Full article (LONG): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/03/lost-history-electric-car- future-transport
or https://v.gd/44r42X Highly condensed excerpts: In the 1890s ... Horse-drawn vehicles had been in use for thousands of years, and it was hard to imagine life without them. But ... the drawbacks of using horses in densely populated cities were becoming ever more apparent. In particular, the accumulation of horse manure on the streets, and the associated stench, were impossible to miss ... To advocates of a newly emerging technology, the solution seemed obvious: get rid of horses and replace them with self-propelling motor vehicles, known at the time as horseless carriages ... this transition has been cited as evidence of the power of innovation ... it should instead be seen as a cautionary tale in the other direction: that what looks like a quick fix today may well end up having far-reaching and unintended consequences tomorrow ... ... in doing away with one set of environmental problems, cars introduced a whole set of new ones. The pollutants they emit are harder to see than horse manure, but are no less problematic ... Today, electric cars, charged using renewable energy, are seen as the logical way to address these concerns. But the debate about the merits of electric cars turns out to be as old as the automobile itself ... The failure of electric vehicles in the early 20th century, and the emergence of the internal combustion engine as the dominant form of propulsion, had a lot to do with liquid fuel providing far more energy per unit mass than a lead-acid battery can. But the explanation is not purely technical. It also has a psychological component. Buyers of private cars, then as now, did not want to feel limited by the range of an electric vehicle´s battery, and the uncertainty of being able to recharge it ... Lithium-ion batteries have made the switch to electric cars possible ... But it would not address other problems associated with cars, such as traffic congestion, road deaths or the inherent inefficiency of using a one- tonne vehicle to move one person to the shops ... The supply of lithium and cobalt needed to make batteries, and of the "rare earth" elements need to make electric motors, are already raising environmental and geopolitical questions ... The future of urban transport will not be based on a single technology, but on a diverse mixture of transport systems, knitted together by smartphone technology ... David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ Address messages to ev@lists.evdl.org No other addresses in TO and CC fields UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/ LIST INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
