EV-Everywhere: Making Electric Vehicles More Affordable
As part of the EV-Everywhere Grand Challenge, we are working with America’s best and brightest scientists, engineers and businesses to make electric vehicles as affordable and convenient as today’s gasoline-powered vehicles. But we can't do it without you.
Storified by Energy Department ·
Thu, Nov 08 2012 12:04:07
In March 2012, President Obama launched EV-Everywhere, the second in a series of Energy Department “Clean Energy Grand Challenges” aimed at addressing the most pressing energy challenges of our time. The EV-Everywhere
initiative seeks to enable U.S. companies to produce
plug-in electric vehicles within the next 10 years that are as affordable and
convenient for the average American family as today’s gasoline-powered
vehicles.
initiative seeks to enable U.S. companies to produce
plug-in electric vehicles within the next 10 years that are as affordable and
convenient for the average American family as today’s gasoline-powered
vehicles.
This summer, we kicked off EV-Everywhere with a series of workshops to lay out the scope of the initiative and dig into specifics of electric vehicles. We also created the EV-Everywhere Framing document, which provides background on the project and establishes draft targets for EV-Everywhere.
Then we put out a Request for Information -- which closed
at the end of October -- asking the public to provide
feedback on the framing document and help us define what makes an electric
vehicle “affordable and convenient for the average American family,” the
barriers to achieving this goal and high-impact new ideas for overcoming those
barriers.
@ENERGY Just submitted an EV idea via email - thanks for doing this!
We received more than 70 email responses to the EV-Everywhere Framework document, but to get additional feedback, we took to our social media channels.
Do you have thoughts on how to make EVs affordable for the average American family? Share your ideas with us now http://go.usa.gov/rt4V
Members of our online community shared great ideas on how to make electric vehicles more affordable to own. Some suggestions focused on subsidies, rebates or other financial mechanisms.
@ENERGY Subsidies, subsidies, subsidies and incentives, incentives, incentives!
@ENERGY Subsidize the production, rebates are too late in the purchase for people to even contemplate buying the EVs.
End oil subsidies. This will grow the EV market and bring down costs.
@ENERGY A well-head/mine-gate carbon tax with a 100%, per capita refund.
Other suggestions focused on improving the technology -- such as batteries and charging stations -- associated with electric vehicles.
Batteries, Batteries, Batteries... Oh did I mention Batteries? Focus research potential into building Batteries dirt cheap, durable and dynamic enough to handle the constant fluctuation of the input signal of Solar power, then make them scaleable from Car Battery to Grid-scale Storage. This would allow home-owners to charge their cars on their own garage solar charging station utilizing an "affordable battery". Battery battery... battery. Battery.
A battery that will last longer so charging won't have to be done for 10-17 hours.
If we can have 2 batteries and charge one battery while driving down the road on the other, could help increase the range of the vehicle. Alot of the public here in the midwest are concern about lack of charging stations and long distances between places.
Another area people focused on was building out the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
If you have solar charge for your EV charging station, that would make it very affordable.
Easy access to charging stations. Subsidies to install charging stations at home.
Some users even shared thoughts on electric vehicle use.
Need to be able to take a road trip. Thousands of miles. Low income people need to be able to switch over. Cash for clunkers was a good idea. Model. Go further.
Over the next few weeks, we will continue to sort through
all your email comments. We are working on incorporating your feedback into an
updated Framework document. While the Request for Information is officially
closed, you can still send comments on the Framework document to ev-everywhere@ee.doe.gov.
