The Future of Cars is Electric

Tesla Motors, an electric car startup company, just published a pretty cool blog post on the future of electric cars.  Granted, you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt since it is coming from an electric car company, but the facts they present are great:

[Popular Mechanics] compared the cost of a cross-country drive for each of the cars, all of similar size. The benchmark drive cost is $212 in a Honda Civic. The VW Diesel Golf came close at $230. E85 ethanol (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) came in at $425; methanol cost $619; the hydrogen fuel cell drive cost a whopping $804! Compressed Natural Gas looked pretty good at $110. And the electric car? $60. And the article wasn’t even about electric cars…

Holy cow!  Driving across the country for $60 in fuel costs!  That’s incredible!  Of course, I will have to see it to believe it, but I like what I’m hearing so far.

This article also responds to the lame criticism that so many people make about electric cars: “the energy has to come from somewhere, so they’re not saving the environment.”  Here’s what Tesla Motors had to say (and I agree, minus the advocacy for coal power plants):

Note, by the way, that we can put a million solar panels on our roofs, we can cover the coastlines with windmills, we can invent amazing tide-powered generators, or clean nuclear power plants, and we will not reduce our dependence on oil by one drop unless we can use that electricity to power cars. Why? Because we don’t use oil to make electricity, so all those cool electric generating technologies do not offset our oil consumption. The fact is that the vast majority of our oil consumption is used for transportation. Trains, planes, and automobiles, folks.

Anyways, I won’t drag this post out too much, but please check out this article, it’s worth a good read.