re: Chris Paine's "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
Vern Padgett said:
Tony what is your analysis of the current California political administration with respect to electric cars? I think we still have CARB ... I keep searching the daily news for the word that Governor Schwarzenegger has 1) placed an order for a Tesla or 2) called for a millionTeslas on the road by 2010.
CARB still exists. Contrary to the impression some people got from the movie, the Zero Emissions Mandate still exists -- but in a weaker form that can be met using low-emission vehicles, not necessary true zero-emission vehicles. Really clean hybrids and gasoline-powered cars can meet it. In the aftermath of the movie there was some talk about tightening the rules up again, but I don't know how serious that is.
If you believe CARB exists to clean up California's smog problem, then the watered down mandate will probably be just as effective, and at much lower cost. If you believe CARB should get into regulating greenhouse emissions or fuel economy, then the strict zero emissions mandate might make sense -- but it would put California in conflict with the Federal Government again.
I got an email newsletter from Tesla Motors this morning which pointed out something I didn't know. Electric cars can still get a sticker for the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in California. They recently stopped issuing the yellow stickers to hybrid cars, but white stickers for pure electric vehicles are still available. Several other states have similar programs.
You make good points. But Jay Leno has an operational Baker Electric, with a Nickel-Iron battery, the original. If Baker could sell electrics in the 1920s, weren't we ready for them also in the 80s or 90s?
They couldn't sell many. After WW1 the gasoline-powered cars had become completely dominant, and electrics were rapidly fading away.
In a country where infrastructure to support gasoline cars is everywhere, and gasoline cars are mass-produced in huge volumes, everyone is familiar with them, and gasoline is inexpensive, there's very little incentive for someone to buy (or lease) an electric car. To make inroads, the electric car needs to either offer something gasoline cars can't provide (like massive torque starting at 0 RPM!), or it has to be pushed forward by external problems (like smog, global warming, rising gas prices). The GM EV1 was fairly weak on the first score, and the time period when it was offered was fairly weak on the second score.
If more of us would have voted for that gas tax in 1978, espoused by third-party candidate John Anderson, we might have had electric cars on the street everywhere already. I voted for him.
That's too far back for me. I was rooting for Paul Tsongas in 1992, though. He never made it through the Democratic primaries, and we ended up with the eight-year-long nightmare of Bill Clinton instead. :'(
You and I are on the same page on this one. It is the fault of the consumer. But my neighbors on both sides of me appear to measure their success by how many giant trucks and SUV Land Crusher V8's they can park in front of my house (as their own driveways are full). How can we bring them on board? Hint: Pray for higher priced gasoline.
I have mixed feelings about this. I've always thought the SUV craze was silly. But you know, people tend to make buying decisions based on issues that are tangible and pressing to them. They don't look at theoretical problems years or decades into the future. You might argue that they should. . . But a lot of times the problems that intellectuals and pundits foresee in the future turn out to be bogus. The seemingly short-sighted decisions made by consumers probably work out just as well on the average. And in a free market, they can respond very quickly when a problem does become tangible and pressing.
I'll give you an example of what I mean. . . In the 1970s energy crunch, the French government saw the writing on the wall. Their scientists and analysts told them the world was going to run out of fossil fuels, and they took action to get ahead of the problem. They started building large numbers of nuclear power plants, and they got nuclear power supplying some large percentage (I forget if it was 60% or 70%) of France's energy. Little did they imagine they were just entering a 30-year stretch of cheap fossil fuels. Now that natural gas supplies are starting to get tight, you'd think they are finally vindicated -- but those nuclear plants are aging, the majority of their service life is behind them now. It was just bad timing.
I put the current Global Warming hysteria into a similar category. In 40 years we'll probably know whether it was a real problem.
So. . . I blame the consumers a little for SUV madness, but not a lot. Because when crunch time comes, I expect them to rally and save us.
