This is great - except I wish the council would get into gear to support their initiatives and not just throw out press releases.

Westminster Council has been terrible at educating their parking wardens about the rights of electric cars to park in the borough for free. They've also been very bad at maintaining their charging points, with half of the charging points in the Marble Arch car park non-functional for the last 2 months.

Progress with electric cars in London is great and we should all be pushing for more, but with accountability by the council to those of us who actually drive electric cars!

Great. Now all we need is some cars to charge them with. The G-Wiz (or Reva) hardly counts. Even it thinks it doesn't - it calls itself a quadricycle. Not that I have a problem with small light cars (I like the looks of the Aixam, but they're not readiily available). It's just that the G-Wiz call itself an electric quadricycle and not a car so that can circumvent the safety requirment of cars. Therefore it wasn't designed to do crashes and so is consequently a death trap.

Also, some people need more than two seats (shock horror, more than one person in a car!).

A few days ago someone pasted this link into the comments on a Tesla car store opening in LA:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/plug-in-hybrids-no-new-power-plants.php

Essentially, the story was about a study saying that in a best case scenario, with something like a fifth of the US car fleet being hybrids, and with recharging taking place overnight instead of during the daytime, the electric grid would not be overtaxed but energy production would instead be extended or enhanced during normally quiet generation hours.

Again, this was a "best case" scenario, which assumed people would not be plugging in the (limited in size) car fleet to recharge during peak generation periods in the daytime.

So now we see these plug-in stations being put in place in London, in a land of essentially coal-based electric generation, and made available essentially for day-time usage. With ever more electric cars taking advantage of this daytime recharging opportunity, the onus of powering cars will inevitably be shifted from some sort of hydrocarbon liquid fuel to the daytime electric power grid. This will inevitably cancel out any gains from demand reduction for other uses of electricity, and all in the name of our current Sacred Cow, the Sacred Car.

Whether this happens in the UK, the US, elsewhere in Europe and North America or across our planet, the result is the same: overtaxing electric generation in order to satisfy the demands of those who feel their personal luxury should come before the well-being of future generations.

There are those, unfortunately, who are stuck in a mid-20th century mindset and think that private automobiles are the epitome of democracy, human rights, "free markets" (taken as a transcendent value in and of themselves, rather than just a potential tool for well-being) and the defeat of dysfunctional central-command economies.

Things are way beyond that point now. Nature has its limits and simply doesn't care about the "right to drive everywhere". We have a much better chance of mitigating the damage to the world our descendants will live in if we first off clearly understand that we need to move to bicycles and other human powered means for local transportation and extensive, efficient and trustworthy train systems for long-distance transport of people and goods. There will be a place for electric and perhaps biofuel-powered vehicles, namely for heavy goods and transportation in rural areas, but we cannot build a sustainable future with a transportation network built around private automobiles as if everything were business as usual no matter how they are powered. Trying to replace petroleum with some other (practicable) means of powering a massive private car fleet inevitably results in an unsustainable drain on some other essential resource.

Folks like George who call the G-Wiz a death trap might be so kind as to do two things for someone like me who doesn't live in the UK (but would love to have one of those "deathtraps"). 1. DON'T buy a G-Wiz, you wouldn't be happy with it anyway. 2. Please provide us with a verifiable report on the number of people killed in the G-Wiz. I haven't read of any.

Otherwise, perhaps you've accepted the fearmongers statements as facts when they usually aren't.

Thanks!

RE the comment by Christopher Miller

I know you aren't the one who wrote that so don't take this personally.

The guy that wrote the tirade about needing to do human powered transportation and we have to get off cars is the main reason people write of the whole green movement as being populated by extremist idiots.

Electric power is the best most efficient means of powering personal vehicles. Electricity can be generated at whatever amount we need. The only reason all electricity is not generated by hydro, geothermal, wind, or solar is that it's simply not cost effective, not because we can't do it.

If you tell people to take positive steps to help the environment they will, if you tell them they must live a 19th century lifestyle for the good of future generations you will be dismissed out of hand.

Too many people assume that sacrifices must be made to be environmentally friendly. That is not the case. We can maintain a high standard of living, whatever that means to someone and still be environmentally friendly.