The idea of electric cars has not been developed recently, and in fact successful electric vehicles were being developed and manufactured back in the 1830s, with projects in the Netherlands, and in Scotland, achieving great success, with vehicles reaching speeds of up to 65 miles per hour. Mostly popular with ladies, the typical town vehicle was clean, quiet, needed no cranking to get started, and cruised at a comfortable 20 miles an hour. The gas powered cars were being outsold quite dramatically.

Although common misconceptions today still prevail, with suggestions that the future of electric vehicles is a world where the motorways are jammed pack full of milk floats and golf carts, this is starting to sound very dated, and increasingly people are aware that electric vehicles today, just as a hundred years ago, are outperforming gas powered alternatives. The recent unveiling of the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car, demonstrated that it could leave a Ferrari Spider standing at the traffic lights, and glide easily past a Mercedes SL550 without any trouble. With a top speed of 130 miles per hour and a 250 mile distance capability between charges, this blows away any dusty old ideas about milk floats.

It is easy to assume that the single most important advantage from using electric powered vehicles is the reduction of pollution to the environment through the burning of fossil fuels, but another advantage is the reduction of noise pollution, all too often forgotten. Our urban life reverberates to the hum and growl of hundreds of gas powered vehicles, and we have come to accept this. However, electric cars have the capability of eliminating almost all of the noise associated with cars, and this can only be an advantage. Some people have speculated that silent, or virtually silent vehicles may prove hazardous to those who may not be as aware of oncoming traffic when crossing roads, such as children or the elderly.

As far as the consumer is concerned, there has to be an advantage - having a clean conscience and knowing that you are doing your bit to help create a greener environment is certainly one of them, but there also need to be advantages in the pocket too. There are many of these, and in the UK for example, by splashing out under five thousand pounds you can obtain a nippy little G-Wiz, which can be parked anywhere in London for free, (itself a saving of over 5,00 - paying for the car in just one year), and there is also no road tax to pay. Not only that, but the car is rated as being in the lowest category for insurance, without losing out on performance. The advantages really are very clear, and financially it makes far more sense than an equivalent gas powered vehicle.

On a much larger scale, one country has taken the gigantic step forward and proposed a strategy to entirely eliminate their need for oil to support their road traffic within ten years. Israel has recently unveiled its Project Better Place which is a long term plan to replace oil based gas guzzling vehicles with electric ones, with an estimated completion date of within ten years. The country already has half a million stations which support the re-charging of electric vehicles, and with the average distance capable of being travelled between charges more than ample to enable a vehicle to travel between any two points within the country without the need to stop, it is both an ambitious project but one which looks as though it could very well set a high standard for the rest of the world. The plans include introducing electric vehicle distribution in a similar way to mobile phones, with companies giving the cars away free whilst users simply pay for the cost to use or charge the car, doing so either on contract with unlimited usage, or on a pay-as-you-drive basis.

As with any new development, the ultimate success relies heavily on consumer demand, and companies piloting electric vehicle schemes are trying hard to win that consumer demand and interest. With electric vehicles being showcased in Hollywood, such as the Lexus driven by Tom Cruise in Minority Report, people are starting to realise that the future isn’t a world full of milk floats, but of slick and powerful cars that anyone would be proud to drive. With the US home to nearly eight million electric vehicles, consumer demand is very much a voice loud enough to have caught the ears of politicians.

Many people are worried that, rather than saving fossil fuel from being burned, we are in danger of either using even more, or simply shifting emphasis and focus from the world outside our front doors to the distant and easily ignored world of the power plants. Electric cars still need to be re-charged, and this power needs to come from somewhere. With most of our electricity being generated from the burning of fossil fuels, there’s no long term advantage. This argument is not true however, and with power plants increasingly trying to source energy from renewable means, and with electric cars using the energy produced in a much more efficient way, the overall consumption of fossil fuel will be dramatically reduced.

Picture a future that is smoke free, with no stinky gasses being belched from the back of cars driving past your street, and with no concerns regarding the waste of fuel whilst you sit idly at traffic lights or in a road jam. Although concerns have been raised that if we all arrived home at tea time and plugged our cars in we’d overload the grid, that has been demonstrated to be untrue, since at night the grid is very underused, and if we all turned to electric vehicles, the amount of energy used would be far less overall. Perhaps we can even foresee a time when the solar panels on our roof allow us to store energy through the day to re-charge our batteries at night.