Cool! How long does it take to fully charge?

Depends on how much juice you feed it (and I don't mean orange juice!). Plug it into a standard electrical outlet and it takes about 14 hours to go from zero to a full charge (or about 5 miles per hour on the charger). Plug it into a special "Level 2" charger (220v, 40amps) and it takes about 8 hours.

Wait a minute... this picture has been PHOTOSHOPPED!

Eeyup!

I had to fix the left side of the photo a little because the person taking the picture didn't get the whole car in the photo.

I should have KNOWN something was up when I saw you photoshopping this picture on RooCam!

what I must wonder is how well one would go on a road trip.... max distance between charges and all

This is a great commuter car, but it is definitely not good for road trips. It has a range of about 80 miles on a charge. But since on average I drive only about 30 miles per day, this is the perfect "alternate fuel" car for me.

I still have my 2008 Kia Rio5. I plan to drive that in the winter and for the occasional road trip.

ah, still, 80 miles is a respectable distance. I am pretty impressed. And it sure will save you on the petrol bill at the end of the week!

http://youtu.be/qP-tyvBGla4?t=29s

Stylin'!

Electric cars, they do the environment good! Snazzy!

Nice

Hmm..Pretty cool. :)
How far do you get with the car with just one charge? <:)

But, where do you get the 1.21 Gigawatts!?

You need to accessorize now!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-TA.....item51c4585a56

SO AWESOMMMMME

That thing rocks. (and the car's neat too)

Yay for electric cars! Hope I will get one too someday

Wait, you didn't get the new Kia Soul? The one that comes with the sexy hamster girl accessory?

Kia announced the Soul EV just a couple weeks after I bought the iMiEV. If they had gotten it out a little earlier, I might have gotten it instead of the iMiEV (in addition to the hamster accessories, I've also been a Kia driver for the last 10 years). On the ohter hand, the Soul EV is about $2000 more than the iMiEV -- which is still the cheapest EV available in the U.S. right now.

Ah, I see.

Still some hot hamster babes, amirite?

Personally I'm waiting for a Jeep Wrangler EV or Hybrid.

Really nice car, Tim.

Unfortunately, they are not really that good for the environment as we think.

Power plants make a lot of pollution as well, in areas where power plants are powered by coal, coal ash (which is contaminated by poisonous heavy metals like mercury and arsenic,) piles up.

Natural gas doesn't pollute as much, but still quite a bit.

We do need to go more for solar power sources, and... (bracing myself,)

Nuclear.

But a cool car, how much did it cost you?

Believe it or not, there have been a couple studies done that if we switched all our commuting miles (not long-distance miles) to electric, and powered the entire fleet with the dirtiest coal plants we have currently on line, we'd STILL come out pretty far ahead in terms of greenhouse gasses, nitrogen oxides and other non-particle pollutants. (The flyash issue is an entirely separate one).

Cars are incredibly dirty when it comes to pollutants, dirtier then any coal plant when it comes to pound-for-pound comparisons. Even switching to an all-electric commuting fleet with our current plants would be an improvement.

What ArchTeryx said. Everything we humans do creates waste and pollution, including the manufacture, use and eventual disposal of electric vehicles. But what we CAN do is to try to reduce as much of that waste and pollution as possible. And the single largest contributor to air pollution (including carbon monoxide and greenhouse gasses) are gasoline-powered engines (not the majority, but a plurality -- something like 40% of all air pollution comes from cars).

Also, electricity can (in theory, at least) be produced using non-polluting, carbon-neutral methods (wind, solar, geothermal).

The power technology may change (cars might one day use an energy source other than array of batteries) but I think eventually most, if not all, vehicles on the road will have an electric engine in them.

I agree with both of you.

BUT...

Face it, the power grid is based on natural gas, coal and nuclear.

Wind power is making progress, and I'm grateful for that.

In Fond Du Lac, I stood directly under a big wind generator, and you know what I heard? Nothing.

I'm afraid our politicians are in love with gas, coal and nuclear.
Why?
Lots of bribes...I mean campign contributions.

Robert Heinlein had a "battery" in one of his books he called a "shipstone," that was to batteries what kites are to the SR-71.
I wish we could have "shipstones."

Tim, I love your new car, and it sounds like the perfect car for you.

My Mom however, has to drive 180 miles to get from her house, to ours.
She does have a fairly gas-efficient car, but it still needs gasoline, and has an exhaust.

Latest thing I've seen on roads are what are called "coal burner" trucks.
This is the far-right way of "sticking it to Obama."

By flipping a switch in the cab, it makes the truck belch black smoke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AyJBX1HFr0

Well, the joke is on the coal-rollers in just about every aspect.

First, they're a tiny tiny fraction of even the pickups on the road. They can make life miserable if you're behind them, but otherwise they aren't raising the overall pollution load.

Second, they're breathing the majority of those nasty, carcinogenic particulates themselves, even if they're blowing the fumes out behind the cab from tall stacks.

And finally, they're wrecking their engines. To blow smoke requires FORCING an engine to burn raw fuel in the most inefficient manner possible, which will gum it up even with the special modifications.

The end result? They pay lots of extra to trash their $50,000 dick extenders many years ahead of their time, breathe a bunch of cancer-causing smoke, and get nothing in return but pissing off the motorists (conservative or liberal) around them. Joke's on them!

My ex-redneck friend Harmless Gryphon's long said that if you have to roll coal, go to a steam and engine show like Stumptown and volunteer some labor on the steam tractors. That's far more constructive and lots of fun besides. Still doesn't do much to stick it to liberals, but hey, can't have everything.

You're 100% correct ArchTeryx.

I saw a "coal roller" go by my house, and the only thing I could think of, was "What an idiot."

BTW, a guy I write to every so often, he lives in the former East Germany.

He still has a Trabant.

Look it up if you never heard of it.

(He does have a VW car now, but he keeps the Trabant, as kind of a joke.)

Wait, why be so afraid of nuclear.

Now that the cold war's over, and we don't need to make more uranium reactors to enrich plutonium, we can do more work on Thorium Reactors, which cannot go supercritical (aka meltdown) like Uranium reactors can.

Other bonuses of Thorium (aka 'pebble bed') reactors.

Thorium is plentiful, it's collected as a 'waste product from Tin mining.

Thorium reactors can 'burn' small amounts of other radioactives, so spent fuel rods, nuclear waste, 'extra' plutonium, can be consumed in the reactor and reduced into a 'much less dangerous' material as a result. (Still not stuff you want to brush your teeth with, but not as bad as the stuff we're trying to bury under the Yukka Mountains.)

(For the 'no more nukes' crowd) Thorium reactors phisically CANNOT be used to enrich uranium and plutonium to 'weapons grade.' (This is why research on Thorium reactors was shelved after WWII, reactors that couldn't be used to 'win' the nuclear arms race were of no use to the Administration.)

Too many "activists" who are scared of nuclear power, they are scared of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Ah yeah, wonder how many of those "Activists" were in the pay of Big Oil/Big Coal?

We were all young and naive then, weren't expecting corporations to be setting up 'astroturf' campaigns to attack their competition.

I doubt hardly any were in the actual pay of coal and oil companies, I was asked to join a group not far from here, back then, they were against nuclear, oil, coal, they were simply anti-nuclear because they spouted a lot of "No Nukes" stuff.

Suffice to say I didn't join the group, and it simply died out.

"Its electric! boogie woogie woogie"

That's really cool! How much does it cost to purchase and maintain?

Do you know how the battery will hold its charge in a cold winter? (I've heard that's an issue but that great advances were being made in these cars.)

When you have to travel long distances, having something like this is great! Enjoy it!

I'm hoping that plug-in hybrids (such as the Chevy Volt) get more advanced and cheaper with time - that's a car you can run all-electric the 344 days out of the year you commute, and switch itself to gas for the 10 days you're road tripping.

Just be sure to take the Kia out once in a while; gas engines don't like sitting idle too long.

I've heard good things about the iMiEV. I hope that it works out well for you.

The base price of the iMiEV is around $24,000. However, there is a government incentive for people who buy EVs, meaning you can get up to $7500 in tax credits*. That effectively brings the price down to $16,500 -- still a bit pricey compared to cheaper gasoline-powered cars, but not unreasonably expensive for a new car these days

*All the usual disclaimers and provisos apply...

That's actually a very nice price. Back in 2009 when I bought my Honda Fit, there was still a tax credit as well. (Not Cash for Clunkers, buying a more fuel-efficient car, IIRC). I considered a hybrid, but they were out of my price range. Considered an electric, too, but even back then they had extremely limited range, and I drove cross-country a LOT in Washington DC. So I ended up going with the Fit.

Ended up setting me back right about the amount of the iMiEV. It's a real gas sipper, but it's got the same problems as any non-hybrid car; mileage sucks when your driving is stop and go, in cold weather, etc. If I could afford 2 cars, I'd almost certainly get an electric like an iMiEV and use the Fit only for cross-country traveling.

Marvin Kaplan lives, and commutes!

"Look at that, TC! No tailpipe!"

Nice set of wheels, Tim! As snazzy as it is sensible~

But Tim, you can't beat my transportation here in the city.

My Trek Mountain Track Bicycle.

http://re-cycle.com/ImageFetch.ashx.....mp;ImageID=541

I'll be curious how that lives up to cold weather. Tugrik discovered a huge drop off in efficiency on his first Leaf when the temperatures dropped and it just didn't have the range to be useful. His new replacement seems to be better so far, but winter hasn't come yet so we won't know until then.

That's one of the reasons why I decided to keep my Kia Rio5 rather than trade it in: I plan to use the Kia for long-haul travel (e.g., Chicago for MFF) and in the winter. The dealer said the batteries are good for up to -20 F, but I'm not inclined to test that hypothesis in a Minnesota winter. :)

As it is, I'm getting a pretty good range even in the cooler Fall weather. Another plus is that there are several charging stations around the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which have come in handy on more than one occasion. And battery technology keeps improving.

Interesting car. How much was it?

Last year around September I got to test drive a Tesla all electric sedan. I'm going to keep an eye on your page as I'm curious to the car's performance, and I might consider the a hybrid or the electric if I can afford it. Hopefully your "Plug in" didn't cost $110.000 for the full package like the Tesla does.

Do they call it an "Immy-Vee" by chance?

I haven't seen any of these here yet but I have seen a few of its petrol engined relitives.

We call those "triplets" here, because of the three car makers that each made their version of the same car. We see them everywhere here! Are you still driving this one? :)

I still do! I've put about 15,000 miles on it and I still get 60-70 miles per charge.

What were the other two car makers?

The other two are the Peugeot Ion and the Citroen C-Zero. :)

How far can you drive on a charge?