WHAT MATTERS WEBLOG

[originally posted on my old blog on October 4th, 2008; updated March 29th 2009]

Nowadays, almost everybody is talking somehow about energy issues. Be it the majority of drivers squeezed at the gas pump or environmentalists worrying about the consequences of our exuberant energy consumption: greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Others worry about the threat our dependence on oil imports poses to our security. With the United States and all other major economies being addicted to oil, what former U.S. President Bush publicly admitted in his 2006 State of the Union address: “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” There’s not only reason to be concerned of the security of our oil supplies but also about the hefty fluctuations we’ve seen recently.

Fortunately , there are some creative minds that want to break our addiction, or at least reduce it. Unfortunately, these creative minds cannot be found anywhere in Washington D.C., nor in the automotive capital Detroit. But that’s not surprising. We will experience some kind of revolution in the not too distant future. Energy technology will become a crucial industry. And when looking back, we see that the giants of the last revolution, big companies like  Google and eBay and many others started out as small Silicon Valley start-ups. What can we expect now with Silicon valley having started to build cars? Will we see cars becoming twice as fast and twice as cheap every other year just as computers?

Wait and see! The now 48-year old Martin Eberhard founded Silicon Valley’s first promising carmaker- Tesla Motors - in 2003. Eberhard named his company after the famous physicist and inventor of the electric motor. Eberhard, showing great concern for the environment and becoming aware of the advantage and potential of the electric motor, decided to build the car of the future. He was thinking of a car that was friendly to the environment, this means with zero tailpipe emissions AND fun to drive. Totally convinced of his idea and highly motivated, he started looking for investors. Next to venture capitalists, former eBay President Jeff Skoll and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the entrepreneur, multimillionaire and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk invested millions of dollars. Today, Tesla Motors has its headquarters in San Carlos, California. Besides, Tesla Motors has an assembly plant in England, motor production in Taiwan and a research and development facility in Michigan which is close to Motor Town Detroit where they can get experienced automotive experts from struggling competitors.

It will still take a couple of years until convenient, stylish and powerful all-electric cars are available in large numbers. But we already know that electric cars can be as cool, as fast and as convenient as any other car. When thinking of electric cars, people will no longer imagine the small so-called neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) in which you probably feel quite uncomfortable when standing next to a pickup truck in heavy traffic. The new electric car models will be snazzy, safe and competitive with gasoline-powered cars. Advancing battery technology is making them more and more viable (The Battery Breakthrough), they’ve finally reached technical maturity. The next step is building up a recharging infrastructure which would not be too expensive. Charging points could be found in a couple of years at all shopping mall parking lots, at fast-food restaurants as well as in front of office buildings. To solve the infrastructure mess, the California-based startup Project Better Place will build an infrastructure of battery swapping stations in Israel, Denmark, Portugal and Hawaii.

For more information on energy issues and electric cars:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 4:16 PM and is filed under Electric Cars & Auto Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.