#ElectricCar

“After Fukushima, I am not sure how any politician in any modestly democratic republic is going to sell a new nuclear power plant to any general population.”

“Would you like the job of trying to sell a new nuclear plant to your electorate?”

“There is one terrible casualty in all of this: The electric car. When they make part 2 of Who Killed the Electric Car? the answer is going to be plain and clear: Fukushima killed the electric car.”

From the LogicalOptimizer blog, just one of many that currently say the same.

Volvo, now in the hands of China’s Geely, may revolutionize the way electric and hybrid cars are built. Currently, you have to shove a big honking battery into an electric car, and a simple honking battery into a hybrid. This adds weight, and obesity is a killer when in come to mileage. Volvo, working with the Imperial College in London has a wild idea: Why not dispense with the big honking battery and use the whole auto body to store electricity. Say what?

Any minute, or at least by the end of the month, the Chinese government will reveal super-secret plans to throw serious subsidy money at clean energy cars. The plans have been so secret that the Chinese market from mild hybrids all the way to full plug-ins came to a standstill with everybody waiting for the government to dole out heavy cash. Of course, GM doesn’t want to stand on the sidelines of this bonanza.

Nissan won’t sell their much ballyhooed pure plug-in Leaf until December. But a successful launch wants to be well planned, and Nissan thinks of everything. They won’t sell you the Leaf just yet. But you can already buy the charger. If you bank account is properly charged.

Did you ever arrive in a foreign country, and the plug of your battery-depleted cell phone did not fit? Or worse, it did fit, and the charger went up in smoke? That’s nothing compared to the impending EV disaster. Buy an EV, and you will find yourself between the battle lines of plugs, voltages, and technologies. Imagine the horror: Guided by your GPS, you limp into a charging station on the last watts in your battery, and their round plug doesn’t fit your square socket.

Ah, the amount of ingenuity electric cars trigger. They need to get charged. Cheaply. They need to get rid of the bad rap that creating electricity isn’t the environmentally friendliest endeavor on this planet. So what about wind power? Comes with its own set of problems. Mitsubishi and the Tokyo Institute of Technology got together and devised a method to use excess wind power to charge electric vehicles while saving the power company gobs of money, a.k.a. the dreaded capex problem. The result? A true wind-wind situation!

Move over! A Tokyo taxi.

Forget about the crafty Japanese starving off any attempt of honest American companies to penetrate the Japanese market. A true blue American company, founded by true blue American venture capital, goes right for the heart of Japan: Tokyo’s taxi market.

Did you ever drive in Milano, Italy? Take my advice: Don’t. Park your car, take a taxi. That must have gone through the minds of the boys in Wolfsburg, when they were searching for a name for their dedicated taxi prototype. “Mamma mia! Let’s call it Milano!”

Japan appears to get extremely serious about all-electric cars. What stands in the way of their success? Apart from the price (we’ll get to that later:) It’s the infrastructure, stupid. Fabricating, fuelling, and fixing an ICE-powered car is supported by an infrastructure that had more than 100 years to grow. Keeping a plug-in running needs an infrastructure to guarantee mobility away from the charger at home. Japan’s Environment Ministry teams up with Nissan, Sumitomo, and other companies to build the infrastructure for electric vehicles, reports The Nikkei [sub].

When we wrote yesterday that GM’s „car of the future,“ to be shown at the upcoming Shanghai Expo, “looks more like an overgrown Segway scooter,” we meant it in jest. Turns out they are serious. It IS an overgrown Segway scooter.

Shanghai is in the grips of pre-Expo frenzy. Shanghai’s Finest are closing down all world famous adult entertainment establishments to present a clean Shanghai from May 1 to October 31 – no red rope treatment, except at the show entrance . General Motors, corporate citizen of Shanghai, unveiled a new electric concept car to up its image as a supplier of non-polluting cars tailored to keep the crowded mega-cities of the future green and clean. Did I say “car?” It looks more like an overgrown Segway scooter. Or something that escaped the Sunday Funnies, AD 1968 …

With the Chinese planning an electrical assault on Europe, with Nissan preparing their Leaf and with Renault charging-up Zoe, Peugeot-Citroen (PSA) is probably feeling a little exposed right now. Bad enough PSA failed to work out an agreement with Mitsubishi. Now they’re deficient in the no carbs category. But don’t worry, a white knight is coming to the rescue and offering them a ready-made electric vehicle. That’s right, they couldn’t work out a capital tie-up, but PSA and Mitsubishi Motors worked out an agreement on electric cars.

Speaking to MarketWatch at the Detroit Auto Show, Tesla Chairman Elon Musk apparently just revealed that the Tesla Model S sedan will be released “within two and a half years.” Which is interesting considering Musk claimed that production would start in 2011 at the Model S launch last March. But then, Tesla is still trying to decide on a factory location, apparently waffling between former aeronautical manufacturing locations in Downey and Long Beach. And apparently Tesla’s mere consideration of a brownfield site in Downey has drawn protests from a group calling themselves The Raging Grannies.