Living in a country as sparsely populated as Sweden and on top of that in the country-side, cars are pretty much necessary. Obviously, I could get by riding a bike and taking the train for longer trips - if I want to spend 4 hours per day just on transportation and waiting for trains. Despite being utterly bored most of the time I am quite fond of my spare time, and if I could afford it I would have a car.
Now, setting global warming aside, the single most important reason to not drive a car is the bloody fuel prize. Even if I won a car I wouldn't be able to keep it because I couldn't afford to fill up the tank once a month. Sweden is, I'm sorry to admit, more than a bit backwards. Yes, we have lots of water-power and a bit of wind-power and we use much less energy per capita than most industrialised countries - but let's face it: we drive around in 10-15 year old wrecks. And there really aren't any incentives to buy a new, fuel-efficient car. You pay the same road tax if you drive an ancient Volvo as if you were driving a brand new VW, and for most people the difference in price pretty much adds up to the difference in fuel costs.
So, driving an electric car would be a huge money saver. In Oslo, the government is building parking spaces reserved for electric cars - and they offer the electricity you need to charge your car for free. On top of that you're allowed to drive in the collective traffic field, cutting roughly 35 minutes off a 60 minute drive. Under those circumstances there is absolutely no reason why anybody shouldn't drive an electric car. Except for one thing...
Would you want to drive around in a thing that looks like that? I mean, come on! It looks like someone stole it from a children's ride at an amusement park. But there are actually electric cars that look good and are fun to drive, like this one, for example.
It's called Tesla and it actually outruns its petrol engined counterpart in a drag race. Small wonder, since petrol engines have an efficiency around 33%, and electric cars are at about 95%, and generally a better torque. The only problem is that the batteries runs out after about 89 kilometres of (admittedly reckless) driving. But it is after all a sports car, and what's the point of driving a sports car at 90 km/h?
Modern electric car batteries are basically a thousand or so laptop batteries stacked together and, for a car like the Tesla, weigh some 500 kg. That's why electric cars look like toys. A professor at KTH says that batteries can become 2-3 times better than they are today, but not much more. For them to get 100 or even 10 times better the technique would have to be developed in away that involves a Noble prize.
The solution seems to be a system for continuous charging, and putting up electrically charged nets over every road and sticking huge antennas on each car is not a viable option. Obviously electric cars use dynamos and even utilize the energy from braking, but that is only a fraction of the amount that the car uses. But there is, today, as we speak (figuratively) a serial produced hydrogen car. It's the Honda Clarity.
It looks like any other family car. But it runs on hydrogen. Small recap: hydrogen is the most abundant element on earth, by far. The car generates electricity by reacting hydrogen with water, and the only product is good old H2O. The only place in the world where you can drive this car is in Los Angeles (hardly surprising, which is also ironic, but that is not relevant) since that's the only place where you can buy hydrogen at gas stations. The hydrogen costs about the same as petrol, and since USA have virtually no fuel tax a rough conclusion is that despite the fact that hydrogen is hard to refine, the process is no more expensive than the process of producing petrol.
But, theoretically, there is another option. Based on my massive Physics HL knowledge of Faraday's Law I've concluded that electric cars could also be "fuelled" by induction. The road would be an electromagnetic field and cars, well - they are supposed to be moving! And just imagine how awesome it would be to describe your car with a work like "flux".
Now, setting global warming aside, the single most important reason to not drive a car is the bloody fuel prize. Even if I won a car I wouldn't be able to keep it because I couldn't afford to fill up the tank once a month. Sweden is, I'm sorry to admit, more than a bit backwards. Yes, we have lots of water-power and a bit of wind-power and we use much less energy per capita than most industrialised countries - but let's face it: we drive around in 10-15 year old wrecks. And there really aren't any incentives to buy a new, fuel-efficient car. You pay the same road tax if you drive an ancient Volvo as if you were driving a brand new VW, and for most people the difference in price pretty much adds up to the difference in fuel costs.
So, driving an electric car would be a huge money saver. In Oslo, the government is building parking spaces reserved for electric cars - and they offer the electricity you need to charge your car for free. On top of that you're allowed to drive in the collective traffic field, cutting roughly 35 minutes off a 60 minute drive. Under those circumstances there is absolutely no reason why anybody shouldn't drive an electric car. Except for one thing...
Would you want to drive around in a thing that looks like that? I mean, come on! It looks like someone stole it from a children's ride at an amusement park. But there are actually electric cars that look good and are fun to drive, like this one, for example.
It's called Tesla and it actually outruns its petrol engined counterpart in a drag race. Small wonder, since petrol engines have an efficiency around 33%, and electric cars are at about 95%, and generally a better torque. The only problem is that the batteries runs out after about 89 kilometres of (admittedly reckless) driving. But it is after all a sports car, and what's the point of driving a sports car at 90 km/h?
Modern electric car batteries are basically a thousand or so laptop batteries stacked together and, for a car like the Tesla, weigh some 500 kg. That's why electric cars look like toys. A professor at KTH says that batteries can become 2-3 times better than they are today, but not much more. For them to get 100 or even 10 times better the technique would have to be developed in away that involves a Noble prize.
The solution seems to be a system for continuous charging, and putting up electrically charged nets over every road and sticking huge antennas on each car is not a viable option. Obviously electric cars use dynamos and even utilize the energy from braking, but that is only a fraction of the amount that the car uses. But there is, today, as we speak (figuratively) a serial produced hydrogen car. It's the Honda Clarity.
It looks like any other family car. But it runs on hydrogen. Small recap: hydrogen is the most abundant element on earth, by far. The car generates electricity by reacting hydrogen with water, and the only product is good old H2O. The only place in the world where you can drive this car is in Los Angeles (hardly surprising, which is also ironic, but that is not relevant) since that's the only place where you can buy hydrogen at gas stations. The hydrogen costs about the same as petrol, and since USA have virtually no fuel tax a rough conclusion is that despite the fact that hydrogen is hard to refine, the process is no more expensive than the process of producing petrol.
But, theoretically, there is another option. Based on my massive Physics HL knowledge of Faraday's Law I've concluded that electric cars could also be "fuelled" by induction. The road would be an electromagnetic field and cars, well - they are supposed to be moving! And just imagine how awesome it would be to describe your car with a work like "flux".
