Monday, July 14, 2008

Who Resurrected The Electric Car?

According to Newsweek, it's Elon Musk. Best known for founding PayPal, he's also chairman of Tesla Motors. Currently all Tesla offers is the super cool, but also super expensive ($110k) Roadster. Elon claims that within 4 years, however, Tesla will offer a fully electric car for under $30k. I have to think that would be huge for the auto market. That's affordable enough that I have to think that they would be selling faster than they could manufacture them. Particularly if gas prices don't let up. And if they could find a way of building a solar panel into the roof or hood so that it charges itself, that could potentially significantly change the market. Something like these flexible solar panels. And as a side benefit, we could see the end of the hypermiling goofballs.

That being said, I'm still waiting for someone to come along with an electric motorcycle. A quick search yields an ugly bike from Enertia that has a top speed of 50 mph, a maximum range of 45 miles, and costs $15k. Back to the drawing board for this one I think. The only other one I could find was a much better looking bike from Hybrid Technologies but still one with only a 50 mph top speed and I can't find range or price details for the model in the video here. They do offer a much uglier but somewhat more practical bike on their web site that gets up to 70 mph but only has a range of 40 miles and a price tag of $17.5k. It looks like we've still got a long way to go before I'll get to ride an electric bike.

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