Apparently not content with just one giant ongoing infrastructure project, Australia has committed to fully outfitting three of its biggest cities for widespread electric car use. In hardware terms, that amounts to 200,000-250,000 charging stations each for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, with an additional 150 battery swap stations scattered between them. The effort will cost $1bn in Australian Dingo Dollars, which is about $667m USD. If that’s not ambitious enough for you, consider this: it should be online in three years.
Granted, most of these ‘stations’ will just be small, designated sockets clamped on to existing lines at homes, businesses and parking lots, and the battery swap stations will essentially trade your batteries the same way that Ace Hardware does your propane tanks. But even if the technology is kind of trivial, the fact remains that a significant part of Australia’s population will soon have a ubiquitous infrastructure for electric cars.
The Australian government is currently encouraging domestic automakers to answer the anticipated demand for electric vehicles, because, well, there are about two right now. There is, however, a suspicious aspect to this plan: the government is suggesting mobile phone-like contracts as a method of charging for the juice, which sounds like about as good an idea as Kangaroo Jack IV. [AP via Slashdot]
Doshu
October 26, 2008 at 3:29 PM
I looked into building an electric car in Australia almost 10 years ago. Even had a test drive of AC Propulsion’s first T-Zero prototype while in the USA. ACP make the motor and controller that was used in the EV1, Tesla and an earlier EV Elise prototype.
I’m a car enthusiast, so I then started canvassing people I know in the industry and other enthusiasts who have built their own kit cars about working on the project. The response was so overwhelmingly negative, that I dumped the whole idea. Even the people who had converted their own vehicles to electric had such a hassle doing it (mostly due to legislation getting in the way) that they advised I not continue.
Our government seems wholly committed to only supporting big business doing this sort of thing. And this plan just seems like more of the same sort of ideology. If they really wanted EVs to take off, they’d provide research incentives and some leniency to smaller manufacturers to create the cars and incentives for independent fuel stations to provide the charging service. If they did that, we’d probably have half a dozen EVs on the market with charging infrastructure in every state already.
Report PermalinkDicko
October 27, 2008 at 8:07 AM
I think the government (who have only been in one year – blame little johnny for what happened a decade ago) are trying to tackle emissions, not foster new industry. I am not saying this is right or wrong. Taking this into account, they are offering incentives to major car manufactures to get as many alternative vehicles on the market as possible in as short a time as possible. How many electric cars would you have made a year as opposed to Ford, Toyota, Mitsubishi, or Holden?
Report PermalinkMarco Parigi
October 28, 2008 at 7:56 AM
Build it and the electric cars will come. I think it is entirely right for the government to be putting in the infrastructure on this one. This stops the chicken and egg situation where nobody wants to spend on infrastructure when there are no cars and nobody wants to buy a new car that is a hassle to fill up.
Report Permalink