What destroyed the electric car?

In the "green movement" that is gaining momentum in the USA, there are some things that are not getting done. One of those things that are not getting is the electric car. Oh sure, there are electric cars out there, but they aren't being produced in the numbers regular gasoline-powered vehicles are being produced in. In a world where many people are adamant about reducing emissions, having electric cars produced in the same numbers as regular cars is a must. Can this be done. However, there are many people who say that in practice that it wouldn't work. As a teenager I was a fan of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I remember reading things about electric vehicles. I often wondered why these forms of technology were not out there so readily available, Why is it that the public could only get this good stuff in magazines, rather than the dealerships where people can get cars run on gasoline? Well, that question is about to be answered at this moment. There is a control pathology here. Because this technology is thought to be "rare" and "atypical" this stuff isn't made easily available. Control of prices and the medium of information. It is only thought to be a "non-mainstream" thing. This technology isn't something new. This has been around for a long time. One of the first cars made was electric. William Morrison built the first electric car in 1897. Electric cars have even been used as taxis before 1900. Henry Ford did not invent the motor vehicle. He only came up with the assembly line. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century, more than a fourth of the cars in the USA were electric. I will give it to Ford. He invented the assembly line. This made it easier to produce more cars faster. It is just a shame that this wasn't used for electric cars. It was used to make gasoline-powered vehicles. Eventually, the gasoline car started to take over as the main car of choice. The reason was that people wanted to travel longer distances and the electric car was not suitable for long distances. That and petroleum was cheap and plentiful. Fast forward to the oil crisis of the 1970's. The environmental movement is starting too. People are looking for vehicles that aren't as expensive to run and that were good for the environment. People are doing more research regarding electric cars as an attempt to build a decent electric car. It research involving motors and batteries. Many said the electric car would never work because of low mileage range per charge, less speeed and less horsepower. I have heard this argument over and over. As an avid science student in the eighth grade, I believed it. Then again, I was only 13 years. After watching this nation go through unstable gasoline prices, and hearing other things that I am not going to mention at this moment, I am not buying that excuse. I figure, make the electric car have more horsepower, make the battery more efficient, make it go faster. If you have the technology to build the electric car, then there must be a way to make it the right way. Guess what. There is a way to make it better. What destroyed the electric car? Why is it that you can't get electric cars easily and why aren't they as efficient,fast, and powerful as they could be? The battery is the main issue. The battery is the main power source. Why not make the battery better? It has been made better. In the 1990's Ovonics was coming up with the patent for the nickel metal hydride battery. Ovonics was bought out by GM. GM came out with the EV1, an electric car that was available with the lead battery as well as the nickel metal hydride battery. It was only available through a lease and initially, only available to residents in California, Arizona, and later Georgia. At the time California had a zero emission vehicle initiative. This meant a zero emission vehicle could not have any tailpipe emission. Regulations were stringent at first, but were later relaxed. This is where hybrid vehicles came in. Low emissions and they could run on electricity. GM thought that the electric car market was a niche market and low on profit, despite customer satisfaction. A few automakers got together to fight the California Air Regulation Board to reduce the ZEV regulations. It worked.

It does not end there. GM repossessed and destroyed the majority of the EV1 cars that were out there. There is also another part of this issue. Texaco bought a share of GM Ovonics and later obtained the patents for the nickel metal hydride battery. Chevron bought out Texaco. Why would oil companies want to buy battery patents that could put them out of business? Simple. These companies never used the patents. Chevron bought the patent and never used it. The oil companies didn't want anyone to use they batteries because then all of the arguments against the electric car would be null and void. Oh sure, there are the hybrid cars out there that can use both electricity and gasoline. Why not do one better and make it electric and electric with solar power and leave gasoline out of this? Simple. It is all a control pathology. Control over resources. Control over who gets to use the patent for the nickel metal hydride battery. Chevron wanted control because if you the consumer bought an electric car that actually worked as well or better than a gasoline-powered vehicle, then one car's worth of oil money Chevron will not get. If these electric cars were available to the public in the same numbers as the gasoline cars, chances are, more people will choose the electric cars. If solar power was added, more people would buy them. Make a good product and you can sell it. The oil companies know this and for this reason, the patent for a better battery is not available for use. That is what happened to the electric car. The technology available to make it run better is owned by an entity that has no interest in using it, but rather, making sure no one gets it. Sounds like a pathology about control to me. Basically, the playing field was made slanted. Someone could come up with something great and that would compete with the oil companies. Many people know that there are better things out there. It is a matter of making it available to everyone and at a fair price. It can be done. Not just in theory, but it can be done in practice, if only the persons who had the patent still had it. I saw gasoline prices go as high as $4.00/gallon after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the oil supplies in Louisiana. This made me realize that electric cars were necessary. Some people told me it would never work. Well, is that really true? The question one needs to ask is WHY? Why isn't it being made available to the public. In my view, the answer is that the oil companies are looking for so many ways to stay in business. If more people were driving electric and solar powered cars, the oil companies would lose money. I don't know everything about what is going on with the electric car. I am not here to say I know everything, because i don't. I will readily admit that. I do feel that there are many things going on behind the curtain that are dirty and hurting our society.

How is this issue regarding the electric car a social issue? Well, pollution has much to do with it. Pollution is more than just an environmental issue. It is a social issue. With air pollution, being a healthy person is harder. With air pollution, rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses go up. Those are people who have the potential to be productive. Those persons might end up spending more money on doctor visits and less money doing other things, starting new businesses if they desire to do so. If less people are starting businesses, then there are going to be even fewer jobs in a job-starved economy. The same persons who have that potential to be productive would also have higher death rates. Those persons who are sick could be doing other things provided they weren’t sick at all. While asthma can be managed, air pollution aggravates it. A person could die from an asthma attack brought on by the air pollution. That person would have to stay inside in the event of a code red air quality index alert. If there are more deaths, these are a few more people who could contribute to society in ways such as getting an education, starting a business, possibly inventing new things, and won’t be doing so because said persons are six feet under. One of those persons could have found a cure for AIDS by now. Someone could have got the patent to the nickel metal hydride battery and actually used it to make electric cars on a larger scale. There are costs out there that few people think about. This affects children too. Children miss enough sick days already. If a child has to miss more days due to pollution-aggravated asthma, that is more time when that the child will miss learning, and not producing results in the classroom. That is a child coming up in the world. It would be very helpful to attend school every day and soak up all of that knowledge, getting good grades and preparing to enter the world. The child should have to be held back due to illness. Pollution has more costs than just the issue of global warming. It has social costs too. That is something to think about when someone says the electric car would never work. I would ask why.