WE killed the electric car

In class on Tuesday we watched Who Killed the Electric Car, which I have to admit, was more interesting than I had anticipated. The movie was about the introduction of the electric car. It seemed pretty fantastic. It didn't run on gas or oil, it was cleaner for the environment, it didn't cost as much to repair, and it had enough charge in it for a normal day's worth of commute. It had a lot of perks, but it wasn't perfect. It didn't charge instantaneously, which can be nerve wracking to someone who's used to being able to fuel their car as quickly as they can type in their pin number. It also wasn't able to run for hundreds of miles on a single charge. The electric cars that we learned about in the movie got anywhere from 60 to 120 miles per charge, and for some people - that's just not practical.



I wanted to see what electric cars look like now in comparison to what we saw in the movie from 2006. The Model S, by Tesla Motors is a nice looking SUV that runs on energy alone, and it gets 265 miles per charge. That would almost get me back to Massachusetts, which is 306 miles away, and takes more than one tank of gas. It has zero carbon emissions and can get from 0 to 60 in four seconds. It seems like a no brainer, but unfortunately it's really expensive. They advertise its monthly price instead of the full price, and they calculate it as "after gas savings". That was a bit of a red flag for me. When I looked into it more, I found that it is actually a $62,000 - $72,000 car. Now, I'm not the best when it comes to car prices. I nearly had a stroke when my boyfriend paid $10,000 for a 2011 with practically no miles on it. For someone who has 76 cents in their bank account, $70,000 for a car seems like an outrageous purchase. At prices like this, I'll never be able to drive an electric car. (although, I was looking for the most updated with the highest miles per charge, there could be cheaper cars out there.)


Let's pretend it's a perfect world, and money isn't an issue, and everyone can afford an electric car - what would happen to the world? There's the obvious perk that we wouldn't be dependent on the middle east for fuel, but what else? What about all those jobs? What about the gas station owners and the auto mechanics out there? Even if they changed gas stations to charging stations, there wouldn't need to be nearly as many. While I can definitely see the positive things that electric cars would do for the world, I also worry about what would happen to the already rough economy. 






A big portion of the movie was about politics and having the wrong people in the right places so that they could maintain control over the auto and fuel industries, and that is positively infuriating - we know what the problem is and we know how to fix it but we pick people to make decisions for us who won't change it. There's definitely a feeling of hopelessness about it.






I think about the future a lot. I think about how our generation is going to be portrayed in history books. I wonder if we're going to go down in history as the smartest and most selfish fools who ever lived, or the people who saved the world.