Burnwinter wrote:
What's the carbon footprint of manufacturing one?
There are two main problems the way I see it. The first is that lithium is rare and the environmental damage in order to mine it is huge. We're already reaching a point where the demand is starting to become unsustainable for laptops and cellphones. There's literally no way to launch electric cars on a world-wide scale without inventing new technology. From what I remember sodium batteries seemed like the most realistic option 6-7 years ago, but sodium ions are larger than lithium which means they're slower and make the batteries deteriorate faster.
The second is the question where your electricity comes from. It's not gonna be a significant enough change if the city where you're docking your car still uses a coal-fuelled power plant. Any future with electric cars would have to involve improved nuclear power plants, which you could argue is something we're already in desperate need of. We need an evolution in reactor technology; not just for electric cars but to be able to maintain and create more equal societies. Cheap, easily available electricity is the single biggest difference between rich and impoverished nations. It's key to everything from higher living standards and increased life spans to education.
I watched a BBC Horizon documentary a year or two back where they talked to scientists who were working on accelerators that will shorten the radioactive decay of nuclear waste down to 100 years or so (instead of the 30-90 000 years we're looking at today) by breaking the big elements down into smaller particles with a shorter half-life, but it's not moving along fast enough. The stigmatization surrounding the subject is too great.
