Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Green Cars
Purchasing or leasing a car that implements green technology is one way that you can save energy and help the environment at the same time. We have all heard that renewable energy works well for things like solar panels and wind turbines, but what about transportation?
Green energy from many different varieties of renewable resources has been adopted by the auto industry in the hopes of making energy efficient and environmentally safe vehicles that don’t run on fossil fuels. Here are some of the green car options currently available:
Electric Cars
Electric cars have an electric motor instead of the conventional internal combustion engine. The energy that powers the electric car is stored in batteries. Since all of the energy produced is stored or used, instead of harnessing the energy created by the combustion of gasoline, electric cars are generally more energy efficient that most gasoline-fueled cars.
Electric cars do not produce exhaust or noxious fumes and are much quieter than regular cars. However, ensuring that your electric car’s battery is always charged can pose a problem. This problem exists because the technology to recharge electric car batteries (basically, gas stations for electric cars) is not nearly as widely available as gas stations. As a result, owners of electric cars are sometimes limited to traveling round-trip distances that equal one charge of their battery. That said, creating more electric car recharging stations could easily eliminate this problem.
Hydrogen cars are powered by hydrogen fuel cells. In these fuel cells, energy is produced when hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons. The result is a clean and energy efficient source of power.
However, the main hurdle for hydrogen cars is the difficulty of easily transporting hydrogen in a wide infrastructure. Compared to liquid fuels, hydrogen is very difficult to transport. To incentivize an increased number of hydrogen car drivers, more infrastructure and hydrogen refueling stations must be created. But to ensure that these stations are maintained and can actually make money, there have to be more hydrogen cars on the road.
Solar Cars
Solar cars utilize solar technology by installing solar panels on the outside of the vehicle, capturing energy from the sun whenever they are outside. Solar cars do not create emissions, since their fuel is energy from the sun.
However, since solar cars rely on energy from the sun, there are certain problems that exist for owners of solar cars. Most notably, driving at night and on cloudy days is an issue. While many solar cars have a battery backup, they generally require direct sunlight to run efficiently.
As implied by the name, hybrid cars are a cross between conventional cars and green cars. Hybrid vehicles generally have both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine, allowing these vehicles to run on gas or diesel as well as on electricity stored in electric batteries.
Supplementing a gasoline-fed car with an electric battery helps reduce emissions, but this comes at the cost of being more expensive to make and repair. Even so, since they are only one step removed from traditional cars, hybrid cars are one of the most popular alternative vehicles to utilize green technology.
Compressed Natural Gas Cars [link to blog post—will be posted 05/28/15]
Compressed natural gas is a form of gasoline that is compressed to less than one hundredth the normal volume of regular gasoline. At that point, it becomes mostly methane and is better for the environment, as well as having many other advantages.
While this technology is currently used mostly for larger, high-use vehicles like public buses, UPS trucks, and other large machinery, it has also been implemented in commercial cars recently. For example, the Honda Civic Natural Gas runs on compressed natural gas. There are also other vehicles that the average consumer can buy that use compressed natural gas, including larger commercial vehicles like the Chevrolet Silverado, Dodge Ram, Forb F-250, and others.
With all of these options available, your family absolutely has options for purchasing a car that uses green technology!
What do you think about green car technology? Would you buy a green vehicle?
