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Quotes about Electric Cars from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Most electric cars can go from 50 to 100 miles on a single charge of their batteries. The average U.S. car travels about 27 miles a day, so an electric car can be a clean, efficient choice, especially as a second vehicle used for urban commuting. Most of today's electric cars use regular lead-acid batteries, but some have more advanced batteries, e.g., nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion. Even more advanced batteries with longer lives, faster recharging times, and greater energy densities are on the horizon. Electric cars have been a cottage industry for a long time." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.) "Six of the seven greenest cars in 1999 are electric cars. For people who make a lot of short trips and live in a warm or moderate climate where batteries perform best, an electric car is cool. Most electric cars can go from 50 to 100 miles on a single charge of their batteries. The average U.S. car travels about 27 miles a day, so an electric car can be a clean, efficient choice, especially as a second vehicle used for urban commuting. Most of today's electric cars use regular lead-acid batteries, but some have more advanced batteries, e.g., nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.)

"A word about the market for electric cars: they will be used mainly for commuting and city driving ?no one would want to take one across the desert. Peugeot has been testing a car with a nickel-cadmium battery in La Rochelle, France, for the past few years, and is so encouraged that it produced 5,000 electric cars in 1995. An interesting sidelight is that market studies find that people's main concern with electric cars is the fear of having the batteries run down while they're out on the road." - James Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science And No One Else Does Either (Get the book.)

"This is one of the main reasons that electric cars have been such a flop during the past decade: The batteries could not be improved to make them significantly less bulky or lighter, or to increase the travel range between charges. What's more, electric cars would have carried a base price 30 percent higher than comparable gasoline models, while the batteries would have to be replaced every few years for many thousands of dollars more. These problems left the electric car in oblivion." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

"Most of today's electric cars use regular lead-acid batteries, but some have more advanced batteries, e.g., nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion. Even more advanced batteries with longer lives, faster recharging times, and greater energy densities are on the horizon. Electric cars have been a cottage industry for a long time. Most manufacturers are tiny by the standards of the automobile industry." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.)

"Peugeot has been testing a car with a nickel-cadmium battery in La Rochelle, France, for the past few years, and is so encouraged that it produced 5,000 electric cars in 1995. An interesting sidelight is that market studies find that people's main concern with electric cars is the fear of having the batteries run down while they're out on the road. In La Rochelle, people typically recharged their batteries every night, usually when they had about 70 percent of their energy left. The Impulse (a GM demonstration car with lead-acid batteries) has a "lock down" mode built in." - James Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science And No One Else Does Either (Get the book.) "For one thing, the battery has to store enough energy for the car to have a reasonable range (the distance you can go without recharging). Most electric cars now have a range of sixty miles or so, but that will have to increase to over one hundred miles for the cars to be commercially marketable. The battery has to have enough power to accelerate the car quickly (the "golf cart syndrome" is a major bar to the sale of electric cars). It has to perform well for hundreds of cycles (ideally, you should never have to replace a battery pack during the car's lifetime), and it should recharge quickly." - James Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science And No One Else Does Either (Get the book.)

"For instance, why not just devote nuclear power to electric cars? With cars the battery/range-of-travel issues still pertain. With a railroad, the electricity supply runs continuously along the track, overhead or on a third rail, so the range of an electric engine is theoretically infinite. Before World War II, U.S. railroad electrification was about on par with other industrialized countries. After the war, not only did U.S. electrification come to a standstill, but it also started to decline and be dismantled. In Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan electrification resumed with renewed vigor." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "In 2003, having failed abysmally to interest the public in buying electric cars, California rescinded the mandate. Meanwhile, General Motors shelved the development of its once-touted EV (electric vehicle). As of late 2003, both Ford and General Motors were turning their attention to fuel-cell cars instead—the idea being that a fuel-cell car would be in effect an electric car, using an electric motor, only without the bothersome batteries. However, fuel-cell cars are problematic for reasons already discussed pertaining to hydrogen and natural gas." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "What's more, electric cars would have carried a base price 30 percent higher than comparable gasoline models, while the batteries would have to be replaced every few years for many thousands of dollars more. These problems left the electric car in oblivion. But they were developed in the first place not in expectation of oil shortages but to mitigate the separate problem of air pollution. In 2001, the California legislature mandated that 10 percent of all cars sold in the state be low-emission vehicles by 2003." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

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