Building on the popular Focus chassis, Ford has introduced a new all-electric vehicle at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The company stated the vehicle would have performance similar to, or better than, the Nissan Leaf, another all-electric platform.
Detroit Lives. At least for now.
My solutions video from last year explained how plug in hybrid and electric vehicles are an important part of the climate solution.
“This video is not available in your country.”
This one is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hvr5rddyE
Heck yeah!
Ford surprised me when I heard about the EV Focus.
I thought getting a Leaf would be an easy choice… it may not be so easy if this Focus comes through. I may have to wait a bit.
If you think that the carbon footprint of cars are their only problem, you’ve been seriously mislead.
They create large amounts of carbon and waste in their construction. They contain many carcinogens and most of the fluids they use are toxic. Cars kill 43,000 people a year and thats only counting accidents. They promote urban sprawl. They strand our youth and elderly and are even more harmful to the poor. Don’t have a job? Well, you can’t afford a car. Don’t have a car? Well, how do you get to work? Public transit? Too bad theres no funding for it. Construction, maintenance and operation of public transit creates far more jobs than the automobile system, yet we refer to one as an investment and the other as subsidized. Guess which is which. We spend enormous amounts of money on the auto infrastructure. Roads construction, repair and expansion; most people don’t realize how expensive parking has become. Lets not forget about the tax dollars we spend on peace keeping and wars in oil producing countries. Urban sprawl causes us to focus on horizontal infrastructure rather than our vertical infrastructure. We can’t properly fund our schools because we have to spend so much money transporting kids through suburban hell. Our “freeway” system divides communities and ecosystem; destroying both. It has destroyed our cities and replaced them with the worst built environment that humans have ever created: suburbia. People really need to get their hands on “Asphalt Nation” by Jane Holtz Kay. The personal Automobile is the worst environmental, economical and social disaster that humans have ever created.
While much (all?) of that is true, we’re stuck in an imperfect situation where many people are totally dependent on their cars – and many others simply refuse to forego the luxury. So, EVs are a step in the right direction towards reducing carbon pollution that we desperately need.
Hopefully town planners are waking up to the costs / benefits of designing for people instead of the almighty motor car, but that is a very slow process of moving people towards mass transit, cycling, walking, etc.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t make more efficient cars. I think that we should embrace EVs as much as we can, but this country would be much better off if 10 percent of people owned cars and the rest rented occasionally to go where public transit doesn’t.
We may be able to get totally fossil free cars in 30 years, but that doesn’t mean that we should shoot for people not needing them by a hundred years.
The problem is the built environment is much harder to change.
We may be able to get totally fossil free cars in 30 years, but that doesn’t mean that we **shouldn’t** shoot for people not needing them by a hundred years.
typo, sorry
even assuming an Apollo program in the US to build rail transit, which seems unlikely at this moment, we still are dependent on cars for the forseeable future.
We have to make them work the best we can, which means plug ins, smart grid, energy storage, etc
If we as a species intend to keep progressing technologically and maintain a similar level of mobility and speed in our daily lives, cars will be needed.
Granted, they should play a significantly smaller role in our lives. With a proper public transit system, we could easily travel between and within cities via trains, buses and public bicycle rentals. High speed electric trains powered by renewable energy would be a big winner.
But, the occasional trip to the boonies to visit grandma or the trip from the train station to a national park may be neatly filled by the electric car. With a properly interconnected transit system and city organization, these should be the only examples where a car would be preferable.
Aside from ground transportation, a liquid fuel solution may be necessary for heavy machinery and airplanes if electric drive is not feasible for those applications (likely).
I like Steve Chu’s use of “Sputnik moment” to describe the challenge we need to take up in order to re-organize America (and the world) into a sustainable civilization.