I realize it’s a small, nonrepresentative sample size, but I saw two electric cars on the same day recently. I first wrote about seeing two electric cars in one week a few years back and haven’t seen many since, until the other day. Granted one was a plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, but the other was a Nissan Leaf with out of state plates, which made me wonder how the owners transported it to Colorado. Was it on a semi/tractor trailer? Did they drive in short increments? If this “bounty” weren’t enough, the next day I saw another Leaf. This one had a pithy license plate “PLUGZEN.”
Market penetration will be the ultimate sign of success amongst electric cars. Do they remain a fringe element in transportation, or is this really the future? Drop-in biofuels seem to have an easier time competing for future transportation rites given the ability to use the current infrastructure, but I still think the future will see numerous options, much like the diversity in energy sources that will be needed to move us into a secure, clean, “unlimited” future. Recent news about Toyota’s planned hydrogen fuel cell vehicle demonstrates it’s still the “wild west” in terms of competition for the future of transportation. In a recent piece, Chris suggests that electric vehicles are here to stay.
A bit of context perhaps. In places like the West Coast, a proliferation of electric cars may not mean as much. As I mentioned earlier this year, I saw a half dozen or more parked in the garage at Los Angeles International Airport. This is not the middle of the country, where distances between locations are greater and adoption of this technology is slower for a wealth of reasons. Although Denver is still not representative per se of middle America, it is geographically and ideologically closer. Giving a potential glance at the future of electrified transportation in this country.
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