http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=742312030&channel=212469179

well if you can buy a mini cooper and have an extra 25,000 dollars to throw at it and live near this place that does the conversion you can have one.
And if you have 100.000 dollars to buy a Tesla Roadster then you can have one.
So I would hardly say that electric vehicles are making strides.
when I can go to the Ford, Chevy, GM, Toyota, (fill in the blank) dealer and buy a car that cost the same as other cars, that is fully electric and can go highway speeds and over 100 miles per charge THEN electric cars will be making big strides.
I want to knw why I cant have one now? What is taking so long this is not new technology.
GM had the EV1 Ford had the Rav  electric suv. Then they stopped making them and you cant buy one unless you are lucky enough to pick up a used rav GM took them all back and crushed them.
They dont want you to have a fully electric car.

How about taking your existing car and converting it to electric for $10,000?  I've heard there are several places that do it.

Here is a link that is almost 10 years old:  http://www.renewables.com/ElectricVehicles.htm

Tesla has plans for a $30,000 vehicle. There are several others coming out in that price range. 

The thing is that with a few thousand teslas on the road, the price for parts will drop.  And the infrastructure will start to fall into place. 

I agree they are coming but its awful slow.
Unfortunately in less you know how to do it yourself there are no companies near me that do conversions maybe in the big city's but not around here where I live.
California seems to be a pioneer in that department.
I hope that one day we will all be driving electric cars that are powered from solar charging systems. But I am sure that will be a long time into the future before we see anything close to that.

Is the car you drive now built in your neighborhood?

Have it done a few hundred miles away.  When it's ready, take a bus over and drive it back.

Here is a quickie web site:  http://www.electroauto.com/

What about these new bicycles with electric backup.  It seems that the problem with a lot of bicycles (at least for me) as that country roads are narrow and curvy and if you are going slow you stand a good chance of getting squished.  So if you could go uphill a little faster it seems to move you into a much safer space ...

http://gas2.org/2008/04/23/affordable-electric-cars-coming-to-us-in-2009/

http://gas2.org/2008/05/27/an-electric-car-you-can-buy-today-the-20k-triac-ev/

I just now saw something about nissan coming out with an all electric car called "the nissan leaf".  100 mile range and 90mph.

I've thought about getting an electric assist motor for my bicycle (an electric car is WAY out of my budget!).  We live twelve miles from town, and while it's mostly fairly level there is one big hill.  The problem I have is that for about half the distance, there are no shoulders at all, so I'd have to ride in the road.  That's just not safe, although I have seen people doing it.  I guess I'm a bit of a coward, but I'd much rather have a good wide shoulder to ride on, or a bike path separate from the road.  If our roads were better designed for safe bicycling, I would use my bike more, and I've talked to other people who say the same thing. 

Kathleen

The problem with electric cars are the batteries. They don't last all that long and when they die, you have a lot of highly toxic material that needs to get dealt with. Oh, and they're very expensive to replace. Until we come up with a better energy storage technology, alternative vehicles like this won't make sense financially or ecologically. Thought I suppose if you look at a typical three to five year lease batteries make some amount of sense... ish...

I, for one, really want to see the MDI Air Car come to full production here in the states. It used some sort of power (I'd love to see solar or biodiesel for the compression) to compress air, and then ran on that. Much cleaner/better all around.

I think the fuel cell might be one of our transportation fuel answers, in a distributed fashion.  However, now, I think the MoU (Masters of the Universe) see petrochemicals as the hydrogen feedstock, hence the Bush admin's subsidy for this particular technology.

However, Prof Nocera, MIT, has apparently found cheap, common catalysts that make hydrolyzing (using solar, wind, etc.) oxygen and hydrogen from water, of any quality, at ambient temperature, without pH extremes, and cheap, a reality.  (First models were made from pvc pipes.)  This provides a way to store the inconsistent solar and wind energy without batteries.

His goal is distributed (residential) hydrogen production and storage, that will feed the fuel cell to generate electricity for home, car, etc.  He has formed a company, Suncatalytix, to get the $$ to commercialize the units.

BTW, this is a kind of imitation of photosynthesis

And I understand there is work being done now to make fuel cells more economical, i.e, using something other that platinum membranes.

Here he is at PopTech - http://poptech.org/danielnocera/

And as of 4/2011

http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/nocera-takes-solar-energy-for-the-masses-one-step-further


I hope the great scientific and engineering minds in this forum can check it out and explain it better than I have    And that this is not off topic or should be in another thread.

nancy sutton wrote:

And as of 4/2011

http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/nocera-takes-solar-energy-for-the-masses-one-step-further

I hope the great scientific and engineering minds in this forum can check it out and explain it better than I have    And that this is not off topic or should be in another thread.

This is definitely one of the most interesting developments in renewable energy.  On the surface, it appears to address the 3 big problems: cost, efficiency and storage.  But without any real numbers we cannot assess cost or efficiency.  Cost, who knows, but the premise is that these are made from cheap, abundant materials.  Efficiency, in theory, it would seem that using solar energy to convert water to H & 02 on spot would be much more efficient than converting solar radiation to electricity and then producing H from that, no?  As for storage, hydrogen is a storage medium, though it is not a very energy dense storage medium.

The affordable electric car was already made and suppressed.
Who Killed the Electric Car: