But if I had the option to buy a vehicle I could plug in every night and drive to and from work every day? Hell yes, I'd take it.
Unfortunately this is where electric cars really fall down, for a reason that their proponents never seem to consider. There simply isn't that much electricity available. Transport accounts for a significant proportion of our total energy usage - according to
this it's around 35%. If everyone suddenly stops using oil and starts trying to charge their cars at home, the entire electricity grid would collapse.
It's not enough for car manufacturers to produce a decent electric car, it also needs something like 50% more power stations and some serious upgrades to the grid to allow that kind of heavy, continuous domestic use. This is even more of a problem than people might think, since the UK, for example, is currently struggling to generate enough power to satisfy current demand and has no chance of coping with an increase on that scale.
Are hydrogen fuel cells workable, or are they still too large, expensive, and inefficient?
Fuel cells are viable from the point of view of weight. Hydrogen is not as energy dense as petrol, but it can be a lot better than batteries. However, it has plenty of its own problems. The biggest one is that hydrogen is not all that safe. It may not be as dangerous as some people claim, but putting tanks of it in the hands of every idiot in the country, especially ones crashing in to each other at 70mph, is not necessarily the best idea. There's also the big problem of infrastructure, since hydrogen is a lot trickier to work with and cart around the place than oil.
Limited resources are also a problem. Most fuel cells currently require rare elements like platinum. It's not just that it's expensive, there just isn't that much of it available once you start trying to put it in things like cars.
Oh...one point I'd like to make. The film states that the oil industry "suppressed" the company making the NiMH batteries. Not having seen it in depth, I defer here. What could he be talking about?
No idea. I assume he's claiming that since the NiMH batteries were not available as soon as originally hoped, that means someone must have done it on purpose. Classic conspiracy thinking really.
GM sells cars, not oil. At least not directly.
This is just about the best counter to conspiracy claims. However, it's actually even better than that. Not only are companies like GM not actually involved with oil and have no interest in suppressing technology that would allow them to sell more cars, the companies that actually are involved with oil are generally the ones best placed to take advantage of new energy technology. They already have a lot of the infrastructure, contacts and so on to make things work, and they certainly have the money to invest in things. In fact, they're often the ones actually developing it. If a company like BP or Shell knew of some brilliant new technology that would solve all our energy problems they wouldn't cover it up, they'd use it to wipe their competitors off the map.
I'd love to see some kind of alternative powered car that doesn't burn oil. Until either oil prices get much higher, or some kind of new technology is worked out that can power a car cheaper and better than oil does, it's not going to happen.
Hydrogen fuel cars look promising presently.
And the hydrogen comes from where? This is the problem with all this sort of thing. Trying to get away from fossil fuels is all very well, but at the moment the only thing it will be replaced by is fossil fuels. If you have electric cars, you need to generate electricity. If you have hydrogen cars you need to generate hydrogen.
That sort of thing is certainly a step in the right direction, since you can then slowly switch your electricity generation to renewables, nuclear and so on. But it's not an answer in itself. You don't save the environment by changing from burning oil in your car to burning coal down the road.
