General Motors (GM) is one of the world’s major automakers (汽车制造商). In January, the company set a goal: It will stop selling gas-powered cars by 2035. It means the company will make more battery-powered vehicles.

This is a big moment for the auto industry. Scientists say it’s important to move away from gas powered vehicles. Doing so will fight climate change. Transportation causes about 25% of global carbon emissions (排放物). Three-quarters of that is from road travel. Countries are taking action. In China, most new vehicles sold must be electric by 2035. The United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands will not allow sales of new gas-powered cars in 2030.

Venkat Viswanathan is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He told TIME for Kids, “It is now very clear that going electric is the future.”

Electric cars run on lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries, which power our mobile devices. Making these batteries has an environmental cost. Lithium is taken from the earth, like the oil used to make gas. But the long-term cost is much smaller. “When you use up a battery, you can recycle the material,” says Jessika Trancik, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Electric cars have another environmental effect. They need energy to recharge. They get the energy from power plants. These places burn oils. But countries can turn to cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar power. If they do, electric vehicles will get cleaner too. Even now, they’re cleaner than cars that run on gas.

Today you could get a ticket if you don’t drive on your side of the road. Worse yet, you could have a head-on collision(正面碰撞). But in 1917, Dr. June McCarroll could not get drivers to understand what seems so obvious today.

June McCarroll was born in New York in 1867. Unlike most young women of her age, she attended medical college in Chicago. After her husband became ill, the couple moved to Southern California in 1904.

In 1917, while driving down a familiar road near Indio, California Dr. McCarroll had a driving accident. In order to avoid a head-on collision with a truck going in the opposite direction, her car was driven off the road and into a ditch (沟). This gave Dr. McCarrolla new idea—paint lines on the road, separating lanes(车道) with a center line.

“My car and I found ourselves face-to-face with a truck on the highway. It did not take me long to choose between a sandy ditch to the right and a ten-ton truck to the left! Then an idea struck me.”

McCarroll wrote to the local government. However, the government didn’t take McCarroll seriously. After receiving no response to her letters, McCarroll took her idea and matters into her own hands. She painted a white line down the center of the street to make two separate lanes of traffic as a way to prevent future collisions.

Dr. McCarroll then asked women’s groups through the state of California to organize letter writing campaigns to state and local politicians and in 1924 California approved of the practice of painting traffic lines on highway roads. The safety practice quickly spread to other states, then other countries. By virtue of the lines, thousands of accidents are prevented and an untold number of lives are saved each year.

The Intelligent Transport team at Newcastle University have turned an electric car into a mobile laboratory named “Drive LAB” in order to understand the challenges faced by older drivers and to discover where the key stress points are.

Research shows that giving up driving is one of the key reasons for a fall in health and well-being among older people, leading to them becoming more isolated and inactive.

Led by Professor Phil Blythe, the Newcastle team are developing in-vehicle technologies for older drivers which they hope could help them to continue driving into later life.

These include custom-made navigation (导航) tools, night vision systems and intelligent speed adaptations. Phil Blythe explains: “For many older people, particularly those living alone or in the country driving is important for keeping their independence, giving them the freedom to get out and about without having to rely on others.”

“But we all have to accept that as we get older our reactions slow down and this often results in people avoiding any potentially challenging driving conditions and losing confidence in their driving skills. The result is that people stop driving before they really need to.”

Dr Amy Guo, the leading researcher on the older driver study, explains, “The Drive LAB is helping us to understand what the key stress points and difficulties are for older drivers and how we might use technology to solve these problems.”

“For example, most of us would expect older drivers always go slower than everyone else but surprisingly, we found that in 30mph zones they struggled to keep at a constant speed and so were more likely to break the speed limit and be at risk of getting fined. We’re looking at the benefits of systems which control their speed as a way of preventing that.”

“We hope that our work will help with technological solutions to ensure that older drivers stay safer behind the wheel.”