Week 10 - The Conclusion

      This week we concluded our project by submitting our official report and presenting our findings to our peers.  We feel confident that we were able to accomplish what we had set out to do at the beginning of this assignment by coming to the conclusions that we have laid out.  For us, this project has gone beyond what we expect most of our peers have achieved with their own projects because we were taken out of our comfort zone.  Typically, as engineering students, we do not expect to be asked to look at the state of an engineering field, in this case the automotive industry, and make educated and unbiased suggestions about how it is doing.  Our research has shown us that ideas may often be good, but may not always represent the solution to the problem.  From our conclusions, we decided that electric vehicles should be the focus of the industry as it pursues cleaner methods of transportation.

     GREET has aided us greatly in our research, but the truth about it is, once we no longer have a need for studies and models like it, we will have accomplished our mission.  As a tool, GREET has provided us with the information that we need to take this argument beyond hearsay, to a intelligent conversation of what the systems are doing today, and how they are changing in the near future.  The focus of future regulation in the automotive industry should be to pressure the production of cleaner systems until the eventual takeover of the full electric vehicles.  Regulation is not a word that many people want to hear, but in all truth, without federal regulation, the industry will continue to thrive on half-baked solutions to lower operational emissions and energy consumption without ever actually removing them from the equation.

     In conclusion, as Drexel University Engineers, we are suggesting that while electric cars are not the ideal system at the moment, the majority of development should be focused on this mode of transportation.  In addition to further development of electric cars, a continued effort should be made to generate electricity with alternatives to the coal fire plants still in use from the previous century.  Utilization of hybrid systems will reduce the impact while in transition, with the intention of slowly purging these systems as the industry yields to zero emission, electric cars.  Also, rather then taking two paths to create energy, by utilizing the electric grid, we can focus more on the single solution to the issue releasing the majority of emissions: Energy Generation.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our proposal, and we hope that it will help to show more people the truth behind the green-car revolution.