Richard Lowenthal, the CEO of Coulomb Technologies – the Campbell, California-based firm that won a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to install the charger and about 4,600 others across the country – says he’s not surprised that few cars have started using New York’s pioneer charger. In October, several new models of electric cars are scheduled to be released, he says. But there are only about 3,000 electric cars on the road in the U.S. right now. He's not sure how many are in New York City, but says most of them are on the west coast. “Right now, the only production highway-speed [electric] vehicle is the Tesla Roadster, but this fall we’ll see cars like the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and the Mitsubishi I-MiEV,” he said. “This will be a very interesting October.”
In October, Chevrolet, Nissan, Smart USA and Mitsubishi are planning to roll out several new electric vehicles and a January study produced by PlaNYC predicts they will be rapidly adopted. The study, called Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City, found that early adopters of electric vehicles would likely purchase the entire supply of available vehicles over the next five years.
“This is going to take over very quickly,” said Paul Scott, vice president of the electric vehicle advocacy group, Plug In America. “The demand for [electric cars] outpaces production for many years. Driving an electric car is so far superior to internal combustion that, once people understand it, it’s just gonna take off like wildfire.”
One of Scott’s tactics for encouraging the purchase of electric cars is appealing to patriotism. He says people who buy brand new gas-powered cars in the coming years are “bad Americans.”
“Not all Americans are necessarily what you’d call ‘good people,’” he says. “Some people would prefer to pollute our air, prefer to give money to our enemies. Some people prefer to buy oil from different countries and send a billion dollars a day out of the country. But most Americans would rather not send money out of the country, not want to give money to our enemies, and not want to pollute our environment. Those are the good Americans.”
Electric cars are objectively better for the environment, according to a study conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. And it’s a lot cheaper to charge one up than to fuel a conventional car. On average, the electricity to drive 25 miles costs 75 cents, whereas the gas to drive the same distance would cost, on average, about $3, according to the California Cars Initiative, a non-profit that promotes efficient plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The batteries of electric cars also maintain most of their capacity over time, unlike the rechargeable batteries in today’s cell phones or laptops. Most of the handful of Toyota RAV4 EVs placed on the market in 1999 are still functioning and operating at about 85 percent capacity, Lowenthal says.
