Report: France Wants 2 Million Electric Cars On Its Roads By 2020
French energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo will announce a plan on Thursday for the country to invest 1 billion Euros ($1.46 billion US) in the infrastructure needed to encourage the adoption of electric cars. That investment will buy 4.4 million charging stations, upgrade the power grid, purchase a government fleet of electric cars, and provide subsidies to EV buyers and auto manufacturers.
France hopes that this amount of investment will be enough to get 2 million electric cars on its roads within 10 years.
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The announcement follows on the heals of what can only be called the electric car lovefest that was the Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany a couple of weeks ago. It appears that Europe is set to fervently adopt the electric car and never look back.
In fact, Renault and Peugeot-Citroen, two of the most prominent French auto makers, have recently announced big plans to bring EVs to the market quickly. While the Peugeot EV was essentially a rebranded Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Renault went the other direction and came out with a whole lineup of electric cars.
The prudent Americans among us might say they are glad that Europe is testing the electric car thing out so that the US doesn’t have to invest so much and can watch the electric car either flourish or fail without worrying we’ve chosen poorly. But I say that America should follow suit.
Source: Reuters
Image Credit: Peugeot
I live in france. French Medias are more and more focused on electric cars as if they had in mind that classic agriculture cannot sustain whole biodiesel needs, even if there are some initiatives on biodiesel in some places on the territory.
I was still a master student in france 2 years ago in a uni lab specialised in algaes, i didn’t have a single lecture showing links betwen algae and biodiesel.
Looks like another French revolution !!
Not only France, Spain are also investing fiercely to have 1 million electric cars (hybrids, plug-in, etc…) in 2014. Very optimistic, but the important is the initial push.
One thing this article does not remember is that, as all the revolutions, the first investers take the risks, but also the patents and dominates the markets. If you invest in electic cars, your industry invest better, your workers and companies espcialices and then, when other countries start the same process, the companies of your country dominates the sector and the technologies.
As with the computers, internte, etc… let other countries make the expenses in investigation… and then your country will to pay for royalties or be some years behind.
1. Batteries will become more efficient on the whole and their price will drop, whereas the oil will simply go up and up as it becomes more scarce. As simple as that.
2. The range of noticeable EVs are sufficient to meet the daily driving needs of more than 95% of drivers ((The vast majority of people (95%) drive less than 100/km a day, 82% of the respondents said they drive 40 miles or less a day, with an average daily driving distance of 27 miles.)).
3. I’m hopeful that the charge network will extend the select districts to nation-wide scale throughout the world, and this environment can usher in active private investings in EVs.
4. It is also in the best interest of electricity utilities that EVs are going mainstream, thereby they need to put in charge stands where needed around highways, major roads with card readers or cell phone tech.
5. The vehicle-to-grid communication technology is helping the battery serve as a storage to prevent the costly blackout standing at about $90 to 100bn per year. That means utilities are shedding cost for additional storage facilities and ratepayers are selling electricity during peak demand so that EVs can make more economic sense, as we know.
6. I remain confident that investing in charge stands could give rise to multiple times as much investing effect, so to speak, some billions of investing, this simple deployment, could call into the most-sought energy independence and solid recovery around the world.
Do you know if eTec / Ecotality, Inc. will be involved with implementing their charging infrastructure.
They just launched this site this past week:
http://www.theevproject.com/
They seem to be everywhere as the infrastructure specialists for EVs.
If they are involved with France and Spain’s electric car charging infrastructure implementation, i’m going to buy stock in this company.