I had the chance to talk energy issues a lot last summer, and I always said that electric cars would become viable as soon as they could drive several hundred miles, and recharge in the time you would normally take to gas up a rest stop; somewhere around 15 minutes. If you can't take your electric car away from home, and then have to plug it in for 12 hours, you don't get the indepedence that owning a car brings.
It appears MIT students have built a car that they can recharge in 11 minutes.
It appears MIT students have built a car that they can recharge in 11 minutes.
The car's range is 320 kilometers, or about 200 miles. I can get about 350 miles on a tank in my car, so we're getting into the right neighborhood. The major obstacles remain building recharging stations powerful enough to get that much juice into the car that quickly, establishing broad standards for the recharging infrastructure, and the many growing pains of getting from prototype to production. Let's hope the federal government doesn't decide to take over electric car development, or we'll never get them on the road.
And of course there's the question of how to generate the electricity that would be fueling the fleet of battery-operated automobiles. Nuclear power anyone?
Everyone thinks that electric vehicles are the silver bullet to solve the "global warming crisis." But where do people think electricity comes from? Much of it is produced by burning coal.
ReplyDeleteI admit, though, this is a pretty cool project. And if we could get some nuclear plants up and running to produce the electricity (love your suggestion), I think it might have some viability.