Electric cars alone won't save Mother Earth
By DAVID BOOTH, Canwest News Service; National Post June 21, 2010
Oft times, I get the feeling that membership in the green movement interferes with reading skills. It could be just that the religiosity of the truly committed eco-weenie stifles open discourse. At the very least, it seems that being a fanatical devotee of the electric car seems to mandate a certain adherence to dogma that interferes with comprehending the written word.
I say this because, on numerous occasions, in not wanting my anti-EV rants to be mistaken as a willingness to pollute the planet willy-nilly, I have qualified my column with an obvious paean to the need to reduce our environmental footprint. Yet, often, I receive letters in which, despite that obvious caveat, my dismissal of the electric car is taken as consent for wanton petroleum profligacy. I am accused of loving muscle cars, being a gas-wasting speed daemon and a non-believer in global warming.
For the record, then, I have never much liked muscle cars; I am, in fact, often accused of driving like an alter knocker for my reluctance to exceed 125 kilometres an hour; and, though I don't buy into Al Gore's apocalyptic visions, it doesn't take a PhD in environmental sciences to see that minimizing CO2 emissions might be a good thing. I might not believe that electric cars are the panacea to save Mother Earth, but neither do I believe in the status quo.
My antipathy toward EVs doesn't mean they don't have their uses. As around-town runabouts, they make sense. Indeed, a company called Communauto in Montreal is adding 50 Nissan Leafs to its fleet of 1,000 shared cars and it is to be applauded.
And while I fail to see the mass appeal of either EVs or conventional hybrids, the benefits of plug-ins -hybrids or the extended-range electric vehicles (E-REV) -are obvious. They exploit all the advantages of electric propulsion while eliminating the real possibility (in a pure EV) that you'll be left stranded.
But, have we yet to fully exploit plug-in hybrids and E-REVS? Why, for instance, after more than a decade of hybrid production, and the recent rush to ever more exotic gas/electric-powered automobiles, have there been no diesel/electric combinations? Diesel technology is sophisticated, reliable and far less consumptive than gasoline engines. Since the engine in the Volt is but a non-stationary generator, diesel power would seem ideal.
The diesel engines' miserliness has been well proven, so why hasn't the green movement embraced diesels more assiduously? Sure, they emit a few more hydrocarbons and diesel fuel's carbon content is about 10 per cent higher than gasoline's, but with a 25-to 30-per-cent advantage in fuel economy, a wholesale conversion, as in Europe's, would seem to be a laudable goal.
Energy efficiency isn't as important as ritual cleanliness and diesel is tainted by petroleum. So's natural gas..
Environmentalists rail particularly against the SUV, so one would think Volkswagen bringing in a diesel variant and Range Rover looking to import a new 4.4-litre turbodiesel for its sport-brute would be worthy of accolades. Since large SUVs and trucks are so popular, converting a large number of them to diesel might seem more realistic than calling for a ban.
And what of hydrogen? With the ascendancy of electricity as salvation, we hear little news about hydrogen-powered vehicles such as Honda's FCX and the Chevrolet Equinox. The challenges of building a hydrogen refuelling infrastructure would be no more onerous than the electrical revolution planned. The hydrogen vehicle's big bugaboo -long-term onboard fuel storage -is a problem more easily surmounted than getting truly effective range out of a battery pack.
My point is that pure electric vehicles are far from the only or the best alternatives to traditional gasoline-fuelled engines. And, while some manufacturers purport to be looking at those alternatives, public pressure for electric vehicles may be pushing them toward a lesser solution.
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