Guest submission by Michael Osborne, founding member and current Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance (TxETRA) board Chair.
Most electric cars are smarter than their smoking hillbilly cousins and they are definitely cheaper to drive. Want to pay a dollar for gas… drive electric. Want to never spend $129.00 dollars on an oil change, oil filter, and air filter again… drive electric. Tired of waiting for your car as your mechanic finishes that brake job on your 3 year old car…drive electric.
Plus, you might experience what I experienced several months ago. I was driving east on Hwy 290, a little faster than the speed limit, when this huge “dually” truck (four tires on the rear axel) comes roaring around me. It’s a real fancy black truck with shiny dual vertical chrome exhaust pipes running up on both sides of the cabin. There was probably some stickers that I didn’t read but I suspect that the long haired driver was a member of a political class that rhymes with bumper.
So this guy passes me, then abruptly slows down in front of me. Then, with the flick of some switch, he zooms off leaving a huge noxious black cloud of smoke in his tracks, with me in those tracks; I mean thick black smoke like a locomotive in a western movie.
Setting e-buses aside, we expect cumulative passenger EV sales to reach 4 million units before the start of September 2018. There are several new EV models that we expect to come to the market before the end of 2018, which should help increase sales numbers globally.
The next million EVs will take just over 6 months. We expect the five-millionth EV to be sold in March 2019.
He also doesn’t believe that climate change is a transcendent problem. That in order to get the carbon out of our world, we will need to run our cars on wind and solar. And with enough electric cars, we will have enough stored energy to do it.
Michael Osborne led the Plug-in Partners effort to develop the 10,000-plus soft orders that led to the production of GM’s Chevy Volt. In the 1980s, Osborne saw the potential of Texas’ vast wind and solar energy resources. He co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Alliance (TREIA) and The Wind Coalition, both of which successfully advocated policies that helped make Texas the No. 1 wind energy producer in the nation and fifth in the world for wind energy production.
The Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance (TxETRA) is a nonprofit organization composed of electric energy vehicle manufacturers, industry leaders, developers, distributors, producers, utilities, and environmental and transportation equity groups. Their mission is to guide and accelerate the adoption of electrical transportation in all its forms, in the most cost-effective way, providing maximum benefit to the citizens of Texas.