Electric cars - A few concerns

September 26, 2008 – 12:35 am

Seeing some recent announcements of North American car manufactures, new electric cars triggered a few concerns. Coming from a country that sells electricity to the USA, I can see that there may be a handful of countries that could handle the new rush to electric/hydrogen powered cars. But what about the other 95 per cent of the automobile consumer world. The electricity available for a direct turn around in types of cars we drive would put electricity amperage at the price of gold and the pollution created through adapting old generating technology would make the whole world look like Beijing before and after the Olympics this year.

Do not get me wrong because I too do not like paying for expensive gasoline; also I am a true believer in developing technology that improves our earth’s environment.

The auto industry is only trying to protect its investors by making a quick swing to alternative solutions and prop up sales to get back to generating a profit. The producing of the energy supply is a government issue, but hydrogen and electricity cannot be produced  in quantities predicted without creating more pollution than the current automobiles worldwide. The world is now reeling under the economic turmoil in the financial markets, yet every week we observe that big auto manufactures have a new electric/fuel-cell car to announce. Like the CAFÉ fleet regulations in the USA, a world organization needs to track the amount of available energy to the amount of the new technology cars produced.

A worldwide monitoring group that will overlooking a sector-by-sector energy produced and amount of new technology cars that can be sold. If the auto industry just keeps selling the new electric/hydrogen car without giving governments enough time to react then coal/atomic-generating systems will be the only quick fix. Although it is nice to see the consumer market warming up to these new thoughts, I believe it’s going to be a polluting nightmare and the blame will be on government not on the manufactures.

A mechanism to control the speed to new technology development has to be put in place or we will witness another debacle just like what happened to the non-regulated mortgage business. In ten years, we will have Auto manufactures sitting with millions of new cars and no means to power them or we will have a layer above the earth blocking most of the precious sunlight.

Paul Banning

pbanning@shaw.ca