Quote:
Originally Posted by Fundguy1
Why do people use the word achievement for electric cars? They've been around longer than ICE cars.
|
As a viable transportation system within the city and highway with the practicality and range at least comparable to ICE, no, they have not. Mentioning golf carts just makes you look ridiculous.
The advantage that makes it an achievement:
1. can use any fuel source transmitted through power lines, so fossil fuels, hydroeletric, wind, nuclear, geothermal, solar, etc.
2. more efficient than a ICE, even with transmission losses and you no longer need a huge infrastructure of tractor trailers, gas stations, storage tanks, etc, to store the fuel in hundreds of thousands of remote locations. Then there's the fuel that all of these things burn just to deliver the fuel. There might be more infrastructure needed to support electric fully, but it's at least partly there already (unlike hydrogen).
3. it works. These cars (telsas) are on the highway and in the cities and driving every day. Maybe this pisses you off, but I like seeing new technology actually working. If they were on the side of the road dead or blowing up everywhere, then maybe you'd have a point, but they are working well for the most part. It's not a dream anymore, it's reality.
4. to start up a car company from zero and make this work is quite an achievement in and of itself, in a world dominated by the major automotive manufacturers. It's not as simple as just bolting and welding some stuff together, lots of engineering, testing, certification, and hoops to jump through that make this an even greater achievement.
Like I said, for some reason this really seems to piss people off, that the cars are out there driving every day and working and that it's no longer a pipe dream or article in Popular Mechanics about how one day there will be electric cars driving around.