Looking into buying a new car?? Try converting one.

It's a fact that electric cars exist. With the Hybrid car market booming, I wonder, why are we settling for 60mpg? Why don't we just ditch the whole gasolene thing?

Well, maybe electric cars have heavy batteries, can only drive for 100 or less miles, and accelerate from 0 to 60 in 20 seconds. Of course, we've all heard about the nuisance of plugging your car in at night, and that "you won't really save that much money because your electric bill will go up." I've decided to research these reasons and let you know what I find.

1) Electric cars have heavy batteries - Yes, this is true, right now. Just do a google search on lightweight batteries though and you'll see some amazing breakthroughs that we know little about. Just consider if we put $1 for every gallon of gas that the US consumes toward lightweight battery research, in one year, we might have some pretty darn lightweight and powerful batteries

2) Can only drive for 100 miles or less - this is true too, mostly, but somehow if you're willing to spend enough $$ you can get one that goes further. You could actually get a really nice one called the "Tesla" next year for only $100,000 (www.teslamotors.com/). This one can drive about 250 miles on a single charge. It's pretty nice looking too. Interesting that we can buy a sports car for $100,000, but we can't get a regular one that will go as far on a single charge. Hmmmm.

3) You won't really save that much money because your electric bill will go up. Well, yes, your electric bill will go up slightly, but there are several factors involved. First is gas price. Right now at roughly $3 per gallon, your price per mile on a 25mpg car is 12 cents per mile. If you have a hybrid that gets *60 mpg (I put the * there because that's under premium driving conditions, they usually only get 45 or 50) you would pay about 5 cents per mile. The charge for an electric car at night would be about 1 cent per mile. Now for those of you out there with SUVs that get 15mpg, you pay about 2o cents per mile. After 50,000 miles, you've paid $10,000 in gas, whereas the rich sportscar guy paid only $500. He still has another 200,000 miles to drive in order to save enough money to justify the original cost, but you see my point.

Enough of my rant. By the way, you can convert an old car to electric for $4,000 to $8,000 (http://www.evworld.com/).