Elecric Cars are a possibility!

A video I ran across on Ted.com was presented by Shai Agassi, who has put his faith and ideas into a startup company called Better Place (http://www.betterplace.com). The company is focused on removing the world from an oil based dependency for transportation to sustainable alternatives. The presentation was superb in explaining his idea which boiled down to an electric car with replaceable batteries. Even though the average range of an electric car is about 120 miles, his idea is to have battery stations instead of gas stations, replacing the batteries in about 2 minutes versus filling up the gas tank with a depleting fossil fuel for 10+ minutes. Similar to a propane tank exchange for RV’s and grills; the batteries would be charged at the station after the consumer is already on the way with fully charged batteries.

On an ecological scale, the switch over to battery based cars brings a car that has a zero emission and zero carbon/fossil fuel vehicle versus the current petrol based vehicles. On an annual basis this reduction would stop 1 car from emitting 77.1 pounds of hydrocarbons, 575 pounds of carbon monoxide and 11, 450 pounds of carbon dioxide along with save 581 gallons of gasoline (http://www.epa.gov/oms/consumer/f00013.htm). With the current amount of cars on the roads and highways world wide, that would be a reduction of 2.8 Billion tons of carbon dioxide (25% of the worlds CO2 emissions issue). Granted going zero emissions will not reverse any issues that have been created by these emissions, it can give the world time to heal and prolong the health of its denizens.

Economical side of the business model/proposal is surprisingly more positive then one would believe. With current automobiles oil is used – with the cost of researching, drilling, and transporting the crude oil added to the refining, transporting to consumer stations built into the overall price per gallon. When dealing with this battery based model, the battery cuts out the middle steps by replacing the gas tank and therefore the gas/oil dependency – no research, drilling, refining or transport costs. Currently the cost of an electric car is the cost of the car and the cost of the small oil well (battery).  To lower the cost of the car, the batteries would be a separate expenditure. Though batteries may seem expensive, most have 2000 lifecycles (charge/depletion). Replacing gasoline miles with electric miles – with an average of 20 miles per gallon, the price of an electric mile would be 8 cents a mile versus 1.50+ a mile with petroleum products. Personal savings could amount to (based on an average 10,000 miles per year) $14,200 per car owner a year and there is not anyone that could not afford to save that amount.