By Lena Babaeva Coradini
A survey by Pike Research found that nearly half of American consumers are interested in plug-in electric vehicles—and “extremely” or “very” interested at that! Consumers were interested in buying a plug-in EV with a driving range of 40 to 100 miles and electricity cost equivalent of $0.75 per gallon. The concerns that the public had were as to reliability and unproven technology.
Another study found public policies will be needed to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles by fleet operators:
Electrification Coalition, in partnership with PRTM, has released a new report that identifies some of the biggest challenges facing fleet operators in adopting plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs), while providing several public policy recommendations to overcome these challenges.
The report, “Fleet Electrification Roadmap,” shows fleet managers the best opportunities and benefits of adopting PHEVs and EVs. The report also provides total cost of ownership modeling for these vehicles in fleet applications for a number of industries. The analysis indicates that with targeted policies fleet adoption of PHEVs and EVs could result in 200,000 vehicles on the road by 2015.
Some of the recommended public policies include tax credits for light-duty PHEVs and EVs deployed in fleets as well as for medium- and heavy-duty PHEVs and EVs, clean renewable energy bonds for infrastructure, guarantee of residual value for the first generation of lithium-ion batteries and federal fleet electrification including the Postal Service.
) above
Environmental
