With the cost of utilities being so high, how can we afford the electrically fueled automobile?

Question

With the cost of utilities being so high, how can we afford the electrically fueled automobile?

Answer 1

It's not the energy price I would worry about yet.  The question is, where are we going to get all the additional electricity to power these vehicles?  How are we going to pay for them? (The Chevrolet Volt, a Malibu-sized 4-door plug-in hybrid, should run about $40-50k when it comes out in a couple of years, or twice the price a normal mid-sized sedan.)

If we were to sell plug-in hybrids like normal Camrys and Accords, there would be a new demand for electricity, thus causing it to rise in price.

Electric Vehicles won't solve anything, in fact, they will only create new problems for Americans.

Answer 2

This asker doesn't understand the difference between child rape and statuory rape.  So there's little hope she'll understand anything that has to do with science or reason.  But that won't stop her from calling other people names.

Answer 3

A converted electric car, with a range of maybe 100 miles, plugged in all night to recharge from empty to full, will cost most Americans about $3. That's about $.03 per mile.

Your car right now (I don't know what you drive, though) costs you from about $.30-.40 per mile to drive. That's how you can afford it.

Miles Rubin, from Miles Automotive Group, said "If you never spent another dollar in power generation, just stayed with the plants we have today, you could charge 180 million cars a night in the United States with no additional cost."

I haven't personally checked those numbers, but that sounds about right. America isn't really using a substantial amount of electricity overnight, even though all the power plants run 24 hours a day. If all of us had electric cars, the cars would be using power that isn't presently used.

In fact, with another electric car feature called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), the utility can actually use your parked car as a part of the grid, storing power, and redistributing it to allow the power company to run way more efficiently than they can now. I don't know a whole lot of detail about this, since I don't really care about that aspect, but you can look it up on Wikipedia. It's a complete 180 of the naive corporate hype that electric cars will use up all our power.

Electricity is way more efficient than a combustion engine. It takes 12KWh to refine a gallon of gasoline. A car could go farther on that 12KWh than it could on the same gallon of gasoline. Power plants, because of their scale, can generate energy far more efficiently than can one car turning petroleum into mostly heat and a little bit of torque. Electric cars allow us to utilize that efficiency.

Not only can you afford to charge it, you can't afford not to. Neither can America.

Answer 4

Electricity is cheaper than gasoline for the amount of energy required to do work. So you will spend less money on commuting to/from work, a lot less. So the money saved in gasoline cost will pay your increased electric bill, and you will have money left over!

THe first question is how are you going to purchase the electric vehicle... Sell one of your gasoline powered to pay for the new one.

The problem with electricity is storage. It is easier and lighter to store gas. Electricity storage is heavier and costs more, but technology is working on it. As time goes on, expect electric cars to weigh less, be cheaper (don't forget to factor in inflation though), and will be able to travel a greater distance between charges at a higher speed.