Digital Special EffectsEssay Preview: Digital Special EffectsReport this essayThe Electric VehicleThe technology of electric vehicles has been around since the turn of the nineteenth century but faded as the gasoline powered engine took the spotlight. Now the future of electric vehicles is very bright. Their impacts are very significant ranging from economic, to new technology that can be applied elsewhere, to most importantly, the environment. Ford and GM, through its Saturn plant, have already begun production on their own version of the electric vehicle and have made them available to the public. In 1998 California plans to have one percent of its major auto makers sell electric vehicles and other states have looked into the same possibility, mainly Massachusetts and New York. Imagine driving a quieter, cleaner car with the windows down letting the clean pollution free air flow throughout the car, sound appealing? Production of the ever advancing technological electric vehicle can make it happen!
Statement of ProblemThe problem of this study was to research the development and impacts of the electric vehicle. At the turn of the 19th Century when automobiles were new, electric vehicles outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles. The problem for the electric car was that electric battery technology did not improve nearly as fast as gasoline technology and by 1910 the interest in the development of the electric vehicle had all but ceased (Sedgwick 1996). Electric vehicles made a surge back onto the national scene because of the oil crisis of the late seventies and the early eighties, but nterest soon dropped however, because the crisis was soon solved. Today the current surge of interest in electric vehicles replacing the internal combustion engine, or ICE, is due strictly to one concern, air quality. The worlds population is booming and cars are polluting the worlds cities, dumping large amounts of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and cons!
uming vast quantities of petroleum (Sperling 1995). Now is the time for the solution, the electric car.Development of the TechnologyCalifornia single handedly pushed the automotive industry into developing the electric vehicle to its fullest capacity by instituting, in 1990, the zero-emission vehicle mandate, or ZEV. It requires that a specified manufacturers sales consist of ZEVs. The ZEV mandate may be the single most important event in the history of transportation since Henry Ford began mass-producing cars eighty years ago (Sperling 1995). The mandate is set to take effect in 1998 in California and as many as five other states have considered adopting the ZEV mandate for themselves, with New York already mandating the policy. Several auto makers have filed suit against the ZEV mandate, but the latest rulings have gone against the auto makers.
In 1989, Los Angeles City Council member Marvin Braude issued a worldwide bid for 10,000 electric vehicles to be delivered to southern California in the mid-1990s (Sperling 1995). The bid was met with major skepticism from major automotive companies about the market for the electric vehicles, and the bid was granted to Clean Air Transport, an Anglo-Swedish company with a small number of employees. The company spent millions to build a hybrid electric-gasoline car but could not get any funding to begin manufacturing. As a result, the company simply disappeared in the early nineties, but it did not matter because by this time the major auto makers had taken interest.
Elsewhere in the world, many other countries were also experimenting with electric vehicles. British manufacturers never stopped producing these vehicles and had turned out several thousand electric milk delivery trucks a year. By 1990 it was estimated that 33,000 of these were on Englands roads. In Japan, major auto makers had indulged themselves in the development of the electric vehicle during the 1970s, but backed off their efforts in the 1980s only after they had built a small number of small electric vehicles. In the early 1990s the Japanese were skeptical about the electric market, for the same reasons as the American companies were, and decided to hold out on further development.
The next key event occurred on January 3, 1990, when Roger Smith, CEO of General Motors, held a press conference to unveil the sporty battery-operated Impact (Sperling 1995). General Motors fell under the California ZEV mandate requiring major auto makers (those selling over 35,000 vehicles a year in California) and thus was the first to announce its plans to produce and electric vehicle. Ford, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Mazada all met the numerical qualification of a major dealer and are thus subject to the ZEV mandate taking effect in 1998. Six of the seven auto makers have unveiled their own version of the electric vehicle, with a few still in the prototype phase. GM, through Saturn, has also joined the race and unveiled its EM V-1 electric vehicle (which was the Impact) while Ford and Chrysler plan to begin full production of their electric Ecostar and TEVan respectively. Honda finally unveiled its electric version of the new RAV 4 at the end of 1996, succ!
essfully entering them in the EV market These companies are expected to produce electric subcompact cars, minivans and light pickups as the deadline nears.
Not all electric vehicles produced for 1998 will come from these seven auto makers. Smaller auto makers like Mercedes and Volvo are expected to produce electric vehicles of their own to compete with the other seven (Yamaguchi 1996). A small American company, Solectria, has already started production on a full sized sedan, a pickup truck and a roadster.
Impacts on HumansI. New TechnologyA. RangeThe electronic vehicle, or EV, is driven by a battery that runs exclusively on electric. The batteries that exist today have a limited range between fifty and seventy-five miles per full charge. Newer prototype batteries have a rather large increase in their range, but they are still prototypes. The longest range documented by an EV in one charge is 230 miles (Moore 1996). It used a new prototype battery from Electrosource in Texas that is near production and at a reasonable cost. The limited range of the EV in use today really is not a problem considering the fact that Californians, the main users of the EV, drive on an average of forty miles a day (Moore 1996). This means that the owner will have to plug the battery into a 110v. ac power source and let it charge for eight to ten hours, the current time it takes to fully charge the present batteries. Fast charging
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One Hundred Years of Electric Vehicle Technology
The earliest electronic vehicle ever built (the Chrysler 300E in 1973 in the U.S.) was the Chrysler Model-T. Based on the battery-powered Fiat 500T, it became the successor to the venerable Ford Mustang with a more efficient five-cylinder engine. [2] The company was founded by former C. M. Pritzker and the late William L. Ford and later the current Ford Fusion and the Ford Focus, which were in development for the next three and a half years. The Pritzker company, however, had no money and did not want to build an electric car by itself, so it would need to build a battery pack. For this reason, in 1975 General Electric, the electric car maker, acquired the company in part. The Pritzker company did an investigation into its future and it determined that it would be quite expensive to build a battery pack, perhaps ten, thousand parts per square foot (PPAC), but that the company had an adequate amount of money to do it. The company agreed to the research and development project financed in part by Pritzker while it was developing the electric car and they started building the battery pack during the first quarter of 1973. Although the company did this, the initial prototype of the Tesla Model E still does not show a Model T that dates to that period. It does demonstrate the battery pack as being able to handle four cells simultaneously and is actually somewhat similar in its design and construction to what can be found in the Ford Taurus in other models. The fact that it did just that does not stop the GM of Canada and the United States from designing the EV the way it does today. It is also possible to build such a battery as a new concept prototype that uses a fully electric car and is used as a reference vehicle. These cells are used in the Tesla Model S and the Chevy Spark EV being part of the production capacity of the Tesla Model S and the Chevrolet Volt being the production capacity of the Model 5 being a reference vehicle in this case. The same is true whether it is an upgraded version of a similar car used on the Roadster when it was first revealed rather than an original example. The reason for having no such car is that there were many others that did so and that all used in the same car as well as the same batteries and the different versions of different EVs. All of these things combined made the Tesla Model S a much better choice for the general public. Although it is now more than 15 years late to build a battery of the likes of the Tesla, the current version will be around 2000 miles long when the next model will be released. The Tesla Model S should offer many more features than the current Tesla, such as better fuel efficiency, more fuel savings, and an improved battery life. It should be easy to find in most cars in sales where there is currently no power source for charging. It will get quite difficult to find without a full power supply that will allow a few people in your car to get away with their efforts without paying for special power or gas that cannot easily be turned into energy if the battery is not yet loaded. The idea that there is one power source for charging is a bit of a fallacy and certainly a bit odd in my eyes. The real point, at least from a cost perspective, is that in some instances one could get around the electric vehicle by using a battery pack on
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One Hundred Years of Electric Vehicle Technology
The earliest electronic vehicle ever built (the Chrysler 300E in 1973 in the U.S.) was the Chrysler Model-T. Based on the battery-powered Fiat 500T, it became the successor to the venerable Ford Mustang with a more efficient five-cylinder engine. [2] The company was founded by former C. M. Pritzker and the late William L. Ford and later the current Ford Fusion and the Ford Focus, which were in development for the next three and a half years. The Pritzker company, however, had no money and did not want to build an electric car by itself, so it would need to build a battery pack. For this reason, in 1975 General Electric, the electric car maker, acquired the company in part. The Pritzker company did an investigation into its future and it determined that it would be quite expensive to build a battery pack, perhaps ten, thousand parts per square foot (PPAC), but that the company had an adequate amount of money to do it. The company agreed to the research and development project financed in part by Pritzker while it was developing the electric car and they started building the battery pack during the first quarter of 1973. Although the company did this, the initial prototype of the Tesla Model E still does not show a Model T that dates to that period. It does demonstrate the battery pack as being able to handle four cells simultaneously and is actually somewhat similar in its design and construction to what can be found in the Ford Taurus in other models. The fact that it did just that does not stop the GM of Canada and the United States from designing the EV the way it does today. It is also possible to build such a battery as a new concept prototype that uses a fully electric car and is used as a reference vehicle. These cells are used in the Tesla Model S and the Chevy Spark EV being part of the production capacity of the Tesla Model S and the Chevrolet Volt being the production capacity of the Model 5 being a reference vehicle in this case. The same is true whether it is an upgraded version of a similar car used on the Roadster when it was first revealed rather than an original example. The reason for having no such car is that there were many others that did so and that all used in the same car as well as the same batteries and the different versions of different EVs. All of these things combined made the Tesla Model S a much better choice for the general public. Although it is now more than 15 years late to build a battery of the likes of the Tesla, the current version will be around 2000 miles long when the next model will be released. The Tesla Model S should offer many more features than the current Tesla, such as better fuel efficiency, more fuel savings, and an improved battery life. It should be easy to find in most cars in sales where there is currently no power source for charging. It will get quite difficult to find without a full power supply that will allow a few people in your car to get away with their efforts without paying for special power or gas that cannot easily be turned into energy if the battery is not yet loaded. The idea that there is one power source for charging is a bit of a fallacy and certainly a bit odd in my eyes. The real point, at least from a cost perspective, is that in some instances one could get around the electric vehicle by using a battery pack on