Why it's important

Just as gasoline-powered cars have a limited range, electric cars do too. The current problem is that there aren't very many "electric stations", where you can pull in, and quickly recharge your car - as you can with gas. People in many parts of the world like to drive and need to drive, relying on our cars for everything from getting to work to taking cross-country road trips and if they can't, they will not accept electric vehicles. So we need to work to make electric cars more like the cars we have today and find a good way to extend their range without using gasoline, like plug-in hybrids currently do.

This is not purely a convenience issue, however, but also reduces cost, energy, and toxicity of electric vehicles and simplifies and improves our energy consumption. Batteries are, obviously, a major component of electric vehicles, but right now can be big, heavy, energy intensive to create, expensive, and sometimes toxic. This is why we have a whole section on this website devoted to finding Better Batteries. The technologies are getting better and lithium ion batteries are showing promise, but the fewer batteries we have to use the better. The better our charging infrastructure, the fewer batteries we may need. If recharging is a short and painless process, consumers may not demand quite the large range they currently expect.

As far as simplifying and improving energy consumption, it is a simplification in that two of our major energy consuming behaviors, driving, and maintaining our homes and things, will run on one system for the most part, electricity. This allows for increased efficiency by allowing vehicles to provide power when the grid is down and absorb power at off peak times and being able to release it at on peak times. This could reduce the number of dirty, inefficient fossil fuel plants used during peak hours, saving on money and emissions. Essentially, vehicles could act like large batteries for the electrical grid, which relates to issues discussed in the Storage and Smart Grid sections.