The first mass produced electric cars have made their way to market. Sales are still slow and availability is limited. Is this the first step toward reducing individual contributions to green house gasses? Perhaps. Depends where you live and get your power from. B.C or Quebec Hydro you would be laughing. The rest of coal fired Canada, probably not so much.
“GM sold between 250 and 350 Chevy Volts in December and Nissan’s sales totalled less than 10 Leaf sedans in the past two weeks. Production for both is slowly increasing.
It will be well into 2012 before both the Volt and Leaf are available widely. And if you’re interested in buying one, you’ll need to get behind the 50,000 people already on waiting lists.
It’s still unclear just how large the market for electric cars will be once those early adopters are supplied. The base sticker price is $40,280 US for the Volt and $32,780 US for the Leaf, much higher than most similar-sized, gas-powered cars. Canadian pricing has not been announced for either car.”
Price is going to be a big hurdle once the cars are more readily available. The other choice is a pure electric or gas/electric hybrid.
“The Leaf is the only all-electric car on the market. It can travel about 160 kilometres on battery power before needing to be recharged. Using a standard outlet, that takes 16 to 18 hours. Nissan recommends that Leaf owners install a 220/240-volt outlet in their homes so they can recharge in about seven hours. The Volt goes about 65 kilometres on battery power alone before needing to be recharged. But it comes with a backup gas engine that GM says can extend its range to 600 kilometres as it kicks in to recharge the batteries on the fly. GM believes the backup generator will make it a hit with customers who worry about being stranded with a dead battery.”\
It seems to me that not having to worry about running out of charge would be a good thing. At least on the surface , but one must factor in maintenance and reliability into the decision on which, if either, car to buy.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
January 2, 2011 at 5:06 pm
jean-philippe
I’m really concerned about the electricity used to power these cars. I don’t know how much power we’re talking about if every Canadian car becomes electric, but it has to be absolutely huge.
Shouldn’t we be talking RIGHT NOW as a society how we intend to feed these cars?
It would be an absolute horror to see oil power plants bloom in Alberta…
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January 4, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Alan Scott
I love your slavish devotion to the need to reduce greenhouse gases, but that is a minor point. If people want to delude themselves into thinking they are helping the great spaghetti monster of global warming, more power to them. It is only the government subsidies to these pieces of crap that I am complaining about. And of these brisk sales of volts, I am sure that quite a number of them were purchased by Obama for US government fleets.
A real shame some of our US politicians are not forced to use volts as they are chauffeured around Washington. Somehow I doubt if Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, or Charlie Wrangle would ever be photographed in one of these toys.
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