Sweden THINK'ing Harder About Wind-Driven Car Fleet

Norway begins larger-scale production of the "emissions-free" THINK City next month.

The Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) would like Sweden's entire fleet of 4.3 million passenger cars to be traded in for environmentally-friendly vehicles...but right now the government is paying a lot more than estimated to move toward that goal. Sweden set aside 250 million Swedish crowns ($US 40 million) for a 33-month program to pay private car buyers a kickback of SEK 10,000 ($1,600) for buying any vehicles emitting 120 grams of CO2 or less per kilometer. But runaway sales - of mostly ethanol cars- may cost up to 1.4 billion crowns ($250 million) by the end 2009!

SEA is undaunted - it wants to build an infrastructure for hybrid and pure electric cars and gave 2 million crowns ($363,000) to a project on the Baltic-based vacation island of Öland to set up a fleet of 25 new THINK City cars and charging stations, the cars to run exclusively on wind-power from island turbines. Home-visit nurses on the island, which is just 137 kilometers long, will use the THINK City cars in their daily duties. Via ::NyTeknik (Swedish)