely wasteful technologies.
The way it works is: In order to control you or us, they have to keep you scrambling for balance which you will never get from a hierarchy of greed. I am sorry to have to tell you that. We burn fuel that comes from a excluding source, and we are "not allowed to do use fuel in an efficient way. In order to use their fuel we have to waste 2/3 of it. The entire power structure is diseased with this (must win) aspect of status quo. If they change things it will alter the status quo, so the rich would rather die (taking everyone with them) than lose money or status.
It is a kind of Hitlerian consciousness. (dying in charge while winning by whatever means)
If you capture enerty from the wind or sun then you can throw it away with no extra waste, otherwise it is just being generated to throw the larger part away.
Thermodyanmics as a physical science came into its own around the beginning of the 20th century and they were just smart enough that if they could control the market, then they could control the people whose only option was to buy through a supply chain.
The body of knowledge that was used to determine this is not available in common knowledge or tabooing knowledge. It is not difficult once you get past being told that there is no more efficient technology than internal combustion. We are being told a humongus lie, and it is completely deniable by law makers. What? Huh? How could we have known we were being total doofusses on this matter?

Well, it's Detroit's problem alright. I still have a 1958 220S Mercedes Benz in my back forty. IT GAVE 30-32 MILES PER GALLON (ImpGal) - That WAS 52 YEARS AGO. But with expanding into the US market since it looks like Mercedes put over time more value on competing with muscle cars at the expense of fuel efficiency. I believe that 1958 milage wasn't improved upon by Mercedes in these 52 years !!! And it was an electromagnetic automatic 6 cylinder !

It is expected that the cost of batteries will drop to 30% of what they now are in 18 months when the new Holland, Michigan plant opens.

The key to price is getting a specialized and automated factory up and going. Up to now batteries have been inefficiently manufactured due to low volume production.

DOE projects battery cost to be 15% of today's price in ten years, 10% in about twenty years.

They are also expecting a 75% decrease in battery weight over the next 20 years. That will mean greater range.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Battery-and-Electric-Vehicle-Report-FINAL.pdf

The Nissan Leaf will let you turn on the heater or AC remotely using your cell phone. It will be comfortable when you arrive to drive.

Those living in extreme temperature locations will most likely plug in when parked for any length of time. Grid power will get used for the initial warm-up/cool-down.

Also, we're seeing rooftop solar panels for powering evac fans to cool interiors in hot times.

Spencer, the decline of reciprocating steam engines was due to the vastly higher efficiency of Diesel's invention. Multistage steam turbine efficiency is quite good and these are widely deployed. There has been no suppression of steam power.

Yes, we have only one earth to destroy. In our minds we think that we can just run down to the local store and pick up another one. We are a world full of self rightous idiots who care about nothing but themselves. We have nearly 7 billion people on the planet all taking a little piece of it every day. We pump billions of tons of pollution into the air and water every day. We are on a slippery slope to Armangeddon and we are either too greedy or too stupid to realize it. I am just thankful that I will not be here to see the carnage and suffering. I would like to see the faces of men like James Inhoff of Oklahoma, Bill the blustering blathering idiot oriely, and the slob/turd Rush limbaugh when this thing goes south. They will be hiding. Yes, you more empty procolamations from these bafoons. It is too late already. The human population will make a self correction simply because it so far out of balance. It is sad-truly sad. What is ironic though is the ones who will suffer the most are the ones who clap like freaking harp seals when the idiot with a vagina Saha Palin cliams that God just wanted to put a coat on the earth because he thought that it was getting too cold? Are you kidding me? This moron with a big red clown button in the oval office. We have no other leaders in the United States that has the ability to think logically. The powers that be could only come up with a village idiot from Wasilla Alaska. That is funny. The joke is on us! We bought that hook line and sinker. You want a vagina. I will buy each of you one of those pocket models. You can carry it around with you and when ever you have the urge you can pull it out and take care of your business. We can not afford to have a throw back to the stone age in the white house or anywhere near it. Grow up you freaking idiots.

Would you buy a $25 to $40,000 small compact gas car that would only go 50 miles before you had to head home and then wait 12 hours for it to fill up with gas? Thats exactly what the electric car companies expect buyers to do. The eletric car will only be a novelty for the few, not a realistic mass market car. In Spain the $775 billion put into electric car development has only yielded sixteen sales. I fear the same will happen here. The real auto fuel of the future that is being ignored is Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). CNG can power any size vehicle, Truck, SUV etc. using the same engines we use today with no new exotic technology. We have trillions of cu.Ft,in the continental U.S., enough for 100 years supply. Why do we continue to pour billions into very limited use electric cars when the same money would really get us off of oil with a legitimate, low cost, low polution fuel source for all our vehicles and available in the US?

RE: RJWill's comment:

You're argument is so off-base it's pathetic.

A US company based in California called Tesla has been selling electric cars for a long time. I'm surprised the writer didn't mention Tesla. The Tesla Roadster is a very cool, sporty-looking car, and it has all the modern conveniences that one poster was claiming are not to be found in electric cars. I'm guessing that the anti-electric sentiment is coming from people who have never driven an electric car, and who firmly believe we have a god given right to completely destroy this planet will the pollution from mining, drilling, burning and spilling fossil fuels.