Design: Johnston Marklee
The vision is electric car chargers at big box stores, gas stations and at home garages. Quick charge stations will punctuate Interstate 10 from Tucson to Phoenix, and a monitor in the car's console will indicate how to get to the nearest plug-in point - coming to Tucson by December.
Nissan is determined to make the rollout of its electric car, the LEAF, different from the introduction of all electric vehicles that came before it. They're banking that the answer to the question of who killed the electric car is infrastructure, the construction of which was recently accelerated by a $99.8 million grant from the U.S. Energy Department. According to TheEVProject.com, "initial infrastructure deployment begins this summer."
In December, LEAFs will pull into the charger-equipped garages of 4,700 families, 500 in Tucson. As it stands now, Tucsonans could charge up only at home or at Bookman's. That's about to change.
The garage charger will remain the primary charger, said Jeanine L'Ecuyer, spokeswoman for ECOtality, the Scottsdale-based company overseeing the infrastructure project. It should restore a car to full juice, good for about 100 miles, in four to six hours.
But before the rollout, hundreds of quick-charge stations will be built in Tucson and Phoenix (AZ), San Diego (CA), Portland, Eugene and Corvallis (OR), Seattle (WA); Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga (TN). At 440 volts, quick chargers can replenish a battery in 20 minutes. Numbers are still undecided, though suggestions are being collected at TheEVProject.com.
"In essence, this is a very large science experiment," L'Ecuyer said.
Some entrepreneurs are already installing chargers at their own expense. Bob Oldfather, CEO and founder of Bookman's Entertainment Exchange, thinks charging stations complement his green business model and could eventually bring in customers."Somebody has to step up before it makes economic sense," he said. The company also had a charger for General Motors' electric car, the EV1.
Brent Sandweiss, owner of Tucson Rental Homes, also sees charger installation as the extension of his business's philosophy. "At the end of the day, responsible companies have to step up and adopt new experimental energy alternative technologies to test their usefulness in the real world," he wrote in an e-mail.
That's something L'Ecuyer likes to hear. Her company has been tasked by the Energy Department for creating a sustainable business model to expand the infrastructure. "The government just can't afford it," she said.
