Today I attended the SF EVA meeting and had a really cool time. I was just reading some comments by JohnH in the Don't Convert It. Electrify It! and found it very in line with some of the things I heard at the meeting.
The SF EVA meeting was attended by the author of Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that will Recharge America as well as the guy who did the first plug-in prius conversion. However they seem to be regulars, the main purpose of the meeting was so some of us could show two-wheeler EV's.
Sherry Boschert had been at the CARB meeting last week..
She described how the CARB decision was a mixed blessing. That even though they watered down the requirements, they also agreed to go back and rethink the whole system. Over the years the original mandate of simply requiring n% of vehicles sold to be Zero Emissions got turned into a complex system that nobody understands.
Another thing she pointed out is a reason why the Volt and some other vehicles aren't going to be available until 2010 or later. It's that the car company earned so many points e.g. by selling NEV's that they don't need to sell any EV's to meet CARB requirements until then.
Oh, I missed discussing the rest of what happened. The main purpose of the meeting was to demonstrate two-wheeled EV's to this group.
I'd brought my Lectra and the Electra bicycle. There were a bunch of other bicycles. They had me and others speak to the group about our EV's, which had me in front of the group for about 5 minutes speaking about the bikes. That was FUN!
Another guy there was Marcus Levison-Hays of Pi Mobility. He's the designer of the bike shown at http://www.pimobility.com .. and he had a lot of really interesting things to say. It's a beautiful bicycle, almost a work of art. He had been part of the CalCars initiative in the 90's to jumpstart an electric vehicle industry. He somehow got involved in electric bicycle design work ...
He described having gone to all sorts of factories in China and Vietnam etc and come out certain that it's not very sustainable to build a vehicle meant to lead society to sustainable vehicles, and then ship it across the planet. So he's building his bicycles in the U.S.
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki