The only practical thing with batteries used in electric car atm would be instead of charging your car you exchange the batteries for charged ones at a petrol station. Otherwise you will be charging for hours.


Maybe one day when they can be charged quicker and last longer that will be an option to charge your own car.

I agree that hydrogen fuel cells will be the next thing. There is also a guy who was trying to cure cancer who accidentally discovered you can burn salt water. Another potential source.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk

Im with the sleepin with the oil company camp. Lets examine the auto industry. The oil companies tell american auto makers hey build gas guzzlers invest in our stock and well all make money. Then along comes japan with gas efficient cars and detroit stuck holding the bag.

Why are american cars more efficient in foreign countries than in america? It's all about the oil companies. When they bailed out the car manufactures I said what they should have done was got rid of the oil subsidies $15 billion. Thats half the $30 billion they receive.

If electric cars are viable what would stop a start-up company from producing these cars and growing rapidly?

There is no grand conspiracy against the electric car, the problem is that (while the technology behind them has advanced dramatically over the past couple of decades) batteries are an inadequate way to hold a significant amount of power in a cost effective way. If people were willing to take out a 6 figure mortgage on the battery of their car we could (probably) all have fantastic electric cars today, but if you want to buy a vehicle that is feature rich for less than $45,000 an electric vehicle is simply not an option.

nah this doesn't have to be true. like i said in my post before here in germany we have many different models now and one is to charge the batteie 80% and this takes like 20-30 minutes atm. i bet this can get even fater in the next years. it's just not possible to charge it to 100% the batteries can't handle that atm.

because we have to pay three times more for fuel here because of taxes. if they would try to sell us your cars we couldn't drive to work anymore so we don't buy them that's why they don't sell the same cars here which they sell in usa. just look at your streets and our streets which cars do you drive and which do we drive? we don't drive american cars, only cars we drive here from america are some ford models or cars from companies for example gm owns.  like opel, which, i believe, noone can buy in usa.. we don't buy ford suvs or trucks here.

and if we have enough money for fuel then we buy the big and expensive european models from mercedes, porsche and so on. american car manufacturers would destroy themselve trying to sell all the cars they sell in usa. rich people here wouldn't buy these models because of expensive mercedes etc. and "normal" people can't afford the fuel for these models. they aren't expensive so we could buy them like you but like you said they need a lot fuel and that's the difference for you and us.

Electric cars aren't the long term solution to gasoline IMO...I see the future as hydrogen power i.e. the Honda Clarity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_FCX_Clarity

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe so using it to power cars makes more sense than plugging them into a wall and then being able to go 100 kilometres and needing another 10 hour charge.

Isn't the problem with hydrogen though it's explosive nature?

I mean if you think a engine full of gasoline explosion is huge.....a engine full of hydrgoen exploding is serious buisness.

If you want an answer to this Conspiracy Theory search the drill society.

The hydrogen isn't exploded in that type of energy production. The only danger (apart from the normal ones of high speed movemenr you get with any vehicle) is that instead of a fuel tank you have highly compressed hydrogen gas, but safety measures can be put in place to avoid explosion in the case of extreme heat for example (if you heat the compressed gas it would put more pressure on the container and maybe explode, but with heat sensors i'd imagine if a car gets caught in a fire somehow there could be valves that let the hydrogen out to relieve pressure, and I think it would then just burn up slowly) compare that to petroleum which is used because it combusts readily, I would say it's actually a safer method of power.

EDIT: the background was white in this pic, so you could see there is a wire going through the 3 yellow points and the light bulb. It's from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Proton_exchange_membrane_fuel_cells

I was more refering if one was to get into a collsion, but I think I get your point. :)