Ten years after the trailblazing Prius, electric cars have finally hit a high gear

With government incentives, public acceptance and increasing plaudits from the motoring press, electric cars could be on the road to success
Adam Vaughan
guardian.co.uk, Friday 31 July 2009 21.55 BST
It's nearly a decade since the original Prius introduced hybrid petrol-electric cars to the UK in 2000. Produced in Japan a decade ago, the Prius – like its main rival by Honda – used a battery and electric motor to recover energy wasted from braking and rolling down hills. The result: one-third the emissions of a conventional car. Although Toyota's car was no overnight hit, backing from Leonardo DiCaprio and other stars coupled with an increasingly enthusiastic motoring press helped it sellmore than 1m worldwide. Other carmakers jumped on the hybrid bandwagon, including Ford and GM.
But hybrids are not the only route manufacturerscarmakers have been pursuing on the road to a low-carbon future. British and US drivers have been able to buy 100% electric vehicles since the late 1990s – notably the Ford TH!NK City in the UK and GM's EV1 in the US, which became the subject of the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?.
In the UK, the electric trailblazer has been the G-Wiz, the tiny Indian-built car popularised by London-based distributor Goingreen. While Goingreen has only sold around 1,000 G-Wizs, the car that people loved to praise (Boris Johnson is a fan) or mock (BBC's Top Gear has crashed and detonated several).
Major carmakers have flirted with selling a new generation of electric city cars to the UK public for several years – see the Smart ForTwo eEd and Mitsubishi i-MiEV – but their models have yet to reach the market. But theimage of electric vehicles as dowdy "Noddy" cars has begun to change, due to luxury electric sports cars such as California's Tesla Roadster and the British-designed Lightning GT.
Other green car developments have arrived under the radar. Since 2007, led by VW and its BlueMotion Polo, all the big carmakers have created "eco marques" – versions of existing cars tweaked for efficiencywith better aerodynamics, gearing and other measures – under names such as "ECOnetic" and "Blue Lion. More prosaically, last year saw a UK trend towards smaller cars with lower emissions: theThe small car sector was the only one to see growth grow in September.
This year, Honda launched its Insight – the cheapest hybrid in the UK so far at £15,490 – while next year GM hopes to reverse its fortunes with the launches the Volt hybrid, which will be branded the Vauxhall Ampera in Britain. 2010 will also witness the first hybrids will be made in Europe next year, plus there's the plug-in Prius capable of travelling further on pure electric power. Electric vehicles are increasingly being seen as the endgame for green cars. Powered from renewable sources, theoretically emission-free, and with political backing, from Gordon Brown to Barack Obama, £5,000 grants for buying one from 2011 and the promise of electric Minis may be enough to win people over.