Why I deserve to be the person getting the free eCar

ESB recently announced that they plan to give away some electric powered cars (eCars) to private individuals in return for some help in publicising the benefits of this new environmentally friendly mode of transport. The application form ask you to state why you believe that you would be the ideal person to receive an eCar, but they only give you a small text box in which to write your reasons. Therefore I decided that I would write this blog post stating my case at length.

1. I am a blogger and would use my blog to help publicise my experiences with the eCar in addition to cooperating with any PR activities arranges by ESB themselves.
2. I have a record  of writing about electrical sustainability issues on my blog and in particular my work with local schools to do Young Scientist projects relating to Smarter Power.
3. My current car is a hybrid car. I chose this because I am interested in helping the environment and because there were no pure electric cars available on the Irish market at the time,
4. My commute to work is only 8km so I would not be a demanding user of eCar, but there is already an eCar charging point at my place of work and I frequently travel long distances at weekends and I would be happy to see how an eCar performs on these journeys.
5. Since I currently  own a hybrid car, all the cars in our household would be electric powered in some form is I was lucky enough to be chosen as a recipient of a free eCar.

I hope you will wish me luck in the application process.

Where should electric car charging points be located

eCar Charger Coolmine

Apparently electric cars are set to become much more common in Ireland in the near future.  However, before this can happen there will need to be a network of charging points for electric cars located at convenient locations throughout the country. The ESB is currently rolling out a series of such charging points.

Obviously such charging points are going to be located at Motorway service stations to facilitate motorists who are trying to undertake a long journey across the country. I was also interested to see that one has been installed in the "Park and Ride" facility attached to Coolmine rail station (near where I live). The idea must be that they expect that local commuters will use their eCars for the short trip to get to the rail station before taking the train.

This seems like a sensible idea, however the only problem is that the charging point is located in the area reserved for disabled drivers. Do the ESB expect that eCars will only be driven by disabled drivers or do they plan to give eCar drivers special permission to use the disabled parking spots?

My environmentally friendly new car

Honda Insight

I am not really a big car fan, but my company car was well overdue to be replaced and after some consideration I decided to go green and choose a Hybrid electric/petrol car. The model I chose is a Honda Insight. which looks quite stylish (an important consideration for the female members of my family). It was delivered yesterday and I must say that my first impression are that it was a good choice - it is a pleasure to drive and it comes with lots of cool accessories that I have not yet had time to fully explore (e.g. a Bluetooth hands free speaker system for my phone and a USB connection to connect my music player with the car's entertainment system).

I am not certain that Hybrid vehicles really are that much more environmentally friendly than a conventional car since all of the power ultimately comes from the petrol engine, but pure electric vehicles are not yet widely available in Ireland and even if they were there would be concerns about the availability of charging stations.

It is a pity that Ford doesn't offer it's Sync platform in Europe, because I would have been very tempted to choose a Ford vehicle if they did. They have announced that they will begin selling both Hybrid and fully electric vehicles in 2011, but as in the software industry there is a significant lag between an announcement and the product being available for sale.