It has begun. The move toward mass produced plug in electric cars.
The fist thing to know when considering electric cars is this:
The lithium-ion battery on a plug-in hybrid costs about $12,000. The battery on an electric vehicle costs about $24,000.
-- Article
Of course those prices are bound to go down, but that starts to put the whole Electric Car thing into perspective, and why, for now, electric cars are both Expensive and have a Gasoline component. It's cuz the battery itself is the price of a couple new Chevy Aveos, and you want as few batteries as possible to make the electric car even remotely affordable...so you use the option of charging the one battery in mid flight. But it's still an electric car. And the new Tesla Model S is priced Not Insane and it's all electric.
That's why I'm pretty stoked that the first pre-production Chevy Volts rolled off the line in Hamtramck, MI plant.
I don't care what you say, it's pretty awesome for a whole lot of reasons.
The Volt drives for the first 40 miles entirely on the Lithium Ion batteries. I don't know about you, but that's pretty much all I'd need for the day. And if I plug it into an outlet during the times I'm not driving it, I could get more than 40 miles out of it in a day, and apparently it just plugs into any normal old outlet.
After 40 miles it uses a gasoline generator to charge the battery while driving.
Not that I'll be getting a Volt any time soon, though. They'll run in the high $30,000 range...but GM says under $30,000 after some tax credit I hear about. I'm still in the used Chevy Aveo/1998 Ford Escort price range with my auto HopingToBuy habits. Basically knock a zero off the end of the Volt price, cut it in half, knock another zero off and offer to trade the car in exchange for some good jokes and that's about where my price range is for cars.
But still...compare the $30,000 Volt price tag to the $101,500 Tesla Roadster price tag, or the new Tesla Model S price tag of $49,000 price and you start to see where the Volt's gas generator comes in handy (all the prices here have that $7,500 tax credit knocked off)...though the Model S is pretty sweet, even if it's $20,000 more....and heck, if you got the means...get thee a Model S. Tesla is a young, promising company, and hopefully they'll grow fast enough to keep up with the huge ones and put the competitive pressure on for better, more Full Electric cars.
And it's cool cuz both the Volt and the Model S are Sedans...and I happen to have earlier left out the Nissan LEAF a 100% Electric plug-in Sedan rated for 100 miles, which is rolling off the line and ready for sale pretty soon...
Environmentally friendly cars that aren't designed to carry children don't count in my book (Hear that Smart car! and Toyota's electric iQ!!!) Families are people too, dammit! Any fool can cut a car in half and call it environmentally friendly...that's cheating (Apparently Toyota plans to come out with its own electric version of the iQ, a teeny two person car that may or may not be released in the US.)
But in the end, I don't care what electric car somebody buys...cuz Michigan is positioning itself to be the leader in car battery production with FIVE, smell 'em FIVE battery manufacturing facilities and ONE right here in Muskegon...SHAZAM!!!!
By about 2012, the state will be able to build as many as 400,000 battery packs a year, Shreffler said.
That will outnumber the estimated global demand of 250,000 electric and plug-in hybrids, according to Credit Suisse, which cautions that unforeseen swings in gas prices or battery costs could drive that number higher or lower.
The good news is that demand for batteries is growing outside of electrics and plug-ins.
--Article
The state's kinda taking a gamble on increased demand for batteries and a National shift toward plug in electric vehicles.
It's a hugely hopeful sign, though, that the winds of change are shifting in the direction of mass produced plug in electric cars.