Are You Driving An Electric Car?

The future is here and the Jetsons had it wrong. We don’t have personal robots to make dinner, we don’t have a tube that puts our clothes on and we don’t have our electric car. You can maybe see not having the personal jetpacks, but having a car that runs on electricity doesn’t seem like it should be that big of a deal. And yet, here we are, not driving electric cars.

There are good, or at least understandable, reasons for this. The more conspiracy minded among us tend to think that the reason we don’t have electric cars is because the car manufacturers are in cahoots with the oil companies, who, obviously, would have a lot to lose if we stopped using gas to run our cars. Of course, they’d probably be the ones supplying the fuel for power generation.

But there are two pretty good reasons that electric cars aren’t commonplace today. The first is that, oil company conspiracies not withstanding, there’s never been a good compelling reason for cars companies to put them into mass production. There needs to be an effective support system for that sort of thing, and since gas became popular first, no such structure exists.

The other reason is very practical. Batteries are heavy. No, really. Cars require a lot of power to move their mass, and for a long time, having a battery that size was a major problem, especially one with a big enough range to actually be practical for driving around with.

Progress is being made in the battery department, and other ways of storing energy, like flywheels, are being investigated. There is a need for batteries that are small, rechargeable, and can go long, long periods with about replaced. Likewise, there’s a need for electric motors that are small and light enough to be practical.

Having said all that, electric cars do exist. There is a fairly substantial hobbyist population out there who are converting regular production cars into electric vehicles, and in many ways this is the vanguard of future development.

Likewise, a few companies are making electric cars. One of the most notable is the Tesla Roadster, a fully electric sports car. The Tesla can go about a hundred miles on a full charge, can go from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds, and is a pretty significant advance in electric car technology. It’s pretty spiffy looking, too.

If you change the amount you need to spend on recharging the batteries of the electric car into a miles per gallon kind of statistic, most of them get what would be well over 200 miles to the gallon. The aforementioned Tesla Roadster, for example, gets the equivalent of 135 miles to the gallon.

So where is your electric car? The same place it’s always been – the future. But nowadays, that future might be right around the corner.