Which market? Japanese or American? This is good news! With a rivalry shaping up between Nissan and Mitsubishi it's even better news: competition is always good for the consumer, price and inovation-wise. Hopefully other major manufacturers will enter the fray soon. Isn't this what we've been hoping for for years?

I suspect with the large gas tax the Canadian government gains from all its petrolium sales, it won't allow us to import these electric vehicles into Canada a few years from now either. Ridiculous. Hopefully they will loosen their import regulations sometime soon.

Sweet! Finally they are getting it! Or is it because LiIons have hit a certain price point / stability?

In the coming years... we of the netroots community should be pushing:

1. a credible, open source implementation of V2G. Something manufacturers could simply download, create & deploy.

2. our cities to begin installing V2G compatible charging stations around town.

3. Our states to begin installing public charging stations at restaurants along highways. With 20 - 30 minute charging on advanced LiIon batteries, I think long-distance charging will happen at restaurants.

4. Our cities / local car share organizations to consider streamlining the process of picking up a car rental for the weekend.

Let's hope for the best. 2005 should have been the "magic year" for fuel cell powered vehichles...

I think these cars are intended for city use and commuting rather than road trips.
I imagine they will mainly be charged at home and (if you are lucky) at work.
You might be able to prolong the battery life in this way.
What people might be able to do would be to hack a generator and use them as serial hybrids. Obviously this would consume most of the boot; but that is the price you pay for being bleeding edge.
Most people would just use them around the town.
I just hope they look like normal cars and not the usual electric horrors you see as "city cars".
If they were based on the current Micra (Perhaps March in Japan) they would be fine.
If they were based on the micra they could leave the fuel tank in in case people wanted to make serial hybrids out of them. If you used diesel it would be safe. Better still they could have a generator as a Nissan option and do a nice job of it.
You wouldn't have the "double up" power of a parallel hybrid but it would be much simpler.

If anyone is interested in seeing the driving conditions in Tokyo they can watch Jeremy Clarkson's visit from 1995.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8701392936812760087

Those wonderful batteries are press releases. Until we see independant lab verification of anything close to 15,000 cycles, those are just words.

As far as charging overnight, the whole world does not charge overnight. Some people have to "fill up" during the day, because they drive more than the 100-200 miles range that the batteries give them.

When the cost gets down to 1/2 lead acid prices, maybe $2000 for 50kwh (about 1/10th of the price now), then maybe. With people fast recharging, you are going to have millions of cars trying to charge 50kwh in 5 minutes. Try handling a grid that has that much unpredicatability in it.

SJC - "As far as charging overnight, the whole world does not charge overnight. Some people have to "fill up" during the day, because they drive more than the 100-200 miles range that the batteries give them."

Sure however if you are doing that many miles then you would almost certainly have a plug in hybrid rather than a BEV. Only a small minority of people do anywhere near that distance per day and even if they do surely this is not a thing that should be encouraged in the future.

"When the cost gets down to 1/2 lead acid prices, maybe $2000 for 50kwh (about 1/10th of the price now), then maybe. With people fast recharging, you are going to have millions of cars trying to charge 50kwh in 5 minutes. Try handling a grid that has that much unpredicatability in it."

Most cars are parked most of the time, they actually spend very little of their life actually driving. This is quite easy to establish statistically and is quite predicatable. On average the will be lots of cars charging however because of the smarts that will be built into the new grid this will occur only when there is a surplus of generating capacity which happens quite often with wind. All parked cars will have preferences set to ensure that sufficient power is left for the drive home. With millions of cars this is still a huge capacity for evening out the fluctuating grid.

I´m soooo tired of waiting for the clean alternatives. Tired of reading about consept cars coming within a few years...Why don´t the manufacturers see that we are millions of people willing to get rid of our gasolin cars and ready to put a big share of our salary on a clean veihecle right now !!!!!. Please, give us the alternatives noooow !!!! Pleeease

SJC writes (trolls?):

When the cost gets down to 1/2 lead acid prices, maybe $2000 for 50kwh (about 1/10th of the price now), then maybe.

What we really need is something like Firefly Energy's cells, which are going to cost somewhat more.  However, they'll pay back mighty fast in savings.  If you pay $4000 for a set of batteries but they save you 80% of your fuel requirements at 13,000 mi/year, 30 MPG and $3/gallon, that's $1040/year savings.  The batteries would pay off before the car loan did.

Total NET cost depends to a large extend on the price of gas/diesel oil. Cheap gas (up to $3/gal) does not help the introduction of Hybrids, PHEVs and EVs.

Why can't Americans and Canadians pay the same price as Europeans do (about $6/gal)? Of course, a major change in fuel tax level would have to be progressive (over 3 to 6 years, well advertised and with enough lead time for buyers to change their attitude.

Secondly, people would have to see where the extra taxes are going.

Why not ask THEM?

The extra tax $ billions could go to various programs such as : to reduce the Federal deficit, lower income taxes for low salary people, more support for hybrids, PHEVs and EVs to reduce the Total Net cost differential with ICE equivalent vehicles to near zero etc.

That's why you need the Firefly Energy cells.  With carbon foam instead of lead as the mechanical support and electrical interconnect, they're not subject to most of the failure modes of the classic design - and they're far lighter.

What about hipercapacitors?

Does anyone know what happened with EEstor's revolutionary capacitor??? Their web site is still "under construction" !?!?

Neil:

Today's regular gas price, around our place, is equivalent to $3.15 USD/gal or about $0.954 Cdn/Liter. It peaked at about $4.13 USD/gal last summer. Sales of SUVs dropped but nobody panicked because everybody expected about $5 USD/gal. The newspapers had done a good job.

By the way, stats indicate that people movement between Canada and USA is almost neutral and even in favour of Canada lately.

Both countries could have business as usual with gas price going up about 4 cents/gal per month for the next 4 to 6 years or until $6 USD/gas is reached. We would adapt as Europeans and Japanese + others did.