An example of this situation occurred when the ignorant people of Christopher Columbus’s time insisted that he was going to sail off the edge of the earth.  In truth, there was no very good answer he could give them.  He could try to explain that the earth was round but very few people would believe that.  We might scoff at such ignorance today, five centuries later, but the reality is that this is not an unreasonable thing to believe.  The world gives every evidence of being flat under casual examination.  Moreover, casual examination is all most people ever give anything.

   People do not like change and the consequence of this is that all our thinking focuses on solutions that will keep things the way they have always been only, somehow, better.  In the magic solution it is a car which uses exactly the same fuel it always used and operates the same way it always did, except that it gets some arbitrarily increased improvement in efficiency.  That would, if fact, be a good thing but not as good as everyone thinks.

  It will do us little good to create a fuel efficient car and then turn around and put another two billion of them on the road, which is what will happen.  You will still have to get the fuel from the same people and that will cause exactly the same problems it is causing now because there will be an ever increasing number of customers for it.

  One of the things we face here is the simple fact of overpopulation.  A second is  the failure to accept the political realities and consequences of dealing with, and being dependant upon, people and countries hostile to our way of life.

  We are being told that the electric car and the 300 mile battery is the solution to all of this.  Unfortunately, this 300 mile battery turns out to be a situation pretty much like what happens when a dog chasing a car finally catches it.  OK, now what?  You got what you wanted, now what are you going to do with it?

    You, at last, have the 300 mile battery the automotive industry says was keeping them from making practical electric cars and you’ve drove 300 miles and the charge is exhausted:  Now what?    There is no current technology which would permit a battery of that size to be recharged in five minutes.  The heat generated in the process would cause the battery to explode.  So what do you do then?  Are you going to wait around for the next 6 hours while it re-charges?

  Actually, no you won’t do that.   Well, not unless the people who design the transportation system are complete nutwads or have such a vested interest in the status quo that they are still pretending that things can go on the way they did in 1950 despite all evidence to the contrary.

  No, you will not wait 6 or 8 hours to recharge the battery because that would defy all common sense.  Actually this mythical battery is not our problem here, and never was.  Actually, a plenty good enough electric car could have been built at any time, AT ANY TIME, during the last 70 years using 1930’s technology and plain old lead acid cells because this mythical 300 mile battery is not our problem and never was our problem!

  As  Nicolae Ceausescui in Romania discovered, as the lords of the old Soviet Union and the Communist Party there discovered, it is not enough to have an army, nuclear weapons and untold mountains of wealth to survive.  In the long run it is still necessary to have some vague idea of what you are doing.  It is still necessary to be able to understand what your problem is before you can fix it.

  In Ceausescui’s case, he was taken out and shot on Christmas day 1989 for his failure to appreciate his actual situation.  One wonders if the same thing will happen to the lords of Detroit?

  Of the electric car itself, what may done is this.  As the battery nears the end of its charge you drive into a service station that looks somewhat like a car wash and an automatic forklift removes your battery pack(s) and replaces it (or them) with another one which was recharged the previous night when electric rates were cheaper.

  This is pretty much what goes on in the welding and commercial gas industry today.  Welders do not own the tanks on their equipment.  They are leased, and whenever they are empty they are exchanged for a new one.

  An individual owning an oxy-acetylene torch may never see the gas cylinders which originally came with it again after their first use, and this fact does not trouble him in any way.  He knows that he can exchange his empty cylinder for a full one at any welding shop in the country.  He pays only for the gas itself.

  As it turns out welding cylinders themselves require special attention and handling.  The inspection and testing of these containers is an activity which lies far beyond the scope of anything which the average owner could possibly do, and he doesn’t have to.  This is all taken care of by the welding and gas suppliers who retire cylinders that are no longer safe to use and replace them with new ones.

  There is not a reason in world that the same thing could not be done with batteries.

  Of course, it would make a nicer car if it employed more advanced technology than lead acid batteries, but it not necessary and never was.

  Again, the focus on battery, itself, draws our attention away from the real problem which is not and never was, the battery.  What we need, aside from fewer people, is an infrastructure to change batteries out when they need to be recharged or replaced and, some standardization in the batteries themselves.

  In one sense, it’s the hole the battery goes into that is more of a problem than the batteries themselves.  The batteries already exist and have for a very long time.  If we could just agree on the dimensions of the space where the battery went, it would not matter what technology went into it.  Everyone could use that accord with exactly the same results that occurred when the government in this country standardized thread sizes.

  Most younger people living today do not realize it but at one time the bolts in a car built at one location in this country were not necessarily interchangeable with those built at another location.  This caused all kinds of problems for a man trying to repair his car especially if he traveled or moved to a different part of the country. The government had to intervene to change that situation.

  Of course, the automobile manufacturers howled and whined and cried doom and despair as they always do whenever anyone tells them to do what they should have had the common sense and decency to do in the first place.  

  Notwithstanding industry complaints, the Unified Standard threads they were finally compelled to use, and which are still in use to this day, benefited everyone in the country across all sectors of manufacturing and business, including the automobile manufacturers themselves.  And this good was accomplished with the automobile industry kicking and screaming all the way down and probably the same thing will have to be done with batteries.

  If push came to shove you could even put a battery pack into a small trailer.  These would be very easy to switch out.  Admittedly a regular trailer would be more difficult to back up and park than a car without one but it should be kept in mind that the trailer would not be anywhere near as large as a small boat.  Also, because of its small size, it does not need to be that kind of a trailer.  It does not need to turn left and right.  It could be attached to the rear of the car in two points as single wheeled trailers do right now.  In this case however, you would probably use two castering wheels.  That is, the wheels would turn instead of the trailer similar to those seen on furniture except, of course, larger.  Not the best solution in the world, to be sure, but a completely feasible one.

  It would also be possible to combine the battery pack with the rear wheels and the motors driving them or even to make the entire drive train, front and rear part of the battery pack so that the entire undercarriage would be changed out.

  Having a standardized integrated power train/battery pack would also allow for integration with light rail systems and could open the possibility of taking power directly from the rails or roadway as electric trains and buses do right now.  This in turn could lead to an extraordinary transportation system that would quickly become the envy of the world and it is with that very idea that we come up against the real crux of what we face here.

  It isn’t just the car that is our problem here.  It is the road itself and the very way we go about making cars.  Since huge amounts of public funding are going to be used developing these new cars and shoring up the collapsing economy and automobile industry we have a right to expect a lot more than another band aid.

  We could get a lot more out of this than just reducing the price of fuel at the pump, and stalling the demise of a failed industry.  We could revitalize our economy and revolutionize life in this country and the entire world.

  People forget that there have been electric trains, buses and cars around for over a hundred years.  There are electric trains all over Europe and in the subways of the United States as well as electrified buses taking power directly from the roadway or overhead in several major North American cities right now.

  Yes we could make nicer cars if more advanced technology was employed but this is not necessary and never was.  A plenty good enough automobile could have been made using plan old lead acid cells and this could have been done at any time.

  The thing which is really going to change everything is thinking about the entire system not just some patches put on existing automobiles to make them pretty much like they have always been.  We do not need anymore cars like that.

  If you are taking your power from the road way and or if you can change out your battery pack anytime that is necessary then a car with an off road range of 30 or 40 miles is more than adequate and this does not require any new technology.

  Yes, new better technology would be nice, but rethinking the roadway itself and the entire transportation system will, at this point, prove to be a lot more important.