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Eberhard 4 (2:15)
Topic(s): Auto Industry / Efficiency / Electric &
Hybrid
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Video Transcript
I got interested in the idea of the electric car somewhere in
2002, just because I was looking for my next car. And I
thought about getting another sports car and buying another
car that gets crummy gas mileage in this era of Middle Eastern
wars and global warming and so on, it just seemed
irresponsible. And I thought about buying one of the electric
cars that were around—you still had some of them on the
market—although pretty much you couldn't actually buy
one as it turned out, or even lease one if what you wanted was
not available.
And so I started getting interested more and more in the idea
and, you know, the obvious question that comes up is "is the
electric car really more efficient, does it really produce
less C02 over its full driving cycle, you know, well-to-wheel
energy consumption, than a gasoline car or other technologies
that are on the market, or does it just move the problem to
the power plant?" And that was, you know, a perfectly
legitimate question that people ask me all the time and that I
was asking in 2002.
To answer that question was actually not that easy. I did a
fairly detailed well-to-wheel energy analysis where I looked
at how much energy does it take to convert, for example, crude
oil to gasoline and then get it into the tank of a car and
then how many miles to the gallon does the car get? With
electricity, you can look the various source fields, you can
look at natural gas, coal, and say, "okay, how much force
field does it take to produce electricity and then how much
electricity does the car consume per mile?" You can say, "ok,
how much natural gas per mile is that car consuming?" and you
can measure its energy that way. And you can compare all kinds
of cars that way. When you do that in-depth analysis it's
surprising; the electric are dramatically better than
everything else on the market, not just existing cars, but way
better than, for example, hydrogen fuel cell cars. Way better
than, um, bio-fuel cars and it was a real eye opener for me.
The sanity check on that math—you know, I did a lot of
math on that—the sanity check, that is cost. How much
actually does it cost per mile to drive that car? And you know
our car is something like a penny a mile to drive and compare
that to whatever you drive; it's a really big difference in
price. So that was the beginning. I started off by saying
"does that make sense?" at least from a technological
perspective. Does it make sense to start a car company is a
totally separate question.