The defining characteristic of the modern American driving experience is freedom—and as long as you have your own car and a full tank of gas, you've got plenty of it. The privately owned vehicle lets you go where you want, when you want, as quickly as you want—and as far as the seemingly endless American highway will take you.
If you buy this premise, then the electric car of the 1990s—such as GM's EV1, Honda's EV Plus, Toyota's RAV4 EV, and Ford's Th!nk and Ranger EV—wasn't the proverbial ticket to ride. These vehicles relied entirely on rechargeable batteries, unlike today's hybrid gas-electric cars that combine a conventional gasoline engine with an electric motor and batteries. An electric drive is fast, efficient, very quiet, and fun. There's only one problem: a single charge of that fun lasted, give or take, only 100 miles. As the energy in these 20th-century EVs was depleted, the driver had to think about getting back home to refill the batteries with electric fuel supplied by a socket—a process that could take seven to eight hours.
That impingement on transportation freedom—real or imagined—was all that EV detractors needed to kill California's zero-emission mandates that ushered in the all-too-brief electric car period from 1996 to 2003. That and a few million dollars.
Carmakers and oil companies waged a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign to KO the California mandates. The rest is history. See the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" for details.
Fast forward past Hurricane Katrina, Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," $100+ barrels of oil, and the rapid ascent of the hybrid car market, and suddenly the carmakers are talking about electric cars again. The range problem has yet to be solved; that said, there are promising signs of an electric car resurgence.
Tesla Motors achieved instant rock star status in 2006 when the company announced its $100,000 Roadster, a screaming-fast, all-electric two-seat sports car built on the frame of the Lotus Elise. There's a lot to admire, on paper, about the Tesla: 0 – 60 mph in less than four seconds, 135-mpg top speed, 200-mile range, and a brilliant tech design that wires together nearly 7,000 mass-commodity rechargeable lithium batteries. The high price tag should be forgiven because—according to company statements—the first e-sports car is only a stepping stone to a larger, more affordable, mass-produced electric or plug-in hybrid car.
News of the Tesla Roadster got people thinking over at General Motors. In June 2006, Rick Wagoner, GM's chief executive officer, told Motor Trend magazine that "axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids" was the biggest mistake of his tenure. In late November, Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman, spoke about the company's commitment to "the electrification of the automobile." Days later, at the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show, the company unveiled the Chevrolet Volt, an electric car with a small engine to extend its range. The Volt is scheduled to go into production in 2010.
Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan, unveiled the company's five-year business plan in May. The plan puts a major emphasis on electric vehicles. Ghosn told The Economist magazine, "We must have zero-emission vehicles." Nissan's joint venture with NEC Corp. will help the company produce enough next-generation lithium ion batteries for thousands of electric vehicles and hybrids a year starting in the spring of 2009. With those new batteries, the company hopes to extend the driving range of electric cars, and dramatically reduce recharging times. This from a company that didn't even have gas-electric hybrid cars in a business plan five years ago, much less a full-electric vehicle.
Stay plugged in—it's inevitable that other carmakers will have electric cars in their plans in the coming months and years.
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