Who Resurrected the Electric Car?

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It’s been ten years since General Motors stopped producing the EV1, the first ever mass produced, fully electric car. It’s been seven years since the last of the cars not sent to museums was crushed, cited as being unprofitable though loved by those who had the honor to lease one. And it’s been three years since Sony Pictures got everybody’s engines revving by distributing a little documentary that made a very big noise. Who Killed the Electric Car? told the story of the EV1, forcing people all over the country to ask a lot of questions and look for a lot of new solutions.

Finally, after car companies have stumbled over themselves for the last few years trying to sell hybrids as the best answer they can come up with and an ex-oilman turned president pointed toward hydrogen cells years in the future, Nissan has green-lighted their new electric car, the Leaf. Well, you can’t get much greener than that. Nissan says they will start selling the four door sedans next year and will rent the batteries, which boast a range of more than hundred miles on an eight hour charge.

While several smaller companies currently offer fully electric cars, many of them either look like cartoons or are outrageously priced. However, that does not mean they are not selling. Many people are opting to convert their cars to electric, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. And though they only average about 55 miles to the charge, they are getting more popular. There are currently about ten charging stations in the Chicago area with more on the way. According to EV Charger news,  due to the number of charging stations in Los Angeles County, one of the cities where the EV1 experiment took place, there is no longer a single list of all charging stations, since such a list would be unwieldy.

Initially, the Leaf will be built in Japan, but the company hopes to also build them in their Tennessee plant. Imagine, American plants actually producing Leafs. It’s almost too good to be true. And yet, it gets even better.

President Obama recently announced that he will use a portion of the 800 billion dollar stimulus bill passed by Congress earlier this year as grant money to boost the production of electric cars in America. After proposing strict federal standards on greenhouse gas emissions in May, Obama follows that up with $2.4 billion dollars in grants for companies to produce longer lasting batteries and new drive trains for the electric vehicles, which could provide a huge resurgence in the slumping American car economy.

With recipient companies being required to match the government spending, $5 billion could go a long way toward creating a lot of much needed manufacturing jobs. The White House called the grants the “single largest investment in advanced battery technology for hybrid and electric-drive vehicles ever made.”

The Nissan Leaf represents the first of the large automobile companies to produce an all electric car, if you don’t count GM’s EV1, Honda’s EV+, Ford’s Ranger EV, or Toyota’s Rav4EV, all discontinued around the same time. But with the recent surge in popularity in electric vehicles coupled with rising gas prices and an environmentally proactive president, Chevrolet plans to release the plug in-hybrid Volt next year, and Ford is releasing the electric hybrid Fusion. We can only hope that the Leaf won’t fall and that this time the electric car will stick around for awhile.