Electric Sports Car, Hybrids and Electric Transportation

While I saw the original article earlier this week, Treehugger posting about it ended up with a much cooler picture of the new electric roadster that's the subject of a lot of buzz this week. While I thought it was cool on the same level as the rest of the conversation, it reminded me of something I wanted to write more about and that's how this roadster, other electric cars and hybrids all fit into the future of electric transportation.

Almost all of the discussion about this car and about hybrids like the Prius as well as about things like hydrogen cars center on the immediate practical rollout to *everyone* at once.

That approach completely misses the point and how these will fit into the longterm timeline of transportation.

See, in order for a technology to take hold on the same widespread level that internal combustion motorized transportation has in the last 100 years, you need parts and systems in place that can be dropped in without having to do R&D on every little thing. For instance, if you want to build a new gas-powered car today, you don't need to invent fuel injectors, disc brakes, steel belted radial tires, etc. And, if you were looking to build said car relatively cheaply, you could just order the parts off the shelf from existing manufacturers.

When you can get the core components off of the shelf, you can expend most of your energy on the aggregated device you're building. That's the exact approach of the recent DIY solar generator project listed on MAKE took, resulting in a backyard kilowatt solar generator for a couple of thousand bucks. The whole thing is based off of basic plumbing and automotive supplies and doesn't require the creation of a whole new manufacturing sector just to enable the rollout. Thus, when putting those solar generators out into rural areas, they can tap into the already abundant supplies and hit the ground running.

This electric roadster exemplifies this fact in that it is using thousands of battery cells originall designed for laptops. This allowed them to spend time developing the motor, etc. instead of having to do R&D on new batteries.

This whole benefit multiplies when dealing with things that are powered by electricity. That's because electricity is an abstract method of transporting energy. It doesn't matter how you generate it, store it or move it around, it's still electricity. That means that once a class of devices runs primarily on electricity, you can swap out the individual bits in the power delivery chain and it doesn't mess with the whole system.

Thus, if the actual motor, transmission, air conditioning, etc. are all based on electricity, it doesn't matter where that electricity comes from. It could be from a coal power plant, biodiesel generator, gasoline motor, solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric, nuclear or 450 raccoons on treadmills. If a new type of super-efficient battery suddenly becomes available, it can be swapped out without changing the rest of the components. If a cheaper way of charging those batteries becomes available, the source can be swapped out easily.

Compare that with transportation that requires a specific formulation of gas and *maybe* ethanol. It's not like you can just switch to solar should gas spike to $9/gallon. I have much the same problem with natural gas heat. Should natural gas go up 10x in price, I'd have to do a complete retrofit of my furnace to survive the Minnesota winter. As a result, at some point, I'll be putting in a hybrid furnace that is both electric heat and natural gas, where it can be switched. I will then be able to use whichever heating method is most efficient and cheapest at any given point.

This is the big benefit to the current crop of hybrids and experimental electric cars. I don't believe that we'll be driving gas/electric hybrids 30 years from now. However, they'll be a critical stepping stone on the path to what we really *will* be driving then. These hybrid solutions give us the bridge to those future implementations.