Crap article. They don't even dig into the real problems of the mining and manufacturing impact of a batt car vs. a 10 year old pick up. And the replacement batteries.
No, they didn't. But considering the liberal rag that published it, I'll call it a win anyway.
Yes of course...what we should do is wait until the PERFECT solution comes along...the one that solves all problems forever. This is apparently the only solution that is acceptable.
Listening to Gilligan piss and moan you would think we went directly from transistors to the I-phone 22 with its circuitry hard wired into our brains.
Listening to Gilligan piss and moan you would think we went directly from transistors to the I-phone 22 with its circuitry hard wired into our brains.
Gilligan has forgotten more about higher forms of technology than your sorry arse will ever even learn to pronounce, much less understand. Go crawl back in your hole and play with yourself.
Self Important Bald Twit
Yes of course...what we should do is wait until the PERFECT solution comes along...the one that solves all problems forever. This is apparently the only solution that is acceptable.
Listening to Gilligan piss and moan you would think we went directly from transistors to the I-phone 22 with its circuitry hard wired into our brains.
...don't you have a Sonic commercial to make?
Self Important Bald Twit
You can build a perfectly good hybrid using Lead Acid batteries
If you and I were not subsidizing it, don't you think that folks who were dealing with market forces would be far more likely to come up with more better solutions? I do.
I am interested in electric vehicles not for the green aspect, but for the value proposition. If they manage to drop to ~20k I may end up purchasing one.
But I think that article does a bit of disservice assuming the people who are concerned with saving the environment would use dirty coal power to charge their cars.
Case in point, Tesla has free charging from the supercharger stations which are solar powered. Also, the highest (by a huge margin) concentration of electric vehicles is in California, which gets most of it's power from Hydro-Electric and Nuclear sources.
And as to the lithium issue, while it is costly it still makes up a minimal percentage of the cost of the battery pack. And the reason it is so expensive (despite being one of the most abundant elements on earth) is that it is found in low concentrations. Current extraction technologies require finding source deposits of greater than 5% purity, or straining from sea water. There are new processes coming online commercially that will make it cheaper to mine the tailings from existing sources (the 1-4% tailings), including from mines that don't target lithium, than the cost of regular mining. These tailings are abundant enough to more than double worldwide production.
As for disposal? Lithium is easy to recycle and not particularly toxic. And Halogen-free electrolyte solutions are being developed by multiple sources as a replacement to the current solutions, the most toxic part of the batteries, with little to no expected impact to performance.