TechStuff Rides in Electric Cars

electric vehicle? Yes? But I actually had a course in college where we studied that, so I'll pretend no, Jonathan, I had no idea. Well, Chris, you ignorant man. I'm going to enlighten you. Now, if only you had spent some hard earned cash on a on an education, then you would know that that that. Yeah, the electric car is nothing new in a sense. We've had electric cars for quite some time. They in fact pre date the

internal combustion engine car. Yeah. They It's funny to look at the alternative methods for powering a car, uh these days, because in of course, electric is one of the more common ways to talk about it. Or hybrids. Again, not new um, but this is UH. There are other things too, like talking about uh ethanol and and plant based fuel.

These kinds of things were talked about at the beginning of the whole car thing when people were saying, you know, oh, well, what what would we used to power an engine or or power a motor to make this happen? And and they ran through these things. Eventually petroleum one out. And the reason this is so challenging now is because the petroleum UH infrastructure is so well established. But um, but it's amazing to to think about because we think, oh, well,

you know electric cars, well they're new. Well not really. The problem is the technology uh hasn't been worked on and and so long, at least by as many people. Right. Yeah, When you go back to the earliest electric vehicles, they were very limited. You could not go very far because the batteries would run out of charge. They were not necessarily rechargeable. You had massive batteries, so that meant that it added to the overall weight of the vehicle itself.

They didn't go very fast. They seem to be all right for getting around uh like a city UH in the late nineteenth century, but any difficult terrain it would start to have problems. Uh. The steam powered cars actually ended up being more popular than electric ones because they could go much faster, and uh, they were not necessarily the best choice either, because they were not terribly efficient. You had to, you know, get the boiler heated up

before you could go anywhere. You had to actually start generating SAM before you could make the vehicle go, And there's always the possibility that it could blow up real good, which not not not something you necessarily want when you're gonna take a little trip down to Grandma's is to have the steam boiler explode on the way there. That's

that's generally what we consider a bad thing. It's productive trans But gas powered cars they had the power and the versatility that people wanted in those early days of travel. And because of that, and because we did build this huge infrastructure to support those sort of cars, there's a lot of momentum built up. Right. Yeah, Yeah, to use a term in a way that I wasn't intending, but

they're exactly. They had built up a lot of momentum, and it meant that any new quote unquote new developments in uh this technology was going to be met with resistance, not necessarily you know, something that people were consciously trying to resist, but just from the very nature of how the industry developed. So resistance, oh man, I am no. I just can't get away from it, so I'll embrace it.

So the electric car is making kind of a comeback, depending upon who you ask, whom you ask, yes, well, yeah, there it's been in the news a lot, especially during the election cycle here in America. Um, but do you want to go back and start talking about some of these early vehicles first, and we can kind of talk about where we are now? Sure, if you've got some

information on early vehicles, I'd love to hear it. Okay, Well, Um, I found a very interesting timeline that that suggested that it was a Scottish inventor, Robert Anderson, who came up with a a very very basic electric car with non rechargeable batteries. It seems like a problem especially in eighteen somewhere in the early eighteen thirty ease as when he started working on that, and uh, you know they kept

working on that. Uh. I also have a Gaston Plante, a French physicist who in eighteen fifty nine had a rechargeable lead acid battery actually the lead acid battery has been sort of the staple for electric cars for a while. Um, but they're extremely heavy, probably because of the lead relate and just a guess um um, but also a camille of it doesn't have the accident on it far Uh. In eighty one improved upon that idea, and then in in Des Moines, Iowa. Uh, William Morrison came up with

an electric car. In the United States here um and uh, you know, they were working on those. They even had a fleet of electric taxis in New York because the first first pedestrian fatality in the Western hemisphere. As I recall, now you're just being you know, am I not? Am I not correct? Wasn't there someone who stepped off a trolley and then was hit by an electric taxi? Okay, well, I don't have that in my notes. So that's possibly that's possible trivia that may live somewhere in Jonathan's head

and could have possibly been made up entirely. Well, let us know, send your email to tech stuff at Discovery dot com. True enough, the yeah, they had, they had about sixty of them in New York. Um. Back in the about the turn of the twentieth century and um, yeah, gosh, that's right. I have to say, I have to specified turn of the century. Yeah, it just shows that I'm still not thinking in the twenty century frame of mind. Yes, but in this case it was a New York state

of mind. Yes, it was so. Yeah. They as a matter of fact, Um, this I had. I found a really cool timeline on NPR, which is a national public radio here in the in the United States. Um, that said that at the turn of the century twentieth century, were about four thousand cars on the road, and at that point it was split about thirty three pc each, steam, gasoline and electric cars. Um. Basically they were clean. But um,

cold weather and batteries, Yeah, don't get along. If yeah, lead acid battery gets really cold, it's harder to get that juice flowing. The electrochemical reactions that need to take place are are slowed down by the cold. That's one of those things where you know, I've heard people say that in order to preserve your batteries, you should put them in some place cold, like a freezer refrigerator. Don't do that. It actually makes it much more difficult for

those electrical electrochemical reactions to take place. So it you might think, oh, it's it's slowing it down. So therefore the juice will last longer even when I'm not using it in a in a UM device, But it's not going to work very well when you plug it back in. So uh, the same sort of thing is true in cold weather. You get in the car and you turn it on, you just barely creeping along because that electrochemical reaction is taking place so slowly, you're not getting the

juice you need to get get moving now. It's you know, we we've made some advances since then, so there have been some more electric cars and we don't necessarily use lead acid batteries and all of them anymore either. Um No, but that was that was state of the art and then not terribly distant past. Um. You know, there are there are other types of rechargeable batteries, and of course

they do need to be rechargeable. It's very important, of course, otherwise we would have to have these stations everywhere that would have, you know, batteries, you have to buy a new battery every time your car was running out of juice. You know, you'd switch them out, and that would not be very economical and it would also take up I mean a ton of space yep yep. Now, of course some you might say, well, what what happened? Uh, Henry

Ford happened? He Boy did he happen? Well? He and and from what I've read about him, uh, he was a convert to the idea of using petroleum based cars. Um. He did like the internal combustion engine, but preferred alternative fuels to uh, to gasoline. But the thing is, you know, once that the Model T was released in for eight fifty dollars um, basically that that you know, it was affordable for so many people, and his production system made

these cars so easily available. Um that they were you know, they were undercutting the prices of electric cars and they were far more available. So it took off and uh then like you know, the infrastructure gets built around it, and then we're kind of not stuck so much as committed to a particular type of vehicle. And it takes a lot of effort to change that. And the reason for the effort behind changing that, uh is largely through an environmental concern, but it goes beyond environment too. But

we'll cover all of these things. So you know, if you if you just think about it from a very basic point of view, uh, and you're and you're really oversimplifying things. It'd be easy to say, oh, electric car makes sense because it does not produce pollution the way a gas powered car does. It's not emitting uh you know, any sort of uh gas that could could pollute the environment. You're not worrying about all the particles that would come out of exhaust. All of that sort of stuff, um applies.

And so there is that part of the argument where if you were to just look at that part of the equation, it would be very easy to say, ah, well, electric cars, I mean, that's better for the world, so we should we should totally switch to that. But you should know, of course, that nothing is ever that simple to to take in other considerations. You have to think, well, how was the electricity generated? The electricity that is charging those batteries in that electric car, which you know you

have to recharge. Most electric cars have well around forty fifty miles of range for a full charge and then up. You know, you need to have at least that because otherwise you would, you know, look, just on a regular commute to work, you could end up stranding yourself, because on the drive there and then half the drive back, you've already gone further than what your car can accomplish on its own. Yeah, Thomas Edison was working on that problem.

He came out with a a nickel steel battery that would last for about miles according to the NPR timeline. Um and uh, you know that would that would make it far more appealing for reasonable commutes. I mean, uh, back at that time, people were not driving the distances they do now rice here in America. Um to do different things and uh so, so that was an improvement. But um, I think another um peg on the side of the gasoline car was Charles Kettering who came out

with the electric automobile starter. And you know, so rather than getting out and cranking your car up with the crank in the front to get it started, that made the gasoline engine easier to start. And when you had the combination of that and the lower prices of the gasolene powered cars and the infrastructure, I think that helped make a serious difference on the in the in the

in favor of gasoline power cars. And so, I mean, of course it's a totally different world than the one we have today where we're looking at the various uh impact of the gasoline car ours out there on the street. But getting back to the idea of the environmentally friendly, if your electricity is being produced by coal uh power power plants, then there's pollution going out into the environment on behalf of the electricity you're using, so you're not you know, the car is not as clean as you

would first think necessarily. Now if you're if your electricity is coming through other means, like you have a huge solar panel farm attached to your house, and you might then that's much more clean. I mean, you still have to consider things like what materials went into producing both the car and the solar panels, because then we might get into rare earth minerals. But we did an entire episode of tech stuff on rare earth minerals, and I suggest you go back and listen to that. Right now,

we'll wait. So anyway, now you know, I'm assuming you're all in the honor system that you did listen. But now you know those rare earth minerals, that's a problem, right, So that's another thing you have to think about with

this electric versus gas. Beyond that, you have to think about things like the cost of the batteries, because depending upon what kind of batteries are in your car there electric car, they do eventually have to be replaced, that they will eventually run out of enough of the chemicals to make that electrochemical process happen, and you'll have to change them out, and they can be really expensive, so I can add to the price of an electric car.

Ah And and price is another one of those issues, like if you look at how much does it cost to drive an electric car versus a gas powered car, and you have to take into consideration everything like not just the fuel prices and the electricity prices. I mean, that's that would be easy to compare because I'm guessing that in almost every case the cost of electricity is going to be lower than the cost of gas. So

from that perspective, they're the same. But then you have to think of things like, all right, well, replacing batteries, you've gotta factor that into the cost. You know that's going to happen, so that drives the electric prices up. But then you think, well, gas powered cars tend to require more maintenance because they have more moving parts, they have fluids that they have to handle like the gasoline

and things of that nature. So we've got tubes and pipes and stuff that you don't have an electric cars. They don't they don't have those those things. There's the only fluids you have to worry about, things like break fluid and uh, when should wiper fluid and of course headlight fluid. Um well, but otherwise, yeah, you know, it's so what I'm trying to get at is that this is a really complex issue, and it's really really really

tricky to do a direct comparison between the two in general. However, most the information I see shows that in the long run, being five years and longer, an electric car properly maintained versus a gas powered car properly maintained is a better deal. But it does take a few years for that to

kick in. Yeah, I do feel compelled to point out that most automobile manufacturers believe that their batteries well outlast the life of the car, so it is unlikely that you will have to replace the array of batteries in a battery powered vehicle. Unlikely, And it also depends on how long you keep the vehicle too. I mean, most people, uh, the the lifespan of of cars has been increasing here in the United States. UM. Where once it was in

the single digits, it's now you know, in the double digits. UM. But of course you do, as Jonathan said, need to take care of your vehicle in order for that to happen. UM. And there's also, uh, you know, there's there's also a matter of shipping costs too, UM because parts for some of these these things, UM have to come from different

places and so UM. You know, I know that a few years ago they were talking about the early hybrid vehicles and people were buying them because they used less gasoline, because they were you know, a mixture of of battery power and gas power. But they said, well, you know, the thing is, the parts come from so many different places that it takes fossil fuels to you know, to be burned, to get those parts to one place to have them assembled and then take them to the place

where you buy the vehicle. And some of the uh, the green hue that you're either partly or completely battery powered vehicle has is sort of tinged by um, the offset of the yes, it gets an oily tinge. I was just waiting because I was like I was staring at Chris, thinking, where's this going. So, yeah, but I can get its green usual they say it is. It's yeah.

It's definitely a complex issue. And and on top of that, you know, you might say, all the the cost of an electric vehicle often right now as we're recording this podcast anyway, tends to be more expensive than a comparable vehicle that is gas powered. It's been improving, right, And it's one of those things, like any technology, where the earlier versions tend to be more expensive, and as we improve our manufacturing techniques and and everything around that, than

the prices can come down. On top of that, we have to remember the political side of this, where in the United States, there are especially within particular states we're talking about both federal and state level here. Um, there are incentives in many places to purchase an electric car where you can get tax credits or rebates, and that helps bring the overall price of the vehicle down closer to within the range of other cars in that class.

A lot of complex issues here. Some of them are economics, some of them are environmental, some of them are political. And that's why it's really been kind of a hot button issue. I mean particularly that political part with the the tax credits I've seen. I've seen praise for that, where where people have said, because of this, you have put electric vehicles within the grasp of more more folks than otherwise would have that opportunity because it otherwise it

would be too expensive for them to buy. On the flip side, there are people saying, this is our tax money, You're giving credits to other people with my money. Uh. I think that's a very personally, this is my opinion. I think that's a fairly short sighted view, saying that my money is going to give someone else a break

when you're thinking, okay. Ultimately, the idea here is that we're trying to get ourselves off a dependence on oil and gasoline as much as we possibly can, and in that sense, it is a benefit to me, even if I never go out and buy an electric car, to help reduce that dependency on oil, particularly when you get into global politics where you have to worry about who is it that owns the oil that we are getting, and what is our political relationship with them, what's our

political relationship with the country surrounding that one, what's that country's political relationship it gets so thorny. So in my in my view, the in the long term game, uh, this incentive to go out and get an electric car

could be of great benefit to everyone. But again you have to be able to take that long term look and just uh suppressed that that initial urge to say this isn't fair because my money is going to help someone else and I don't see, like I'm not buying an electric car, so I don't see why I have to pay this this tax money. Yeah. Yeah, And now, of course, um, whether or not you agree with it,

it's it's easy to at least understand that point. I mean, not all not all politics are understandable, but understandable to say, hey, you know, I'm i'm I'm paying taxes, I want to see something for my money, and uh, well the thing the easy argument for that is we'll go buy an electric car, dude. Um, But no, that that's that's oversimplifying the argument that the thing is because they're so expensive, they're not affordable for everyone. Um, perhaps somebody particularly likes

their car. There. Car enthusiasts are very passionate about certain vehicles. Um, and you know, for a long time we've had uh, gas powered vehicles that people have fallen in love with, so you know, they're they're gonna be people who still love that UM, which in my personal opinion is understandable. But I also would like to UH see electric car succeed because I do think there are UM, you know, better for the environment in the long haul, uh, at

least in the immediate sense. Now there's a lot as we were talking about, this isn't something that's gonna happen overnight. There's a lot of work that has to be done. One company that I think UM is interesting to to follow is a company called Better Place, which is UM. I believe UM uh an Israeli company, and they have been working with organizations all over the world to test

out there uh their systems. Now Wired magazine had an article about them and UM their founder, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his his first name writer not shy Agassi UM and UH basically they have their Their website is very informative about the different kinds of technologies that

they are looking at. But they're working on ways to convert UH more typical cars rather than building them from scratch to UH to electricity and and UH basically creating the infrastructure that would be necessary to power these vehicles, um, which I mean no pun intended power um. But yeah, I mean it's some it's I think that you know, if you poke around on the website they have at least they give you an idea of what it's the kind of work it's going to take. And it's not

going to be Um. I don't think it's going to be one company or one person or one country around the world. It's going to take many people in many countries, you know, working on the problem to generate a real solution to it. Because you know, frankly, if you look at the timeline on NPR there there um, it goes from the downfall of the electric car in nineteen twenty basically all the things we were talking about before to ye. And that's because people just weren't working on the problem

in between. I mean they were, but they were it was more of a I wouldn't say hobby. It was something where they were testing ideas. More so than we're going to build a fleet of electric cars. We're gonna take it back from these uh, these gasoline powered ideas. We're gonna we're gonna completely revamp that, and it goes from when uh, General Motors came out with the e V one UM, which it's sold at Saturn dealerships. I remember because I have a SAD and I saw one

every once in a while. You joined the cult. I did join the cults. We also had a Saturn, So I can't I can't criticize UM, which is now an orphan car. Um. But there have been others, of course, you know recently, um, that are all electric. Tesla Oh yeah, Tesla's famous and in fact, Automobile magazine named the Tesla Model S as its two thousand car of the Year, keeping in mind we're still in twelve and car years

make no sense to me. But no, they named the Tesla Model SUH the car of the year and said that it was, um uh, a very impressive ride, a very quiet, very fast car. And they and apparently we're all endangering their driver's licenses by driving far too fast. And well, the Tesla Roadster UM, which was its first yeah, which is a sports car, was its first car out there. UM,

I understand has a whiplash in ducing acceleration. Yeah, it's it's one of those things where just it's an incredibly fast acceleration, like just the it's it's a really powerful vehicle. And we should also say that according to the Energy Collective, there's been a two increase in sales of electric vehicles from eleven. But if you want to know that what that is in real numbers, you know, you're two percent more. That sounds incredible when you get down to real numbers,

that's around thirty eight thousand cars. So that's about the same number of cars in the entire year that some of the more popular models sell in a month. So

you know, you've got to take keep your perspective on there. So, yes, the the industry is growing, which is good, but it's still very tiny in comparison to the traditional gasoline powered cars and even to hybrid vehicles which have had they've they've had a few more years to uh to really start hitting the market, at least in the United States.

Um and I want to talk really briefly, just explain very quickly the what makes electric cars work, because we talked about how in the gas engine you have all these tubes and pipes and stuff you've got you're using combustion to help drive pistons. Um, you know, expanding gases, all this kind of stuff. That's that's what's providing the

the energy you need to make the cargo. But with an electric car, you're talking about batteries, a controller, and electric motor, and the electric motor is what's generating all the energy to make the cargo. And the basics of an of an electric motor are pretty simple, and that comes down to, uh, two magnets. How do they work? We actually have an article on it if you want to know. But all right, so imagine that you have

this is a very super simple electric motor. Let's say that you have, um, you have a magnet and it's uh and sort of a semicircle uh shape, and you've got a north end of the magnet on one side and the south end of the magnet on the other side. Okay, so it's think of it like an arc. So you've got the south end on one side, the arc in the north end on the other side of the arc. In between, like mounted on a on a pole, you have a rotor that can spin freely around in a circle.

And then you have mounted on that rotor and electro magnet. Now, when you run a current through that electromagnet, it creates a magnetic field, and uh it magnetizes this electromagnet. So you have a north pole in the south pole. Now, when the north pole in the of the electromagnet and the north pole of that permanent magnet that's mounted in an arc are close to one another, they repel each

other and Santa Claus flies off. And then when the north pole of the electro magnet gets close to the south pole of the permanent magnet, they attract one another.

So whist the penguins. If you just have the current run I'm ignoring Christopher when you when you if you just have the current running through one direction in this electromagnet, it's going to align itself so that the north pole of the electromagnet is pointing at the south pole the permanent magnet, and and the south pole of the electromagnets point where the north pole of the permanent magnet. But then if you were to reverse the current, that would

also reverse the polarity of the magnet itself. The electromagnet, the poles would switch, which would mean that now suddenly it would be pushing away from the the permanent magnet. Uh as it is currently um aligned, so it would move and rotate so that the poles were again attracted to the opposites. So by switching the current the direction of current inside the electro magnet at a particular rate, you can get that rotor to turn. And as the rotor turns, which I think was a soap opera, it starts,

it's it's doing work started. You can harness that work to generate electricity. That's the basis of the electric motor. So you're using magnets to turn a rotor. By the way, that we usually refer to that as a a brushed motor, and the reason for that is there there are contacts on the inside of that rotor uh that when the magnet is spinning around, it's what's allowing the the current to change direction. Because you're you're getting power from batteries.

Batteries are direct current, that's DC, so direct current is always going to flow in the same direction. Alternating current is electricity that is reversing the flow of current rapidly in cycles pulses UM. So in order to convert d C to a C, which is what we really need for things like an electric car, you would have these Um. These little they are called brushes uh inside the electric motor that once they hit certain contexts, that's what would

allow the the flow of electricity to change direction. Uh. There are also brushless electric motors. In this case, what you do is you put the permanent magnets on the rotor, so the rotor magnets are never going to change, and you put the electro magnets on the field around the rotor, and you just change the the direction of current in

the permanent magnets. They're stationary, so you don't have to worry about figuring out how you're gonna swap the flow of current over and over with a moving object, and the rotor itself will still spin and generate energy that way. Electricity. Yeah, now you know some some battery you're charging is accomplished in gasoline power cars through the alternator um and uh you know they're there are other regenerative breaking and some

other things that help out with that. But of course it's much more of an issue with electric cars, UM. You know. And and the distance the it's hard to say. It's weird for me to say mileage because I always think, you know, miles per gallon UM and also kilometers to the people in this is an honest question. Kilometers, kilometer ridge, what do you call it in Europe anyway? Distance? Um, yeah, the distance you could travel. Let's just say that is

and how it's being silly, but I really don't know. Um, the distance you can travel with an electric car is still one of the big issues. It's still a reason why people are hesitant to adopt the vehicles, although they're they're more likely to these days. Um. But some people have tried to get around that with sort of combinations that uh seem you know, like they they might be

more challenging than others. Chevrolet here in the United States has the Vault, which is primarily an electric car, but it does have a gasoline powered engine in it that can take up It's sort of like the reverse of a Toyota Prius, where you use your your gasoline engine to get from like you say, on the highway, and then as you're driving in the city where it stopped

and go, it converts over to electricity. Um. The volt is supposed to work primarily on electricity, and when the battery runs down and you still need to get somewhere, the gasoline engine can help you get the rest of the way better place. UM envisions a world in which the batteries are not attached to their vehicle itself, So you could pull into a battery battery replacement station and somebody will pull the battery for you, put in a freshly charged one, hook it up, and you're ready to go.

UM in addition to charging stations, and again that's expensive because that's infrastructure that's more than just the car. You've got to have the stations available to do that. But I have to say that is a pretty practical way of looking at it. Yeah, we've also talked about fuel cells in the past that are not too different, or a hydrogen based car, and same sort of same sort of challenges applied to that. Where you're talking about, Yeah,

the hydrogen powered car sounds like a great idea. You get heat and some water vapor, which granted is technically a greenhouse gas, but it's not. It's not a pollutant in in the way that carbon dioxide is. But you know, you've you've got uh, you know, when that's your your

your output and you're using it. Sounds like a hydrogen based fleet of cars will be a great idea, but then you have to figure out how to support the fleet of cars, and that's where we start running into problems where you you're looking at a multiple multibillion dollar problem with most countries, including places like the United States, which are it's a big country with lots of people in it. Of course, there are larger countries with even more people in it, and for them it would be,

you know, a significant challenge to switch over. Electric cars are not maybe not quite as dramatic a a shift in the sense that with the right adapters, you would be able to plug your car in UH in to any UH outlet that was capable of putting out the right amount of power, so you wouldn't necessarily have to have refueling stations designed specifically for electric cars, except when

you're talking about going on a really long trip. If you were doing a road trip of any length, then you're thinking, well, I definitely need to figure out something to supplement the distance this car can go, because otherwise I'm never going to get to where I'm headed. But you know, they've they've made some pretty strong strides in that as well. Tesla reports that it can with its vehicles hit two fifty miles on a single charge, which

is pretty impressive. Yep. Yeah, but there are other challenges to UM actually some that are very recent. UM. And no jokes please if you know something about Fisker, but just just as at the time we're recording this, it's very early November. UM. Hurricane Sandy just hit the north eastern part of the United States and went into Canada, UM and caused quite a bit of damage up there.

And I found this kind of interesting, UM because I found a story about Fisker in which sixteen UM Fisker Karmas, which are expensive electric vehicles, UM, were submerged by saltwater from the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, and the saltwater affected the cars and they caught fire. Yes, there are a hundred thousand dollars apiece, so it's very bad karma UM.

But basically they were they were apparently stationed in Port Newark, New Jersey, and when the storm came in, the storm surge, you know, caused the tides to swell, they got doused in saltwater, and apparently when they got flooded, the systems in the car reacted to the saltwater poorly, to say the very least, and the cars caught fire. Um, now they've been accused of the reason I had said this, If you're not familiar with them, they have been accused

of fires before. But I think in general this could be a hazard. Um, if you live in a storm prone area, this might be something that you have to worry about. You might say, well, I have to evacuate, not because I think the storm is gonna be bad, but there will be flooding, and if it's flooding enough for my car will be partially submerged. Um. You know

people have that problem now with with combustion engines. When a gasoline powered car, if the water gets to a certain depth, you know your gasoline power car won't work. A diesel might sort of depending. Yeah, so there are a lot of things to think about. I mean, I think I think for the general approach your the move towards electric cars is I think more positive than not positive. I think it could happen. The thing is my will the podcast. No, I think it could happen. I think,

but it's gonna take work and people need to realize that. Yeah, it's it's going to be more expensive at first, but you know, in a long run, the technology will improve, the the infrastructure will improve, and and in the long run it might be uh, we all might be better off for it, even if you don't necessarily believe in the human powered part of car global warming. I think the air will at least be cleaner. You might be able to see outside of l A on a right day,

So help guys. If that wraps up our discussion about electric vehicles, kind of where things stand right now, I am curious to see if this trend of people buying more electric vehicles, if that does in fact continue, if hybrid cars are anything to go by, then that's a good indication that we will see more electric cars on the road in the next few years as people adopt

this technology in greater numbers. But if you guys have any suggestions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, I highly recommend you'd get in touch with us right It's at tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled. There is tech stuff eight s w and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot Com