Electric cars offer buyers a badge of immediate environmental respect.
Buy one and you can say to hell with Abu Dhabi’s $90 a barrel Murban Light Crude. But unless some kind of electronic replacement is installed, electric cars will never have anything.
decent sound
The entire line, no matter the manufacturer, will never offer the gruff response of a Mopar, the refined rumble of a GM Corvette V8, or even the unbridled backlash of an upgraded tuner. The really fast electrics let out a kind of whine when you hit the throttle, but I prefer the twin-carb Super Beetle in my backyard. That air-chilled meat-and-potatoes roar alerts my dogs to my arrival a block from home.
And the electric ones have a funky look.
These concepts cross my mind as the electric car finally crosses the threshold into the arms of Joe Consumer. Let the wedding begin. Whether the marriage will be happy or fall apart after a rough weekend in Vegas, no one knows.
Boulder, Colo.-based Pike Research said the union will be far from happy with consumers having to take the bad times with the good if they expect it to work. The 14-page study released this week said most people who drive electric vehicles won’t own them but instead drive a fleet car and predicted the media is likely to overreact when someone somewhere has a bad experience with electric vehicles.
The rest of Pike’s 10 predictions were the development of setbacks in charging times, the arrival of start-stop technology (at traffic lights to save energy), idling charging stations, the appearance of vehicles with cells of fuel, advanced battery development, range anxiety becoming more myth than reality, electric two-wheelers outselling cars, and a drop in the price of electrical components.
“Electric two-wheelers, including bicycles, scooters and motorcycles, constitute a huge global market that will continue to dwarf electric passenger vehicles for the foreseeable future,” senior analyst John Gartner and Pike president Clint Wheelock wrote.
After reviewing their findings, I tried to imagine what the roads will be like by 2015 when Gartner and Wheelock say annual electric vehicle sales will exceed 300,000 units. Certainly more diverse.
But the roads may have some hydrogen powered cars and other alternative fuel vehicles. Natural gas may become a decent competitor when home drillers find a measurable way to avoid disturbing underground aquifers with new fractal extraction techniques.
Let’s hope the automotive designers stop making cars for Hello Kitty and produce something noteworthy. Although I must admit that Camaro, Mustang and Challenger meet the freshness requirements. But they are supposed to.
Most models from American and Japanese manufacturers (I mean gas burners) look pretty vanilla in an oddly rounded way. I just hope they take a lesson from Tesla and the Sigma kit-car when they produce the next generation of electrics.
Go for just a pinch of awesomeness. Then, along with the eco-badge, EV owners can retain a bit of respect from their fossil fuel purist brethren.