Electric cars get a kick-start

No longer seen as too expensive or too impractical, electric motoring is the world's fastest-growing vehicle market – and set to continue

Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 April 2009 22.00 BST

Until now, electric cars have been criticised for being too expensive (the California-based Tesla roadster costs around £90,000) or looking more like go-karts than real cars (think G-Wiz). But in recent months, mainstream manufacturers have jumped on board, buoyed up by increasing enthusiasm from governments to fund demonstrations or provide incentives to consumers to kick-start the electric market.
Last year BMW showed off an electric version of the Mini, which it will lease to customers in the US and Germany. The car is part of the motor company's larger Project i, its attempts to reduce the use of petrol and diesel in its cars. Rival carmaker Daimler is working with energy company RWE to build a charging infrastructure. For its part, the German government wants a million electric cars on its roads by 2020.
In February, Mitsubishi unveiled the MiEV, a four-seater city car with a top speed of 87 mph and a range of up to 100 miles. Its battery can be fully charged from flat in a relatively fast six hours when attached to mains electricity and, when it goes on sale in the UK next year, it will be the first production electric car available to buy from a mainstream manufacturer.
Hot on its heels will be all-electric cars from virtually everyone else. Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet all have all-electric cars at advanced stages of development and, at motor shows this year, have fallen over themselves to introduce their electric plans to the world.
There are also new companies trying to get in on the market. The Chinese company BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, was set up in 2003 and began looking at electric vehicles almost immediately. The company knew that, to compete internationally, it would require something unique about its cars. Now the company is poised to tap into the world's fastest-growing vehicle market, as the Chinese swap their bicycles for cars, and plans to use this as a base from which to launch its plug-in hybrid, the A5, and all-electric car, the E6, later this year.
In China, the government will invest over $1.5bn (£1bn) in the next few years to support the development of electric drive trains in cars and is also considering giving incentives to consumers to buy cleaner vehicles.
"Vehicle electrification is inevitable, it will happen," said Dan Sperling, a member of the air resources board of California, and an environmental scientist at the University of California, Davis, during a speech to car experts in London last year. He is also Arnold Schwarzenegger's environmental enforcer, leading the introduction of electric and hybrid vehicles to California, where Better Place has been contracted to set up demonstration networks of its battery-swapping business in several cities including San Francisco.
Sperling went on to compare the challenge to electrify road transport with the Apollo Moon shots of the 1960s. "John F Kennedy said: 'we have the resources, we have the talents but we haven't had the resolve.' There are ways, even with battery technology the way it is, lots of opportunity to use it but certainly with more investment and better policy and focus, we can push it much faster. The good news is that, in transforming our fuels, vehicles and transportation systems, we need much less invention than we needed to get to the Moon. From a technology perspective, it's easier."