I am fascinated with electric cars. And 2010 is going to be a huge year for them. Finally, road-ready, road-worthy electric cars (and hybrids) will be produced by a range of big car makers and it will be the turning point, I believe, in a technology that holds so much promise that we will wonder in a decade what the hell we thought we were doing.

The Tesla, Nissan Leaf, Toyota EV and Chevy Volt

So I’m based in California, which is also the hotspot for electric car techology in the world (although Germany and Scandinavia are also very promising) and I’m a journalist so it makes sense to bundle it all up and start writing about electric cars and electric car technology.

So this is the first blog post along those lines, tagged “electric car”. And my intent is to write many, many more. If I find I really get into it and there is alot of interest out there, I may set up a separate site but at the moment I’m just going to subset on this blog.

What have you got then?

Well, straight off there are two interesting events coming up next month in Detroit and Vegas.

In Vegas on 6 Jan is one leg of Nissan’s big tour for its new electric vehicle, the Leaf.

Between 11 and 24 Jan in Detroit is the North American International Auto Show – and it has an entire “Electric Avenue” dedicated to electric vehicles. There should be some big news from the event.

And then back in Vegas between 26 and 28 Jan is the much more nerdy Lithium Supply and Markets conference – which sounds very dull but lithium batteries are what make the new breed of electric cars possible, so this is important stuff.

Resources

In terms of resources, there’s not that much out there – part of the reason I want to get involved – but here are some initial pointers:

• EV Perspective – wealth of links to news. A community site – and there is a small but dedicated EV community that I hope to get to know
• Plugs and Cars is probably the best blog out there on this stuff
• Plug in America is a great place to learn more about what’s going on in this area. The meeting point for a lot of people.
• Tesla are the sexiest electric car makers out there at the moment
• Toyota is putting alot of effort into electric cars
• Alot of people over this part of the world are excited about the Chevy Volt. Electric cars might just salvage the US car industry, which continues to knock out crappy cars that only Americans would ever buy. Volt is due to launch in October 2010.
• And lots of others