>Toyota has been on the cutting edge of hybrid electric technologies (despite some recent bumps in the road) and will be unveiling a new “people’s” plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in 2012 – www.nytimes.com. They are expected to be less expensive than other Toyota models of longer range hybrid electric vehicles. These “people’s” cars will have an electric battery range of 13 miles. They will also be able to fully charge in 3 hours, compared to 10 hours for a normal plug-in vehicle. This could speed up the production of plug-in vehicles across the automotive sector if the new Toyota Prius model is successful. This also means that people could be driving cars that do not use gasoline for short distance driving. Power for the car comes from the energy grid (or if your lucky, solar panels on your roof or a wind turbine in your backyard). Now we just have to move away from generating our electricity from coal and our transportation system could be down right green.
Some companies already offer technology to convert existing hybrid electric vehicles to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. If you would like to spend some cash up front to convert your car (about $6,000), you could save yourself some dough in the future, not to mention thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions. Or you could wait until 2012 when you might need a new car anyway and get yourself a fresh “people’s” plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
