Google gets into Electric Cars ~ Who needs a hundred year head start?
10 year old Silicon Valley Startup: 1
110 year old Detroit Auto Industry: 0
Well at least somebody is concerned with getting the electric vehicle off the ground. In a recent post on Google’s blog, they have been partnering with a few other silicon valley startups to get electric vehicles into the mainstream faster than the US auto industry seems to want to do:
We’ve been working with Google engineers and Hymotion/A123Systems to build a small fleet of plug-in hybrids, adding an external plug and additional batteries to a regular hybrid car so that it runs on electricity with gasoline (or even better, biofuels) to extend the driving range for longer trips.
Be still my nerdy heart. And with Congress finally getting into high gear, we may actually be making some progress towards oil independence, maybe, sort of, kind of.
Well, you have to start somewhere, and as my Digg traffic told me, consumers are definitely excited for a car that can deliver both fuel economy, practicality, and eco-friendliness.
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Converted hybrids are great if you can afford the $20,000 purchase price for the new hybrid car, and the approximately $10,000 for the plug-in conversion.
How about somebody comes up with a conversion kit for non-hybrid cars? I have two front-wheel drive cars; it seems to me it wouldn’t be all that hard to add an electric motor to the rear axle and install a battery pack in some spaces that are under-utilized, such as under the seats and in the trunk ahead of the axle (okay, that reduces my available trunk space, but I seldom- that is, never- fill the trunk all the way anyway).
This is an even “greener” approach, because it recycles an existing vehicle that would otherwise be replaced with a new one, with all the environmental impact of manufacturing. Keep the conversion price under $5000 and you’d sell a bunch of these.