The once and future Car.

The electric car is back. Hopefully here to stay as major car manufacturers are increasingly pushing the idea of the electric car on a public made wary of their efficacy, ironically by the those same manufacturers. Now with the Chevy Volt, Nissan LEAF and the All electric ford focus hitting the consumer market, major corporations are teaming up with Cisco to provide a method of controlling the household meter from spiraling out of control.

While I'm a huge proponent of the electric car, I think only aiming at the consumer market at this time is trying to fit an older paradigm to a shifting world view. The partnering with Cisco is symptomatic of a lack of infrastructure on which the electric car can sustain itself. By pointing only at private car owners the burden of allowing the electric car to succeed or fail rests solely on the shoulders of first adopters.

What to do, then? Municipal vehicles. Set up a single city on a fleet of electric vehicles, buses, cop cars, city workers, even subsidize cabs to switch over as a part of city works. By going the public route, the major car manufacturers can pipe R&D money into the infrastructure of having charging stations set up around the city, experiment with new technologies in the public sector and try to involve not just the municipal government in paying for it, but the electric company, community investors, and even federal money, all in the vane of infrastructure.

Set up the infrastructure, then open it up to the clamoring public that knows it works and the chance for making money on this is limitless. Charging stations at every parking meter. Charging lanes on the highway using short range broadcast power like WiTricity. Just ID every vehicle using RF chips that passively bills consumers as they use. A monthly bill from the city or electric company would make it easy.

Whether this comes to pass or not, the electric car needs to be the future. Let's just hope they don't drive them into the desert again to tear it all down.