Electric Cars - Future of the Automobiles
Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:05 Written by Administrator Tuesday, 13 October 2009 06:09
Electric Cars - Future of the Automobiles
What are Electric Cars?
Electric Car is an alternative fuel automobile that supports the Sustainable energy principal and runs on renewable energy sources. It works with electric motor controller for propulsion instead of regular petrol or diesel (internal combursion engines) engines. It produces less noise and air pollution by reducing the emisison of carbon gases into the atmosphere.
Why we need electric cars now?
There are many things interrelated and basically related to the problem of carbon savings and carbon nutrality. Electric cars seems the right solution of the problems related to green house gases and effective carbon savings. Global warming has become a big problem now for industrialized nations as well as developing nations. Lot of energy consumption is need of the hour for rapidly developing countries with large populations like China and India.
Why we can not depend any more on current solutions like Petroleum?
- Supply and demand ratio of petroleum is not good and increasing prices have made it even more difficult for poor countries to maintain good supply of petroleum.
- Not much research is done about the renewable sources of energy. There are wind power, solar power as well as ocean generated energy solutions but they are not very practical and economically viable solutions.
- Crude oil is not easily reachable in the core of the earth. Lot of oil reserves are still unexplored and might remain so for long because of financial unfeasibility.
Now what we need the most to reduce the effective carbon emission is an alternative energy source which is easily available and can last for many decades to come. We don't have much options left but still there are few with which we can experiment. Electricity and vehicles driven by electricity is one of them. Electric cars are the future of the automobile industry.
Pollution by cars and motor vehicles in general has increased a lot in last few decades. Now it counts for the total of 20% of all global warming causes. As the economic growth in poor and developing countries will allow its people to buy more and more cars situation is going to be worse than ever. Middle cclass in countries like China and India can easily afford cars now and it is going to increase the problem of global warming even more.
Why other options failed before?
Scientists have tried and tested other energy resources like Bio-Fuels and Hydrogen before but they are not very much satisfied with the results. Especially Bio fuels are not very carbon saving in nature and only reduce the amount of green house gases by less than 10%. In few methods it is even more pollutant than the conventional energy sources like coal and crude oil.
Main sources that is used for the bio fuels are either maze (as used in north america) or sugarcane (as used in latin america particularly brazil) both good source of alcohol. As the world is going through hunger crisis and 45% of world population still living below poverty line with little or no access to nutricious food few human rights groups argue that it is not good to use food products as fuels. Lot of carbon is generated to process and purify these fuels and effective carbon saving is not much, so bio fuel is a poor option we have.
Other option that automobile companies like GM tried were fuel cell driven hydrogen cars. Hydrogen cars are most gentle on environment as the fuel burns 100% in engine without leaving any tracable gases in the atmosphere. General motors tested its hydrogen car model Hydrogen-3 few years back and results are good.
But there are few problems related with the hydrogen cars also. As hydrogen cars run on hydrogen as fuel and it is highly explosive in nature. Other major problem related with the hydrogen cars are fuel cells itself are very costly and can increase the price of the car so much that not many can afford it and hence the effective carbon savings are not much if the car is not widely used.
You may find more information about Electric cars at Wikipedia
Electric Cars by India Daily is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at indiavoice.info.