[Peakoil] electric cars should drive our dreams...

[Keith Thomas]

This is fantasy, pure fantasy. I never thought I'd see such pie-in-the-sky nonsense coming from Beyond Zero Emissions. 

I have added below a couple of clips from James Kunstler which, I hope, will cool down the overheating Matthew Wright.
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Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
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On 15/01/2011, at 2:13 PM, Jenny Goldie wrote:

http://www.theage.com.au/business/electric-cars-should-drive-our-dreams-20110113-19pv7.html
Electric cars should drive our dreams

Matthew Wright

January 14, 2011
The Australian car industry faces a big drop in demand.

... The upward trend in electric vehicle production and demand - which will increase along with oil prices - is the key to future-proofing the Australian car industry.

The first Chevy Volt electric vehicles rolled off GM assembly lines in Michigan last month. The US car maker has made the electric vehicle (EV) a key plank in renewing its brand.

....If we want to avoid being left with an increasingly weak car industry, we have to move ahead with manufacturing pure electric and plug-in hybrid electric cars in Australia.

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From 2 August 2010:

I'd like to know how many Americans believe that electric cars run on virtually free energy (but I don't have pollsters on my payroll). I'd bet a lot of them do, including President Obama. Sorry to rain on this uplifting parade. At best, such a car fleet would run on coal -- that is coal-fired electric power plants -- but even that is a ridiculous fantasy when you actually pencil-out the details. Not to mention that a nation full of people with dwindling or vanishing incomes won't be in a position to fork over forty-grand for one of those new pseudo "green" vehicles. Also not to mention -- wait for it -- that due to rapidly vanishing capital there will be far fewer car loans available. The only thing growing in this part of the picture is the number of Americans who cannot possibly qualify for a car loan under normal terms that would require regular repayment of interest-and-principal. (Plenty of Americans qualify for the new "innovative" kind of loan -- the kind that you never have to make payments on, but for the moment, the banks are choking to death on them, so additional approvals may lag for a time.)

It's instructive that so much current hoopla about economic growth revolves around the issue of cars. For, if anything, reality is telling us very clearly that the mass motoring paradigm is near its end. Our determination to prop it up at all costs, despite the grave impairments of available capital and energy resources is a symptom of our detachment from reality. It's also a fine illustration of the psychology of previous investment, which prompts a desperate society to squander its scarce remaining resources on the very things that are putting it out of business.

We don't need more highways. We're about to find out that we don't have the money to keep up regular repairs on the highways we already have. The hundreds of millions of "stimulus" dollars that President Obama flung into "shovel-ready" highway projects was among the more tragically dumb mistakes he made early on, and he has apparently learned nothing along these lines since then.

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From 13 July 2009

      A genuine reorganization of the US economy seems beyond the ken not just of all US politicians but of the entire US news media and business leadership. A wonderful example last week was the idiotic press conference by General Motors marketing chief, Bob Lutz, who thinks he can revive the American Dream with electric cars. (By the way, this is pretty much the same thinking I encountered at the Aspen Environmental Forum among the Green celebrities.)

     From a purely practical standpoint, the electric car is absurd.  If they were produced on a mass basis, they would crash the electric grid -- assuming that the masses could afford to buy them, which assumes a lot. We simply don't have the electric generating capacity to run even one-quarter of the current car fleet on volts, and building the necessary nuclear or coal-fired power plants in five years is also an absurdity. (Don't expect wind, solar, biomass, or anything else to pick up the slack.) If electric cars were produced as just a niche product for the elite (e.g. Goldman Sachs employees), they would soon provoke the resentment of the non-elite left to the mercy of the oil markets.

     Anyway, America's motoring dilemma has gone beyond the issue of how we power the cars -- and even beyond the insanity of blindly maintaining our extreme car dependency per se.  The continuation of Happy Motoring now hinges on two other big quandaries: 1. the likelihood that there will be far less capital available for car loans, and 2.) the likelihood that there will be far less government money for road maintenance. The problem of Peak Oil -- and the prospect of price-jackings and shortages -- is just the cherry on top.

     By the way, for practical purposes Bob Lutz of GM is an employee of the US taxpayers now, since the US owns 60 percent of the "new" General Motors, so he must be considered a spokesman for national policy. Since a transformation of the US car fleet to electric vehicles is absurd, what would be an appropriate response to profound economic contraction? How about walkable communities connected by public transit?  Why is that not a focus of the "new" General Motors?  In 1941 the company made the transformation from cars to armaments in a matter of months; why can't it produce the rolling stock for a renewed passenger rail system?  Or trams?  Is this not enough of a crisis?

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