For a long time the electric car was the future, it was the thing that was going to save us from our reliance on fossil fuels. This didn’t happen and now the electric car isn’t really considered to be all that great of an option. There are a number of advantages to an electric car. The biggest is obviously that it produces no emissions. It also offers the advantage of not requiring fossil fuels, meaning we don’t need to import them. However it is another of its advantages that may have doomed the electric car and prevented it from becoming more widely used.

A lot of people blame the oil companies for killing the electric car. They think it was all part of a conspiracy between the oil companies and the government. In fact it was the car companies that killed the electric car. The problem from their standpoint was that an electric car will run forever. There are very few moving parts in an electric car and since they spin rather than reciprocating they rarely break. Other than changing the batteries there is really no maintenance required. This sounds great to most people but it is a disaster to the car companies. They rely on the fact that cars are going to break down. They make a great deal of money selling all of those replacement parts. They also depend on the fact that every few years you are going to get tired of maintaining your car and buy a new one. The electric car would dramatically cut into those sales.

Although the car manufacturers have little interest in building electric cars they didn’t single handedly kill them. There are some real issues that need to be addressed if you are going to build an electric car. The first is the length of the charge on the battery. You can only drive a couple of hundred miles on a charge. Unfortunately charging the battery is not a simple matter of pulling into the gas station, it takes many hours during which you won’t be able to drive. The far bigger problem with an electric car is the question of where the electricity to charge them is going to come from. Most areas are already struggling to provide enough electricity. If everybody switched to an electric car the need for electricity would soar. Since it is virtually impossible to get approval to build a new power plant the question of where all this electricity is going to come from is a pretty big one.

Of course the electric car didn’t really die; the technology that was developed for them is being used in hybrid cars. This solves the issue of charging the battery since it uses an internal combustion engine to do this. Unfortunately it has turned out that hybrids aren’t really any more fuel efficient than regular cars. It seems we can make regular cars that are even more efficient than hybrids if we want to.