With the current oil crisis, people worldwide have been trying to find ways around using gasoline to fuel their cars. Fossil fuels are technically renewable, but the conditions that they form under, coupled with the amount of time it takes to do so, make it prohibitive to treat them as anything but a finite resource. As a result, manufacturers have developed cars that are powered by a variety of sources, including gasoline, manual power, solar power, electricity, and combinations of sources.
Electric cars have several key advantages that other vehicles, particularly gasoline-powered cars, do not. They don't produce heavy, foul-smelling exhaust like gasoline-powered cars, which means that they pollute less. They can also be charged using a house's current, making special trips to a gas station obsolete. They don't use fossil fuels, so they don't contribute to the oil crisis and gasoline shortages, and they are generally cheaper to charge up than gasoline-powered cars are to refill, particularly given the way gas prices have doubled and even tripled in the past few years. All of these make electric cars look like very attractive prospects, but they still aren't commonly seen on the road. Hybrid cars that use a combination of electricity and gasoline are more common, but still make up a minority of the cars on the road today. Though electric cars are cleaner, more convenient, and less expensive to operate in many ways, they have a few key disadvantages that bar them from widespread acceptance.
To begin with, gasoline-powered motors tend to be much more powerful than electric motors. This means that electric cars generally aren't able to accelerate, go up hills, and haul things as easily as gasoline-powered vehicles. Electric motors are also relatively uncommon, which means that owners of electric cars can have a very hard time finding a mechanic to service their vehicles. If the owner of an electric car runs out of power on the road, it's a lot harder for them to get help. When gasoline-powered cars get stranded, all drivers have to do is walk to a gas station and buy a container of gas to take back. This doesn't work with electricity, however. Lastly, in many areas, electric cars still rely on fossil fuels. Several power plants still use coal as a power source to produce electricity, which means that cars in areas served by these plants are still dependent on fossil fuels for operation.
Electricity is generally a much cleaner power source than gasoline, which makes speculation on electric cars worthwhile. As solar and wind technologies become more efficient, and cleaner, more renewable power sources are developed, electric cars might end up becoming more widely used than they are today.
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