Updated from original article published May 2007.
Electric cars may be the biggest tease in automotive history. Promised for decades as the mass-market solution to all of our energy, environmental and traffic woes, highway-safe, all-electric vehicles have popped up from time to time in glowing media accounts — but only occasionally on a real road.
This time, however, things might actually be different: Highway-safe EVs seem to be headed toward commercial reality. A handful of start-up companies are building products that are already available. And if you plunk down a deposit right now for at least some of the new highway-safe models, after a custom-build interval of several months, you could expect to receive your new EV sometime next year.
It's true that we already have plenty of workable Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs) that can legally putter around at up to 25 mph on 35-mph streets. And dozens of highway-capable EVs are sprinkled across the nation's traffic grid at this moment, including George Clooney's new Tango ride and some still-operable relics called Corbin Sparrows.
But in Save the Earth lore, mainstream EVs rank right up there with the snail darter. In fact, when the notion got closest to technological and cultural success, General Motors killed its EV-1 in the late '90s. And while even the humblest EVs have been embraced by greens and geeks over the years, they've never gone fast enough or far enough to enter traffic with conventional vehicles. So most American consumers have yawned at them.