The Tesla Roadster is a beautiful car. It turns heads, drops jaws, handles well, and packs serious punch. It’s not a gas-guzzling sportscar but an all-electric roadster that uses no gasoline. While rumors may fly about what the secret start-up EEStor is doing with its batteries, there is no doubt that Tesla Motors has delivered a breakthrough. Even given its over $100,000 price tag, the company has clearly shown that powerful, fast, reliable, and cool cars that run on electricity can be produced. The Tesla gets up to 240 miles per 5 hour charge. This is more than enough to cover normal daily driving and can be charged up easily overnight. The GM Volt, on the other hand, gets 40 miles out of the battery before a gas engine takes over. The addition of a gas engine on the Volt gives it an advertised gas-battery range of 400 miles. The Volt will sell for a much more reasonable $40,000, making it actually affordable for a large percentage of consumers. Assuming mass production of batteries and electric cars takes off, the price will fall so long as consumers are keen on buying them. In this sense, and for the long term health of our country and economy, it wouldn’t hurt to have $4 gas again. Given the current state of the economy, consumer interest and $4 gas look unrealistic in the short term. Look long term, however, and there is really no alternative to transitioning to a nation of electric car drivers.

Both of these cars testify to the promise of electric cars as a low polluting, serious alternative to the internal combustion engine. Plugging in your car to “top off” instead of hitting the local gas station reduces imports of foreign oil. Energy for the cars comes from the domestic electricity grid, which already spans the country and lessens the infrastructure challenges associated with the hydrogen economy mentioned in the post below. Furthermore, the grid will only get greener over time as more renewable and clean technologies are added and begin producing energy. At first supplementing and then replacing coal power plants with energy sources such as solar, wind, nuclear, and thermal power as their price falls and efficiency rises will reduce pollution while creating new economic growth. President Obama looks like he is serious about promoting a smarter, greener grid and investing in green technology as a job creator and economic stimulus. Let’s hope he and Congress can work together to help truly usher in the 2nd green revolution.

2nd Green Revolution