The car I want to drive doesn’t come in electric. Even when they’re subsidized, most people don’t want them. They are high-cost, low-range and take forever to recharge. There are two kinds of people in this world: car people and everyone else. I am a car person. I’m very particular, or maybe I have a character flaw, but the car I want to drive is my Chrysler 200.
When I worked in high-tech technology, I learned that it’s smart to be a late adopter of anything new, especially technology. In time, competition increases and prices come down. Let rich people, like rock stars and actors, buy Teslas and Volts, they’re not for you.
I realize that an electric motor is an excellent way to power an automobile, it’s what supplies the electricity that’s the problem. A friend of mine who worked for a battery-powered carmaker said, “When I left the company, my parting gift from my colleagues was a 75-foot-long extension cord!” He also added, “There are three types of liars in this world: liars, damn liars, and battery engineers.” A battery breakthrough has been promised since the demise of that poor old Baker electric car 100 years ago and we’re no further along now than we were then. Jay Leno has a huge car collection, some Baker Electric ones too. He said, “The thing that killed the electric car the first time around is that women loved them. You could just get in it and drive away. Even Henry Ford’s wife drove one. And, like today, you can’t sell a man a woman’s car.”
A modern Diesel engine would triple its range and you could ‘recharge’ fully in five minutes. “Yes, but diesel is a fossil fuel” the electric car fanatics cry. Chances are very good your electric battery is charged by burning natural gas.
“Electric cars have zero emissions but tailpipe emissions are last century’s problem”. According to Environment Canada, cars and light vehicles are responsible for only 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Electric cars currently get one percent share of the market and even if they reached 10 percent of new car sales in 10 years, the automotive contribution to greenhouse gases would still be only 10 percent of 12 percent, less than a 2 percent overall reduction. Really, battery-powered cars impact on the atmosphere is a non-issue.
Where do the batteries come from? Most are based on elements such as nickel and lithium. The nickel still comes from the Sudbury region, where it is mined using diesel-powered equipment, shipped by diesel-powered trains to the west coast, loaded onto bunker-C-fueled tankers for shipment to China, where it is loaded back on to diesel-powered trains and sent to the battery factories. The finished batteries are shipped to the car assembly plants in North America in the same fashion the elements were sent.
A lucrative subsidy in Ontario mostly goes to wealthy people who can afford any car they want? Not only is it a zero societal benefit, there are very high electricity prices to power them! Car-sharing services? Maybe. Both, of course, remain limited by how much electricity can be delivered safely and economically to their charging stations.
Now, there is a technological solution that will achieve the environmental, transportation and economic goals we all share. It’s hydrogen fuel cells, the only feasible long-term solution. The technology and the infrastructure are both closer than most people think. The more time and resources wasted on stopgap short-circuits like battery-powered electric cars, the farther we are from achieving those goals.
Electric cars aren’t pollution free; they have to get their energy from somewhere. When China gets electric cars, they will be powered by electricity produced from coal plants that pollute the atmosphere, big-time. The assumption that, just because a car is electric, it must be green, clean, renewable or whatever, is nonsense.
Some people argue that saving the environment is so urgent that bad ideas are better than no ideas at all. At least it’s a start! These people should come to Ontario, where the manufacturers are moving south. The one sure way to shrink our carbon footprint is to shrink our economy. The way things are going, we could be very good at that.
So, when any battery-powered car can compete on a level playing field without tax-funded bribes, give me a call.
