Iceland: A land a few years ago struck with one of the most devastating economic crisis faced by the country so far, indebt to countries overseas after an over-inflation of its banking system.  With a population just over 300,000 people and a very small industry it is hard to see how it is supposed to totally renew its car fleet into an electric one.  Referring back to Marcus Laube’s blog post on the electric car fleet of Iceland, I have a completely different perspective on this matter.  Yes, Iceland is immensely rich in its Geothermal and Hydroelectric energy, but that does not mean that it should have only electric cars.

For a country to do that it would require a huge investment, either from the government, or individual households to totally replace their cars with expensive electric ones just so they can enjoy the benefit of the cheep electricity.  In the current state that the Icelandic economy is in now, there are no such funds to go around, and even though it would drastically reduce the amount of petrol imported to the country, it would only mean that the price of electricity would go up, as increased demand will shit the price up-wards leaving the Icelandic households in worse shape than before.

Thus I think that even though it is a good idea to work towards in the future to have a greener car fleet, it is not the time right now to be thinking about this as the most important thing now for Iceland is to get out of its economic slump.