Instead of paying 10-20 cents a mile to a number of companies and countries in a some-what free market, we will be moving toward a system where one company, not based in the United States, will have complete control over our fueling infrastructure.
If you weren't aware, the project better place system is like the cell-phone market in the US. You will buy a slightly discounted car but are only able to fill up at exorbitant rates from bp-owned equipment.
On the other hand, cars like the Volt (as if it will ever be built) or a PHEV Prius can be charged at home or any type of outlet. A completely free market with no monopolies. We can't afford to change from a dependence on one fuel to a dependence on a single company.
EDIT:
Well, shoot, maybe I should have read it all. They won't be operating the same as in Israel. Hence this line in the article:
"That’s likely why it was clearly stated that the thousands of Better Place stations to be installed in northern California will be agnostic to the type of electric car"
I will cling to the performance and adrenaline-rushed excitement of driving my 300hp, 6-speed M.T. gasoline-powered car until death (or absolute lack of funds) pries it from my bare hands.
I would rather die of starvation before being forced to drive one of those electric slothboxes.
Then again, that's me, I doubt many of my fellow citizens have the same passion for automotive ecstasy.
I've only just realized that this kind of behavior in response to global warming represents the flip-side of why anonymity brings out such horrible things in people, on the internet.
Instead of specific victims and anonymous perpetrators, we have specific perpetrators and anonymous, scattered, uncertain victims. It hardly even makes sense for people to talk about victims of one's globally dispersed pollutants, even if it causes just as much damage.
I meant that I assert that the profligate use of fossil fuels harms people whether you realize it or not. But it obviously doesn't feel like an activity you should be blamed for, because no specific people are harmed, much, by such actions.
It's not merely automotive enthusiasts who do such things. Nearly everyone thinks they're a special case. That really worries me.
To get a sense of the scale of things, the north pole ice-cap has receded so much in the summer that the increase albedo is putting incredible train on the greenland icecaps. If they melt, hundreds of millions of people in low lying coastal regions, such as Bangladesh, will be displaced. It could be averted if people refrained from heating all of their massive homes in winter instead of wearing a sweater and driving in two tons of steel and glass to get to the shopping mall and riding in a Lamborgini or an SUV or a big F-500 truck because it feels good to them. Because it almost doesn't matter what happens to technology in the next few decades, unless our attitudes change, we will find ourselves in a major environmental mess.
It's the difference between Kant's categorical imperative and the game-theoretic optimal action. "Responsibility" means lowering your personal utility just because if everyone did as you do, everyone's personal utility would be higher.
...personally, I just hypermile when I'm forced to drive, and ride a 45mpg, 3 second 0-60 motorcycle other times. I trade off expected lifespan instead of externalized environmental effects for my automotive enjoyment.
I was under the impression electric cars could deliver more performance and adrenaline than petrol cars, because an electric motor produces maximum torque at all speeds. Is this not so?
Sure, a Tesla Roadster can do 0-60 mph in four seconds, but it doesn't _sound_ as cool as a Lamborghini when it does so.
Seriously though, I would be very sad if internal combustion engine powered cars vanished. I personally suspect that the future of personal transportation is still gonna be based on liquid fuels (maybe cellulosic or even algae-derived ethanol) because they're so much easier to store and transport than anything else.
Hydrogen storage requires weird high-pressure containers and exotic materials. Electricity storage requires weird toxic metals placed in weird toxic solutions. Ethanol storage requires a bucket.
There's a lot of research funding going into biofuels right now, but unfortunately the basic numbers don't make sense for biofuels as the world's primary energy source. You can convert solar energy into carbohydrates, extract the carbohydrates and convert them into ethanol, transport the ethanol to thousands of gas stations (sitting on prime commercial real estate), and combust it to create pressure that's harnessed to rotate an axle. There's a significant percentage of waste at each of those steps, and you end up requiring, like, all of the Earth's surface area for growing biofuel crops. (Even with algae.)
Alternately, you can harness sunlight directly, distribute it across the existing grid (fairly unobtrusively), temporarily store it in batteries or capacitors, and directly power an electric motor with it. Electric storage also benefits from the same economies of scale as laptops and cell phones.
My opinion, a humble one, is that biofuels are better suited for niche applications where electricity can't be used.
There are 250 million passenger vehicles in the USA.
And 7.6 million sold in in 2006.
No one is going to take your car, but if they wanted to, you could probably keep it for 40 years or so, if manufacturing was switched to 100% electric car tomorrow :)
Tesla Roadster 0-60 in 4 seconds which is not bad but go with KillaCycle LSR Electric Motorcycles which goes 0 to 60 in .97 seconds yea less than one second quarter mile in 7.89 seconds @ 168 MPH.
Spending initiatives like this are why the wife and I are leaving the state early next year. We don't feel like sticking around when the tax bill comes due, which we'd have to do if we bought a house here.
Evidently the state's not deeply enough in debt yet. With the higher taxes coming up to pay for all this, even more taxpayers and corporations (7,000 in the last few years) will leave, accelerating the financial death spiral.
Apparently not included in the plan: building new power stations, or even any discussion of it.
Anyone got any good numbers on questions like: if half of California's cars were switched to electrical over the next ten years, how many more power stations would the state require?
It depends on how much use they get out of each vehicle and which sort of vehicle they are. I calculated that about ten square meters of mirrors at a solar thermal station would power one average U.S. daily commute with an electric microcar. A low drag vehicle like the Aptera would require around 5 - 6 square meters, instead. Provided that we can get our drivetrain, engine, and regenerative braking as efficient as we think we can, then we can get that down to 3 square meters for a compressed air powered microcar, and less than 1 square meter for a compressed air powered scooter.
