With all the talk recently of EV’s being tested in various countries and three models (Subaru R1e, Mitsubishi iMIEV, Nissan Denki Cube) potentially arriving in the US in just a few years, it’s worth revisiting once more the notion of how well such a product would be received here.

My longtime position has been that if you make even minimally reasonable assumptions about the vehicles–they’re safe, they’re as efficient as one would expect a small, all-electric vehicle to be, they’re affordable, and they don’t have any weird “gotcha” details–they’ll find millions of happy owners.

My reasons:

• By the time these vehicles come onto the market as a mainstream transportation option, circa 2012, gasoline will likely be much higher than it is today, giving people a far greater economic incentive to switch to an EV. The price of electricity will also have risen during that time, but it will still be far cheaper per mile driven to fuel with electrons than with hydrocarbons.
• Even if the car has a modest range, say 50 miles (although I expect 100 to the the norm), it will still work very well in daily commuting and local errand duty. Families with more than one vehicle won’t replace all of them with EV’s, but they could replace one, and in time up to N-1, with EV’s. Eventually I would expect a lot of American households to adopt the strategy I first heard from my father-in-law at least 15 years ago: You own only EV’s and you rent a gasoline or ethanol powered vehicle when you need to make a long distance trip. There would be more initial social resistance to that model in the US, but the rise of very short term car rental services, already well underway, could ease that transition nicely.
• Consumers and businesses will quickly figure out the benefits of EV’s. You will likely be able to buy one with a choice of battery pack size, as well as upgrade it years after the initial purchase through the dealer or a third-party company. I would also expect to see companies, including car dealerships, rent auxiliary battery packs–extend the range of your EV from 100 miles to a more trip-friendly 250 miles for a week, etc.

I’m not predicting that EV’s will instantly be a universal replacement for vehicles with internal combustion engines. Some people won’t like EV’s for whatever perverse reason, some really do need larger vehicles with special capabilities, some don’t have a handy way to recharge them overnight (as in their own garage), and there’s the most obvious problem, a battery range that’s far less than the even a single fill up range for a gasoline powered car of the same size.

So far, even restricting EV’s for commuting use sounds pretty revolutionary: Millions of drivers piling up billions of short-trip miles without a drop of gasoline being consumed, and considerable savings in CO2 emissions.

This was exactly the line of thought that led me to the conclusion that the real EV revolution is in the second plug.

Nearly all discussions of EV’s assume the same basic operating model: You plug it in overnight to slowly recharge the battery, and in the morning you drive off. If you’re lucky, you can plug in during the day (note to hotels, airports and parking garages: here be profit potential), but most people will return home on that same charge from the previous night. The critical detail is that it takes hours. not minutes, to recharge a battery that’s even half discharged.

But what if your EV had two plugs? One that connected to a normal 110-volt socket in your garage, and one that could handle a much larger current and give your battery, say, an 80% recharge in 15 minutes? Would you be willing to stop at a filling station for a 15 minute recharge and cup of coffee every 100 miles (instead of a 5 minute gasoline fill up every 300 miles) if it meant you could save 10 to 15 cents per mile in fuel costs? And remember, you could still top off your battery at home overnight, so you would only have to resort to the filling station for longer trips.

This isn’t just speculation, as there’s been a lot of talk about quick charging car batteries, with that “80% in 15 minutes” capability seeming to emerge as “the” target, and I’m sure that the engineers working on driving down the cost of battery packs are also spending time finding ways to make them withstand the considerable stress of such high-current recharge cycles. This could, in fact, be the perfect market opening for ultracapacitors, which should be able to take on a full charge much easier than a true battery. But for the purpose of this post I don’t care what’s inside the “battery pack” as long as it safely and efficiently stores and then delivers electrons.

Once such dual-plug EV’s hit the road, how long do you think it would take before filling stations started adding quick-charge capability? This infrastructure build out would take time before charging stations were available “everywhere”, but that limitation would be buffered by the potential, mentioned above, for people to buy or rent battery pack upgrades for special circumstances.

At that point, how quickly would you and most people you know ditch your gasoline cars completely, knowing that you would pay much less for fuel, pollute less, contribute less to your country’s trade deficit, and no longer care what the price of oil is doing in response to events halfway around the world?

If that’s not the beginning of a complete revolution in personal transportation, I don’t know what is.