Ford pulls plug on electric car

alex lantsberg wideye at ziplink.net
Sun Sep 8 22:33:50 PDT 2002


one of the inherent limitations of these little think cars is their limited range - a reasonable concern when considering long commutes and the general spatial dispersion of the suburbs and edge cities. i know a few people with think mobiles here in sf and they love em for cruising around the city. that's great for a compact little place like sf, but no doubt presents concerns to the vast majority of people who live in suburbia.

making these cars work in the US would necessitate significant land use changes, not quite the scale that were precipitated by the internal combustion engine, but large nonetheless. such changes would definitely be for the better.

as for pollution...point sources are much easier to control than nonpoint sources belching over a several hundred square mile area. many of the air quality gains of the clean air act are now being lost due to the increased vehicle miles driven. there are real concerns about the damage of power plants, but that's far more mitigatable than 260 million little pollution generators.

alex -----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Chris Clarke Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 9:59 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Ford pulls plug on electric car

on 9/8/02 9:17 AM, Jordan Hayes at jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com wrote:


>> due to poor customer demand and lack of government support for the
>> environmentally friendly cars.
>
> Right, like subsidized electricity to run them. How cool is that? No
> emissions _from the car_ but let's burn up a bunch more coal to fill the
> batteries with electricity. And get someone else to pay for it. Bleah,
> no thanks.

All extremely valid criticisms, though given the efficiency of electric motors, the cars had a greater ratio of miles driven per unit of fossil fuels burned, even taking electrical transmission losses into account.

And gasoline is heavily subsidized as well.

-- Chris Clarke | Editor, Faultline http://www.faultline.org | California's Environmental Magazine



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