Is the primary hurdle to buying electric cars the purchase price, or the lack of public charging infrastructure? A couple weeks ago I referred to research saying it’s the purchase price, that prospective electric car buyers don’t want to pay a price premium for electric cars. New research by a…
In the 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama boasted that we’d have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. As I noted in my last post, it’s 2015 and we’re nowhere near that goal. What happened? I think Obama over-reached … but there is this little…
Is the electric car inevitable? With lower gasoline prices currently I’m seeing news articles going both ways, some predicting the rate of electric car adoption will be hurt, while others say lower gasoline prices won’t harm the adoption rate because there are other advantages. Who can predict the future? However,…
The Sierra Club has just unveiled a “quiz” that tries to help you know which electric car to buy. While it’s a good idea, and the questions make sense, the answers they give aren’t very good. Even so it’s worth going to http://content.sierraclub.org/evguide/pick-a-plugin and seeing what suggestions they have. There’s an idea…
What if it’s time to buy a new car, what do you choose? Thanks to lithium-ion battery technology, we now have a new drive-train choice. Rather than being limited to variant of gasoline engined vehicles, we can now buy electrified cars or motorcycles. Assuming you’ve already chosen to go electric…
From the viewpoint Silicon Valley’s award-winning National Drive Electric Week celebration yesterday, electric cars are becoming mainstream. Our region is enjoying the highest rate of electric car sales in the country, and for our 2014 NDEW event we had the intention to have the largest assemblage of electric vehicles anywhere.…
A big critique of the current crop of electric vehicles is the price is out of reach for low- or middle-income people. We have this situation where tax breaks and other perks are being given to well-off people, with the Tesla Model S and Fisker Karma both explicitly targeting the…
I’m accustomed to seeing Fox News as the enemy of electric cars, with Bill O’Reilly leading the anti-everything-sensible crusade. For some reason he’s beginning to sound sensible about electric vehicles, and is even making arguments similar to ones I’d make when “debating” with one of his fellow Fox “News” show…
Current cars, and the cars coming in a few years, are simply not at all like the cars of just a couple years ago. These newfangled cars for young whippersnappers are like rolling computer networks, with various embedded computers and software services all talking to each other. It’s even common…
At first they ignore you, then they attack you, and then you win. Is this the pattern playing out with a flyer being distributed to Tesla Model S owners in San Francisco alerting them to deep dark secret “facts” about Tesla and the Model S? The flyer, posted today on…
Does familiarity breed contempt, or confidence? That depends on a lot of factors, but a recent study showed that after about 3 months of electric vehicle ownership, EV drivers gain confidence and drive further afield. Familiarity can breed range confidence rather than range anxiety, so please don’t buy into the…
If we can switch from caffeinated to decaffeinated coffee at the drop of a hat, why is it so hard to switch away from gasoline fuel for cars to something else? We know that gasoline and all the other fossil fuels cause a wide range of problems, and that it’s…
Jalopnik, a so-called “automotive news” website (so far as I can tell, they rely on luridness rather than journalism) just posted a “10 worst electric cars of all time” list, placing the Coda electric sedan at the #10 spot. Really? I think they missed on some real gems they put…
Remember the Nissan Leaf sales figures in 2012? It was pretty dismal. While looking something else up I just came across this Time Magazine article from September 2012: Is It Time to Declare the Nissan Leaf a Flop? Well.. Looking back at that, Leaf (and Volt and Model S) sales…
Selling people on a different kind of car is more than selling them a car. It’s about selling them on a different way of driving, or rather a different propulsion system. Tesla “Recharge” from Über Content on Vimeo.
