Seven reasons why I love electric cars

CleanTechnica

Not sure what you think about electric cars? Not sure if they’re awesome or meh? I think you can tell from the title what I think. There are probably plenty more reasons than this, but these are the big reasons (for me) to love electric cars:

1. Electric cars are better for the environment (and thus, your health). Almost anywhere they charge, electric cars are better for the climate, air quality, and other key facets of the environment. Given that we all rely on a healthy environment to be healthy and live a high quality of life ourselves, this is a huge (often underrated) win for us.

2. Electric cars cut our reliance on oil from foreign countries that don’t like us. US oil production peaked decades ago, and it has peaked in many other developed countries as well — it seems quite likely that it has even peaked globally. For now, though, oil use in the US (and many other countries) is dependent on imported oil (about $1 billion a day) from quite unstable and US-unfriendly nations. From the link above: “Ten of the countries who we import a lot of oil from are also on the State Department’s Travel Warning list: Algeria, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.”3. Electric cars can be hooked up to solar panels! If you wanted to make your electric car even a lot greener than the standard, just hook your house up to some solar panels and charge your car at home as much as possible! Of course, there are also public charging stations hooked up to solar panels in some places. And renewable energy is growing fast across the country and the world in any case, making charging of electric cars cleaner and cleaner.

4. Electric cars have some serious torque. If you like the thrill of getting off the line super fast, an electric car is for you. Electric cars have constant torque. Even an old Datsun can become the world’s fastest car with a good electric setup — check out the White Zombie for proof.

5. Electric cars have relatively stable (and super low) fuel costs. Compared to the wicked price swings of oil, electricity prices are super stable. And again, as noted above, if you go solar and go electric (for your car), your situation is even more stable. (That is, your fuel costs are $0 or close to $0 for decades.) And those relatively stable fuel costs, pretty much anywhere you charge, are also considerably lower than the fuel costs of a gasoline-powered vehicle.

6. Electric cars are super quite. Unlike the roar of gasoline engines, electric cars are super silent. Noise pollution, especially from cars, is really a big stressor on society today. But if we were all driving electric cars, that could be nearly eliminated. (For safety reasons, they need to make a bit of noise, but that noise is added and can be chosen, so it doesn’t have to be so… noisy.)

7. Electric cars are cheaper! Simply with the fuel cost savings, many electric cars are cheaper than your standard gasoline-powered car. Of course, plenty of factors come into play here to determine such comparisons — length of ownership, differences in gasoline and electricity costs where you live and drive, how efficiently you drive, etc — but this is the case overall. Notably, though, if you also factor in health costs (a little harder to do, but worth doing), the scale is even further tipped towards electric cars (in a good way).

What do you think of those 7 reasons? More you’d like to add?

Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1qhIW) – Reproduced with permission.