So after about 6 months of driving the truck I upgraded to a 1967 mustang. I was doing pretty good then. I was getting about 14 mpg and that was not to bad considering gas was cheap. I can remember filling up at 74.9 cents a gallon or 4 gallons for 3 bucks. That was in the late 90's. I remember when gas crossed the $1 mark. It was no big deal though I could still afford it. I went to California one summer to visit my friend Zach. Gas was outrageously priced at $1.50-1.75. I had a hard time figuring out how any one could afford to drive out there. After a year
and a half of driving the mustang I decided that a reliable car that got good gas mileage was in my future so I sold it and bought a 1991 Honda prelude SI. Once again I doubled my mpg. I was getting 28 mpg in the car and I was a happy camper. By the end of high school gas kept going up very slowly but so did my pay check so I upgraded once again to a 1
993 Honda civic EX. After a few tweaks I was getting 41+ mpg on the highway. I still have the civic and it is our cheap transportation. In the past couple years gas has doubled. Crude prices are setting records. It all got my brain spinning. I knew very little about Electric Vehicles 6 months ago but I was touting it as the direction out transportation should be heading. My knowledge was limited. I knew electric motors were very efficient. I also knew the main limiting factor to electric vehicles or EVs as they are known is the batteries. To be work in a car they need to hold more power and they need to recharge fast. Battery technology has really stumped me in the past. Why are they so stagnant. Why can a computer processor performance increase 10 fold in ten years but batteries have had very few break throughs. I also knew that regardless of what oil prices did If we were driving electric cars it would have minimal impact. Electricity is energy independent. We can use Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, hydrogen or even coal or oil. It doesn't matter, and we have options keeping prices low. I wouldn't call myself a tree hugger but I am not opposed to keeping the environment clean either. Even if we get our energy from a 100% coal fired plant it would still be cleaner than all the cars on the road. It is easier to control emissions from one plant than millions of cars.I will end this with an interesting quote from EVworld.com
"Even charging the car with power from the average U.S. electricity grid — half of which comes from coal — the yearly carbon emissions would be one and a half tons, significantly less than gasoline’s four. Even in the wildly unreasonable scenario that an electric car was charged with one hundred percent coal-fired electricity, emissions would be two and a half tons per year, still less than corn ethanol’s three. Regardless of its source, electricity is the cleanest transportation fuel."
No comments:
Post a Comment