Drive Sustainable!

Drive Sustainable!
Our club members drive all kinds of EVs (Teslas, BMWs, Jaguars, Leafs, Bolts, Fords, Audis, electric bikes...)

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Electric Cars and the Panama Canal

 Our club member, Mario B., sent us an excerpt of an article about electric cars:

Here’s a passage from a book written in 1976, before the age of EVs, that illustrates the advantages of electrical power used to drive the Panama Canal’s locks. It sounds a lot like the advantages of EVs over ICE vehicles.

  • Charging EVs uses electricity transmitted over wires, rather than fuel trucked in to service stations.
  • EVs can have multiple independent motors.
  • Electric motor characteristics.

 The Path Between the Seas – The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870 – 1914

by David McCullough

 The advantages of electrical power were many: it could be transmitted over long distances; in complicated installations each different machine or mechanism could have its own motor drive (exactly as in the locks), instead of the power being transmitted here and there from one central source by an elaborate system of drive shafts, belts, and pulleys (as in a conventional steam-driven factory). The motors themselves were relatively small, compact, watertight; they turned at constant speeds irrespective of the loads put upon them; they required a minimum of attention; they would not blow-up.

 Page 601.

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