Brent Kearney

If you haven’t yet seen Who Killed the Electric Car?, watch it, as soon as possible. It is somewhat infuriating, but also exciting to think that there exists electric vehicles that can go 300 miles on one charge, and accelerate from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 3.6 seconds — today. You plug it in at night in your garage. Or at the office. Zero emissions.

The documentary is very well done; unless you’re an oil executive, you won’t be disappointed. Well maybe you will be disappointed, and maybe even angry — with the oil & gas industry, the auto industry, and the Bush administration, all of whom conspired to kill the electric vehicle market before it got started. Too much money was at stake. The electric car would remove billions in revenue from oil and gas, and billions more in parts and service of traditional vehicles.

One eye-opener is the exposé of the hydrogen fuel cell and hybrid vehicle scams. The best hydrogen vehicles are four times less efficient as electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel is more expensive than gasoline (and sold by oil companies, of course), it will take at least 2 decades from now to bring them to market, and due to the lack of hydrogen fuel infrastructure, they are very inconvenient to drive. Oh, and also: it takes much more energy to create and pressurize hydrogen gas than you can get out of it with a fuel cell. The hybrid vehicles on the market today still depend on gasoline, and are not a huge jump in fuel efficiency over traditional combustion engine vehicles, when compared to the EV.

An electric vehicle uses no gasoline, and you can recharge it almost anywhere. The power grid is increasingly being fed by more eco-friendly power sources, such as sun and wind. Even nuclear energy is a big improvement in emissions over coal and natural gas. In any case, eliminating personal transportation as a source of burning fossil fuels and thus spewing hydrocarbons into the atmosphere is a big step forward.

The infrastructure for electric power already exists, obviously, but as EVs gain popularity, it can be vastly improved. For example, at highway rest-stops, charged batteries could be exchanged for depleted ones in the same way that empty propane tanks are commonly exchanged for full ones. This of course, won’ happen until the EV market has matured and standards for batteries are developed.

The “death” of the EV was a temporary set back: check out Telsa Motors. This is what is needed — new companies who do not have vested interest in the established vehicle monopoly and its related industries. As the film points out, the only reason we still depend on oil and gas is the lack of political will by the powers who are currently in place.