Yesterday morning I got call from Jim over at FuelVapor Technologies to REV motors' Wine and Cheese/show and tell, and I decided that I would go check it out. I kind of thought that it would have been more fitting to have a pizza and beer event seeing as it was held at the company showroom/garage. These guys have tried to target a fleet vehicle market as they generally have a set route they do and it is generally around 100 kilometers a day (according to the company). Their plan is to outfit as many vehicles with electric motors that have a range of about 160 kilometers as possible. It is an interesting concept because they are not designing new cars, they are retrofitting pre-existing vehicles. The key here is the "rapid charging batteries" that can get a full charge in about 10 minutes. This is neat stuff but the infrastructure is probably the biggest question. They claim to have a potential recharging system but that is yet to be seen. I'll obviously be having more discussions with the management of this company. We'll see what comes of that. In the interim, the question begs to be asked, if you have "zero emissions" coming out of the tail pipe, but you are burning dirty coal when you plug in your car, is your car green? That is something I would like to explore.
The thesis behind that would basically look like: if carbon from coal fired plant for the amount of electricity needed to charge a car per 100 kilometers is less than the carbon from the tail pipe, than this is a step to being cleaner. If not, than it is not a cleaner car. That is a study I will embark on and will keep you all posted with what I find.
Cheers
