At $130-A-Barrel Oil, Electric Cars Look Cheap

photo credit: Edward Faulkner

With oil prices so high, how much would it cost to convert every registered car in America to an electric vehicle? Nothing, according to computer scientist Philip Greenspun. Well, nothing more than we are spending already in oil.

He figures that if we took the $400 billion that Americans spend every year on oil that goes into cars, we could use that money instead to pay the interest on an $8 trillion loan. That would be more than enough to swap out the 250 million registered cars in the country with electric vehicles, and still have trillion of dollars left over to start building new power plants based on renewable or nuclear energy. (But even if we stick with coal plants, they are still more energy efficient than car engines). Here is his math:

* total oil consumption in the U.S.: 21 million barrels every day (CIA Factbook)
* cost per barrel: $130
* days in year: 365
* total spent per year: $1 trillion
* percentage of oil consumed by passenger cars: 40
* total spent per year on oil for passenger cars: $400 billion
* at 5 interest, how much we could we borrow and pay $400 billion every year in interest: $8 trillion
* number of registered cars in the U.S.: 250 million (Wikipedia)
* cost of a new electric car, if mass-produced: $20,000
* value of a used car, if exported to Latin America or China: $5,000
* cost to upgrade average existing American car to a brand-new electric car: $15,000
* number that could be converted for $8 trillion: more than 500 million cars (i.e., twice as many as we have now)

Read more . . .

Random Posts:

• What Cleantech Should Learn from Nanotech (Before It’s too Late)
• Site Diverts Shopping Money to Charities
• The (good and bad) future of the Internet
• The New Innovation Toronto Look
• The Virtual Mosque

Related posts:

1. Making Electric Cars Cheaper Than Gas Cars
2. Ford, Chrysler, Nissan to deliver on electric cars
3. Customizing Electric Cars for Cost-Effective Urban Commuting
4. Magnetic road strips could power electric cars
5. Stronach has plan to build electric cars in Canada

Tags: barrel oil, cia factbook, coal plants, electric car, electric cars, electric vehicle, electric vehicles, Innovation, oil consumption, oil prices, philip greenspun

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Project Energy, TechCrunch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.