Want a 2012 Toyota Rav4 EV? You Won’t Be Able To Buy One

Interesting read....
By Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield
Contributing Writer July 15th, 2011

Its one of the most eagerly anticipated plug-in vehicles to join the market in the next year or so, but the reintroduced Toyota RAV4EV won’t be available to buy, says Geri Yoza, Toyota’s National Business Planning Manager of Advanced Vehicle Marketing.

Instead, the electric SUV will be available to fleets and car sharing programs rather than individual customers.

Designed by Toyota and given an all-electric drivetrain by electric automaker Tesla Motors, many fans had hoped the 2012 RAV4 EV would pick up where the legendary 1997-2003 Toyota RAV4 EV left off.

Still considered by some electric vehicle fans as the one of the best electric cars ever made, the original RAV4 EV featured a top speed of around 78 miles per hour and a range of between 100 and 120 miles per charge.

The original RAV4 EV was leased by government agencies, fleets and private customers with some lucky customers being able to buy them at the end of their leases. Many of those cars are still working today, years later.

The rest? Returned to Toyota at the end of their lease and crushed. We’re pretty sure you’ve heard the story.

But with only leasing and large fleets being targeted, will the 2012 Toyota RAV4EV have a similar fate to its predecessor?

We really hope not. Instead, we’re hoping Toyota’s plan to offer the RAV4 EV to a limited base is something that will change as the car becomes more popular in coming years.

Since Toyota is the only major automaker planning a plugin crossover SUV for the 2012 model year, we think it would be a big mistake if the RAV4 EV remained exclusive to such a small segment of the market.

History repeating, or an insurance against a platform Toyota still doesn’t trust? Let us know in the Comments below.

Source;
http://www.allcarselectric.com/news/1063236_want-a-2012-toyota-rav4-ev-you-wont-be-able-to-buy-one

New Liquid 'Refill' could change how fast batteries charge in EV's

By Yang-Yi Goh,
TechNews
Daily Contributor 08 June 2011 10:46 PM ET

A new breed of quick-charge “liquid” batteries could help make recharging electric cars as easy as filling up at the gas pump.

Electric cars may be driving the auto industry toward a greener future, but a great number of issues still need to be resolved for them to catch up with their petroleum-guzzling forebears with regard to performance and desirability.

Perhaps the biggest problem facing electric auto designers lies in the battery: large and inefficient, today’s standard rechargeable lithium-ion batteries take hours to replenish and are suitable only for short distances. Chevy’s Volt model, for instance, takes nearly 10 hours to fully charge using an ordinary 120 volt outlet, and is able to travel only 25-50 miles before resorting to its backup gas engine.

Thanks to a group of MIT researchers, however, a new generation of leaner, more powerful, and easy-to-refuel batteries may be just around the corner. In a paper published in the May 20 edition of the journal Advanced Energy Materials, the group — led by MIT professors of material science Yet-Ming Chiang and W. Craig Carter — describe a novel approach to battery architecture that revolves around what they call a “semi-solid flow cell.”

[Read also “History Repeats Itself: Carmakers Again Put Electric Vehicles in Fast Lane”]

Essentially, the new design houses the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — as solid particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. This thick, quicksand-like liquid is pumped through the system during the process of charging or discharging the battery.

According to MIT, the architecture should make it possible to reduce the size and cost of a complete battery system to about “half the current levels,” while providing a “10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow batteries.”

“For two decades, advances in batteries have relied on development of improved components to be used in the same basic, inefficient architecture,” Chiang told TechNewsDaily. “Our work represents the inception of ‘Batteries 2.0.’”

The batteries will hopefully bring the performance levels of electric vehicles up to par with their gas engine counterparts. Using the semi-solid flow architecture, Chiang estimates a car will be able to travel 200-300 miles on a single charge.

“Our objective is to replace ‘range anxiety’ with ‘range euphoria,’” he says. Additionally, the new design will make refueling a snap.

Drivers will have the option of either simply pumping out the liquid slurry and replacing it with a fresh batch, swapping out the tanks like you would a spare tire, or recharging the existing material when time permits.

The technology is still at an early stage of development—Chiang expects the first commercial prototypes to be ready in about two years, but foresees the semi-solid flow system challenging the current cell-module-pack approach by the end of the decade.

Source;

http://www.technewsdaily.com/future-cars-2794/

Best Buy to sell its customers electric vehicles

You've got to be kidding me....

According to the latest reports, it appears that Best Buy will become the biggest ally for electric vehicles manufacturers as they are planning to sell EVs. For those who don’t know, Best Buy is already selling Brammo electric motorcycles and won contracts to install home chargers for the Ford Focus Electric and Mitsubish i EVs. What is more interesting is that Best Buy currently has 1,101 U.S. stores and they say that they get more “traffic in a weekend than some of these dealers do in a month”.

Chad Bell, a senior director who oversees Best Buy's efforts in mobility and transportation says that Best Buy is beginning talks with traditional automakers beyond Ford and Mitsubishi, says Autonews. The Nissan Leaf could also be present in Best Buy’s offer as it is the first 100% electric car from the Japanese manufacturer and has been named the 2011 World Car Of The Year.

"We are having conversations with some of the startups," Bell says. "I would say the conversations are going well. We are very excited about several partnerships that we can't talk about yet."

By Andrew, 09 May, 2011.

Source;

http://www.4wheelsnews.com/best-buy-wants-to-sell-its-customers-electric-vehicles/