My Sunday paper's headline and feature article, consisting of 3/4ths of the front page and an entire followup page, is titled "
Make Way for Electric Vehicles". The article was written by Dana Hull of the Mercury News. While not containing too much that everyone here doesn't already know, it does compare the total cost of driving 15,000 miles between a Honda Civic and a Nissan Leaf. Assuming the cost of gas to be $4.00 a gallon (it is more than that in most areas of California right now), the additional purchase price of the Leaf, compared with the Honda, would be recouped within 3.9 years. If the price of gas goes up to $4.50 a gallon (most likely here by the summer) the owner of the Leaf would pass the cost of owning a Civic within 3.4 years. This is outlined in a prominent box on the newspaper's front page.
The article goes on to interview a couple who converted their Prius to a plug-in in 2006 and has just bought a new Chevy Volt, as well as a Nissan Leaf - making them the only family in the nation known to own three plug-in vehicles (according to the article).
The article explains the potential future of EVs, their rising demand and needed improvements in energy density, which are rapidly being addressed by various start-up companies fueled by venture capital investors.
According to the article, our Northern California utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (which everyone loves to hate), has analyzed hybrid vehicle registration data and says that the Bay Area will be "ground zero" for EVs, particularly in the Peninsula, East Bay and Marin County. It expects anywhere from 219,000 to 845,000 electric vehicles to be on the roads within Northern California by 2020.
One part of the article, which I particularly liked (as I have a real interest in history), was the section about the early history of electric vehicles. Here is what the article had to say: "
The first big push for electric vehicles came more than a century ago. In the 1890s, electric taxis were common on the streets of new York City. When President William McKinley was shot in 1901, he was driven to the hospital in Buffalo, N.Y., in an electric ambulance. Henry Ford purchased an electric vehicle (a 1914 Detroit Electric) for his wife, Clara, and also worked with Thomas Edison on an electric vehicle model. Sales of plug-in vehicles peaked in 1912, when 6,000 were sold."
Unfortunately, the article didn't have a single word about electric motorcycles.
But I still found it interesting and I hope the paper's readers did too. The article certainly made me feel like the San Francisco Bay Area has the potential to be a great place for electric motorcycle sales and ownership. I am sure that anyone who is going to buy an electric car would certainly also want to have an electric motorcycle in their garage.
