Geni, electric cars will probably never be a fix all as they don’t have the range and fast charge required for everyone. The do offer a good solution for most people who will not travel far on a daily basis. With concerns for batteries, they will be forced to recycle them. This will create new industry too so while it’s not a perfect system, it can be made more efficient. As Joober said the technology should improve given a few years. Car companies put big research dollars into making their product better than their competitors. Another thing that excites me is new companies will enter the electric car market. More choice and more competition will in time make these cars more affordable.
Again I congratulate Obama for his initiatives in embracing the future and reducing oil consumption.

As a result, they simply won’t follow the same development curve that the combustion motor has done over the last 50 years. I’m not boo-hooing electric cars, I’m boo-hooing plugin electrics that rely heavily or entirely on a big battery pack as ‘the final solution’ to diminishing oil availability. It can’t be, because the car became so popular because it evolved to suit the lifestyles of everyone. Thus any future solution must do the same, hence why we still need hybrids, we still need fuel cell powered cars, and a few plugin electrics.

But as i said, even if we all get electric cars, thats just the small shriveled fruit on the top of the tree called sustainability which is what we are aiming for. It doesn’t make sense to be putting so much effort into getting that, whilst ignoring the big, juicy easy to reach fruit that for some reason we just leave dangling.

and Geni – regarding electric cars, note this, how efficient were Petrol cars 50yrs ago?, now picture an electric car in the same trend, give it time and we’ll get to a point where electric or any other alternative fuels become as efficient and effective if not better. And yes it is a definate solution, oil is a finite resource so going electric or alternative is a must, maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually…

Seems that at the moment, CO2 and global warming have overshadowed the original goal of sustainability. CO2 is but a small part, and we are not even looking at the whole of that small part at the moment.

Why?

Because cars big fancy cars are a WANT not a NEED. Some Bozo will come out and say I need an SUV to transport my HUGE boat or dancing stallions or to circumnavigate the globe. All those thing are not important to the well-being of the world, country or even personally. They are extravagant 20th century pleasures previously only the domain of Royalty.

Get over it, you do not need a turbo six litre sedan.

I’m all for cleaning up our emissions as a society, however lets drop this torch and pitchforks lynching we are currently doing to car manufacturers because we need a scapegoat to hide our inability to face the fact that WE wanted huge SUVs and V8 powered everything. That demand triggered car manufacturers to produce those vehicles, and with the multi-year time period it takes to go from design to retooling to manufacture, car manufacturers simply can’t respond to the sort of oil prices rises we saw last year.

To those who say plug-in electric cars are the answer, answer this. How environmentally friendly will it be to produce the battery packs for the near 60 million cars sold each year across the world? Small town runabouts like the volt have a 182kg battery pack, the tesla has a 500kg one. 60 million * 250kg average = 15 million tonnes of batteries each year for vehicles alone. Batteries aren’t exactly daisies and butterflys to the environment, lithium ion batteries are very toxic. Electric cars are a part of the solution, but aren’t THE solution. Never mind our antiquated suburban electricty grid infrastructure which was designed shortly after WW2 and struggles to handle the power draw of all our airconditioners and plasma tv’s at the moment (just ask Victorian industry about the regular brownouts each summer). How well do you think they’ll hold up when we start charging up a couple of million electric cars each day?

All I’m saying is that if you really give a shit about CO2 emissions and the environment, get less rapped up in these symbolic but largely useless initiatives and start demanding changes that will actually make a real difference. Real clean power, real lifestyle change to reduce energy consumption. Stop buying bottled water, insulate your roof, seal windowsills, install a solar hot water cylinder, recycle more. That’ll do far more to help the environment than buying a new slightly more fuel efficient car every few years, when all that happens is the energy consumption of manufacture eats away the fuel and emission savings.

But hey, thats too hard. Much easier to stone the car manufacturers and convince ourselves we’re doing something, when really, we’re just running away from the true problem, our consumption centric selves.

Low fuel costs encourages truck freight instead of rail. It encourages air freight of items which should go by ship or not be sold internationally at all like food.

It also encourages diesel electric trains instead of electric.

Cut the crap about CO2 and just encourage people to drive fuel efficient cars or use public transport. There are lots of small cars fun to drive.

fuel goes up, so too does good and services.
Not everyone can ride a bike or train to work.