Automobile revolution!
The green car has arrived! It heralds the end of the era of the gas guzzlers merrily polluting our environment for the past decades, as reported in your pages on December 4. It logically follows Wahid Khan's write up on "muscle cars" in the "Rising Star" on 3 December! The linkage between automobile's past and future, published by you on successive days is coincidentally remarkable, to say the least!
We in Bangladesh, importing every drop of automobile fuel or the crude oil to refine it should and must keep close track of the new green automobile models, now undergoing a sea change in our economic interests, to contain our rising demand of imported liquid fuels!
The hybrid car has two prime mover-- electric and petrol engine both. It not only needs petrol, but also servicing and maintenance of two separate drives; the petrol engine as well as the electric battery and motors. In contrast an electric car only needs servicing and maintenance of its battery and electric motor. It needs no petrol! Personally, I would go for the electric car. The Nissan's electric car "Leaf" with a lithium-ion battery can run over 100 miles between battery charge! This should meet most urban driving needs.
Readers may question; that with shortage of electric power in Bangladesh; how can we charge the batteries of all these cars? This can easily be done at night between midnight and 6:00am; when our electric power demand is the lowest; and the car battery can be easily charged in two hours! All we should have is to have the charging cable incorporate a timer switch set to operate staring from midnight up to say 3:00am. If we have, say 60,000 such vehicles; then we can preset the timers starting from say 11:00pm, 1.30am and 4:00am respectively. Alternatively, we can have battery charging stations in petrol pumps, where spare batteries can be charged and kept ready, using the station's in-house generating sets or inverters, and just changing the car's battery for a fully charged one. This will require the car owner to have two batteries!
The electric car like the electric 3-wheeled scooters now being run in Bangladesh will be the right step forward-- both to reduce the import of petrol and diesel fuel used in automobiles as well as contain environment pollution. Proverbially, killing two birds with on stone!
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