The West Coast is about to take part in the biggest rollout of electric cars and charging stations in the world.
The first mass-market electric cars go on sale in greater Seattle and Oregon’s Willamette Valley at the end of this year. Pollsters are finding high interest in the Northwest in electric cars.
If you’re one of those curious drivers, now is your time. Here’s what you need to know.
Rendering of fast-charging station
Back in the fall, the Department of Energy awarded a Phoenix company $100 million to build electric vehicle charging networks in five states. Washington, Oregon, and California are among those states. Now is when the rubber meets the road.
Rich Feldman is Pacific Northwest manager for the federal contractor eTec.
“We are starting construction and will have those facilities available in the fall. It will go for about a year, so we wonít have them all available all at once,” he said.
Feldman is supervising the installation of more than 2000 electric car chargers in the greater Seattle area and another 2000 at homes and public places in Portland, Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene.
“Shopping, fast food, movie theaters, the variety of places that people think about when they’re able to park and leave the vehicle for an hour or two,” he said.
Feldman says you can suggest locations for public chargers on the website: theevproject.com .
That’s also one place drivers can sign up to be among the first to buy a highway-capable electric car from project partner Nissan.
Feldman says the EV Project wants to convince a subset of Nissan Leaf buyers to participate in a study.
The Nissan Leaf all-electric vehicle goes on sale in late 2010.
900 drivers in each state would let researchers from the Idaho National Lab monitor their driving and charging behaviors.
“In exchange, they get a free, home-based charging station,” said Feldman.
The Nissan Leaf and the plug-in Chevy Volt are supposed to hit dealerships late this year. They’re the first wave of mass production electric cars.
Mark Perry, who directs product planning for Nissan North America, said, “So the concern about somebody, ‘If I use this vehicle/purchase this vehichle, can I get charging,’ that’s going to be a very easy answer here.”
Perry said the price of the fully electric Nissan will be announced at the end of this month. Then the company will start taking deposits from consumers.
Prepare to pay a substantial premium over a comparable gasoline powered compact. The four-door, five passenger electric Nissan has a range of about 100 miles.
“We going to both sell and lease the entire car, including the battery. There had been a lot of conversation about separation of car shell and battery and different approaches. Nissan is still going to explore different business models in other parts of the world. But here in the U.S., definitely an entire transaction – car and battery purchase or entire lease,” he said.
Copenhagen hotel owner Kirsten Brøchner with her leased Norwegian-made Buddy electric car.
As Perry indicates, other companies and countries are trying different business models to lure consumers into electric cars.
Denmark is another place on the cutting edge. I happened to visit there recently and took a look around.
In Copenhagen, innkeeper Kirsten Brøchner acquired two plug-in cars from a specialty carmaker in Norway. Because electric cars are so new, she decided to lease instead of buy.
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Source: opb.org
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