I made three short trips in my car today, and again got to thinking how 90% of my driving could be easily accomplished with a Plug-In Hybrid Car or Electric Car and no gas.
One of the ideas I had been kicking around was doing a gas to electric conversion, though lacking a garage and the automotive experience to strip out a gas engine and wire up an electric one dissuaded me. Building a kit car with an electric powertrain would cut out the effort and waste of removing a gas engine, in exchange for the complexity of assembling the rest of a car. Also, most kits tend towards high-end supercars; $20,000 is a great deal to get the same look as a $250,000 Lamborghini, but not so for a electric car budget. Sterling, though, does have a teaser on their site about offering an electric drive kit in the future.
That leaves a conversion with advantages in both overall complexity and selection. There are also ready made kits for some cars, to the tune of $9,000 for a simpler approach. A decent Chevy S10 pickup that isn’t too old would run about $10,000, plus batteries and incidentals. That puts the total in the low $20,000 range for a modest range conversion.
Of course, that much puts you in range of some new hybrids, particularly considering the conversion labor and the premium for a new vehicle that’s been professionally engineered bumper-to-bumper. My current favorite, the Nissan Altima Hybrid, is $27,000 with some meager options to get 40 mpg highway and perhaps convert to a plug-in later.
Unfortunately, that leads me to the same conclusion as before and one of the reasons you don’t see more electrics and hybrids: going green costs you a healthy premium. For me, it would offer a certain technical cache and sense of social & environmental responsibility, but there are cheaper ways to get both at the moment. I’ll put this idea back on the shelf until it’s time to get serious about replacing the Maxima or the itch strikes again…
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