This one happened a while ago, but I didn’t actually get a chance to post about it until today, when I put two and two together to make six.
Until the end of 2008 the Nice Car Company were viewed by many as the rivals to Goingreen, the UK agent for the funny little Indian electric car, the Reva (or G-Wiz, as it’s known here).
The Nice Car company had a very nice showroom and office in the western side of the Capital, and had some pretty nice cars too. Okay. I can’t keep up this NIce talk. I’ll just stop being silly and carry on as normal now. I promise.
Anyway, back to the story. The Nice Car Company not only were the agents for the MEGA Truck and MEGA City, (which many people affectionately called the “Nice car”) but also sold Vectrix electric Motorbikes. At last year’s London Motor show the Nice Car Company launched a whole range of EVs, including an impressive conversion of a Fiat 500 which they planned to lease to customers rather than sell. They also planned to sell the MyCar, which Nice Car Company Founder, Julian Wilford, assured me I would just go crazy for. On arriving at the motorshow last year I had to admit to him that, after looking at it, I’d rather have owned the original Mega City. It just looked more conventional and I’d test-driven one a year or so earlier (and liked it). I liked it better than the MyCar. But at least others did hail the MyCar as the latest in EV must-have. The Nice Car Company were also showcasing an MPV style vehicle, the Zeo, which I quite liked the look of. It was touted to do 50 mph+ and a decent range too. It would have made an ideal vehicle to replace my City El with (before I decided on a plug in prius, that is). Heck, it’d still be better than a plug in Prius if I could have actually owned one – as I would never have had to fill up with fuel, but I digress. Take a look at some MyCar butt.

Earlier on this week I ran an article detailing ten top DIY conversion links. I decided that perhaps it’d be nice to detail ten top PHEV sites for anyone interested in plugging their hybrid in. Unlike the EV conversion scene many plug in hybrid conversions are commercially done, partly due to the expense of battery packs and the demographic of the owners wanting conversions. However, it’s possible to convert a vehicle (existing hybrid or a regular engined car) to a plug in hybrid yourself. You just have to know where to look for help and ideas. Hopefully this list will help.
It is possible to convert a regular gas-powered car to a plug in hybrid too – so don’t think this list is exclusively for those Prius owners. While plug in hybrids aren’t anything new (the first one was back in the early 1900s) we’re certainly at a point where plug in hybrids are starting to enjoy a bit of a golden age. At least, I think that’s where we’re heading. I don’t think we can get to full electrics without at least a passing time of plug in hybrid popularity. I hope that in a few years’ time my list will need redoing as more and more conversion and PHEV options become available.

Today’s post has been rattling around in my head for the past week or so after a couple of comments to previous posts I’d made really got me thinking along with some really intense discussions with various EVers this week. Big thanks to Joe Lado, my good friend Pyoor Kate and Andrew Bissell for getting me thinking. What about? Well, about the future of plug-ins in the UK.
See, it’s long been my thought that EV conversions have to play a part in the future of plug in vehicles. How else are we going to get the 33 million or more vehicles on the roads of the UK switched to greener fuels? Scrapping them all isn’t an option. At £2,000 per pop, (in a scheme similar to those held in Germany and Ireland) I simply don’t see the money being there. Someone would have to fund it. As Pyoor Kate put it when I chatted to her earlier today, £2,000 to force coerce people into scrapping working vehicles to switch to newer vehicles may be a great idea on the face of it, but what if those vehicles don’t need replacing. What if they’re mechanically pretty sound?