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The idea of electric cars has not been developed recently, and in fact successful electric vehicles were being developed and manufactured back in the 1830s, with projects in the Netherlands, and in Scotland, achieving great success, with vehicles reaching speeds of up to 65 miles per hour. Mostly popular with ladies, the typical town vehicle was clean, quiet, needed no cranking to get started, and cruised at a comfortable 20 miles an hour. The gas powered cars were being outsold quite dramatically.

Although common misconceptions today still prevail, with suggestions that the future of electric vehicles is a world where the motorways are jammed pack full of milk floats and golf carts, this is starting to sound very dated, and increasingly people are aware that electric vehicles today, just as a hundred years ago, are outperforming gas powered alternatives. The recent unveiling of the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car, demonstrated that it could leave a Ferrari Spider standing at the traffic lights, and glide easily past a Mercedes SL550 without any trouble. With a top speed of 130 miles per hour and a 250 mile distance capability between charges, this blows away any dusty old ideas about milk floats.

It isn’t just the fact that these electric vehicles produce lower gas emissions, they also produce far less noise pollution too - an often forgotten element of our gas powered vehicles. Some people who have lid comfortably into the driving seat of a sport electric car are shocked by the lack of noise, vibration and raw growl - and it has jokingly been suggested that speakers be installed in some of these models to simulate the growl of a familiar engine. On the flip side of the coin, some people have expressed concern that with almost silent cars nipping around town, there may be an increase in the number of children and elderly people injured on the roads, since the familiar clues of oncoming traffic will no longer be available.

It isn’t only the fact that those who buy and use electric powered vehicles can sleep easy at night knowing that they are doing their bit for the environment. To really be appealing to the average consumer it has to make financial sense as well as environmental sense, and in this regard electric vehicles can score very highly. For example, for a mere fraction of the cost of the average car you can purchase a G-Wiz, which sits snugly in the lowest bracket for road insurance, and is also exempt from road tax. With two hundred recharging stations across the UK, keeping it running is easy, and if you live in London there’s a huge advantage because you are allowed to park for free, as well as being exempt from the congestion charges. This alone can represent a saving of over 5,000 per year, which is more than the cost of the car!

On a much larger scale, one country has taken the gigantic step forward and proposed a strategy to entirely eliminate their need for oil to support their road traffic within ten years. Israel has recently unveiled its Project Better Place which is a long term plan to replace oil based gas guzzling vehicles with electric ones, with an estimated completion date of within ten years. The country already has half a million stations which support the re-charging of electric vehicles, and with the average distance capable of being travelled between charges more than ample to enable a vehicle to travel between any two points within the country without the need to stop, it is both an ambitious project but one which looks as though it could very well set a high standard for the rest of the world. The plans include introducing electric vehicle distribution in a similar way to mobile phones, with companies giving the cars away free whilst users simply pay for the cost to use or charge the car, doing so either on contract with unlimited usage, or on a pay-as-you-drive basis.

As with any major change to long established consumer habits, there has to be enough demand to make the whole idea of replacing gas powered vehicles with electric ones, otherwise the finance is simply not going to be sufficient to enable change on any real scale. Most people are now aware that milk floats are not the be all and end all to such vehicles, and with films such as Minority Report showing Tom cruise tearing up the road in a sporty little electric Lexus, many people are starting to see that there are multiple advantages to the idea of switching over, and that there is no need whatever to sacrifice style for efficiency or even for the environment.

An issue that those sceptics raise concerning electric vehicles is that although eh car itself might not be giving off fumes and harming the environment by burning up fossil fuels, the energy for the batteries has to come from somewhere, and this is likely to be through the main electricity grid, itself powered through the burning of fossil fuels, so that ultimately the whole scheme simply shifts the focus away from the end consumer and back to the big industries. In fact this argument is not entirely valid, since more and more power companies are turning to renewable sources of energy, and this is likely to continue. The other argument is that of the fuel consumption ratio. Gas powered cars burn the fossil fuel in a very wasteful way, whereas electric cars use energy in a much more efficient manner. In this way, the actual amount of energy used, and therefore the amount of fossil fuel burned, is far less.

Perhaps it is becoming increasingly easy to picture a world in which we can glide around quietly and serenely, with no smog or fumes choking our streets, no noise roaring through our urban spaces, and no need for concern when stuck in traffic that fuel is being wasted. Although fears have been raised that when we all return home for work and plug our cars in for the night we’ll overload the mains grid, these too have been quashed, with energy companies pointing out that only a fraction of capacity is reached at night, and with all of us switching to electric cars the overall need for energy will be massively reduced. Perhaps we can even envisage a day when our cars are recharged from the energy our own solar panel roofs collect through the day whilst we are at work - a recipe for a virtually clear conscience.

Tags: Computers and Technology