Technologies notwithstanding, there are really only two types of electric cars: real cars, which the manufacturers hope to sell in mass quantities, and compliance cars, which the manufacturers hope will get California off their backs. Green Car Congress explains the difference:

We’d suggest that any plug-in car has to meet the following criteria before it can be considered real:

• It’s sold outright to consumers, not only leased; and
• It will sell at least 5,000 or more a year in the U.S. or reach total global sales of 20,000; and
• It’s offered outside the “California emissions” states, or will be within 18 months

Any car that doesn’t meet those tests at a minimum isn’t a serious volume car; it’s either part of a test fleet or it exists just to comply with the [California zero-emissions vehicles] requirement.

The Nissan Leaf, for instance, has achieved Real status: it will sell in five figures this year in the US and can be had for purchase at pretty much any Nissan store you can name. Honda’s Fit EV, not so much:

Honda obligingly revealed that it would lease the Fit EV for $399 a month (on a base price of $36,625), but not offer it for sale.

And, it said, it plans to offer only 1,100 of them from 2012 through 2014, starting in California and Oregon this summer, expanding into six East Coast markets next year.

The very model of a modern for-compliance car.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

The grotesque blob to the left is one of the two winners of the 2012 European Car of the Year award, and its sheer hideosity, to me anyway, suggests something Peugeot might have come up with after hitting the schnapps really, really hard. But no, this is an American car with a schnoz transplant: the Opel Ampera — to be sold in the UK with a Vauxhall badge — is the European version of the currently-in-hibernation Chevrolet Volt.

Apparently Volkswagen’s tiny Up!, exclamation point included, took second place, and the worldwide Ford Focus finished third.

Both Volt and Ampera will be sold in Europe, though Opel, being ostensibly a more prestigious name than Chevrolet, carries a higher list price: €42,900 versus €41,950 (including VAT). The Vauxhall variant, due in the spring, starts at £33,995 including VAT, but before Her Majesty’s Plug-In Car Grant.

Eventually, I’m told, the Volt will be sold in Australia as a Holden, and it will probably look better than either the Chevy or the Opel.

Still undetermined: if, after invoking Volt and Ampere, GM will come up with more electrical names for future EVs. (Watt TF, perhaps?)

While we’re all cursing the ever-increasing price of gasoline, Bertel Schmitt has snagged a picture of what he describes as “Leaf’s Grandfather”: tucked away in a corner of Nissan’s Tech Center is a pure-electric vehicle, circa 1950.

It is not technically a Nissan; the Tama Electric Car Company, which built this nifty, if slow, box, was formed from the remains of the Tachikawa Aircraft Company, which (surprise!) got out of the aircraft business after 1945. Tama eventually became Prince Motor Company; Nissan bought it in 1966. (Nissan fanboys will perhaps be shocked to hear that the fabled Skyline was originally a Prince product.) Schmitt quotes the following numbers: cruising range, 96.3 km (almost 60 miles), top speed 35.2 km/hr (22 mph). You could probably get more than 60 miles out of the current Nissan Leaf if you kept the speed down.

Still undetermined, at least by me: if Tama was named for IJN Tama, a Kuma-class light cruiser sunk by the US Navy in 1944.

I certainly hope this doesn’t take a whole 1.21 gigawatts:

It was a revelation unlike any other in the history of the De Lorean Motor Company Friday evening, Oct. 14, when the company stunned the crowd by unexpectedly presenting a prototype that will catapult the iconic De Lorean cars into the future: the Electric De Lorean.

The car, which will not be called the DMC-12 Volt, will pack a 260-hp electric motor somewhere — presumably out back where the old 130-hp engine used to be — and will be capable of something like 125 mph.

This grandiose vehicle will presumably be assembled at De Lorean’s Humble facility.

The bane of your existence, should you choose an electric vehicle, is waiting for the wee beastie to charge up already fercrissake. It’s almost enough to get you to take the bus.

And if you’re in Tallahassee, some time next year you’ll get the opportunity to take an electric bus. These big boxes have even less range than your car — about thirty miles — but they have one thing you don’t:

Proterra’s system allows a battery electric bus to pull into a transit center terminal or on-route stop and automatically connect to an overhead system that links the bus to a high capacity charger without driver involvement. The bus is then rapidly charged in 5-10 minutes while passengers load and unload. The charging station technology includes advanced wireless controls that facilitate the docking process and eliminate any intervention from the driver. The driver merely pulls into the transit terminal as they normally would, the wireless controls identify that this is the right type of bus and automatically guides and connects the bus with the charging station.

Says Proterra, you get 92 percent of full charge in six minutes. From the looks of things, the charging unit is guided into place by a couple of roof rails. Simple enough. This probably wouldn’t work for cars without some complicated height adjustment, but then again, the car wash seems to be able to figure out automotive width just fine.

You don’t hear that around gas stations anymore, and you definitely won’t hear it in connection with electric cars.

Oh, wait:

[A] gas station in Tennessee has become what we think is the country’s first gas station to offer a chademo rapid-charging station alongside its gasoline pumps.

Murphy Express Gas on Lee Highway in Chattanooga, Tennessee has installed the charger as part of a test program into electric car charging. If successful, it will install rapid charging stations at some of its other gas stations.

“Chademo,” usually styled CHAdeMO, is a specific quick-charge protocol — not quite a standard — which uses high-voltage DC to charge electric vehicles in a fraction of the time it takes when they’re pluged into typical wall outlets. The only current (sorry about that) vehicles that can take advantage of this protocol are Nissan’s Leaf and the upcoming Mitsubishi i, which can juice up to 80 percent of maximum in half an hour.

For now, Murphy isn’t even charging people for the charge.

We’ve been hearing so long about how electric cars are going to save us from a horrible environmental fate that we may have overlooked one minor detail. Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism, however, didn’t:

I’m not going to lay out a long case against electric cars right now, but suffice it to say I think they’re just another subsidy to the auto-based system, and that the true environmental harm in cars is not their actual emissions, but the land use patterns that they necessitate, and an electric battery doesn’t change this one bit.

Imagine this little scenario at breakfast:

Spouse 1: So this little Nissan Leaf can do 70 miles on a single charge?

Spouse 2: I’d bet more like 55 or 60 if the weather’s nasty, but nobody really knows for sure.

Spouse 1: Still, even with a 55-mile range, we could buy that house out there on 220th Street and still be within commuting distance.

For those who insist that we need to bring people back to the urban core, this has all the makings of a Step Backwards.

Some of the new hyper-quiet electric (and semi-electric) vehicles have little noise generators up front, the better to alert pedestrians to your presence.

If your EV doesn’t have one of those gizmos, here’s an alternative that requires no retrofitting:

To alleviate this danger, it is important that you play music very loud, preferably with the bass turned to the maximum, with your windows down to improve safety.

They’ll owe you for saving their lives, even as they revile you for playing death metal.

(Title inspiration here.)

It seems to me that a lot of the so-called “range anxiety” associated with electric cars might be due to the fact that it takes so long to recharge them: There’s a quick (30-minute) charger for Leafs (Leaves?) at Nissan dealerships in Japan, but it costs a dealer upward of $15,000, so it’s not really an investment for civilians. Besides, at the slowest gas station I know, I can fill up my current car in nine minutes or so.

Which statistic, if this pans out, won’t impress (or depress) anyone with an electric car anymore:

Mr. Kanno of the Japanese company Energy Use Technology Research K.K. has reportedly received a patent for a system that can charge a typical electric vehicle in about five minutes. Five minutes, you ask? Yes. Five minutes.

Mr. Kanno’s breakthrough idea, according to Integrity Exports, came when he realized recharging was ultimately limited by the capacity of the electrical cables. Therefore, Mr. Kanno’s patented technology constantly collects electrical power from the grid and delivers it to plug-in vehicles in a five-minute burst.

Must be some humongous capacitors in there somewhere. (Or not; “electrical engineer” is yet another position for which I am not qualified.)

In a piece called “The EV Expectation Gap,” The Truth About Cars editor Edward Niedermeyer reproduces this graph from an Accenture study, and it looks to me like electric cars like Nissan’s Leaf are going to have a whole lot of trouble selling to anyone beyond committed green folk:

Survey respondents evidently want a single charge to last for eight days’ worth of driving.

One current EV — Tesla’s $100k-plus Roadster — claims a range close to 400 km, though it seats only two, snugly, and cargo space is theoretical at best. And while it does zero to sixty in a shade under four seconds, actually verifying this for yourself will cut into that range rather substantially.

The Chevrolet Volt, with its gasoline-engine backup, can actually pull off something close to a 400-km range for less than half what Tesla asks for the Roadster, and it seats four. I suppose there might be EV purists out there who reject the Volt because it occasionally burns some gasoline, and premium gasoline at that. If there’s a lot of them, Niedermeyer’s conclusion seems inevitable:

[T]here’s a giant disconnect (nearly ten-fold in fact) between the actual number of kilometers driven each day and the range expectations for future EV purchases. Meanwhile, 62% of respondents rejected battery swapping, the most credible current solution for range anxiety, for reasons that are not immediately clear. In short, Energy Secretary Chu had better be right when he says EV range will triple and costs will be reduced over the next six years… otherwise, EVs will die a quick death at the hand of consumers’ outsized range expectations.

And this time they won’t be able to blame General Motors.

Addendum: “In a land where 40-mile commutes are a lot more common than 4-mile ones, the Nissan Leaf has a tough row to hoe.”

Oregon, home of some of our most enthusiastic environmentalists, collects a stiff 30 cents on every gallon of gasoline sold in the state. (The Feds are already taking 18.4.) What’s more, several cities and a couple of counties add a tax of their own.

So far, so good: as they said in Econ 102, you want to discourage something, you slap a tax on it. It’s apparently just dawned on them, though, that pure-electric vehicles, which burn no gasoline at all, will contribute nothing to the kitty, and that simply won’t do:

A bill before the Oregon Legislature aims to deal with the government’s potential beefs with a growing fleet of cars and trucks that never stop for fuel at a gas station: that they don’t ever pay the gas tax that helps cover the cost of state and local road construction and maintenance.

Under House Bill 2328, those drivers would pay a “vehicle road usage charge,” starting with model year 2014 electric vehicles and plug-in gas-electric hybrids.

And how will this charge be determined? There was a pilot program conducted in Oregon several years ago, which was intended to determine whether it might be more useful, or more remunerative, or anyway more something, to drop the gas tax entirely and replace it with a per-mile fee. Not everyone was enthusiastic about having their every trip logged and reported via GPS, it turned out.

So no GPS in the new bill. Instead, someone will have to develop a gizmo that can read your odometer and report the details back to Salem — since they’re sure as hell not going to take your word for it.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Until there’s a nationwide infrastructure worthy of the name, owners of electric cars have reason to be a trifle antsy: they’ve got limited range, and they know it. The not-quite-pure-electric Chevrolet Volt was cunningly designed to circumvent the problem by throwing in a small gas engine under the hood, but purists — you can’t have a green market, or indeed any kind of market, without purists — aren’t having any of that heretical stuff.

Enter eVgo. Borrowing a model from the wireless industry, they’re offering three different plans to keep your car charged. For $49 a month, they’ll set you up with a 220-volt home charging system, but nothing more; you’ll still have to buy whatever juice you need. At the $79 level, you get the charging box, plus unlimited access to the local network of public charging stations; for $89, they’ll also cover the price of the juice used at home by the charger. Also borrowed from the wireless industry: a three-year service contract.

So: $3204 for the works over 36 months. Considering that a home charger alone costs somewhere in four figures, this might be the screaming deal of the year, once those public stations are in place. And in which proud environmentally-oriented community will you find this program? San Francisco? Portland? Nope: Houston, Texas, to be followed by a rollout throughout NRG’s Texas service area in 2011. As Glenn Reynolds might say: “Faster, please.”

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Martin Winterkorn, Volkswagen AG Chairman of the Board of Management, has been at least somewhat consistent in his cheerleading for VeeDub’s eventual electric car, but apparently not everyone on the board is so persuaded:

[I]t came as a bit of a contradictory shock to hear Volkswagen’s Board Member responsible for sales, Christian Klingler, express emotions bordering on outright hostility regarding the future of electric cars in a roundtable discussion during the media launch for the electric Golf in Germany this week. “The electric car is not a request from the customer, the electric car is a request from the government,” said Klingler, going on to describe how there is no market demand for electric cars.

According to Klingler, VW has been careful in developing electric cars and is waiting to see what the “willingness” of customers is to buy an electric car before they truly commit.

Meanwhile, down the road at Daimler, Dr Z is calling for governmental incentives:

“Even in the best case, the cost of electric autos might run several thousand euros more than conventional vehicles for the foreseeable future,” [Dieter] Zetsche said [Thursday] in a speech in Stuttgart. “In other words, we need appropriate sales incentives.”

Volkswagen hasn’t gone that far — yet. But Stateside, I have to wonder how many Volts and Leafs (Leaves?) would be moving in the first year without that $7500 contribution from taxpayers.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

I’ve already figured that I’m not a likely early-adopter of electric-car technology, but I know my driving patterns. On the assumption that you may not know yours, Treehugger has been offering what they call a Virtual Electric Car Test Drive:

You just have to use your car’s trip computer. Every time your car is parked long enough in a spot where it could be recharged if it was electric, you note the number on a piece of paper along with the date and you reset the trip computer to zero.

After a while, it should give you a good idea of how often you would need a longer range than what current electric cars offer. So for example, if after a month you realize that on most days you drive less than 20 miles, and your longest trips between “charges” are 50 miles, a car like the Nissan LEAF might work perfectly for you (the LEAF has a range of 100 miles).

Most days I drive 20-25 miles. If I never went anywhere else, this would actually work for me. This is, as you all know, not the case. Still:

This could mean that an electric car fits your needs as long as you have a second vehicle with a longer range.

And actually, that’s what I see as the usual garage complement for owners of Leafs (Leaves?) and whatnot: a conventional vehicle for the occasional road trip, and an EV for grocery-getting and other around-town errands. My single-car garage, however, is not exactly what you’d call expandable.

John Marshall wonders why we’re not taxing the living daylights out of these alternative-whachamacallit vehicles:

[G]overnments and big business have missed out on one particularly easy green revenue scheme, I mean revenue stream — green drivers. Eco-minded drivers will pay pretty much anything (they pay more to get less horsepower than the comparable dinoblood model). And odds are, hybrid and EV drivers are the folks among us who are least averse to taxation.

Then again, it’s anybody’s guess how many Volts Chevrolet would be able to unload were it not for a $7500 taxpayer contribution sitting on the hood. (The other big debut for this year, Nissan’s Leaf, is ostensibly sold out, but it costs several thousand dollars less and comes with similar Federal incentives.)

As they say in the carbon biz, though, there are offsets. There hasn’t been a tax credit for any of the Toyota/Lexus hybrids for three years. (Law says: credits start getting phased out after a manufacturer has moved 60,000 units.) Prius sales are down a smidgen lately, but this is due to the unexpected failure of gas prices to soar into the stratosphere, not to the absence of incentives.

If you really want to guilt-trip alternative-vehicle buyers into paying more taxes, you’re going to have to give them a reason for it. Like, for instance, compensation for externalities:

Driver A buys a V6 Ford Fusion sedan — a sensible daily driver with a bit of an added kick over the base model. The car burns gas and gas alone, much like 97%+ of the other vehicles on the road today. Driver B pays $5000 more than Driver A to get the Fusion Hybrid, which runs on gas and electricity generated from the brakes and from the main internal combustion powerplant. Driver B’s car weighs considerably more due to the inclusion of 800 pounds of NIMH batteries, and so uses more energy per mile to move its mass than Driver A’s car (not all of that energy comes from burning fuel, true, but seriously, it’s physics!), thus hastening the inevitable heat death of the universe. The fact that hybrid owners are trying to kill us all and bring about Ragnarok aside, Driver B probably got a tax credit, despite the fact that those batteries had to be produced somewhere. That somewhere is almost certainly a toxic mine run by brown people in some godforsaken hellhole where Driver B will never visit.

Mass is also the enemy of fuel consumption, so perhaps the most sensible way to do this is to impose a Mass Tax, something like 10 cents per pound of curb weight, proceeds to go to anything over which Congress has no jurisdiction. Maybe a fund for remediation of toxic mines in godforsaken hellholes.

It seems obvious, if only from the laws of physics, that electric vehicles will have to sacrifice a bit of their range if asked to climb a mountain. What isn’t obvious, at least to me, is how much of that range will be given up.

A comment left by the owner of an electrified Toyota RAV4 at AutoblogGreen (1:25 am, 5 September) quantifies the matter:

These numbers originally came from RAV4-EV FAQ list, although I haven’t tested my RAV4 on big enough hills to verify. They also seem to work eerily well for a Tesla Roadster, despite some significant differences between the cars.

Going up a hill costs you roughly 6.5 miles of range per 1000 feet of elevation.

But, coming down again, you regain 4.5 of those miles through regen. So the net cost once you’ve come down is 2 miles per 1,000 feet of elevation.

Nevertheless, Chevy’s Volt has a “mountain mode” that kicks the range-extension engine on early if you’re expecting to traverse the Continental Divide or something.

And furthermore, it’s not like your average gasmobile is going to be able to make the Pikes Peak run for free.

Actually, it appears to be self-serve, but no matter, maybe; the parking garage at Portland, Oregon’s World Trade Center now has its own electric-vehicle quick-charger, which, if you have lithium-ion batteries, can boost you to 80 percent of full charge in 20 to 30 minutes.

This strikes me as a sensible location, since (1) Portland has a solid core of greenish individuals who might be on the waiting list for, say, the Nissan Leaf — there might even be a Tesla or two around town — and (2) a parking garage is a likely location for these things, since presumably you’re going somewhere and might be gone for 20 or 30 minutes. (Then again, there’s the question of whether Oregon drivers can be taught to fuel up their own cars.)

This may not be the first public-charging station in the States — there’s a different-looking sort of device in Vacaville, California — but I figure that if EVs are going to be anything more than the nichiest of niche vehicles, there will need to be charging stations in both metropolises and cowtowns.

Portland’s charger is free, but then you’ve already paid $3.00 to get into the garage.

Apparently you should not attempt to recharge an electric vehicle using an extension cord.

You probably won’t get anywhere plugging it into the socket where the cigarette lighter used to be, either.

No, not one of those. Sheesh. We’re talking an H3 with Chevrolet Volt-like underpinnings:

At an event held in the nation’s capital, [Senator Orrin] Hatch got the chance to pilot the extended-range electric HUMMER H3 from Raser Technologies that was debuted at the SAE World Congress earlier this year.

According to Hatch (via Green Car Advisor), “[This electric H3] is specifically designed for America’s best-selling vehicle class — SUVs and trucks,” and he further states that efforts to help the U.S. auto industry recover “must address our real need for larger vehicles.”

I mean, it’s not like GM is surviving off fat Chevy Aveo revenues. Still, I have some reservations about the product: what the H3 does best is clamber over rocks at low speed, miles away from the nearest electrical connection. A more conventional truck with this same powerplant might find more buyer acceptance, if only because it can be used around town for something other than running over Prius owners.