EV: Not As Clean As Claimed
The push for electric cars seems to be relentless, what with the government reducing the import duty on electric cars from 110 per cent to just 15 per cent even though electric cars are not as clean as they are made out to be.
To produce a 1,000-kilogram battery, which is required for one car, you need 5,000 kilos of raw material and many barrels of crude oil. Those are the numbers for a single battery for a single car. The alarming number of forests that are being cut down for mining is not good for the planet. Why is there such an overriding emphasis only on electric cars and bikes; why not on electric induction stoves? Most houses have electricity, why do we not start using electricity for cooking? There is no such thing as a “zero-emission car”. With electric cars, we are only transposing the pollution from one region to another.
For the past one month I have been driving the Audi Q8 e-tron and it has been quite convenient to plug it in and charge it at my office car park, but I will not do a long-distance drive, say, to Mumbai and back or to Goa and back.
FASTag seems to be a bit of a scam—even if one has sufficient balance in one’s account, at times the toll booth attendant charges one double the amount. The reasons given are either that there is insufficient balance in the FASTag account or that the FASTag itself is not valid. Why is it necessary to have a separate FASTag for every car; why can we not have one FASTag that we can use for two or three cars?
Another scam is the mandatory high security registration number-plates (HSRP). It is interesting to note that the same number-plates in Goa cost half the price charged in Maharashtra.
EDITOR – ASPI BHATHENA
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