Posts Tagged ‘Bay area’

Three ChargePoint Stations Located in Downtown Martinez to be Unveiled on Earth Day, 4/22/10, 11:00 am at City Hall

Business wire, April 21, 2020, CNBC.com

MARTINEZ, Calif., Apr 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The City of Martinez is proud to announce that it will become the fifth Bay Area city to install ChargePoint(R) Networked Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles (EV). The three 120V stations, manufactured by Coulomb Technologies, a leader in EV charging station infrastructure, are located in and around downtown Martinez, including one at City Hall; one at Main and Court streets; and one at the Amtrak Station.

The official unveiling takes place during a ribbon cutting ceremony at 11 a.m.

Pacific on Earth Day, Thursday, April 22, 2010 at Martinez City Hall, located at 525 Henrietta Street. City officials including Mayor Robert Schroder and representatives from Coulomb Technologies will be on hand for the ceremony, which will include a demonstration of the station in use with a Prius plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Installing the EV charging stations was important to the City of Martinez because it demonstrates support for cleaner transportation. Non-highway vehicle emissions accounted for almost 50 percent of the City’s overall greenhouse gas emissions in 2005. Affording the public convenient and accessible ways to utilize transportation options more friendly to the environment, such as charging stations for electric vehicles, is essential to the overall process of reducing the City’s carbon footprint and supports the goals of the City’s adopted Climate Action Plan.

The Martinez charging stations will be available for use by consumers for their personal electric vehicles, as well as by City staff to charge the City’s fleet of four electric vehicles used for local transportation in the downtown area.

Martinez joins San Jose, San Francisco, Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill as Bay Area cities that have networked charging stations installed. Other areas in Northern California include Campbell, Sonoma County and Chico.

Vehicles that are currently being sold and that can use these charging stations include the Wheego, the GEM (Global Electric Motorcar) and the Prius plug-in hybrid. Other vehicles scheduled to come on the market in 2010 include the BMW Mini E, Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and Triac by Green Vehicles.

Anyone that comes to the unveiling event on April 22nd with one of the above plug-in vehicles will receive a card good for 10 free charging sessions.

“EV drivers have one more EV-friendly destination for their Bay Area travels as we welcome the City of Martinez to the ChargePoint Network,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies. “These installations bring us one step closer to a metropolitan region where drivers can take their EV’s for all of their transportation needs and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions for a cleaner Bay Area that is less dependent on foreign oil.” Measure C funding for the three EV charging stations was provided by 511 Contra Costa (the transportation demand management agency for local jurisdictions and the county) and approved by TRANSPAC. The Measure C funds are 1/2 cent sales tax for transportation improvement projects and are collected through the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and used to deliver local projects and programs.

TRANSPAC is made up of elected officials and staff from each central Contra Costa County City (Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek, Concord, Clayton, Martinez, and unincorporated portions of the county).

The network of electric vehicle charging stations is accessible to all plug-in drivers by making a toll free call to the 24/7 number on each charging station, or signing up for a ChargePoint Network monthly access plan and obtaining a ChargePass(TM) smart card. Other future payment options include using any smart (RFID) credit/debit card to authorize a session or using a standard credit or debit card at a remote payment station (RPS) to pay for charging sessions. To locate available charging stations, visit mychargepoint.net and click “Find Stations.” About Coulomb Technologies, Inc.

Coulomb Technologies is the leader in electric vehicle charging station infrastructure with networked charging stations installed in municipalities and organizations worldwide. Coulomb provides a vehicle-charging infrastructure, with an open system driver network: the ChargePoint Network (www.mychargepoint.net) provides multiple web-based portals for Hosts, Fleet managers, Drivers, and Utilities, and ChargePoint Networked Charging Stations ranging in capability from 120 Volt to 240 Volt AC charging and up to 500 Volt DC charging. For more information, follow Coulomb on Twitter at twitter.com/coulombevi. Download the ChargePoint iPhone App.

SOURCE: Coulomb Technologies, Inc.

Wheego has been added to the evrace.com list of Electric Vehicles.

by John Voltz for Cleantech Blog, March 2, 2010

Recently, I made a small diversion from my walk to the office in San Francisco and took a ride in a Wheego. The Wheego was being showcased at Justin Herman Plaza right across from the Ferry Building not far from my office in the heart of the city’s Financial District. The Wheego is a brand new all-electric car from an interesting manufacturer in Georgia. Locally, the Wheego is sold at Ellis Brooks Auto Center. This intrigued me. Ellis Brooks is a venerable car name in San Francisco, having been around for 40+ years. I still remember their radio jingle from my childhood, “See Ellis Brooks today for your Chevrolet, corner of Bush and Van Ness . . .” The Ellis Brooks dealership now sells pre-owned cars and is no longer associated with GM. It has just begun selling the Wheego. Before I took my test drive, I had a chance to talk to Ellis Brooks’ grandson, John Brooks, about why they decided to sign up with Wheego. He seemed comfortable with the manufacturer in large part because the car was assembled from components made by manufacturers already in volume production of vehicles.

So how was the ride? Pretty good. It was quite roomy with a nice, quiet ride and a firm feel of the road. Allowing for the fact that it is a small two-seater coupe, it had the feel of real a car – not a golf cart or an experiment.

Now I should back up for a minute and explain that I have long been a skeptic that there will be significant adoption of all-electric vehicles any time soon. But this car changed my mind a bit.

My skepticism about this has been based on looking at the passenger car market and thinking about what it takes to succeed in that market. Then I compared the passenger car market to other potential electric vehicle markets.

Passenger cars have been the province of integrated high volume manufacturing, low margins, very high quality expectations (especially fit, finish and amenities), and very high service and support expectations. In short, the barriers to entry for this market seem quite daunting, especially when compared to the delivery truck market or the ATV market. These markets have significantly lower volumes, less integrated manufacturing (many manufacturers are essentially final assemblers), much lower quality expectations on fit, finish and amenities, and lower service and support expectations.

There are some low-volume passenger car manufacturers, but all make vehicles aimed at high priced specially markets, not low to mid priced daily drivers.

There is another big difference between the passenger car market and the delivery truck market – what delivery truck buyers want fits really well with what electric vehicles do best:

• predictable low to medium mileage daily duty cycle
• low noise
• excellent torque
• low total cost of ownership

 

With an electric delivery truck, you don’t need to worry that you’ll ever need to drive from San Francisco to L.A. to visit your sick aunt. In fact, for commercial trucks, limited range can be a plus – there’s no way for trucks to wander very far. With passenger cars, limited range is a big reason not to buy.

Given this, I have felt for some time that we wouldn’t see significant adoption of all-electric vehicles until we started seeing real traction in markets like delivery trucks. I expected passenger cars (and delivery trucks too to some degree) would likely first go hybrid, then shift the hybrid balance to more electric (e.g. using fuel to run a generator to extend the electric range), and then later shift to all electric. These successive market advances would be linked to gaining manufacturing scale, cost down of batteries and other components critical to all-electric vehicles (though batteries is the big one).

My Wheego ride today and my chat with the dealer changed my view. Here was an all-electric car, at a regular car dealer, with a high but regular car price, from a car manufacturer that nearly appeared out of thin air. You see Wheego as a manufacturer is just a final assembler. From my initial quick look, Wheego came on the scene as a passenger car player in 2007 or so, backed by the former founder of MindSpring. Before then, it was exclusively an electric golf cart manufacturer. So it’s really been an eye blink in automotive time scale (2007 to 2010) to see cars turning up at dealerships. Granted, the model at dealers today and the one that I test drove is just a medium speed vehicle (MSV) with a top speed of 35 MPH and not for highway usage (more on that later). But this was still impressive to me.

Wheego gets the car bodies from a big manufacturer in China (a body that is currently used for gas drive cars in other international markets). It gets its motors from a Wisconsin electric motor manufacturer and its motor controller from Curtis Instruments who makes controllers for forklifts. Maybe the truck style manufacturing could work for passenger cars after all.

In addition, I began to think about the current passenger car market for all-electrics. There probably is a significant market for all-electric vehicles, even in the current economy, and even if they aren’t strictly ‘economic’ on a dollar per mile basis compared to gas or hybrid cars. Think about how much the early EV1 cost in its day[1], and how people still rave about it years and years later. In my revised view, I think there will be a small but significant true believer market in the U.S. for all-electric cars. Yes, the big boys are coming – Nissan with the Leaf, Chevy with the Volt, Ford with the Focus EV, but not for a year, maybe two, maybe more. In the mean time, the true believer market will be served by the likes of Wheego, Think, Smart, and others. Even after Nissan, Chevy, Ford and other big car companies arrive in the market, the early entrants may have continued success. Plus they may have customers and EV infrastructure that car manufacturers with non-existent, dormant, or failing EV programs may look to acquire. There is no substitute for firsthand customer knowledge.

The Wheego I drove was a medium speed vehicle (MSV) with a max speed 35 MPH and a real world range of 40 miles. The highway speed version is on the way – due to arrive this summer. It is currently undergoing NTHSA cash testing. It will have a top speed of 65 MPH and a range of 100 miles. The high speed vehicle (HSV) Wheego will not be a lot different than the MSV. Differences include: lithium ion batteries, airbags, and some additional structure supports to the body.

I now see the all-electric car market developing from two converging paths – the true believer all-electric passenger car market and the more economically driven all-electric truck and fleet vehicle markets. The true believer market will drive visibility and customer expectations, and provide valuable real world feedback about what electric car consumers care about and will pay for. While the truck and fleet markets will help dive down cost, I expect both will speed the adoption all-electric cars to a significant portion of the passenger car market.

So for you true believers out there, price before incentives for the MSV Wheego is ~$19K (and it’s eligible for a 10% Federal tax credit) putting the MSV price around $17K before any state or local incentives. Prices for the HSV have not yet been announced, but the target price is in the $30K range (and it will be eligible for a $7500 federal tax credit) putting the net cost of the HSV before state and local incentives in the roughly in the mid $20K range.

---

[1] The EV1 had a nominal low price of $34K or ~$48K in today’s dollars though it was never sold only leased. Reportedly production costs were $80+K per vehicle at the time. Initial lease costs were $640/month or $900/month in today’s dollars. Later this dropped to $350/month or $ 500/mo in today’s dollars with many different incentives layered on.

by  Kamala Kelkar for the San Francisco Examiner, February 18, 2010

All-electric car manufacturers from Atlanta are using the Bay Area as a hub to sell their two-seater vehicles, which can reach 35 mph, plug in like a refrigerator and cost about $19,000.

Wheego signed a contract with family-owned dealer Ellis Brooks — located at 1395 Van Ness Ave. in The City — and will offer test drives from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday.

The company has been selling about 100 cars a month since October through about 20 dealers nationwide. It’s relying on the Bay Area to kick up sales because “it’s either the No. 1 or No. 2 market for new technology adopters,” Wheego President Jeff Boyd said.

The vehicle runs on sealed, lead-acid batteries, charges overnight and uses 90 percent fewer moving parts than a gas engine, Boyd said.
Wheego also is planning to release a higher-speed vehicle that can reach about 65 mph in the summer, but takes up about twice the amount of energy and would probably require an upgrade to outlets at home or a plug-in station.

There are about 25 plug-in stations in The City and about 10 in San Mateo County. However, Plug-In Bay Area, a coalition of electric and solar companies including PG&E, is banking on a $12 million state grant to add more stations and make upgrades.

Charging your car

There are about 130 charging sites in the Bay Area. About 25 of them are in San Francisco.

The City: Civic Center parking garage; Costco; General Hospital; Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf; Palace Hotel; Presidio Main Post; Toyota, Honda and Ford dealerships; SFO

SAN MATEO COUNTY

Colma: BART; Saturn dealership
Menlo Park: Sun Microsystems building
Redwood City: Electronic Arts
San Carlos: Liberate Technologies (by arrangement only)
South San Francisco: Costco

Source:  www.evchargernews.com/regions/ch-bay-all.html

kkelkar@sfexaminer.com

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Atlanta-electric-car-company-plugs-into-Bay-Area-market-84658442.html#ixzz0ftcjh9C7

UPI.com, December 9, 2009

Santa Claus to Unveil New ChargePoint Networked Charging Stations on December 10th

 The City of Pleasant Hill announced today that Santa Claus will make a guest appearance in his plug-in Prius as he stops by to charge up at Pleasant Hill City Hall. Pleasant Hill has become the fourth Bay Area city to deploy the ChargePoint® Networked Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles (EV). Manufactured by Coulomb Technologies, the charging stations will be made operational in the city during a special holiday season unveiling ceremony on December 10, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. at the City Hall Parking Lot, 100 Gregory Lane.

Coulomb Technologies, Inc.
Anne Smith, 408-313-8089
anne@annesmithcommunications.com