Whadya know!
Finally!
An American company has literally reinvented the wheel!
A regular electric car is finally out there for those of us who just want something environmentally sound to get to work and back and yet still leave a planet worth living in for our grandkids!
Check these prices in this month's
and follow me below the fold:
Just kidding.
You can't buy an electric car from any American company making our mass market cars. You can buy a weird looking toy overseas. Or a fabulous $90,000 Tesla, if you are filthy rich this year. If you live in India you could have been zipping around in your electric Reva for the last 4 years. If you are UPS, and want to look good for those green city folk of course you can buy electric trucks for your deliveries. If you need a powerhouse to lug stuff around your giant warehouse you can buy a all-electric workhorse like this.
But for everyday moms to just get to work and drop three 60 pound kiddies at school, no electric car for you... unless you can think outside the box. You know an electric is cheaper because you've done thecost comparison:, and you know its better for the planet because The Union of Concerned Scientists emails you every day about it, and you know its better for your kids asthma because you have 2 brains in your head.
The way you can get an electric car now is to visit the underground economy to secretly convert your outwardly normal vehicle to an environmentally sound and sensible car, by simply bypassing the entire gas guzzling combustion engine.
From the cheapest to the most expensive heres the 3 ways you can convert to electric, by removing the combustion engine and replacing it with electric.
- If you are the handy type, that will cost you around $6,000 in parts, and a week off to go take the class this summer with the expert, Mike Parker.
- Or at a cost of around $15,000 to $20,000 you can pay another company like this one to scrape out the entire oily mess of the entire combustion engine and to insert an electric engine in your donor vehicle.
- Or, if you are doing ok financially this year, what a great time to really step up to do something great for the planet like invest in a limited-run all electric car by Alan Cocconi of AC Propulsion, who helped engineer the power electronics for the prototype of the GM EV1, is creating, like this Beetle conversion. Like 1. and 2. you'll need to own or buy a "donor vehicle" to use as the shell, like this VW Beetle.
If this is the year your ships come in, even better: get on the waiting list for a Tesla later this year.
By investing in the short runs of these luxury electrics you move us all closer to mass market vehicles for the rest of us.
So when you need to buy your next car, or when your transmission fails its time to think of making the switch. Instead of running back and reinvesting more dollars in the last gasp of the failing economy of the combustion engine and its partner, oil, consider visiting this underground economy of converters of donor vehicles instead.
Because if anyone is going to reinvent the wheel its going to have to be us. Why continue to support the industry that did not allow you to buy anything but gas guzzlers. The Union of Concerned Scientists says that your next car purchase decision is the single most important decision consumers can make to help the planet.
Certainly apart from the auto companies dragging their feet on this and oil companies forcing them to keep us addicted to oil, the rest of us can see its way past time to go back to the drawing board and Reinvent The Wheel.
And while we're at it, we also need to reinvent the Freeway
by adding Solar Power
for our all electric fleet
and reinvent the Bridge with Wind Turbines
Energy Turbines could be either Wind or Lunar Power: On the bridge, above, as Wind, or built under a road that goes over a coastal body of water they become ocean tide powered or
Lunar Power
and we need to reinvent the Architecture (pdf sorry) Wind Turbines as Adam Siegel diaried here
Really, every building should not merely be energy efficient but could and should also create at least its own energy. In Australia, which is about where we will be another 10 years into global warming the government website helps consumers find battery banks designed to provide many days energy requirement with no input from the charging source ie for Solar energy at night and wind energy on windless days, although interestingly you only need between like 5 and 15 mile an hour wind for ideal windpower conditions.
and theres all the different ways to power a building with Wind Power.
The roofs of every large commercial structure in America are all also prime Solar farmland as well, obviously. I hate it when people say Oh but we'd need a land area the size of Texas to Solarpower the country. We already have a land area the size of Texas worth of rooftops and parking buildings available! Lets farm that land for America!
Why couldn't every big building owner rent out their rooftops for big time Solar Farming and earn comissions on the power from their rooftop farm like rural farmers are doing now?
Really, every vehicle, bridge, building, parking lot could be producing energy to power our future. And they can be. Theres tons of great ideas like these on the drawing board.
But great energy ideas are not going to be coming from the Fossil Fools "energy" companies. They make a living out of killing and plundering, which is diametricly opposed to creating and inventing.
Ideas that are in the public interest and for the Common Good, really should be protected at public expense to prevent them from being bought and buried,
as the electric car was, by The Oiligarchy. Ideas being developed at our expense by the Department of Energy are at particular risk. I would like to see some legal protection by some public interest group like Public Citizen for ideas taxpayers fund via DOE.
Although I am hopefull that we can get regular electric cars made by a new bunch of entrepreneurs far from Detroit, I sure hope this time there are some protections against intellectual property that is for the Common Good from being plundered and killed again.
Please, Tesla and all you terrific companies starting up, please don't sell your technology to the Oiligarchy. And please all you legal geniuses here at dailykos, devise some cunning legal way to protect this planet from those who would bury it for a buck.