Have You Joined Conservatives For OPEC?

(aka Volt bashing right wingers)

by Brian of London (March 2012)

One statistic: oil accounts for 95% of all transport power in the USA. It only accounts for less than 2% of electricity generation. [Source: James Woolsey in WSJ April 2010].

So while it fell to Honda and Toyota to come up with and successfully commercialise the hybrid idea of electric and gasoline working together, it took a lot longer for the US auto industry to be dragged into competition.

However, the Volt carries a penalty for having two power sources. It needs to do this because there has been almost zero investment in infrastructure for anything except oil transport. How many mobile phones were sold before someone sank millions into a network of cell towers?

And to load the Chevy bailout money onto the first few thousand Volts off the production line is creative accounting of the worst kind. The latest smear? A disconnected, parked Tesla electric sports car has a completely unusable battery. Tesla warned early drivers specifically about this and Nissan says it’s never happened to any of their 20,000 cars, but suddenly it is a big story for Fox. It’s really just a case of a new technology needing new care: we all know not to drive when the oil warning light comes on but we don’t know about the extremes of Lithium battery chemistry.

I’ve written already about the Better Place battery switching network about to go online in Israel: that’s the kind of thinking we need and it’s outside the box Big Oil has allowed car companies to play in. That is also why it’s progress is hugely important and I suspect why it’s been privately funded. Better Place crucially separates the battery from the car because it allows owners to lease the biggest part of their car that will wear out. And when batteries improve or cheapen, existing owners gain the benefit without worrying that their own batteries are depreciating very quickly.

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