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Electric Cars Advantages and Disadvantages
Of the advantages, the environmentally friendliness is an important one. For one, electric cars themselves are zero emission vehicles, meaning they don't emit similar toxic material that is associated with traditional gasoline engines into the environments where they operate, which is an important consideration for especially large cities with poor air quality. If the electric cars use power produced by fossil fuels in the power plant, such as oil, coal, or natural gas, the substances that pollute the air can be controlled more easily at a power plant than at the tailpipes of millions of gasoline-burning cars. It is often said that the electric cars operations are more easily controlled, making the engines run only as needed and to do so more efficiently, in comparison to traditional gasoline engines. The price benefit of operating an electric vehicle have been estimated to be 5 times less to operate an electric car, in comparison to gasoline engine that gets 20 miles per gallon, $3 per gallon gasoline price level. That estimation was done by William Baumgartner and Andrew Goss, for Business Economics (October 2000). There are disadvantages to the electric cars of course. One disadvantage is the price of building the electric cars at the moment. The hight price has to do with the fact that there is no mass production of these cars, and the economies of scale work in favor of the traditional gasoline powered cars. This disadvantage is disappearing very rapidly, however, as hybrid cars, which use both electric engine and a gasoline one, are being sold in increasing numbers. Many analysts see the hybrid vehicles as the last phase of development before people start buying cars that use only electric engines. Another point in considering electric cars advantages and disadvantages is that electric cars need an infrastructure of recharging stations. This infrastructure build up will mean a lot of costs, which will increase the price of electricity for electric cars at the recharging stations. These recharging stations need to be build quite close to each other, given the limited range of 160 km (100 mi) in most cases with electric cars, and the batteries currently take at least three hours to recharge using charging stations.
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