2016.01.14 Electric Car: Farewell
The electric car is gone today.
Honestly, the departure of my minor slice of the future seems like something more worth contemplation than the vehicle I picked up today to replace it.
The Good
The philosophical aspect gets top billing here: electric vehicles need to happen. The sooner they are adapted for the majority of transportation, the better off we'll be. Regardless of any flaws we might nitpick about, the reliance on fossil fuels is a losing proposition. I need to do better about this, too. And I will.
A close second for me, personally: TORQUE. Not just magnitude, but the immediacy of it's availability. Hand-in-hand with that is the surgical finesse with which the torque can be applied to the ground, both positive and negative.
Low center of gravity. Even as an absurdly-proportioned economy box, somehow managing to have the twin faults of being tall and narrow, the low-slung Tesla-derived battery pack served to ballast the vehicle dynamics in a way that made it confident and nimble.
Duty cycle was a surprising combination of WIN. This was my daily-driver, so it leveraged the maximum from the green check boxes, plus it's size and driving dynamics made it a traffic-piercing weapon. And stacked on top of those was the fact that I never ever had to stop for gas. Built into the back-and-forth from work was ample charge times. Never having to divert to a fuel station is massively freeing.
The Bad
It could not go on road trips. This is a combination fail of the vehicle and of a lack of infrastructure. Tesla has it right - enough range on one charge to go significant distance, plus fast enough charging to make pit stops feasible. The B-ED had neither. 100km just isn't far enough for a travel leg, and a mean best-case recharge time of ~3 hours is too long for a pit stop. Alas.
Front-wheel-fucking-drive. While I realize that this was never meant to be a sporty vehicle, I cannot describe to you the massive opportunity missed by sticking with the conventional front-drive arrangement. It might not have been transformed into a Lotus, it would have been a very solid "fun car" quotient if the thrust was applied from the rear. Seriously. I am convinced that if I drive the rear-drive BMW i3, I will have to officially hate Mercedes for all the understeer I suffered this past year.
That's it. I think the car was technically too expensive - but I didn't actually have to pay much to use it. And, technically, I think it is not very pretty - but it suited its utilitarian purpose sufficiently. It wasn't comfortable enough for extended use, but it couldn't perform extended drives anyway. An array of quibbles I could make about individual features also get shrugged off as category errors - it was always my cheap commuter, not my dream car.
The Future
Well, humanity's future is to stop using fossil fuels. Either we run out, or we wean ourselves sooner than that. The second option is better. Regardless, if civilization stays sufficiently technological for vehicles, we're going to have electric cars.
My future is to have an electric car as soon as I can make it feasible. Hopefully a Tesla. But even if not that, then something electrically-motivated.
The future of the electric car... well, I hope that's bright. And I hope it becomes a no-brainer for almost everybody soon. In order to make that happen, we'll need cheaper battery technology. Preferably with less weight and higher energy density. Faster charging would be cool, too.
We'll also need infrastructure to support recharging for longer trips. But pause for a moment to contemplate that for a bit. We already have most of the infrastructure already in place for 99% of the charging required - all that's left is for those occasional longer trips. Then pause and consider, is there any way that some charging ports could be anywhere near as difficult to install as a fuel station? Yeah, no, probably not.
Let's just say that I'm not investing in oil and gas stocks. For a variety of reasons.