New Ideas for Electric Car Charging

Image Gallery The Chevrolet Volt will come with a 120-volt charge cord so owners can recharge their vehicles directly from a standard home electrical outlet. PHOTO: GENERAL MOTORS

Plug-in electric cars will be available for consumers by the end of the year. This new "fueling" method can enable us to drive without exhaust emissions and reduce our oil dependence. In addition, a home solar or wind energy system can offset the pollution from power plants used to charge plug-in vehicles for truly zero-emissions travel. If enough people make the switch to electric transportation, the dire consequences of fossil fuel dependence and climate change could be avoided.

I have built more than two dozen plug-in electric cars over the last 20 years, from electric rototillers to electric Porsche Spyders. The vehicles I built had onboard chargers that could be plugged into common 110-volt or 240-volt outlets. When plugged in, no current flows until another switch or timer turns on, so there was no chance of arching or shock.

In 2002, I stopped building electric cars and purchased one of the few electric cars sold by Toyota (a RAV4 EV) that met the requirements of California’s zero-emission mandate. Although the electric cars I built were fun to drive and never left me stranded, the weight of the lead-acid batteries available at the time was a limiting factor in the cars' practicality.

We use our electric car for all local driving. For longer trips, I have set up the RAV4 EV’s inductive wall-mounted charger so that it can be put in the back of the car and plugged into any 30- to 50-amp 240-volt outlet.

A gas-run RAV4 costs around 0.10 dollars/mile for fuel and maintenance, so we’ve saved close to $10,000 driving our electric RAV4 over the last eight years. More importantly, we have saved about 5,000 gallons of fuel and stopped 50 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

Our electric Toyota RAV4 has a 27 kWh NiMH (nickel-metal hydride) battery pack with half the weight of a lead-acid pack of the same capacity. It can go 80 to 100 miles per charge and now has 120,000 trouble-free miles on the original NiMH battery. We have a 3.5 kW net-metered solar array that allows enough excess power into the grid during the day when rates are high to offset the power used to charge our EV at night when rates are low. The night rate is about 0.07 dollars/kWh, which means it costs less than 0.02 dollars/mile to drive our EV.

Up until now, EVs produced by major manufactures have required a wall-mounted charging station and each one had different types of conductive plugs or inductive paddles. Now, there is a new a standard conductive plug called the J1772 that will connect new EVs with home or public chargers. It was recently announced that 37 million tax dollars are being spent to install 4,600 EV charging stations nationwide — more than $8,000 per station. It would only cost from $100 to $300 to install a high-power 240-volt outlet in a home garage or carport and an inexpensive meter could be added for a charge at 240-volt outlets accessible to the public.