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Article By: JoyceM.Stuart
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Driving Through Electric Dreams - The Future Of The Car
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.
Often it is forgotten or ignored that there is another side to the use of electric vehicles to be kinder to the environment. It's not all about the smoke and fumes that will be saved, but also the noise factor. Electric cars are almost silent, the only sound from within the sporty models being a vague impression of having a hairdryer in the boot. Noise pollution is a forgotten attribute of gas powered cars, but imagine a world of near silence. Some people have expressed concerns that with nippy little cars silently dashing about that children and the elderly may find it difficult to anticipate or seen these coming, and that road calming measures or extra noise making speaker need to be fitted.
As far as the consumer is concerned, there has to be an advantage - having a clean conscience and knowing that you are doing your bit to help create a greener environment is certainly one of them, but there also need to be advantages in the pocket too. There are many of these, and in the UK for example, by splashing out under five thousand pounds you can obtain a nippy little G-Wiz, which can be parked anywhere in London for free, (itself a saving of over 5,00 - paying for the car in just one year), and there is also no road tax to pay. Not only that, but the car is rated as being in the lowest category for insurance, without losing out on performance. The advantages really are very clear, and financially it makes far more sense than an equivalent gas powered vehicle.
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.
Many people are worried that, rather than saving fossil fuel from being burned, we are in danger of either using even more, or simply shifting emphasis and focus from the world outside our front doors to the distant and easily ignored world of the power plants. Electric cars still need to be re-charged, and this power needs to come from somewhere. With most of our electricity being generated from the burning of fossil fuels, there's no long term advantage. This argument is not true however, and with power plants increasingly trying to source energy from renewable means, and with electric cars using the energy produced in a much more efficient way, the overall consumption of fossil fuel will be dramatically reduced.
Picture a future that is smoke free, with no stinky gasses being belched from the back of cars driving past your street, and with no concerns regarding the waste of fuel whilst you sit idly at traffic lights or in a road jam. Although concerns have been raised that if we all arrived home at tea time and plugged our cars in we'd overload the grid, that has been demonstrated to be untrue, since at night the grid is very underused, and if we all turned to electric vehicles, the amount of energy used would be far less overall. Perhaps we can even foresee a time when the solar panels on our roof allow us to store energy through the day to re-charge our batteries at night.
Article Source: ArticleZones.com
About the Author
With modern technology on every corner, more of us are turning onto the colour green. From electric cars to hybrid cars our planet now has a conscience. The environment is on everyones minds, the rainforests, wildlife and nature..green is the colour.
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