Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category

Listen up, early adopters and EV fans. If you're one of the first 5,000 buyers of the 2012 Nissan LEAF that was just announced this week, it looks like you'll get a home-based charger as part of the deal.

Arizona-based eTec has been selected for a $99.8 million grant and will exclusively supply the first Nissan LEAF EV buyers with chargers.

eTec said that it will be the "largest deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure in U.S. history."

The tech company intends to cover Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, and Salem, Oregon; Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville, Tennessee; Phoenix, Arizona; San Diego, California;...

Nissan has made a lot of news on the EV front lately: the company received a $1.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to develop electric vehicles; it's partnering with Renault to build EV infrastructure at sites around the globe; and it's planning to drop its own EV into showrooms by 2012. Now, Nissan says it has developed a plug-free way to charge EV batteries via inductive technology (in much the same way that the 2010 Toyota Prius backpack we gave away charges cell phones). No gas lines, no plugs? Consider us amped. [GuardianUK via BusinessInsider]

Given the volume of disposable material it consumes on a daily basis, McDonald's may see like an unlikely place to set up a charging station for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles. In fact, the idea of ANY fast food joint catering to EVs seems a little weird to us--much less one in Cary, North Carolina. Then again, it's a brave new internet-friendly world out there, chock-full of innovation, including Coulomb Technologies' increasingly popular ChargePoint charging stations. One question, though: how many Big Macs can anyone eat and still fit behind the wheel of a MINI E?

[AllCarsElectric]