Will An Electric Car Match My Driving Needs

We have been hearing about electric cars for years but they have been rare and hard to find. Electric cars have existed since the early days of motoring but the problem of limited battery power and the weight and cost of the batteries have always prevented electrically powered vehicles becoming more common.

Modern battery development is changing the game and the increasingly high cost of gas and the prospect of it becoming ever more expensive as demand peaks while supplies dwindle makes the electric car seem a much more economical prospect in the future.

An electric car that can be quickly and easily recharged overnight with electricity provided by renewable energy resources would be a very environmentally friendly vehicle and should be very cheap to run.

There are several limitations of electric cars. While the cost per mile can work out very low when you are using an electric car the cost of the batteries makes electric cars expensive to buy.

The limited range of electric cars before they need to stop and recharge their batteries can be a huge disadvantage compared to gas powered vehicles. The typical range of the currently available electric cars is somewhere between 100 and 200 miles while a recharge may take as long as 10 hours.

This means that electric cars are very good around town and for short trips but if you plan to travel any distance you need to allow a lot of time for stops to recharge your car batteries. As the electric vehicle infrastructure develops it may become possible to drive into a garage and replace your batteries with a fully recharged slot-in battery pack just as we can change the batteries in a flashlight but until that time comes long trips in an electric car are not really a realistic proposition.

To overcome the disadvantages of pure electric cars some car companies have developed hybrid vehicles of which the most established and well known is the Toyota Prius. These vehicles have electric power but also make use of a regular gas engine to either power the car or to recharge the battery.

With a full tank of gas a hybrid electric car can match the range of more traditional gas engined cars. The basic idea is that the electric motor can be used to drive the car while the battery has enough charge but when the batteries become drained of energy the gas engine can either power the vehicle or produce electricity to recharge the batteries.

There are a variety of different hybrid electric cars available to buy now including the previously mentioned Toyota Prius, the Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid pickup truck and the excellent Ford Fusion Hybrid.

While there are plenty of good reasons why we should all use less gas, and reduce our energy consumption and the importation of oil from around the world we have to be realistic about these alternative vehicles.

The standard line is that most of us only travel a few miles to get to work and visit our local stores and shopping malls so the limited range of electric cars will cope just fine with that. You can drive to work and then plug your car in to recharge ready for the journey home. Well, maybe one day you will be able to. The chances are you will not find a suitable charging point within reach of where you park your car at work and if you did you would have cables everywhere which could be considered a health and safety risk in these risk averse times we live in.

If your commute to work and back home again is less than about 80 miles you should be ok with most electric cars and you could recharge the batteries at home. Always assuming you have a garage you can park your car in where you can plug it in. If you park on the street running a cable across the foot-way is likely to get you in trouble with some authority or another and it would certainly be a danger to members of the public who are walking past.

For a second car that is used just for taking the kids to school and shopping trips an electric car could be an excellent choice and it could save a lot of money on gas but the problem with all pure electric cars is what you do when you want to go somewhere further afield or during the time your car batteries need recharging. If you have a second car that can be used then this is not a problem but if you depend on your car being available at all times the electric car might not yet be a realistic option for regular driving right now.