New York Times published this report of a Nissan-Renault product launching soon in Israel and scheduled to debut in the US in two years. This is an all-electric vehicle that solves the short-leash problems of decent sized/decently peppy electrics by a simple stroke: you can swap the battery for a fresh one quickly rather than wait for an hours-long recharge. The article is taking comments and maybe 1/4 of the respondents are clued in that the sustainability claims for electric cars are a hoax. The rest of the comments in reply to the question "What would get you to buy an electric car?" with pavlovian drooling about the specifications they demand in order to spend their dollars. I got annoyed at them:
The error, IMO, of most of the wish-list specifications of an acceptable "electric" car that have been set forth in these comments is that there is little understanding of the underlying collective energy consumed.
IF the electric car were driven in, say, Montreal or Tacoma, one might claim they were powered by carbon neutral [though hardly "fish neutral"] hydroelectric. Back here in Boston, the electricity I buy for my electric car would come mostly from coal burnt somewhere upwind of my driving range: environmental degradation is simply pushed into someone else's back yard though with less dependence on foreign oil. To go the greater distances gas guzzlers can cover, even with a lithium battery, requires a bigger, heavier vehicle. Moving nearly a ton of metal just so your one tush can get from here to there means more kilowatts per person mile are needed than the light electric cars now on offer. [you can't afford a Tesla!] Result: Negligible net reduction in energy consumption AND continued dependence on burning fossil fuels. You are all kidding yourselves. And baring a huge biotech breakthrough, hydrogen is just as illusory an improvement: hydrogen is primarily obtained by electrolysis of water and you only get out the watts you put in.
The one virtue of the Nissan/Renault plan as it is to be implemented in Israel is that the battery can be readily swapped for a fresh one. At the cost of doubling the number of batteries that must eventually be disposed of, a very significant power source phase issue is avoided: Most of us drive during daylight which would make conventional built-in batteries UNAVAILABLE FOR CHARGING FROM PHOTO VOLTAIC SOURCES DURING DAYLIGHT HOURS. And Israel has the sunshine.
Most of you are still thinking like the consumers you were bred to be. Unless we replace the original sources with something clean, sustainability requires that we each INDIVIDUALLY consume less energy. Period.
The electric car is not going to solve our problems. Consumption us our problem and why get excited about yet another way to consume? The possibility of entrepreneurial types putting up solar powered recharging facilities [e.g. parking garages with a roof of photovoltaic panels ] is the one viable and potentially sustainable idea that could salvage the environment that heedless consumption via electric cars would leave us. Lets just see what Exxon convinces congress to do about the licensing of such structures!
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