Electric Cars Have Arrived

Electric cars are in the news today: almost half the cars sold in Norway in the first six months of 2019 were fully electric.

Well. That settles it. Since Norway is the country that Donald Trump immigrants to the United States should come from, we should all switch to electric cars.

But seriously, folks. If you were a Texan you might think it's a little odd that Norway is so into electric cars, since they are a major oil producer. But Norway borders the arctic, and it's totally clear to anyone who lives in the north that global warming caused by people burning fossil fuels is wreaking havoc on the climate.

The Norwegian people understand that some things are more important than lining oil company execs' pockets with more money.

The perceived problem with electric cars is that they take a long time to refuel. And this is true: it can take several hours to recharge the batteries. But how often does that really matter?

We bought a Kia Niro plug-in electric hybrid four months ago. It goes a paltry 26 miles on an electric charge before the gas engine kicks in.

I was skeptical about this short electric range. But in practice, we use almost no gas. In the last month, we used gas seven times. Most days we don't use any gas at all and our mileage readout looks like this:

999 mpg means that only the electric motor was used and no gas was burned. On the 25th we drove it in the morning, recharged it, then drove it in the afternoon.

We have filled the tank five times since we bought the car. We bought it in Salt Lake City and drove it home to Minnesota. Equally impressive is the fact that the car's gas range is 600 miles on a full tank.

It's a small SUV that can hold a lot of stuff -- we put two bikes in the cargo area along with our luggage on the way back from Utah.

The average person who commutes less than 26 miles a day will see similar results. But even someone who commutes the average 32 miles a day (and I pity the fool...) would commute 3,200 miles between trips to the filling station. And if you can plug in at work, you would use no gas at all.

And that's with a 26 mile electric range. Cars like the Tesla and the Nissan Leaf have much longer ranges, and could go several days without having to recharge. Yes, it would be a hassle to drive from Salt Lake to Minneapolis with one of those cars. But how often do people do that?

Electric cars currently use lithium batteries, and the lithium supply is kind of wonky. Most of it comes from a mile-high desert in Chile. But there are new battery technologies in the works that may not use such a hard-to-get material.

In the long run, though, gas-powered cars should be replaced by hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles. The hydrogen should be produced by electrolysis, using electricity from wind power or solar cells, which is a great way of storing that energy for later use.

At this point, every family with two cars should be looking to replace one of their gas-powered cars with an electric vehicle. Not only do you reduce carbon emissions, but you save money as well -- in most areas electricity costs half what gas does.

Plus, electric cars make this cool futuristic sound when they move.