Are electric car sales “bogged down” and “slow”? It depends on whether you compare sales figures to sales of equivalent gasoline cars, or whether you compare them to previous era’s of electric car sales. I fall in the latter camp, and am overly excited about the large growth in electric car presence on our roads. At the same time many long time automotive journalists see sales figures of a few hundred or a few thousand per month as paltry. When a writer on Crains Automotive News says we need to “Uncouple the Electric Vehicle Coal Tender” because electric car sales are anemic, we have to put this in perspective that he is a long-time automotive journalist covering an automaker (Chrysler) who recently suspended its electric car development programs.
He talks about a “freight car full of political baggage” due to the A123 Systems bankruptcy, and tries to tell us the “the real reason electric vehicles and their miraculous mpgs aren’t swamping the nation’s roadways” is because of the batteries, describing battery packs as being equivalent to a “coal tender”. For those of you too young to remember steam locomotives, a coal tender is a car immediately behind the steam engine that holds coal. Part of the job of the train engineers was to repeatedly shovel coal from the tender into the furnace.
Reading his piece (link below) one gets the idea that he wants to subtly portray electric cars as sluggish, and full of problems.
One of those problems is when the battery pack runs out. Repeating the “coal tender” analogy, he says “When the energy — coal, wood, electrons — stored in those vessels ran out, the wheels stopped moving, and the passengers grew very, very irate.”
Of course when a gasoline powered car runs out of fuel it, too, stops and the passengers can grow very very irate as well. The difference is that after 100+ years of market presence gasoline powered cars have a great infrastructure of recharging stations. For electric cars that infrastructure is still being built, but it does exist. It’s not like there are zero recharging stations for electric cars. They exist, however you do have to engage in a bit of pre-planning to make sure to have successful trips. I’m sure our great-grandparents 100+ years ago also had to carefully plan trips in gasoline powered cars, when the gas stations were still few in number.
The solution he suggests is rather interesting, but also impractical. Namely, what if electric cars were powered somewhat like streetcars are? That is, streetcar systems have overhead wires that the streetcars use to power themselves. There are lots of electric train systems running in every major city, and those electric trains prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that electric vehicles can be fast and powerful and move large amounts of mass (how many tons does a 10 car BART train weigh?).
But for this to work means wiring up every street in every city with electrical wiring to support electric cars. Just imagine the hue and cry that would erupt. With the political nightmare being aimed currently at electric cars, would the Republicans with the web of rhetoric they’ve spun be able to politically support such a huge public works project to dig up every street in the country to install wiring to support electric cars? No.
What, then, is Larry P. Vellequette, the Crains writer covering Chrysler, getting at? Maybe he wants to paint a picture where:-
- Electric cars are fatally flawed and battery packs can never be the solution
- The only solution is an impossibly expensive public works project that would be politically impossible to get going, and would entail ripping up every street in the country
In such a picture electric cars look like an impossible solution, and makes one want to throw up their hands and give up and surrender to the oil companies who will continue selling us the fossil fuel derivatives with which to power our cars.
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- US Government releases new regulations on hydraulic fracturing, that some call “toothless” - March 20, 2015
- Tesla Motors magic pill to solve range anxiety doesn’t quite instill range confidence - March 19, 2015
- Update on Galena IL oil train – 21 cars involved, which were the supposedly safer CP1232 design - March 7, 2015
- Another oil bomb train – why are they shipping crude oil by train? – Symptoms of fossil fuel addiction - March 6, 2015
- Chevron relinquishes fracking in Romania, as part of broader pull-out from Eastern European fracking operations - February 22, 2015
- Answer anti- electric car articles with truth and pride – truth outshines all distortions - February 19, 2015
- Apple taking big risk on developing a car? Please, Apple, don’t go there! - February 16, 2015
- Toyota, Nissan, Honda working on Japanese fuel cell infrastructure for Japanese government - February 12, 2015
