As electric cars step from lab to showroom, customers must choose

LOS ANGELES — Stalled for nearly a century, electric cars are about to move into the fast lane when the first of a new generation of vehicles reaches dealer showrooms next month.

Every major automaker plans some sort of electric or plug-in hybrid offering over the next several years, a wave of competing technologies reminiscent of the beginning of the automobile age.

General Motors will soon start shipping its Chevrolet Volt, which uses a gas engine to generate electricity when the batteries run out. By year's end, Nissan will launch its Leaf, which is powered only by batteries and will be able to get the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving, the company said Monday. Ford will come out with an all-electric version of its Focus compact car next year.

"Electric vehicles are finally real and not an R&D project," said Mark Sogomian, a partner at Ernst & Young.

This influx of new-technology cars comes after a century of reliance on gasoline combustion engine vehicles. More than a century ago, cars ran on all kinds of fuels and strange mechanisms: windup cars on giant springs, Peugeots burning something similar to mothballs, and vehicles on steam, electricity and a variety of petroleum products.

Fossil fuels eventually won that race because gasoline was stuffed with energy and was convenient to transport and store.

Still, everyone has toyed with electric cars in recent decades, particularly during times of high gas prices. But they never caught on because battery technology limited the range of the cars and oil prices always receded, making electric cars comparatively too expensive. Now, improvements in battery technology, pollution concerns and fears of soaring gas prices have given new impetus to alternative-fuel vehicles.

In the coming months, consumers will have to start doing more than just deciding whether they want a sedan or a sport-utility vehicle.

They will have to consider for the first time how they want their new car powered, and that will create new questions: What's less expensive per mile — gasoline or electricity? How far can I go on a charge? How much more will it cost me to purchase a green car?

"The rules are changing, and in a way everything is up in the air again, just like it was more than 100 years ago," said Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

The eco-friendly profile is enough to persuade Barbara Odza, a graphic designer from West Los Angeles, to make the switch from gasoline to electric. She is buying a black Nissan Leaf for about $20,000 after federal and California state tax incentives, and expects to get the car in January.

The cost of the charger and its home installation, along with a portable quick-charger unit for faster powering, could add $3,700 to the price tag. But out-of-pocket costs could actually be more like $1,000 after various government credits and other incentive programs, she estimates.

"I've been waiting for a long time for someone to develop an electric vehicle that an average person can use every day as a commuter car," Odza said.

Driving the Leaf will take more effort than the Volvo C30 she is giving up. When you "get off the freeway, there's gasoline available all over the place. You don't have to be as meticulous with the planning as you do with the electric vehicle, where the infrastructure doesn't yet exist."

For early converts, the two first vehicle choices will be Nissan's Leaf and Chevrolet's Volt. Both represent vastly different approaches to electric-car technology.

Because it relies solely on battery power, the Leaf's range is limited to about 100 miles — maybe more if you drive conservatively in cool weather and definitely less if you rev the engine with the air conditioning running on a hot day.

The Volt can go a lot farther, primarily because it is technically a hybrid rather than a pure electric vehicle. It goes about 40 miles on a single charge. When the juice runs out, a four-cylinder gas engine kicks in as a generator and powers the electric drive train, extending the car's range by about 300 miles.

Owners will get some of the money back in savings through lower maintenance and operating fees.

Nissan says its Leaf will cost about $440 to maintain for the first three years. That would be about a third of what owners would pay to maintain a similar-size, gasoline-powered Versa.

Much of the savings comes from not having to do oil changes. Savings from the Volt will be less — just a few hundred dollars below the roughly $1,600 a driver would spend to maintain Chevrolet's compact Cruze sedan over a five-year period, according to IntelliChoice, an auto-information company.

People charging at home will pay an average of $2.75 each time they replenish the Leaf's 24-kilowatt-hour battery, according to Nissan. That amounts to about 3 cents a mile, depending on driving conditions. Drivers of an automatic-transmission Versa will pay about 11 cents a mile, figuring gasoline prices at about $3 a gallon. People driving the Volt on a combination of electricity and the gasoline-powered generator would pay about 8 cents a mile during an excursion of about 300 miles. About $1.50 of that would cover charging the 16-kilowatt-hour battery. That compares with about 10 cents a mile for a Chevrolet Cruze.

It's going to take time, but the era of gasoline combustion engines is starting to end, said former race-car driver Al Unser Jr., who now works with Zap, a Santa Rosa, Calif., electric-vehicles company.

"Eventually there will be a time when the electric or alternative-fuels car will be mainstream and what you are driving today will be in a museum," he said.