Home Made Electric Car
st0ckman.blogspot.com David Murray may drive the quietest car in North Texas, powered only by a small electric motor, and not creating any ...
How Electric Cars Work
Electric cars could power our future transportation needs. Check out this video from HowStuffWorks to see an electric car in action.
RAV4-EV Battery story - part one (1)
batteries? Are they invisible, immaterial? Can they be for real? Here's the story of how they came to be, and why they work in the Toyota RAV4 ...
Does the Infrastructure Exist For The Coming EVs?
Better Place , a Silicon Valley-based company that earlier this year received $350 million in new venture capital funding , is working with Denmark’s largest utility to build a network of chargers and battery-swapping stations in that country. The idea with battery swapping is that people will drive into a station and have their low-charged electric-car battery replaced for a fully charged one.
Better Place is also active in Israel and lists Australia, Canada, Japan, and the U.S. as target markets. In the U.S., the company is focused on California and Hawaii, though it’s not clear if the company has done any work there yet. A spokeswoman for Better Place didn’t return a call seeking an update on the company’s U.S. plans.
Another player in the market is Coulomb Technologies , based in Campbell, California, which builds charging-station networks for utilities, private companies, and local governments. The company has shipped over 700 charging stations worldwide to 129 customers, said spokeswoman Anne Smith. Clients include McDonald’s fast-food restaurants and the city of Hillsboro, Oregon.
Many electric-vehicle owners are expected to do the bulk of their charging at home, at least initially. eTec will install 220-volt systems in the homes of some Nissan Leaf owners that can charge the cars in four to six hours. But many believe that a wider network of charging stations, with faster charging options, is needed to reduce so-called “range anxiety,” the fear people have of driving too far and possibly getting stranded if they can’t find a charging outlet.
One future issue for electric-car infrastructure is the state of the nation’s electricity supply. While many believe existing power grids can handle any additional demands made by electric vehicles, particularly at this early stage, some experts say neighborhood clusters of electric cars may require utilities to plan carefully around capacity issues as the market evolves.
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