可能不是最美好的月的电动汽车。五月一日尾，电池驱动汽车，美国制造商宣布破产；在第二十六个更好的地方，一个大肆宣传与插拔电池汽车启动子（筹资近1000000000美元的2007），申请清算以色列。菲斯克，另一个美国的电动汽车生产商，这部分是由纳税人资助，走到了崩溃的边缘，有没有车辆自（也是国家资助的）电池制造商A123，去年，倒塌。菲亚特-克莱斯勒的老板说在上个月，它将失去10000美元每500E电瓶车销售。汽车的费用是32000美元，双汽油版的价格，但菲亚特曾试图把他们因为加利福尼亚在“零排放”的汽车制造商的销售配额。

The news has not all been bad. Tesla, a Californian maker of battery-powered sports cars, recently declared its first quarterly profit, and repaid its $452m of government loans early. But overall, electric cars, whether purely battery-powered or hybrids that use petrol engines as backups, have been a flop. They are expensive, even with state subsidies, and the all-battery ones have a limited range.

新闻也不都是坏的。特斯拉，加州电动跑车制造商，日前宣布其第一季度的利润，和偿还政府贷款4.52早期。但总的来说，无论是纯粹的电动汽车，电池供电或混合使用汽油发动机作为备份，是个彻底的失败。他们是昂贵的，即使有政府补贴，和所有的电池的人有一个有限的范围内。

In this section

在这一部分

The strange rebirth of liberal England

自由英国的奇怪的重生

Towards the end of poverty

对贫困的终结

Tougher love needed

严厉的爱的需要

The price of peace

和平的代价

Flat batteries

平电池

Reprints

重印

Related topics

相关主题

Internal-combustion engine vehicles

内燃机车

United States

美国

Barack Obama

巴拉克奥巴马

Technology

技术

Science and technology

科学和技术

Does this failure matter? Not that much. The main reason why Better Place failed seems to have been bad management. In 2009 it struck a deal with Renault to sell 100,000 electric cars with swappable batteries by 2016; it sold just 1,300. It failed to get other carmakers to make vehicles with swappable batteries, restricting its subscribers’ choice.

这种故障的重要吗？没有那么多。主要的原因，更好的地方失败似乎是糟糕的管理。2009它已经与雷诺出售100000辆电动汽车用插拔电池2016；它只是卖1300。它没有获得其他汽车制造商与插拔电池使车辆，限制用户选择。

Another barrier has been that all cars have been getting greener, driven in part by manufacturers’ need to meet emissions standards. In the longer term a race is on between scientists trying to create low-cost, low-carbon “biofuels”, which could give petrol and diesel engines a new, clean lease on life, and others trying to make electric batteries lighter, cheaper and more reliable. The odds are that pure electric cars, despite their slow start, will be part of tomorrow’s cleaner traffic: they just will not be the whole answer.

另一个障碍是，所有的汽车都已变绿，驱动部分由制造商必须符合排放标准。在长期的比赛是对科学家试图创造低成本，低碳燃料，它可以给汽油和柴油发动机，一个新的，干净的生命，和其他人试图使电池更轻，更便宜和更可靠的。赔率是，纯电动汽车，尽管他们的慢启动，将成为明天的清洁交通部分：他们只是不能全部答案。

We watched “Star Trek” too

我们看了《星际迷航”

Given this uncertainty, the wise thing for politicians would be to set overall emissions targets, and leave the risk to businesspeople. Wherever this has been tried, in Europe, America, Japan and more recently China, carmakers have grumbled: but they have responded—most notably by squeezing more efficiency out of the century-old internal-combustion engine.

鉴于这种不确定性，政客们明智的举动就是集总体排放目标，而把风险的商人。铜装饰无论这已经试过，在欧洲，美国，日本，最近中国，汽车制造商也抱怨：但他们表现最明显的就是从百年内燃机压缩效率更高。

Sadly politicians see electric cars not as a means to a greener future but as an end in themselves. Barack Obama is still prattling about having 1m of them on America’s roads by 2015 (so far he is only 5% of the way there); this week Angela Merkel restated her aim to have 1m such cars on Germany’s roads by 2020 (a mere 3,000 were sold there last year). Under fire from Congress, Mr Obama has stopped lending to makers of electric cars and batteries, but he still wants to increase the maximum federal credit for electric cars from $7,500 to $10,000. And the Chinese government is planning to revive an old subsidy scheme worth up to 60,000 yuan ($9,800) per car.

可悲的是政客们认为，电动汽车并不是作为一种手段，绿色的未来而为最终目的。巴拉克奥巴马还说约2015有100万人在美国的公路（到目前为止他只有5%）；本周安吉拉默克尔重申她的目的2020已经在德国的道路上，100万辆这样的车（只有3000的销量去年）。火从国会下，奥巴马先生已经停止向电动汽车和电池制造商的贷款，但他仍希望增加最大的联邦政府信用对电动汽车从7500美元到10000美元。和中国政府正计划恢复旧补贴计划，价值高达60000元（9800美元）每车。

Such subsidies make little sense. If governments want to cut emissions it would be better, say, to pay people to insulate their homes. Better Place achieved little in its brief, expensive life. But if its failure, despite having such weighty backers (including GE and HSBC), persuades governments of the folly of picking winners, it will not have died in vain.

这种补贴毫无意义。如果政府想要削减排放会更好，说，付钱给人来隔离他们的家园。更好的地方取得的小小在其短暂的，昂贵的生活。但如果失败，尽管沉重的支持者（包括通用电气和汇丰银行），说服政府挑选赢家的愚蠢，它不会白白的死去。