Full Electric
Any day now, the first all-electric Tesla Roadster will hit the open road. The smoking-hot, two-seat sports car accelerates from zero to 60 miles per hour in about four seconds—as fast as a Ferrari. Equally impressive is its range: It can travel more than 200 miles on an overnight charge. Thanks to its lightweight carbon-fiber bodywork and its use of advanced lithium-ion batteries, the Roadster gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon of gasoline.

Electric cars didn’t die with Thomas Edison, who worked on developing their batteries a century ago. There are more than 50,000 electric cars on American roads today, though most are fleet vehicles or odd-looking hobbyist creations. Electric cars enjoyed a brief renaissance in the 1990s in California when the state’s zero-emission regulations pushed reluctant Detroit firms to produce them. G.M.’s EV1, the most aerodynamic production car ever made, was popular with environmentalists and technophiles, but ordinary consumers were put off by its limited range and the inconvenience of recharging it. The program was killed in 2003.

The new generation of battery-­powered cars is much more promising. Unlike its predecessors, the Roadster doesn’t need to be recharged at special stations: It can plug into a household outlet. It also has double the range of the older generation of battery cars. At nearly $100,000, the Roadster’s price is steep, but Tesla Motors is also developing a $50,000 version, code-named White­Star, that it hopes to bring to market within three years.

Mitsubishi and Nissan have said they are working on electric cars as well, but the real innovation in this area is coming from nimble industry outsiders. Norwegian entrepreneurs have acquired the electric-vehicle technology that powered Ford’s Think car and will start selling the two-seater in Norway early next year and in the United States in 2009. The Think City can travel about 112 miles on an overnight charge, making it attractive mainly as a second car or commuter vehicle. Another rival is the Reva, an Indian-made electric car already available in Britain. This two-seater has a range of only about 50 miles, but it runs at about a tenth of the cost per mile of a typical gasoline car. Chinese models, including the Happy Messenger, are wild cards; their reliability remains questionable.

Will it take off? Electric-car drivers enjoy tax benefits and other incentives in California, thanks to the state’s goal of getting more zero-emission vehicles on the road. But for the technology to make the big time, the batteries must prove ­reliable and safe, and the cost of carbon-fiber bodywork needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude from today’s level.

Plug-In Hybrids
Heads turned at the sight of Greg Hanssen’s license plate: "100 mpg." If you looked at the rear bumper of his Toyota Prius, you saw the secret that made the car so desirable: an ordinary electric plug. Hanssen, an electrical engineer and master tinkerer in the Los Angeles area, runs a startup that converts conventional Priuses to his homemade plug-in technology. He replaces one of the car’s standard computers with his own and fits it with a bigger, more robust battery, ending up with a vehicle that can be driven purely on electric power, with the gasoline engine as a backup. Plugging in overnight for the next day’s commute lets owners take advantage of cheap, off-peak electricity rates, bringing operating costs down 75 percent.

Instead of the nickel-metal-hydride batteries in stock Priuses, Hanssen uses the superior lithium-ion technology found in laptop batteries. He also hacks the Prius’ software to prevent the gasoline engine from kicking in unless the car is traveling at high speed. As a result, his modified Prius can go 30 miles in all-electric mode, compared with less than two miles for an ordinary Prius. And even when burning gas, Hanssen’s car blends in electric power to improve fuel economy and provide about half the total power at highway speed.

Hanssen and like-minded activists have managed to whip up so much media attention and grassroots clamor for plug-ins that the big auto manufacturers have been forced to respond. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, in January, G.M. announced plans to rapidly develop plug-ins. Executives unveiled a prototype, the Chevrolet Volt, that they intend to have ready by 2010 in an effort to catch up with Toyota, which has a big lead in conventional hybrids. Toyota has never liked the idea of plug-ins—it even marketed the Prius as the electric car you never plug in—but in mid-2006 it made a U-turn. Toyota now promises to deliver a handful of plug-in prototypes to the University of California, Irvine, by November for environmental-impact studies. Malcolm Bricklin, who brought the Yugo to America, plans to import plug-ins from China through his firm, Visionary Vehicles, by 2009.