The electric car was hugely popular with consumers and yet it was never mass produced. What is next for the electric automobile?

Our nation’s dependency on oil has greatly damaged our environment and depleted our planet’s natural resources. Despite the 1973 oil embargo, the United States has still increased its import of oil from other countries. Americans have become too reliant on our SUV’s and foreign oil. Fortunately there is a solution in sight; the electric car.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, electric cars were actually preferred by consumers over cars with traditional engines. Unfortunately, what gave way to this preference was a decrease in price and an increase in the availability of oil, along with the mass production of traditional automobiles heralded by Mr Ford. There were 100s of millions of cars built in the twentieth century, and virtually all of them have combustion engines. Science within the last few decades has confirmed that human activity is responsible for the planet’s warming and a large part is due to our cars averaging 19 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions for every mile driven. Surprisingly, around the 1980s the giant automaker General Motors started to garner attention for its focus on alternative energies in light of this rather ominous threat. During this time, there was further pressure for auto companies to design and manufacture “clean” products. For example, the state of California had passed its “Zero Emissions Mandate,” which required there to be a certain percentage of cars manufactured that emitted significantly less CO2. And in the 1990s GM assigned Saturn to market the EV1, the first electric car ever designed for use on a large scale. Read the rest of this entry »