How green are electric vehicles?
Believe it or not, if you had been walking through Manhattan in 1900, there is a good chance you would have seen an electric car. Roughly one third of cars on the road in New York back then were electric, while the city’s taxi fleet had 30 electric vehicles (EVs). It was to be a brief heyday.
It was Henry Ford’s Model T – first produced in 1908 – that signalled the beginning of the end of the electric car. Suddenly, petrol-fuelled cars were relatively affordable and, thanks to Ford’s pioneering use of the production line, ubiquitous.
Improved roads and cheaper petrol prices saw the electric car all but disappear by the mid-1930s, and it wasn’t until the 1970s – amid soaring oil prices and gasoline prices – that the potential of EVs began to be seriously considered again. [Read more…] about Electric Future: Stalled car revolution
