A Crystal Ball

I had to laugh when I saw a meme on Facebook yesterday that showed an electric car stopped on the side of the road being charged by a huge generator. Someone commented that it didn’t take a crystal ball to see where this whole electric car thing was going and that it would never work.

Well, as a matter of fact, I do have a crystal ball. Okay, I don’t know if it’s really crystal or not, but it’s a glass ball, so stop being so picky. But at any rate, I don’t need that ball to tell me that the meme and the person making those comments are completely wrong. Like it or not, no matter how you love the oil industry and don’t want things to ever change, electric cars are the future. And keep in mind that this is coming from a guy who came of age in the muscle car era and loves Detroit iron. But facts are facts and reality is reality.

As an author I do a lot of research into all kinds of different things and have many different sources, from various websites and library access to a subscription to Newspapers.com, which has proven invaluable, especially in writing my Tinder Street family saga.

I love going to the website and reading old newspaper articles from the late1800s and early 1900s when they said the same thing about the horseless carriage. It was nothing but a rich man’s toy. When it ran out of gas, you’d need a horse or mule to pull it back home because they darned sure were not going to have places to get fuel located all over.

Of course, there were plenty of people who scoffed at the idea of having electricity in your house, too. Not only was it unnecessary, it was also downright dangerous! Newspaper articles and letters to the editor talked about how people would perish in infernos having all that electricity going through their wooden houses. And it wasn’t bad enough that you were going to burn up your own family, you would probably burn up the entire neighborhood! No, forget that nonsense, it wasn’t going to happen.

But you don’t have to go that far back into history to see how wrong people were. Back in the early 1970s I remember browsing through a junk shop someplace in New England and finding a big stack of photography magazines from the mid-1950s. There were several articles about how color film was just a passing fancy and would not last. Nope, black and white photography ruled and it would continue to rule forever. I read the same things about digital photography back in the early 1990s. Are you kidding me? Replacing film with some kind of computerized camera? Dream on!

Then that damn technology thing came along and changed everything. Who knew?

As battery technology evolves, and it is evolving, the demand for electric cars will increase, and we’ll eventually find charging stations just as easy to come by as gasoline pumps. No, it won’t happen today or tomorrow but it’s coming, and it won’t be all that long. I know because my crystal ball told me so.

Thought For The Day – Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.