A lean thought on green car

After I studied lean manufacturing concepts I couldn’t help of thinking common issues in lean lines. When I heard about the “Green Car” or the “Electric Car” I evaluated it using lean concepts. As you know lean concepts can be applied virtually anywhere. This is why lean gurus say “Lean thinking is universal”.

The hype of electric car comes with its green label. It promises a clean drive. With the move towards green technology worldwide electric car catching the imagination of the world. These vehicles do not generate any smoke and produces very minimal sound and heat compared with a traditional machine. So seems to be clean isn’t it?

But the question is from where they get required power from. Generally this will be from the grid. You will be charging your vehicle just like you charge your mobile phone at your place. Where do you get this energy from? Mostly from power plants across the country. How do they manufacture electricity? Mostly by burning fossil fuel like coal and other heavy petrochemicals. So in fact when you charge your vehicle, you are burning possible fuels and emitting pollutants to the environment.

Secondly how do you store the energy, using batteries right? (According to my knowledge this is the most popular way of storing the energy). They are heavy making the vehicle heavy. So vehicle becomes less energy efficient. When it comes to disposal they can be toxic to the environment. There will be losses in electricity transmission from power station to your home where you charge your vehicle. Again wasting more.

When you think in lean ways, you will just moving your waste (pollutants like CO2) from your eye sight to another central location. This is exactly opposite what lean proposes. Lean wants to unhide the waste so that it can be treated. On the other hand lean wants to treat the root cause of the problem not just the symptoms. Here the symptom is the pollution, and the cause is the usage of fossil fuels.

So unless you produce your electricity without fossil fuels, you will not be reducing the actual pollution. So you have to treat the cause by using renewable energy sources. I would like you to use a lean technique like “5 Why” to get deep in to this. If you have some time you can share your findings with us by leaving a comment on this post. I can guarantee you; you will find some amazing root causes to this problem.