Are electric vehicles (EVs) the future?

In short, NO!

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Much is being made of electric vehicles (EVs) and some make them out to be the bees knees with regards to transportation, and especially after the cheap oil is no more.

However, no one seems to consider that once the oil is “gone” there will be no way to even manufacture those cars, vans, etc., and charging them also will be a little questionable.

The future of transportation neither lies with vehicles with internal combustion engines using biofuels nor with electric vehicles. The future of transportation lies with old technology, I am afraid to say, not with new. The future lies with what we have had before the car and we best wake up to that fact and truth and rather fast.

It requires energy to extract the raw materials from which to make electric vehicles and their batteries, energy to make the vehicles and their batteries, and then some to charge the batteries and to continue charging them. That needed energy, however, may be rather short in supply.

While electric vehicles look great and cool “on paper”, so to speak, and also in reality while we have both the power to make them and the power to charge their batteries the final reality is, more than likely, going to be a different one.

We need to contemplate, and it is high time that we did, a car-less (I said car-less and not careless) future, even one without electric vehicles.

This car-less future will come to pass anyway whether we contemplate it or not and that by simple virtue of the fact that the electric car and van will simply not be affordable to most as prices will move into the Rolls Royce, Bentley and Daimler category.

Once our manufacturing capacity is reduced and diminished due to the lack of (cheap) oil and gas and the costs of everything due to the rise in the cost of fuels or lack of fuel such cars will cost more than just a small fortune and then some.

Those very prices will simply put this mode of transportation well beyond the reach of all but the richest in society. Motoring will become, once again, the (almost) exclusive reserve of the financially well endowed, as it was in the early days.

It will be back to shank's pony and the boneshaker for the rest of us and no, it won't be electric bicycles either. It will be those of the human-powered ones using pedals.

I know that I paint a rather bleak and pessimistic future as far as motoring is concerned but the facts all speak against the status quo of mass motoring, even if with electric cars. The time of the car is running out.

It is much more important that we preserve those resources required for the electric cars and other vehicles for things that we really need in the future, after oil.

© 2011