Electric Vehicles Make Kinder, Gentler Drivers

I have a very brilliant friend, Dr. Boris Monahov, who lives in Bulgaria and does a great deal of advanced battery research all around the world.  I met him at the Energy Storage show a month or so back, and we try to stay in touch with one another.  Here, he writes something interesting and funny that I thought I’d share:

I am sorry but I will not be able to join you guys for the webinar – I will be flying home from Geneva.

I agree with and like your idea about the green electrons. Actually, some theoreticians use “colors” to describe quarks. I would only add electrons  also don’t have watches, don’t possess shares and don’t care who is in the House today.  So it is our duty to help them.

The software you mention is very good, and we need a version of it also to download into our brains. Do you know that the DoE found higher CO2 savings when drivers cared more about energy consumption than they got from switching the car from an ICE into a full hybrid of the same size?

I guess you can foresee my general remark: software is good but not so good as adding batteries to the grid.

Good luck at the webinar!

Boris

 

I respond:

There is no question in my mind that EVs make kinder, gentler drivers out of all of us, and I think there are two inter-related reasons for that. The first and most obvious is range anxiety; drivers know that they can affect their destiny with respect to when and where they will run low on charge. The other is the effect of metrics themselves. EVs have very in-your-face and accurate displays of the driver’s instantaneous power consumption, expressed very visibly in Watts, and we all like positive feedback.

Travel well, and stay in touch.