Setting the Standard
I recently watched an interview with the head of Tesla Motors. Tesla are an American car manufacturer who make electric cars. They’re not a huge company. They don’t enjoy the economies of scale of companies such as Mitsubishi. They have, however, produced a very attractive, high-performance electric car that has a useful range. They quote the range as 244 miles, but independently verified tests have shown that this can be considerably more. performance is 0-60mph in around 4 seconds and the top speed is limited to 125mph.
The car can be full charged up in 4 to 6 hours (depending on the charger in use) from any domestic electrical supply, and the cost is in the region of 2 cents per mile. For most people, the lack of charging points is not an excuse – you could charge it at home, at the office, at a freined’s house etc.
The car looks like a sports roadster which anyone would be happy to park outside their house.

The problem with the Tesla is that it costs £94,000 in the UK. That’s way outside my motoring budget, but it’s something to aspire to.

Requirement
My journey to work is an 86-mile round trip, so if I bought an electric car, I would need a good range. The Tesla’s 244 mile range would be just fine. I could drive to work and back every day for a week on just 2 charges. In fact, at 2 cents per mile my weekly mileage would cost $8.60 (about £5.38). It currently costs me about twice that per day in petrol (gasoline).

I have a wife and 2 children, so any car that I bought would need at least 4 seats, which also rules out the Tesla.

Enter the Big Guns
With the Tesla car out of my reach in terms of price, I had a look for alternatives from the major car manufacturers. The first one I came across was the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
This car sounded quite promising as it has space for 4 adults. They also claim that it can be charged from flat to 80% in just 20 minutes. If there public charging points on our motorway service areas, that would work out fine – plug in the car, go and have a cup of coffee, and then ready to go.

Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it sounds. You’d really need to like coffee if you went on a long journey as the range of the i-MiEV is only 100 miles. Charge to 80% in 20 minutes and that’s down to 80 miles. If I went to visit my parents, I’d need to recharge twice along the way.
More impressive though is the claim that it will travel 10,000 miles on £45 at the UK’s current electricity prices. That’s equivalent to about 0.72 cents per mile, compared with the Tesla’s 2 cents per mile – about 1/3rd of the cost.

No Oil Painting
And then you see the pictures. The i-MiEV is hideous. Park an i-MiEV alongside a Tesla and you can see that they are worlds apart. I would be embarassed to park an i-MiEV outside my house. I’d have to rent a garage in another street to avoid the embarassment.
In addition, Mitsubishi are considering lease-only on these cars, at a staggering £750 per month. I wouldn’t pay £750 for a car that runs out of juice after 100 miles.

Next up was the Renault ZE (Zero Emission). Sadly, still a concept car; not due for release for another 2 years.
Again, it’s not a good-looking car. The acid-green windows on their demonstrator don’t do it any favours. Cunningly though, it has a solar panel in the roof, but I suspect that you don’t get much of an extra charge from that.

Having now seen the pictures of just two examples of electric cars from major manufacturers I decided to see if anyone made a good-looking electric car. So Google Images came to the rescue, and it was just as I feared. All of the major manufacturers seem to think that an electric car should look like a golf cart, an egg on wheels, or a milk float.

Not many of the cars seem to be available to buy, and those that are available, are outrageously expensive. £25,000 for a plastic egg sitting on a huge battery? I could buy a beautiful, new, petrol-driven Alfa Romeo for less than that. Good looks, room for the family, high performance and outstanding handling.

I can’t be the only one who wants a good-looking, practical electric car that I would be proud to own, can I?
Mitsubishi’s mileage costs are very impressive, but at 3 times as much, so are Tesla’s when you compare them with the cost of running a petrol or Diesel engined car. So why don’t the big companies look at what people want and need. Compromise. Produce a good-looking family car with a decent range. If it costs 7.2 cents per mile to run instead of 0.72 cents, that’s not a problem – it’s still a lot cheaper than the combustion engined cars, and a lot cleaner.

Tesla got the range and the performance in a small roadster. Surely the big companies could scale that up into a useful family car.