The future of electric cars
It’s hard to tell where the future will take electric vehicles, but it’s clear they hold a lot of potential for creating a more sustainable future. If we transitioned all the light-duty vehicles in the U.S. to hybrids or plug-in electric vehicles using our current technology mix, we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 30-60 percent, while lowering the carbon pollution from the transportation sector by as much as 20 percent.
To help reach these emissions savings, in 2012 President Obama launched the EV Everywhere Grand Challenge — an Energy Department initiative that brings together America’s best and brightest scientists, engineers and businesses to make plug-in electric vehicles more as affordable as today’s gasoline-powered vehicles by 2022. On the battery front, the Department’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory is working to overcome the biggest scientific and technical barriers that prevent large-scale improvements of batteries.
And the Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is advancing game-changing technologies that could alter how we think of electric vehicles. From investing in new types of batteries that could go further on a single charge to cost-effective alternatives to materials critical to electric motors, ARPA-E’s projects could transform electric vehicles.
In the end, only time will tell what road electric vehicles will take in the future.
