Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey by William Tucker

Author:William Tucker [Tucker, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bartleby Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The auto companies worked furiously to improve their batteries but in 1996 they told the CARB they would be unable to meet the deadline. The CARB relaxed the 1998 and 2001 mandates but insisted the manufacturers market 1,800 ZEVs in California by 2000. Then, in a surprise move, Toyota introduced the Prius to Japan in 1997. A gas-electric hybrid, the Prius draws some inertia off the wheels during braking and uses it to produce an electric current that recharges the battery. Unfortunately, the Prius still emitted some exhausts and therefore could not be sold as a ZEV. It would not help Toyota in California.

In 2000 the majors all brought out electric vehicles in the Golden State. Because of an obscure federal safety regulation, the cars could only be leased instead of sold outright. In any case, they attracted few customers. Despite a massive advertising effort, Toyota was only able to lease 300 of its RAV4-Ev model. Most electrics were dumped onto car rental agencies where they sat quietly on the back lots.

In 2002, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, the energy correspondent for The Economist, came to Los Angeles on a story. At the rental agency, the sales clerks persuaded him to try an electric, telling him it had a range of 100 miles, would recharge “pretty quickly” and allow him to drive in HOV lanes. Reckoning this as part of his research, Vaitheeswaran took up the offer. As he recounted a year later in Power to the People:

The vehicle proved to have a much shorter range than I thought it would—closer to 50 miles than a 100. The fact that I sped along at 80 mph in those empty HOV lanes might have drained the battery faster, but only certain highways had that lane; more often, I was crawling along in traffic like everyone else. And most of the time, I was going nowhere at all, since my vehicle kept running out of power. Charging proved the biggest nightmare. There were plenty of chargers around, but some were of the wrong sort; others were locked or nonfunctional. And rather than the “pretty quick” recharge, my useless battery took more than five hours for a full charge. As a result, my entire visit turned into a fiasco of delayed or missed appointments, apologetic cell-phone calls, and panicky exits from the highway to obscure malls and commuter-rail stations in search of a charger.12

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