Earth Equity News

Electric Vehicles Charging Up Automotive Industry. By Ken Bensinger, LATimes, October 27, 2009. "After years of hope and hype, electron-powered driving finally appears to be on the verge of reality. In the next three years, at least a dozen pure electric or plug-in hybrid cars are slated to hit the market in the U.S. Electricity-driven vehicles from giants such as General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co., as well as start-ups like Fisker Automotive in Irvine, will provide consumers with a wide variety of choices. These new vehicles promise to combine blinding fuel efficiency, radical new technology and futuristic styling that makes the hybrid Toyota Prius look downright staid. Battery makers and automakers alike are tooling up factories to produce big volumes of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, power utilities and regulators are scrambling to figure out just how big the market will be... In August, President Obama set a national goal of getting 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. It took about twice as long to get a million hybrids rolling on U.S. streets and highways.
"Electric cars are hardly new. In fact, a century ago, around the time of the dawn of the automobile, there were as many electric as gasoline-powered cars. But technological limitations eventually killed those early EVs, and electric cars didn't truly raise their heads again until the late 1990s. That's when a smattering of electrics, including the much-lamented GM EV1, were made available in California as part of a government-mandated test program. Wildly popular among a select group of enthusiasts, they were officially declared unfeasible and unprofitable by automakers. Today, only a few hundred are still on the road, among them a Toyota Toyota RAV4EV driven by Paul Scott, co-founder of electric vehicle activist group Plug In America."