Our immediate family have been pretty loyal to Toyota, currently with a 2001 Prius, my folks have a wheelchair-mod'ed Rav 4, and I love our mid-90's Volvo station wagon.
Not buying an American car has not about ideology, but about design. Large, heavy cars withpoor gas mileage, mushy suspensions, and window cranks that didn't work was our idea of Ford and GM.
That may change with the Chevy Volt. With most of our power being hydro-generated, and the fact that cars would charge at night when demand is low, I've been looking forward to an all-electric or plug-in hybrid, and it looks like GM may get to production before Toyota.
We're happy to wait and hope someone else comes to our market like these guys, but in any case, an electric-hybrid is on our shopping list.
2 comments:
The first car I ever owned was a beetle. It was a gift, given in about 1976, and was old then. It had 6volt electrics and the cills were hanging off. Fortunately I worked at British Aerospace at the time and the 'tin bashers' made a new set for me out of aircraft skin for £2. They made them for everyone who had £2 and they kept the drawings ready.
My current car is a 1990 Volvo 740 estate (station wagon!). We seem to have been leading parallel lives. Good luck with the chevy if thats the way it goes.
Hmmm. I have a buddy who works for BC Hydro forecasting supply and demand to determine when to buy, sell and generate electricity. He says that they are definitely NOT ready for large numbers of people to start charging cars whether at night or not.
He also told me that the difference in cost of electricity generation between day and night is only about 10%. After all, it's easy to slow a dam down. It's thermally generated power that can adjust to load variance.
But yes, I'm excited about the sudden change in availability of electric cars about to appear on the market. If only we could convince the environmentalists to let us build more dams.
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