Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
.
Transportation
I have some direct experience with ef
ciency in the trans-
portation sector thanks to my wife. She was one of the few
who had a General Motors EV-
, their all-electric car,
which she received on one of those important decadal
birthdays. It could (and she did) out-accelerate a Porsche
up to about
miles per hour thanks to the very high
torque of electric drive at low speeds. With night time
charging at off-peak rates, it cost her only about
cent per
mile to drive compared with the
cents per mile my car
cost to drive when fuel was only
$
.
per gallon. Since
electric drive is much more ef
cient than the standard
gasoline engine (more on this later), she was two to three
times as ef
cient in primary energy terms, too. Sadly,
General Motors took back all of the EV-
s and crushed
them, something Rick Wagoner, GM
s former Chairman
and CEO, said after the deed was done was one of his
worst mistakes. My wife threatened to elope to Mexico
with her car, but I did manage to talk her out of it. She
drove a Prius for eight years, but mourned her loss.
The Prius was gone in
'
when she switched to a
Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid with about a
mile
range on batteries alone. It also has a gas tank and a
gasoline-powered engine that only drives a generator to
produce electricity to keep the car going for a total of
about
miles on a full battery and a full tank. Almost all
of her driving is local and she uses about
gallons of gas
per year. With nighttime charging where we live in
California, electricity costs about
cents per mile. With
gasoline at about
per gallon as I write this, gasoline
for a normal car costs about
$
.
cents per mile. No one is
