Alternative Transportation: The Electric Car

Gasoline powered cars are everywhere, with 800 million of them in 2008 (Seamans), it would be hard for the civilized world to give the car up for an alternative mode of transportation. The internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) provides transportation to millions everyday, someday though the petroleum supplies will run dry and an alternative will need to be found. If we as a society wait until that day to find the alternative, said alternative will be costly and probably inefficient. Electric cars have skulked in the shadows, neglected and abused, but soon that all will change.

Electric car was first invented in 1834 by Thomas Davenport (Helmers), though not a practical mode of transportation at the time, it was a small-scale model that drove around a homemade track. The car was powered by the first DC electric motor. The electric car was shunted to the background when Henry Ford mistakenly chose the internal combustion engine vehicle over the battery electric vehicle to put into mass production. At the time of the model A being put into production, three quarters of all cars on the road were rightfully electric.

It is estimated that four million years of life are lost every year in the European Union alone due to the high pollution levels cause by conventional petroleum powered vehicles. This is because twenty-five percent of the EU population live within five hundred meters of a motorway carrying in excess of three million cars each year. (Helmers) These health problems need to be addressed as health care costs are becoming more expensive each year.

Each year an increasing number of cars are being produced, and due to new materials and manufacturing techniques these new cars are lasting longer than ever before leading to...

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...anode can be made from a silicon or graphite film (Landi). As the film degrades the ability to release the stored energy from the battery also deteriorates, leading ultimately to a dead battery that will no longer charge. As lithium batteries are expensive, and an electric car uses many, the cost of replacing all of them upon wearing out is a turnoff to buyers. Enough batteries to power a Smart car for one hundred kilometers costs roughly seven thousand USD (Helmers), a comparison with stop at the fuel station is enough to deter even the most ecominded. By replacing this film with particles partly solves the deterioration problem. The battery will still deteriorate, albeit over a longer period of time. When nanotubes are put under the stress of the charging and discharging of a battery, they grow wider and taller, increasing their contact with the lithium over time.