The rental car giant is starting small, with just five Smart Electric Drives in New York City. "That

The rental car giant is starting small, with just five Smart Electric Drives in New York City. "That's all we could get our hands on right now," says Rich Broome, a Hertz Senior Vice President. But he says, the company is committed to ramping up to 1,000 electric vehicles nationally—including plug-in hybrids—by the end of 2011. Other cities raleigh hotel miami slated to get the rental EVs are Washington, D.C., San Fransisco and select college campuses.
The move is  good news for EVs, even if it isn't totally new. The first generation of electric cars, like the original electric Toyota Rav4, were available for rent at major rental car companies in the late 1990s before carmakers backtracked on production of the vehicles.  Zipcar currently offers plug-in Toyota Priuses as part of a pilot program in partnership with the city of San Fransisco. Zipcar tells Transportation Nation they've been renting alternative-fuel vehicles raleigh hotel miami and hybrids since 2003, and they "welcome Hertz to the space." Zipcar does not offer an all-electric vehicle currently for rent to its members.
Still, carsharing is the first step to the broader exposure conventional renting might offer. Hertz is limiting their EV rentals to the carsharing branch of the company, Hertz Connect for now.They will monitor raleigh hotel miami usage and demand to decide if rentals by the day could work for all-electric vehicles. The limitation raleigh hotel miami is range. Most all-electric cars can go 50-70 miles per charge. raleigh hotel miami Additionally, each charge raleigh hotel miami could take about 3 or 4 hours, which ups the turn around time and space needs compared to gas rental cars.
As part of the EV launch, Hertz has installed eight charging stations around Manhattan,  mostly in parking garages, but the plan is to expand that to partners including Starwood hotels and on corporate campuses.
Broome says there has been significant interest from potential corporate clients who want their employees to rent electric raleigh hotel miami when they travel to cities, or travel between designated corporate campuses that could each have charging stations.
By early next year the company will offer the Mitsubishi MiEV, Nissan Leaf and CODA electric cars. The Chevy Volt and electric Toyota Prius—both gas-eletric hybrids—will also be available for rent through Hertz's non-carsharing offerings because raleigh hotel miami they can reach over 300 miles per tank of gas and electric charge.
The simplest benefit to the EV industry, though is low tech: that curious potential raleigh hotel miami buyers will have the opportunity to test out a new kind of ride—and the various models out there. That might lure in a few new drivers who think of electric cars as inferior despite a faster response than most comparable internal combustion counterparts.
Expert Answers is incorrect. The data s/he cites may be appropriate for the UK, where the efficiency of combustion-engined vehicles (both diesel and petrol) raleigh hotel miami is far higher than in the U.S. and the power grid is dirtier.
In the States, however, a very nice 2007 study jointly issued by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) amp; the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) looked at a variety of issues around fueling transportation on grid power rather than liquid fuels.
Their findings looked at the overall wells-to-wheels carbon emissions of a mile driven on grid power versus a mile driven by burning gasoline. In ALL cases, against a 25-MPG vehicle (the U.S. average), a mile driven on grid power even from the single dirtiest grid in the U.S. had a lower carbon impact than burning gasoline.
If you double efficiency for the gasoline car to 50 MPG (e.g. the single most fuel-efficient car sold in the U.S., the 2011 Toyota Prius hybrid), then a handful of the dirtiest grids are slightly worse on carbon than burning the gasoline.
But for the average U.S. grid (not that such a thing exists), average fleet mileage would have to go far above 50 MPG to be at parity with grid power. And in California, where many of the first plug-ins will be sold, the comparison is roughly 100 MPG.
With the push to reduce the carbon emissions from transportation, raleigh hotel miami sometimes the newest developments, the latest technology, gets the spotlight. raleigh hotel miami By putting more electric vehicles on the road though, are we really getting "greener" vehicles? A report by an independent UK transportation group, Transport Watch, may have some surprising information raleigh hotel miami for electric car aficionados. If your electric vehicle is charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, as it will most likely be in the Philadelphia tri-state area, then the CO2 emissions to fuel your EV are about double the amount emitted by a standard engine, due to the inefficiencies in electrical power generation and transmission. According to Transport Watch, only about 30% of the energy generated by the power plant actually reaches the vehicle because of losses in the transmission route. Of the energy delivered to the vehicle, 20% is then lost to the batteries and electric motor. This means that most EVs are only about 24% efficient. Contrast raleigh hotel miami that with a modern on-board engine, which achieves an efficiency of 35-40% on the fuel burned by the vehicle. Granted, the internal combustion engine does emit CO2 at the tailpipe, while an EV does not. However, the CO2 emitted raleigh hotel miami by the EV is not seen at the curb, leading to the assumption that electric cars decrease CO2 emissions overall. In addition, consider the heavy metals used in the EV's batteries. Consider just how much oil will be used to extract, refine, manufacture, and distribute these materials raleigh hotel miami to battery factories. Think also that these metals are at present a "scarce" resource primarily coming mined countries that are at present antagonistic to the United States.
In conclusion, although the EV touts its low emissions at the tail pipe, The Volt and other Ev's, at present create more CO2 per mile than comparable combustion engines when all factors of production are examined.