Quote:
Originally Posted by jeremyc74
Right on Nixon! 100% correct.
I'll add one more thought.
From a technical point of view, there are viable clean alternatives to coal for electricity produciton. Some of them are still too expensive for mass consumption, but they are there, and are becoming closer and closer to "grid parity" every year.
I think the solution in the future for many households will be one full electric vehicle, and one plug in hybrid. That will move a significant portion of the daily running around over to electric, but still give the family unlimited range without charging for vacations and road trips and such.
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Thanks for the post, you are right that electric cars do have the unique advantage of getting greener each time a power plant is made greener. So if a single coal-fired plant that provides electricity to 50,000 homes is upgraded to make it cleaner, or replaced, then every electric car that was charged by that power plant instantly becomes cleaner. You can centralized your efforts to clean up a few thousand power plants, instead of having to address millions of individual vehicles. And your clean-up efforts have immediate results for the electric cars already out there.
With a gas or diesel vehicle, you have to wait until the vehicle is replaced by a new vehicle with cleaner emissions in order to cut pollution/consumption. That means waiting until the old cars flush through all of their used vehicle owners. That can take decades.
As for predicting what people will own in the future, I don't know what will happen. There are too many IF's. There might not be any battery-powered electric cars some time in the future. They could all be capacitor-powered electric cars instead. There are companies working on that, who promise capacitors that can charge in roughly the same time it currently takes to fill up a gas tank. I just can't clearly see what the future of electric vehicles will be any further out than a month or two.
We know that BMW will be leasing out 1000 electric Mini's.
We know that Tesla will be delivering more Roadsters
We know that there are a number of slow-speed NEV's that will be delivered
Beyond that, it truly is anybody's guess as to what cars will actually make it to market, and what people will buy in the future.