Electric cars - any questions you want answered?

Hope I'm posting this in the right place, if not then please move it boss...

Bit of a strange question for you all, so let me start with an explanation.

A really good friend of mine here in St Albans is currently taking part in a competition in which 10 bloggers each have a Nissan LEAF for a month to drive around in and one of them gets to win one at the end of the month. They've all been asked to blog and tweet about it and have all been set challenges. So for example he was asked to go out and try to buy dinner for four for the same price it takes to charge the car overnight (£1.91). His competition page is here: http://the-big-turn-on.co.uk/challenge/ ... walsh.html if you want a look.

He's offered several of his friends trips in the car to see what it's like. Mr C's already been out in it and was quite impressed. I'm hoping to go out with him soon and was thinking of blogging about it and maybe taking some video footage as well, in particular to try to show how quiet it is compared to a normal petrol or diesel car. My blogging has moved away from "green issues" lately. Not for any real reason other than I spend most of my time running after LMC instead so that's what I've ended up blogging about. However, I thought that this might be a really good opportunity to blog about what having and driving an electric car day to day is really like. I hope to cover all the questions from those that some people might think it silly to ask - like how do you actually charge it, both at home and out and about - as well as looking at the economics (higher upfront cost, service costs, vs lower fuel bills and lower tax etc).

So, are there any questions that you would like answered when I see my friend Alex? Is there anything that you want to know or would like me to show an explanation of on video on my blog?

(As a little disclaimer I'm nothing to do with the people behind this competition or Nissan at all. Alex and his wife are just good friends and I'd obviously love it if they were to win the competition, but I'm also really interested to find out about the car, mainly because it's possibly the closest I'll ever manage to get to owning an electric car myself.)

Many thanks.

Mrs C

I guess it is a little late now to help with the competition...
Are you still open for questions?

May I know what is the price range for a Nissan electric car?

This is quite an old thread, and we (unfortunately) haven't seen Mrs C in here for a while, so I think you've missed the chance to ask.  I don't know any more than might be found by Googling, and I guess you can/have tried that.

But - I wonder about the wisdom of electric cars in the current environment.  We are currently in a bit of a hole with electricity generation, trying to match ever rising demand with the need to close coal fired plant and the retirement of ageing nuclear stations.  Enthusiasm for new nuclear is muted and it will take a while to build, and we still have no long term place to put the waste.  Availability of a suitable long term underground storage location with stable geology is a problem, and that's before the fracking bonanza !  And it does not seem like a good time to increase our reliance on Mr Putin's friends at Gazprom ...

And although batteries are quite efficient these days, the combined efficiency of generation/transmission/charging/discharging/electric motor is perhaps surprisingly not a lot different to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine.  

Perhaps time to discourage car use ? But no.  Here come driverless cars ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28551069

This interests me because robotics was my thing (I was once in the Oxford group mentioned).  I don't doubt that it can technically be done, but I await with interest the solutions to the non-technical problems:

Who has liability in an accident ?  Is someone in the car still legally in charge ? Is it the car manufacturer ? The software house ?

What happens when, figuring out that the car must be made to stop to avoid collision, pedestrians decide that they have de-facto priority ?  We'll need something like American jaywalking laws to prevent gridlock in towns.

And the laser scanners, radars etc sticking out of the car - best lock it up at night !