Like your cell phone? How about a cell car?
What’s a “cell car” you ask? Well, first of all, it doesn’t really exist yet—but it’s on the drawing board. Like a cell phone, it’s a car that would be battery powered instead of combustible fuel powered. Big deal—we know there are already battery powered cars out there—what’s the difference? The major difference is, again like a cell phone, the car could be free with the commitment to a six-year service contract or longer.
Until recently, the resistance to the mass production of electric vehicles (EVs) has been the excuse that there are no batteries on the market that can last through ten years of recharging or go long distances. Without those batteries, the major auto manufacturers explain, there’s not going to be a strong enough market to justify the billions of dollars necessary to convert from combustible cars to EVs.
But that argument has changed, thanks to the imminent peaking and permanent decline of oil production and the development of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. On the one hand, because of the recent flattening of oil supplies as demand continues to climb, the price of operating a combustion car is expected to continue to rise. On the other hand, due to the increased capability and safety of the new generation LiFePO4 batteries, the overall costs of buying, maintaining, and fueling EVs is now below that of combustion cars.
With those developments in mind, we now have enough incentive and technology to start mass producing electric vehicles. What we don’t have yet is a coherent plan for setting up the EV infrastructure. And what, you ask, does an EV infrastructure consist of? Good question. For the answer, we turn to Shai Agassi, who came up with the concept of the EV or cell car infrastructure (by the way, he doesn’t refer to it as a “cell car”—that’s my contribution).
Shai realized that even though most people would want to own a battery car, right now they’re afraid they would get stranded without a way of conveniently recharging.
You can’t just grab an extension cord and walk down the highway to find a place to plug in and recharge. You need to be able to recharge about anywhere you park and to find battery exchange centers on every block. And Shai specifically wants the electricity needed for all the EVs to be generated from strictly renewable sources.
He has calculated that such a national cell car infrastructure, what he calls the Electric Recharge Grid, would cost approximately $100 billion—the cost of the oil we consume in just two months in this country. For about one year’s worth of oil—$500 to $600 billion—we could additionally create enough renewable electricity to recharge all our cell cars. Once the infrastructure is in place, they can then start marketing the program just like they do in the cell phone industry. You sign up for a two-year program, you get a certain amount of battery recharging and replacing free. You sign up for a six-year program, they throw in the EV—free.
Think of the benefits of a system like this—it will: massively reduce the CO2 contribution from cars as well as coal-fired power plants; create hundreds of thousands of new, well paying American jobs; greatly reduce our unhealthy national dependency on oil; reduce or eliminate the need for America to maintain such a hugely expensive military; put cars in the hands of those who can’t now afford them, and the list goes on.
I hope you’ll take the time to go to the suggested website below and read more about the project. At least remember the concept “cell car” for now—you’ll be one of the first in the country to know about and use the term. Cool, eh?
For more information on Shai Agassi’s ideas, go to www.projectbetterplace.com. Send any questions or comments to Dr. Bob Ross at rossongco@aol.com.
August/September 2008 Contents