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Be sure to check out the feature article on Inside Line by Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan, Electric Cars Now, Not Tomorrow Electric vehicles are not new to our industry. Manufacturers were offering battery-powered cars 100 years ago. But due to constraints on range, affordability and the supporting infrastructure, battery-powered cars were never mass-marketed and the internal combustion engine became the standard...

As reported on Inside Line, the Detroit Auto Show is going to have a feature area for electric vehicles named Electric Avenue. I suppose the manufacurers are hoping to amp up interest in the auto show with a battery of EV's ( they haven't named the vehicles that will be displayed yet). I imagine it's going to be a high voltage display that will overload your senses, although I'm not expecting to be transformed into an EV enthusiast by the sparks...

DETROIT (Reuters) - Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid. The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package. I've said it before and I'll say it again...

The Tokyo Auto Show is this month and auto shows mean concepts, which are one of the things I love about the shows. This 122 inch long, 43 inch wide two-seater is the Nissan Land Glider concept. You ride tandem-style in this electric vehicle and the body and tires lean up to 17 degrees into turns like a motorcycle...

Electric cars may eventually be the future, but from where I sit, that future is certainly not now. Battery limitations seem to be the biggest hurdle, although pricing is starting to look like an issue as well. The Volt is supposed to be about $40K, which is pretty pricey...

From the Washington Post: After years of trying to make cars sound as if they were riding on air, engineers are considering how they might bring back some noise. They're trying to make some of them -- those silent hybrids -- more audible. But how?..

Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp., the biggest seller of hybrid cars, is sticking with nickel as the preferred battery material for most of the vehicles after three years of secretly testing Prius hatchbacks with lithium-ion packs. The tests appear to be among the most thorough done by companies planning to introduce the batteries, said Menahem Anderman, president of consulting firm Advanced Automotive Batteries in Oregon House, California...

According to sources, a plug-in version of the Prius should hit the market in about 2012. Toyota plans to build 20,000-30,000 plug-in Priuses a year and intends to price them at about $48,000 - twice the price of a conventional Prius hybrid and about $8,000 more than the Chevrolet Volt, which will hit the market at the tail end of 2010. Just like the Volt, I don't think a $48K vehicle is likely to be a widespread commercial success...

Nissan's new all-electric car to be sold starting late next year will have 100 miles of pure battery range, a Nissan North America planning director said. The thing that bothers me the most about electric vehicles is that proponents of EV's never seem to talk about about where the electricity to charge the cars is going to come from or how much it's going to cost. How much is adding the load of charging vehicles to the grid going to affect pricing of electricity?..

When electric vehicles are viable, people will buy them. But you cannot force the marketplace to buy something by propping them up with government incentives. Look at the collapse of the ethanol industry as an example...