Paul
Allscion -- an e-commerce Website with news and accessories for your Scion vehicles
http://www.allscion.com/store


http://www.infozine.com/news/stories...iew/sid/16709/

 

wow, just wow. that's awesome, all three things mentioned in that article. i'm gonna go look up the cost on those buggers. i live 1 mile from work, so having a full electric car, instead of a bike, would be kinda neat and doable for me


edit....to pricey for my blood, i guess ill have to wait till they have flying cars, and these go down in price..

 

it's weird... scion is made to be a "youth" brand, yet now they are thinking of making an electric model... which no one under the age of 30 cares about... weird...

some one is going to give the money saved argument towards teenagers, yet the up front cost would put a scion out of our price range... it seems that market study has shown toyota that NOT JUST the youth group is buying up scions, as i have ALSO seen on the road...

 

sure its electric, but if those things are cheap with that kinda performance who cares lol.

 

so what is the price on these things?

 

Not Dead Yet
The electric car stages a comeback

By MARK VAUGHN

AutoWeek | Published 07/28/06, 2:22 pm et



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Advertisement


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The electric car of today may be a lot like the dead guy being carried to the cart at the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Cart Master: Bring out yer deeeeaaaad!

Customer: Here’s one.

Dead guy: I’m not dead!

Cart master: He says he’s not dead.

Customer: Yes he is.

Dead guy: I’m getting better! I think I’ll sing a song!

You remember the movie: The electric vehicle was supposed to have died several years ago when the California Air Resources Board gave up trying to force carmakers to build and sell them. But just because no one has to make EVs doesn’t mean no one is making them.

AC Propulsion’s Scion xB electric vehicle conversion is a fun drive. AC yanks out the Scion’s mechanical guts and swaps in its own electrical innards: a 120-kilowatt, 162-lb-ft, 13,000-rpm AC Propulsion electric motor with regenerative braking and integrated charging; a 550-pound, 39-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack good in our test car for 150 miles; and a bi-directional grid interface that with a thousand or so other like-wired xBs can help power up the city when rolling blackouts loom.

AC Propulsion has been in business for 14 years in San Dimas, engineering electric cars and drivetrains used in many if not most electric vehicle projects.

A test drive is remarkably simple—you step on the throttle and it goes. In 46 miles the charge dropped by about one third. We see no reason why 99.9 percent of our fellow Angelenos crowding us on the San Bernardino Freeway shouldn’t be in AC’s EV.

Ah, but there is a reason: The first dozen or so conversions will cost $55,000 apiece. But AC has new majority ownership led by retired battery chemist Lu Chow and is looking toward China and Taiwan for markets and manufacturing.

“We now have the wherewithal to go forward with the Scion project,” said AC president Tom Gage.

Tesla has some wherewithal, too. The EV startup publicly touts its $60 million in capital, most of which is from Silicon Valley billionaires like PayPal’s Elon Musk. Tesla will launch its first EV roadsters next summer with $100,000 window stickers. But at that price you get performance to match: 0 to 60 takes four seconds and top speed is 135 mph.

We got a ride in a Tesla and found it almost as thrilling as the three-second 0-to-60-mph Wrightspeed X1 electric (“Screaming Fun,” Feb. 20). With a bonded aluminum chassis and carbon fiber body, the Tesla weighs 2500 pounds, much of which is battery. In addition to exotic-car performance, the big draw of the Tesla is a claimed 250-mile range.

With so many electrics in the works right now, let’s hope the industry does better than the dead guy from the Python movie. You might recall he was finished off with a klonk on the head and got dumped on the cart. Dead

 

it's tricky. the younger group may not have as much money so they get a cheaper car. electric model might cost more to save gas but the break even point has to be 3-5 years i would think to make it worth it. last time i read the break even point was 100,000 miles. the battery technology is the limiting factor. maybe instead of glass roof we should have solar panels. price goes up again.

 

I'm 25 and would love to have a full electric Scion XB or Hybrid or the Tesla Roadster to commute back and forth to work. I live like less than 10 miles from work...

i think it's BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!! If the price is right....

 

im sorry to say this, but you are a rarity, not the rule... the Scion demo is about the most power, the best looks, and the coolest stuff for the least bit of money...

perhaps an xb, considering it never had a lot of power anyway, would be cool... but the kids dont want a 20+k SCION!

i agree that it might bne great for you, but my discussion was more a questioning of Toyota of AMerica's business plan (if this is true, of course) for marketing a FULL electric on the scion brand! kids could not care less! parents do! sure we have no money, but maybe if we stopped mashing the pedel of our supercharged tcs, we would have some better MPG numbers!

 

I saw that Tesla on TV the other day, and it's an amazing machine! I don't have much to add to what was said in the article, except to say it's worth a google-search just to see it's smashing (no pun intended, hopefully) good looks!

 

heres a video of the wrightspeed concept version of that electric car. the x1 smokes a porsche and a ferrari.
http://www.pluginamerica.com/media/Wrightspeed.wmv

 

so is this being made for performance or to better the environment? because charging up uses electricity which comes from coal burning, fossil fuel producing plants right? how does that better the environment?

 

that's a good point, and that's why cars like the Insight (that's the one I remember touting it) are actually cleaner than electric cars. electricity still comes predominantly from burning fossile fuels.

 

Thats exactly what I was going to write, but I would replace "10 miles" with "3 blocks"

 

If I had a choice of getting my box turbo/supercharged or having it converted into a full electric, i would no doubt go for the full electric. Even with a limit of 150 miles, the pros greatly outweigh the cons. This would be one step closer of turning the xB into the new VW bus. My hippie forefathers ran their vegetable oil-burning VW buses to the ground (and many are still to this day), and I want to be the old-___ hippie still driving around in my electric xB in the year 2058, when all the new whipper snappers are flying around in their atomic-hydrogen hybrid, time-travelling DeLoreans. For the sake of the planet and all of us apes stuck on it, i would gladly sacrifice a bit of maximum daily driving distance (MDDR). Besides, being an old-___ hippie (in the future!) still driving an xB? Sign me up.

 

i have a cheaper solution then... WALKING!

 

Like a majority of our tC's dont cost over $20k after some options are added to the mix? My tC was $19,208 and well over $20k after taxes.

 

instead of full battery operated scions... why not make hybrid scions?

 

^^ cost more $$$$$$ i'd assume

 

hybrid will never get you that much more milage.

the problem is cost.... the batteries are expensive. diy'ers have been doing this in the Prius community...converting to plug-in recharge electric, but the cost is between $3k and $10k depending upon how much you can do yourself. and the batteries in the X1, that smokes the porsche in the video i posted earlier cost $30k alone.