From the article:<p>"But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative."<p>So the author of the article is advocating against electric cars because 1% of trips require more range?<p>Has he never heard of a rental car?
Of course. but they are very fashionable, so we must subsidize them massively.<p>Of course it might make more sense to tax the pollution than for government to try to pick the next technology. Didn't George Bush tell us it was going to be hydrogen cars? Now its supposed to be electric, but who knows what will actually happen in reality?<p>When you pick one technology and give it all of the advantages, it makes it all that much harder for competing technologies to succeed. A level playing field is best.<p>We have an entire industry of people trying to figure out what technologies will win. They compete with each other and have all kinds of different backgrounds and differing opinions. And they learn as they go, something Washington seems incapable of doing.
I am not sure how they come up with their numbers. Wikipedia says that in the US an electric car would emit less than half of the CO2 of a gas powered equivalent.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emissions" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emi...</a><p>And it seems that the UK uses less coal power than the US. Thus, the emission reductions in the UK should be even better, i.e. more than 50%. But the article says the emission reductions are only 20%.<p>I wish they would tell us more about their calculations. With these types of estimations, one can bring about drastic changes of the conclusion with subtle changes of the assumptions in the estimate.
<i>First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages.</i><p>Such as...?<p><i>Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim.</i><p>So? I care about convenience (less/no trips to the fill-up station) and overall cost.<p><i>But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative.</i><p>So rent a gas car. Plan for this when figuring the ongoing costs of your electric car.<p><i>And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range.</i><p>So require that this be disclosed, so people know to get something with at least 1.5x the range they'll need in a day.<p>I guess those two things were the "distinct disadvantages" mentioned earlier. Neither is terribly convincing.<p><i>Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven.</i><p>This should solve itself in a decade or two if we stop letting the NIMBYs block nuclear plants. And all the already-sold electric cars will benefit just as much as the not-yet-sold ones.<p><i>The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax.</i><p>And here I suppose we have the purpose of the article. But why not just stop subsidizing it before adding a tax?
Other points aside, the last point this article makes is a good one: a carbon tax would be a far more effective way to create a more efficient transportation system (and broader economy), than attempting to pick the winner from the start.<p>It's sort of the "I, Pencil" problem - the interactions in the economy are far too complex to manage in a centralized manner. In this case, we have individuals attempting to predict the winner based on very limited information and applying a subsidy, which may or may not be anything more than arbitrary.<p>The alternative is to have all the millions of decision-makers be informed and influenced by price differences emanating from the pollutants themselves, motivating them to seek more efficient solutions. The effects are far more wide-ranging and actors are guaranteed to be rewarded in proportion to their benefit to the environment. The same holds for other subsidies: for solar, for weatherizing homes &c.<p>It's a shame our current advocacy & media landscape leaves little room for someone like me who supports a carbon tax but not cap & trade or direct subsidies. Here's to hoping <a href="http://votereports.org/" rel="nofollow">http://votereports.org/</a>, or something like it, gets us there.<p>Actually, I just emailed <a href="http://www.carbontax.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.carbontax.org/</a>, hopefully I can get them in the system in time for the election.
Here in Kansas City, 87% of our electricity comes from coal. 11% from nuclear. Wind makes up the lion's share of the remaining 2%. One of the Sierra Club's members had his soul crushed when a friend of mine pointed out that he was, in fact, piloting a coal-powered car.<p>That's not to say the tech isn't cool. But it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car.
One does wonder if this article was financed by oil companies. Richard Pike, the specialist the article referred to had a 25 year career at BP [1] and has put forward arguments that oil shortage is a myth [2]. I am adding The Economist to my list of untrustworthy new sources.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.as...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-shortage-a-myth-says-industry-insider-842778.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-...</a>
The fact that such a huge portion of electricity comes from coal is a much bigger problem than all the commuter cars on the road combined. Switching all those power plants over to nuclear makes sense environmentally, politically, and financially.
I would like to see a full carbon cost for some of these "green" cars. I bet that between manufacturing 5 to 6,000 batteries per car and production of the additional electronics they are creating a lot more waste than people realize.