Hybrid Cars
Essay Preview: Hybrid Cars
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Hybrid Automobiles
The technology of the electric vehicle has been around for a long time but faded as the gasoline powered engine became more popular. Now, the future of electric vehicles is very bright. Their impacts are very significant that ranges from the economic point of view and also from the environmental. Imagine driving a quieter, cleaner car with the windows down letting the clean pollution-free air flow throughout the car. Production of the advancing technological electric vehicle can trigger this idea to come into effect.
The problem of this technology was to research the development and impacts of the electric vehicle. At the turn of the 19th Century, when automobiles were new, electric vehicles outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles. The problem for the electric car was that electric battery technology did not improve nearly as fast as gasoline technology and by 1910 the interest in the development of the electric vehicle had all but ceased (Sedgwick 15). Today, the current surge of interest in electric vehicles replacing the internal combustion engine, or ICE, is due to mostly one concern, air quality. The worlds population of cars is polluting the worlds cities, producing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The electronic vehicle is driven by a battery that runs exclusively on electric. The batteries that exist today have a limited range between fifty and seventy-five miles per full charge. Newer prototype batteries have a rather large increase in their range, but they are still prototypes. The longest range documented by an electric vehicle in one charge is 230 miles (Sedgwick 21). The limited range of the electric car in use today really is not a problem considering the fact that Californians, the main users of the electric vehicle, drive an average of forty miles a day (Sedgwick 6). This means that the owner will have to plug the battery into an 110v. AC power source and let it charge for eight to ten hours, which is the current time it takes to fully charge the present batteries. Fast charging is still in the developmental stage and will work somewhat like a gas station where one pulls in and in ten minutes the car will be fully recharged.
Battery-powered vehicles would provide modest greenhouse gas savings if introduced into full-scale production today. The energy efficiency of the electric car would only increase, drawing less energy from power plants, meaning even more of a substantial cutback in greenhouse gasses. Electric vehicles using electric from natural gas power plants will only cut the release of greenhouse gasses more, natural gas is the cleanest burning and most efficient fossil fuel. The electric-powered automobiles do not burn the fossil fuel, they just use the electricity generated from the natural gas power. These cars that run on electric which was generated by nuclear of hydroelectricity would have nearly zero greenhouse emissions. The switch to a hybrid car would also lessen the drilling for oil and our dependency on other nations to readily export it to us.
The primary reason the government has shown its support for this technology has been air quality. Automobiles and small trucks are responsible for about half of all urban air pollution. Todays vehicles that are powered by gasoline and diesel fuels emit the vast majority of carbon monoxide, half of the hydrocarbon and nitrogen pollutants, and a small proportion