Sixty-six Miles Per Day

I have been meaning to clock the daily miles we've been putting on our ICE vehicle, and had the chance over a 25-day period from December into January. Pretty significant numbers for a family where both parents work from home!

It is downright infuriating to think that there were production EV's available ten years ago -- with heat and other such amenities -- that would easily be able to achieve this range, then come home to plug in overnight. And yet, thanks to inertia and ill-will, that initiative stalled out and today we are largely limited to home-brewed EV's like the e-Vanagon -- and lead-acid battery technology, instead of the perfectly adequate, should've-been-widely-available-and-affordable-by-now NiMH battery packs that powered vehicles like the Toyota RAV-4 EV, the Ford Ranger EV, and the EV-1.

But before I get grumpy thinking about the past, let's turn our eyes towards the future. Hope everyone got to see EcoWorld's Electric Vehicle Gallery 2007 -- the most promising EV's available and under development at the moment in the US. But check out what's happening overseas!

Just this month, British blog Autocar reports that Renault-Nissan will bring a mass-production EV to market as soon as 2011. And a new lithium-ion battery factory opened last week in Europe, backed by a French billionaire who is working to get EV's on the streets of Italy even sooner -- by the summer of 2009!

Meanwhile, over the weekend EV clubs in San Diego and Miami held drag race events to show off the capabilities of a large collection of present-day EV's and promote the cause. Congratulations to the hardworking sponsors of "Battery Beach Burnout" and "Electric Dragin'"!