I have been researching electric cars. One of the problems with electric vehicles (EV) is range anxiety – worrying about running out of battery juice before getting to a charging station. This is being eliminated by charging stations popping up all over. A few months ago, I test drove a Nissan Leaf. I liked the experience, but the Leaf is a little small and I was still thinking about range anxiety. Then I found out about the Toyota Prius Plug-in.
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The Prius Plug-In is coming out in the Feb-Mar 2012 time frame. I went to the plug-in website and put myself on the list to be one of the first to buy one. Toyota refers to their Plug-In as a “PHV” – that’s plug-in hybrid vehicle. The Prius Plug-in will only go 13-14 miles on the electric-only batteries, and then becomes a regular Prius hybrid. That’s not all bad, considering most of our driving is around town to the grocery stores and to the post office and bank. Under that scenario, we would be driving in pure electric mode and not burning any gas. This will really drive up our miles-per-gallon (MPG) number. The standard Prius gets 51/48 MPG, so the Plug-In could get way over 100 MPG, depending on how many electric miles are driven. I am still considering the Prius, but I just found the Ford Focus Electric.
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The Ford Focus Electric is larger than the Leaf, goes 100 mi on a charge (about the same as the Leaf), but charges in half the time as the Leaf. Ford hasn’t announce the price yet, but the Focus EV could be less than the Leaf, especially considering that Nissan just raised the price of the Leaf. Ford says the Focus EV will be out “the end of 2011″. I’m not sure when that is, but will probably be before the Christmas holiday. So there are still no details on the Focus EV for color, options available, and price.
Over the next 2 years there are a lot of electric vehicles and plug-in vehicles coming out. If you buy one, how do you find out where the charging stations are? The website I like the best is CarStations.com. This site has chargers for all different charging networks. Another website that is more complex to navigate was put up the US Dept of Energy.
My research is documented in these links.