The real reason for electric cars?
Their longevity. Especially if they are done the right way.
Tesloop is a Californian shuttle service composed of Teslas. So far, as you can read here, each of Tesloop’s cars have been driving about 17,000 miles per month, fully recharging at least twice each day. Also, so far, “The cars have never died of old age”, and Tesloop “predicted their drive trains would practically last forever.”
It is too early to be sure about this, especially because the cost of replacement batteries, and if/how often they must be replaced is not clear yet.
But if electric vehicles (EVs) could really last five times longer than conventional cars", while costing a fraction of them in maintenance and “fuel”, the implications on the car market could be huge.
And that is we keep making cars the old way
The implication on the car market would be huge… if we insisted to stick to the old models of economic growth and intellectual property, that demand hard repairability, very little modularity, and deliberate incompatibility of spare parts.
Just think what would happen instead, and how much more money and resources we could all save, if, instead of just sharing them:
- all those EVs had standard, interchangeable batteries, and other parts
- the same “adversarial interoperability” that is high time to restore in social networking or smartphone batteries were also applied to cars
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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