Plug and Drive

So I've been following this blog called Potential Energy from Technology Review. It's kind of like this blog in that it talks about different types of energy, and lately they've had a lot of posts on electric cars, so I figured I'd jump on in and talk about them as well.

Electric cars seem to be the thing of the future, having a car you can plug in and then drive around town. Electric vehicles have batteries in them that get charged when you plug them in that power an electric motor in the car, allowing you to drive where you will up to a certain distance before you need to charge up again.

Electric vehicles have many benefits, including their electric motors have only 5 moving parts compared to the hundreds of moving parts in the typical internal combustion engine that most other cars have, providing easier maintenance. Also, the car, itself, does not have any tailpipe emissions like the combustion engine cars. They are also more efficient at converting stored energy to driving power than their counterparts.



Along with these benefits also come disadvantages. One handicap is that electric vehicles are generally more expensive because of the batteries needed to power them. Also, they have a limited range, making people weary to buy them because they don't know if they'll be able to make their destination or not, and even though the car doesn't produce any harmful emissions, the process of producing electricity to produce the power for the cars produces harmful emissions into the air, evening out the benefits gained from the car.

To combat the range problem, some companies have made a hybrid, electric-gasoline car that uses the gasoline to recharge the battery once the charge is gone, so that you can drive longer and farther. A Washington Post journalist got to drive one of these cars, the Chevy Volt, and found that it was very enjoyable and nice, joking the only problem he heard of was that when your finger brushes over the radio, it goes into "Seek" mode. His article can be seen here.

So overall, maybe these cars can be the car of the future even though they were invented and used before the 20th century, and with more money being budgeted for them with Washington's new budget,  it looks like the future is looking up for these electric vehicles.