The Rebirth of the Electric Car

nytimes.com

6 points·kkim··8 comments

Electric cars have ALWAYS been about the batteries. Good motors and lightweight frames have been around for decades.

You need to have a charge time of less than a few hours and you need to be able to travel more than 200 miles for more people to buy it.

Check out ZAP cars for some good options http://www.zapworld.com/

I think the goal of the electric car should not be how fast it charges or how far it goes, but rather... when will the car be able to drive indefinitely off the power of the sun coming through the frame of the car?

That should be the seventy-year goal for electric car design. This is a good start though. But where does the electricity that charges the battery come from?

Solar is not the most efficient means of producing electricity, so why should that be the goal? The cost in energy of manufacturing today's cells means the cells need to generate electricity for 20 years before they return their energy investment.

You're forgetting that by using solar power, you're not using fossil fuels anymore. You save an extremely large amount of environmental damage even though the process of producing solar cells might not be very efficient today.

There's a plug in the wall.

Where does that power come from? Fossil fuels, eventually.

We also have plenty of Uranium, Wind, Water, Geothermics. Eventually fusion might be ready.

Oil is a wonderful substance to power cars - for its high specific energy content. But for producing grip power we are not that dependend on it.

(TODO: Fetch some statistics.)

1 karma to whoever figures out what PR firm is behind this :)

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