The Editor's Blog

The Electric Hot Rod?

Holding the future hostage to an outdated mindset —

It’s very frustrating. There’s a lot of media attention being given to the very real and exciting electric cars now finally appearing on the consumer market and that’s a good thing. But every time I see an article or a news story about an electric car somebody always starts going on about how slow the electric car will be compared to what we drive today.

It seems people always insist on comparing the performance of each new electric vehicle that comes along to the old V-8 gas-guzzling race track ‘performance standards’ set back in the cheap gas heyday of the 1960s and early 1970s.

This is an irrational, regressive and even dangerous comparison to make. The idea that an electric car really isn’t going to be worth much until it performs like the gasoline vehicles we spent 100 years developing and perfecting is last-century thinking at its worst. I mean, even if they could make one with that kind of so-called ‘performance’ that did not cost $60,000 or more, why is that a goal we should even be striving for these days?

Now don’t mistake me for a car-hating freak. I *love* my 1968 Mustang with its rumbling 351 V-8 engine. But I only drive it now on the rarest of occasions. It’s an antique from a bygone era and as nostalgic as I feel about it, I do NOT want the electric car I’ll be buying someday to be modeled after it, or cater to the mindset that created it in the first place. That was then. This is now. Let’s move on.

We are in a new century, and an extra 4 billion people have come on board since the muscle car days when those zero-to-sixty ‘performance standards’ were programmed into everyone’s head as somehow the way cars are supposed to be. But as a society we now need to adopt a new mindset for the new world situation. Actually, we won’t really have a choice about that — a new mindset will be thrust upon us whether we want to adopt it or not. There are 7 billion people now, but in just ten more years there will be 8 billion people living here (!) It won’t matter what kind of fuel we are using in our personal vehicles — strict conservation of ALL resources (even manufactured ones like electricity and hydrogen) will be mandatory.

The electricity which electric cars “burn” is not free in terms of cost or consequences to our world. It does not appear by magic out of the wall outlets in our homes. It must be generated somehow and so it remains a valuable resource — something we need to treat with respect and a conscious attitude of conservation.

Even solar, wind and water-generated electricity carry some cost in terms of resources used to create power. You have to consume a lot of aluminum, steel, plastics, chemicals, electronics and other materials — plus use energy  — in order to manufacture, ship and install the devices to capture those ‘free’ alternative energy sources. Although that cost is far more reasonable that what we have been paying to burn gasoline, the fact remains that how we use any resources must now be considered far more carefully and prudently than we have in the past. All of the casual, wasteful practices we acquired during the last century will have to be put away, including the purely psychological need for excessive speed in our personal vehicles.

Our new ‘performance standard’ must be based on something more responsible than how fast a car can go from zero to sixty and what its top cruising speed is. I just don’t see how the personal vehicles for all of our billions can deliver a truly acceptable resource consumption curve at top speeds much more than 60 mph. People are just going to have to accept this sort of limitation and social responsibility as the price of living in an overpopulated world. But seriously… if you stop and think about it without emotion… 60 miles per hour is plenty fast enough for a personal vehicle.

Sure, today the idea of driving “only” 60 mph seems terribly sluggish and even dangerously impractical on our absurdly fast-driving super highways — but that is only because everyone else on the road is going so fast. If everyone were also doing 60 mph, then that speed would soon feel as ‘natural’ to us as it does to go blasting down the road at 80 or 90 mph today.

In fact, why do we have to wait until we’re all driving electric cars to readjust our ‘performance standard’ to a more responsible level of speed and fuel consumption?

Putting into effect a worldwide agreement to limit driving speeds to 60 mph would not only save tremendous amounts of crude oil, but would cut way back on greenhouse gas emissions and also save quite a few lives. And those are benefits that would not take years or decades to achieve like so many other green initiatives and  proposals — those benefits could be achieved tomorrow with the stroke of a few pens. It would not require us to change our existing vehicles or spend billions on any mega-projects. All we need to do is just back off on the old gas pedal a little bit. How hard is that?

— Jim Beacon

Filed Under: Conservation, Electric Cars, Hybrid Cars, The Green Mindset, The Politics of Green, Transportation