So I have recently been pretty interested in the Chevrolet Volt that is going to be coming out. If you aren’t familiar with it, basically it is a an electric car that can go 25-40 miles running purely on electricity and then after that a gas generator comes on to supply power. Once the gas engine comes on it gets comparable gas mileage to any other similarly sized vehicle, and is capable of going around 300 miles which is about what we expect from a typical car these days.
After reading all about this I saw that Nissan was coming out with a 100% electric car. The Nissan Leaf. This car has no backup plan once the electric batteries are dead, but it has a significantly better range than the Volt, at about 70-100 miles.
I think these cars are pretty awesome. I’m not an extreme environmentalist but I do believe we need to be doing what we can to save the environment without being crazy. These cars are a fantastic step in the right direction of helping the environment as well as reducing our dependency on oil.
Now when I see new technology like this my first thought is always, yea that’s cool but no one will use it unless it is convenient. If it’s not convenient people will not do it. Period. End of story. No on is going to take a Nissan Leaf and drive across the country. For one they will have a hell of a time finding a place to charge the car every 80 miles, but even if they could schedule that no on is going to wait around all day long to charge their vehicles. If they can’t do it in time efficient manner then it won’t happen.
Yea yea I know that’s not what these cars are made for. They aren’t made for cross country trips. They are made for city driving. They are made for commuting to work every day, going to the grocery store, and picking up the kids from school. This is where my genius plan to make money comes in. 
I don’t know what the average work commute for people in America is, but I don’t really care cause national averages are terrible ways to look at things. So let’s think about this. The Chevrolet Volt goes about 30 miles on an electric charge before it startes to use gas; the Nissan Leaf goes about 70 miles before it dies completely. I imagine that the vast majority of people could not use the Volt to drive to work and back from work with out using any gas. You could possibly do it with the Leaf but even then lots of people would be in trouble. Especially if you hit some bad traffic, have to take a detour, or run some errands on your way home from work.
So here is the plan. If you go to business, especially big business at first, and pitch the idea to them of installing a few charging stations in existing parking spaces. You could run electricity there so that people could have their cars charged while they are working. If people could do this I would be willing to bet that they could even take their car to lunch if they wanted to. You could pitch the idea by offering an all in one service. You could have the electricity run to the parking spots as well as putting up signs or a new paint job to indicate that those spots are only for electric cars.
This wouldn’t cost very much for business to implement. Minus the cost of paying you to install this for them, their only cost would be the electricity used to charge their employees cars, which is only a couple dollars per day, per car.
Companies that are building LEED certified buildings are already giving priority parking to people with hybrid cars, why not add a charging station for them too!
And don’t stop there. This would be slightly more complicated but I know there is a solution out there for this.
As long as it takes hours for these cars to charge I don’t think that conventional gas stations are the places where these cars are going to be charged. They need to be charged at places around town where people spend significants amount of time. Places like the grocery store, the mall, and sports arenas. If you could figure out a solution for being able to charge for this service then the opportunities to install these in $1,000s of locations becomes a real possibility. As well as the potential for a continuous income stream instead of just a one time payment like it would be when installing them for a company that was going to give away the electricity for free.
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