Oh well, I guess I fit the pattern: "male, highly-educated and concerned about the environment". I also have been driving a DIY-converted electric car for four years. Having made a bit of a hobby out of reducing my family's environmental footprint in the house, transport was next when the time came to replace one of our two cars, the one that never left town. When I started planning 5 years ago the car companies had been saying for ages that they would have an electric car out in the next year or so. I did not think they would arrive that soon and have been proven right. Even now I could not afford a new one although the iMiev price is now down to something in the 30 thousands. So, contrary to the reported pattern, I expect to use my electric car for 10 years or more and then buy a cheap second-hand commercial EV.

The most common question I get is about range, which happens to be 70km in the car I converted. Range is entirely determined by how much battery you can afford and have room for. I spent some time resetting the trip meter on our previous petrol car for every around town trip to get a feel for the length of our typical driving. The range I have is enough to get from home to anywhere in Canberra and back with some spare capacity.

The next most common question is: "How long does it take to charge?" This is hardly ever relevant in practice. More relevant is that I get a useful amount of charge into the car in 1-2 hours of charging from an ordinary power point. It is very rare that i would do a trip that has the car run down to nearly empty and then want to have it completely full soon after for another long trip. I use the analogy of a cordless phone. When you make a phone call it almost always is fully charged and you put it back on the charger when you are done. If you make another call a little later you don't worry about whether it is fully charged or just partially topped up; you just know that you have ample for another conversation. My car has a gauge that counts amp-hours into the battery when charging and out while driving so I can do a series of partial discharges and partial top-ups without getting to full and still have an accurate reading of the state of charge of the battery. Still, the first trip of a day is always starting from full. To answer the rarely relevant question: 6-7 hours if run down very low.

Another common question is about performance. I was only aiming for performance equivalent to an ordinary small car but it worked out rather better. I routinely take off a lot faster than anyone else at the lights, the car is really fun to drive and my inner hoon comes out occasionally! My ordinary, off-the-shelf electric motor and controller has twice the torque of the petrol version of my donor car and I never use less than 3rd gear to take off.

Battery life is a common question: After 4 years and 40,000km I can detect no loss of performance from relatively cheap chinese LiFePO4 cells. These are rated for thousands of charging cycles and I expect a decade of use before perhaps retiring them to a stationary application. Ultimately they are recyclable.

A really nice conversion is possible for $12-15K if you do it yourself, including the cost of an engineer's report and a car in reasonable condition but a dead motor.

For me, as an early adopter, my main motivation was to be able to run a car on renewable energy, the same as the house. Mass adoption is more likely when the early adopters have gone some way to normalise EVs and dispelled a few myths. Nonetheless, it was important to me that I can expect to same money in the long term, even paying a premium for GreenPower. My fuel costs, even with the premium, is less than the cost to run any petrol car available and maintenance costs are lower also. Mass adopters will want the upfront cost to be low too since long term savings don't seem to convince to many people and they will need convincing about the convenience of charging at home rather than making a special detour to a filling station. Still, range anxiety is the biggest issue I hear from others yet my lived experience is that it is not an issue after a very short adjustment period. Still, I agree that a plug-in hybrid will suit many people who have only one car. I would like our other, petrol car (that goes on longer trips sometimes) to be a plug in hybrid so it could run electric most of the time but they are not yet available in a wagon format. Even then, they will always be more complex and expensive because they need both petrol an electric bits.

Feel free to ask any questions about what it is really like to live with an electric car!