"Chevy Volt Newest New York City Police Car" by Peter Valdes-Dapena

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The New York City Police Department has a new cruiser that will be silently plying the city streets very soon.

Among 70 new electrically-driven vehicles purchased by the City of New York will be 50 Chevrolet Volts that will be used for, among other things, police work.

The Volts won't be chasing down bank robbers -- at least not yet. They'll be used by traffic enforcement agents who cruise the city's streets writing parking tickets.

The Volt will be the first electric car used by the New York City Police Department, although the department already uses a number of hybrid cars and electric scooters.

General Motors, which makes the Chevrolet Volt, calls it an "extended-range electric vehicle." It can travel up to 35 miles on a fully charged battery, according to EPA estimates. After that, a gasoline engine generates power for continued driving.

The city also purchased 10 Ford Transit Connect Electric vans and 10 Navistar E-star electric utility trucks.

Among the agencies using the vehicles will be the city's Departments of Correction, Environmental Protection, Sanitation and the Fire Department.

"The largest-ever increase in the City's electric-powered vehicle fleet is not only good for the environment, it's good for city taxpayers, too," Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith said in an announcement. "Using electric vehicles reduces air pollution and carbon emissions while also lowering gasoline consumption."

The vehicles were purchased using grant money from the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York Power Authority.

Electric Car Rentals Begin in Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and London.

ELECTRIC CAR RENTALS START by Jim Motavalli, New York Times contributor who blogs about green transportation.

Green with Envy: Tesla's EV at the Hertz Party (Photo by Jim Motavalli)

TIMES SQUARE — Everybody wants me to drive their electric cars these days. Pouring rain kept me away from a nice ride-and-drive opportunity with the New York Power Authority which wanted to showcase a healthy and growing fleet, and Monday I made it down to Times Square to take a spin in the green cars that, as of next week will be available in the Connect by Hertz car-sharing fleets. That’s right. Next week. Electric car rentals — first in New York, followed by Washington and San Francisco. (London and maybe Beijing will be next in line.)

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Company reps hand me the keys as if I’m about to have the thrill of a lifetime, but of course I’ve driven every electric vehicle by now, many of them multiple times. The Tesla Roadster I’ve driven probably five times, and on more than one coast. (I did a video about one Tesla drive in Manhattan.) But it’s always great fun to drive this $109,000 high-voltage shock wagon. I love the Tesla, even in Times Square, where instead of dodging prostitutes, you try to avoid out-of-town Broadway patrons and the Charmin bear. (More on that below.)

In big traffic, the Tesla is stop-start: You find a miraculously clear avenue and sprint down it, only to jam on the brakes a few seconds later, but it’s exhilarating. Hertz is going to make the Tesla Roadster (and presumably the Model S) available only to prestige-collection rental customers for $100 a day.

The Nissan Leaf will be $7 an hour in the car-sharing program, according to Hertz Global EV Leader Jack Hidary. I’ve driven the Leaf in Manhattan before, courtesy of Nissan — a memorable fast run through Central Park. This time I took it through the theater district, turning heads all the way. The Leaf is impressive, quiet, comfortable, sophisticated, and bristling with high-tech aids to help with charging and plug-in connectivity. It handles excellently, as I found out when I was steering around rickshaws and bicycle messengers.

I’ve driven Coda sedans on both coasts, too, and this one was resplendent in two-tone white and black. The Coda, which has been delayed until the second half of 2011, is still a work in progress, meaning that the company hasn’t gotten through crash testing yet. Spokesman Matt Sloustcher said Coda is going for a four- or five-star New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) rating, which it plans to have in place by next year.

The Coda isn’t as cutting-edge cool as the Leaf, though it does look good with the black wheels that Sloustcher said customers preferred in a survey. It’s also more expensive than the $32,790 Leaf at nearly $44,000. Its two selling points are an extended battery range of 120 miles rather than 100, and onboard battery heating and cooling, which should extend the life of the pack.

Coda has been doing fairly well with fleet sales, since the Hertz deal complements another with Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and Sloustcher told me that 30 to 50 percent of sales could be to corporations and governments. (The first charging station in my hometown of Norwalk, Conn., is in a municipal parking garage — put in not by a homeowner but by the town.)

I had a quick spin in the Coda, and it accelerates well, although it's a bit noisier than the Leaf. Coda has added two-tone leather seats, which is a nice touch to an interior that needed brightening up.

Hertz has a pair of charging stations at Connect offices in Manhattan, and is partnering with Starwood Hotels, which is installing stations at the snazzy new Element Times Square hotel, and soon at other Starwood Aloft, Element and Four Points by Sheraton hotels. The idea is that you’ll stay at an Element, suddenly need a car for a night out, and there will be the cutting-edge electric cars available for a first-time trial.

Absolutely wonderful news!! Looking forward to my first electric car rental!

The production and infrastracture for electric cars is a long time coming! And a wonderful Christmas present to Mother Earth!

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The U.S. Department of Energy has allocated $400 million to electric vehicle infrastructure. Several companies are working with cities to put in charging stations in the next year -- about 12,000 of them. Most of them are going in Western state cities where power is primarily from renewable resources and cheaper than other areas. For instance, in Oregon, 69 percent of electricity is generated by hydropower.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams said his city has learned from its experience with building one of the biggest bike networks in the country.

"We built a system that made people comfortable with going from Point A to Point B," he said, adding that bike ridership has doubled in the past 15 years. "The thing we know having introduced large-scale strategic changes in our transportation system here ... is you do your homework upfront, you figure out what it is, in this case that will address people's range anxiety, and then you watch it very, very closely in the first six to 12 months, and you make the necessary changes."

Therein lies the question or questions: How many charging stations do you need? For how many electric cars? Do you put in thousands of public charging points, and then watch as just a few cars use them? Will people even buy electric cars if they don't see places to get power around town?

At your house, plugging the car in overnight is not an issue. When you are out running errands during the day, it can become a concern.

Early buyers of electric vehicles are more likely to put up with the inconvenience of locating public charging, but large-scale sales will depend on the public's comfort with always being able to get fuel.

"The charge infrastructure is going to be something that people adapt to," said Ted Bohn, an electrical engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois. "It's like you get used to charging your cell phone battery or your laptop battery, you know when you need to plug in."

He said it makes sense to put chargers in where people will spend a lot of time -- offices, coffee shops, shopping centers, movie theaters. On the street, charging will be a different story, similar to hunting for a public bathroom. It depends on how badly you need it.

Home chargers should be able to fill a car's batteries in a few hours. A fast charger outside a grocery store might be able to do the job in 30 minutes. But if all you can find is a 110-volt outlet, getting anything more than a few miles' worth of power will take more than half a day.

"If the public infrastructure is out there, it makes people feel more comfortable, particularly the people who aren't very familiar with electric cars," said Paul Scott, vice president of Plug In America, a coalition of electric car advocates and drivers. Scott lives in California and has driven an electric car for eight years. He said he trades with hybrid-owning friends when he goes on a long trip.

"That said, we feel there is going to be an awful lot of organic growth in public places," said Britta Gross, General Motors' director of global energy systems and infrastructure commercialization. "[Consumer demand] for public charging is the right way to do it because then it says you are going to do it in just the right spots [where people show they want to charge].

Determining the right spots is falling into the hands of companies that have tapped into the Department of Energy millions. One of those is ECOtality, which manages the EV Project, an initiative to get the electric car movement reborn.

Jonathan Read, chief executive officer of ECOtality, said that besides helping local governments, utilities and consumer groups set up charging networks, the primary goals are charging station projects that connect cities such as one planned for Interstate 5 along the West Coast.

"The objective is to show what's necessary to build these major corridors," he said. "What we're doing is rolling out the largest infrastructure program for electric cars in history, but we're also doing is, under the auspices of the DOE program, is we're collecting data -- where people charge, how often they charge, so that we can have hard data to share with other communities of what the consumer is looking for and what we need to do as an industry."

Nissan, makers of the Leaf, an all electric car which is scheduled to hit the roads in a few months, said the data collected from the initial rollout will be hugely beneficial to other parts of the country that will be a part of the second phase.

"Of course we're not going to be 100 percent perfect with every decision, every location," said Mark Perry, director of product planning at Nissan. "So the deliverable is how do people use it? What is the impact on the grid? What kind of support did drivers need? All that information will be important."

A closer look at Nissan's Leaf:

Lessons learned from the rollout of charging stations to support the General Motors EV1 more than a decade ago are helpful but "somewhat irrelevant," he said because the new charging stations are much more sophisticated as are the electronics in the car.

One of the people working on Ford's electric vehicles said it is vital not to repeat earlier mistakes of putting recharging spots where they weren't needed. The Ford Focus electric car will become available in late 2011.

"Some of the most premium parking spaces were used for EV charging, and there weren't the vehicles to support them, and you can imagine what the impact was for non-EV drives," said Mike Tinskey, manager of global electrification at Ford Motor Co. "The answer is not only putting them in the right spot but at the right time."

Another issue was the technology:

Mike McQuary, chief executive of Wheego electric vehicles in Atlanta, Georgia, said those charge points were built to varying standards and that one of the huge "breakthroughs" recently was an agreement reached between car companies and makers of recharging stations over international equipment standards.

"There's going to be one type of socket and one type of plug," McQuary said. "Before that I thought we were going to see a Beta vs. VHS sort of thing."

The standard was the last big hurdle before the new electric vehicles hit the road, he said.

General Electric is probably the biggest player now getting involved in the manufacture of charging stations. TV ads for its WattStation are already running during network primetime.

"When someone as large as GE comes into the space, you know they have done their research and they see a very big future," said Perry of Nissan, which is partnering with a company called AeroVironment for home charging stations.

While the general public may still look at the electric car as a novelty, its advocates see the coming wave of new models and stations as a big step toward eliminating this country's use of oil, especially foreign oil, and helping the planet. Stopping to get a charge away from home is a small price to pay, said Scott, the Plug In America vice president.

"If you care about the environment, if it bothers you that you are polluting everybody's air, if it bothers you that you are sending lots of money out of the country," he said, "then it's worth it to you to spend 20 minutes recharging."

NOTE: A hybrid uses both gasoline and a battery, so if you want an all electric, it should be clear that it is ALL ELECTRIC.

"Who Killed The Electric Car?" - A Documentary

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Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the 10 year life span of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1. The film explores the role that several parties including auto manufacturers, the oil industry, state and federal governments, and consumers played in the failure of the electric vehicle in the 1990s.

It has been criticized, primarily by General Motors, for not accurately portraying the company's dedication to the technology. Most criticisms focus on the movie's implication that there was a high demand for electric vehicles and an unwillingness of automakers to produce the cars.

Tom Hanks is working with a company to continue to produce an all electric car. Wonderful that he's helping save the planet!

I saw Who Killed The Electric Car? It's so sad that General Motors made these cars which were so successful, and yet were squelched for very obvious reasons.

People on the streets' opinion in changes in energy

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