Small, Cheap, Norwegian Electric Car

On July 31, 2007 in Uncategorized

Link to CNNMoney article

Just found this on Slashdot.org:
A Norwegian car company plans to release a small plug-in electric car that will go on sale in Europe next year, and could hit US markets by 2009.

The company is working with Google, Tesla Motors, PG&E, and the inventor of the Segway, to produce a compact electric car that can be sold only on the Web. Hopes are to eliminate dealers,  lower cost of manufacturing plants, and have ahigh-power lithium-ion battery pack that you lease, not buy (provided by Tesla Motors.)

I think this will be great if they can actually do this and manage to keep costs low. A little skeptical about leasing batteries, but I guess it’s better than having to replace them all the time ($$$$).

Seems like one could  rig up some photovoltaics and charge the batteries while driving or sitting in a parking lot, without having to plug the car into an electrical socket.

One of my questions though, is will it have regenerative braking?

This part is cool:

“Because each vehicle is Internet-ready, you can text-message your vehicle to, say, check its battery charge.”

This part is even better:

”

Where’s the market for the old batteries? One answer might reside in the basement of PG&E’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Against one wall, a nickel metal hydride battery salvaged from a wrecked Prius sits plugged into a standard utility meter. When a switch is thrown, the meter begins to spin backward as the battery feeds electricity into the grid.

PG&E plans to buy thousands of plug-in hybrid and electric car batteries that have outlived their usefulness for transportation but still retain capacity. The utility will install them in the basements of office towers and at electrical substations to store green energy produced by wind farms and solar arrays.”

Any thoughts?

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