Imagine a car that could go 300 miles – that’s Chicago to St. Louis – on battery power. That’s not possible today without either an assist from a gasoline-fueled engine functioning as a charger (the Chevy Volt solution) or an alternate drive provider (the Toyota Prius solution). The fact that such cars need, in effect, two engines, means that battery-powered options remain much more expensive than their purely gasoline-fueled peers, which require only a single powertrain.
“We need batteries that last longer, charge quickly and are inexpensive,” says ecologist Joe Fargione of The Nature Conservancy, an expert on the environmental impacts of biofuels, another transportation fuel alternative. “With that [electrification of cars] would be relatively simple. The rest of the technology is there.”
via Txchnologist
January 25, 2012
