The Electric Vehicle

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The Electric Vehicle

The technology of electric vehicles has been around since the turn of the nineteenth century but faded as the gasoline powered engine took the spotlight. Now the future of electric vehicles is very bright. Their impacts are very significant ranging from economic, to new technology that can be applied elsewhere, to most importantly, the environment. Ford and GM, through its Saturn plant, have already begun production on their own version of the electric vehicle and have made them available to the public. In 1998 California plans to have one percent of its major auto makers sell electric vehicles and other states have looked into the same possibility, mainly Massachusetts and New York. Imagine driving a quieter, cleaner car with the windows down letting the clean pollution free air flow throughout the car, sound appealing? Production of the ever advancing technological electric vehicle can make it happen!

Statement of Problem

The problem of this study was to research the development and impacts of the electric vehicle. At the turn of the 19th Century when automobiles were new, electric vehicles outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles. The problem for the electric car was that electric battery technology did not improve nearly as fast as gasoline technology and by 1910 the interest in the development of the electric vehicle had all but ceased (Sedgwick 1996). Electric vehicles made a surge back onto the national scene because of the oil crisis of the late seventies and the early eighties, but nterest soon dropped however, because the crisis was soon solved. Today the current surge of interest in electric vehicles replacing the internal combustion engine, or ICE, is due strictly to one concern, air quality. The world’s population is booming and cars are polluting the world’s cities, dumping large amounts of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and consuming vast quantities of petroleum (Sperling 1995). Now is the time for the solution, the electric car.

Development of the Technology

California single handedly pushed the automotive industry into developing the electric vehicle to its fullest capacity by instituting, in 1990, the zero-emission vehicle mandate, or ZEV. It requires that a specified manufacturer’s sales consist of ZEV’s. The ZEV mandate may be the single most important e...

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One main question that I found in researching the ZEV mandate was what if the auto makers qualifying for this mandate do not meet the standards because they do not have a perfected model that can be released to the public? Are they going to be fined, or will they not be allowed to sell their vehicles in California? Perhaps a solution to this question would be some type of agreement between those companies, that must meet the ZEV mandate that would allow companies to gain access to certain EV technology that will help them in developing their own model.

Works Cited

Doctors, R. (n.d./1996). A system approach to batter powere vehicles. http://www.west.bnet/~rondoc/evs.html

Moore, Taylor. (1996). The road ahead for EV batteries. EPRI Journal, 21 (2), 6-16.

Sedgwick, David. (1996 December 30). Entrepreneur prepares to zoom into market forEV batteries. Automotive News, 15-20.

Sperling, Daniel. (1995). Future Drive. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Yamaguchi, Jack. (1996, July). Honda and Toyota enter the electric vehicle market. Automotive Engineering, 28-34.

(n.c./1996). Ford Motor Company: Electric vehicles. http://www.ford.com/electricvehicle/info.html

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