It is the day before I pick up my Zero S. I'm very entertained by peoples first impressions of these electric vehicles and there misconceptions. I was originally going to celebrate my new purchase by driving it home the 150 miles, however the date it was ready to pick up happened to coincide with my partner's arrive from the S.F. airport so it turns out I will pick them both up with the truck. The funny part is when I was planning my trip home I was asking a friend if I could charge my bike at their house along the way. Their replay was: "I Don't really have a problem with it as long as our electricity bill doesn't go crazy. Do you know how much electricity you would require to charge up? Maybe then we could calculate some sort of rate." It is funny because most people have gotten to know kilobytes, megabits, gigabytes and now terabytes as they are in everyones electronic lives. However, also we all have used electricity for our entire lives almost nobody knows how many watts something is (unless its a 60 watt light bulb or a 500 watt car stereo system) and how many watts are in a kilowatt and what that means in terms of their bill and energy usage. I let her know that yes a payment plan could be worked out, I'd be happy to pay 5 times the cost, which happens to be less than running her dryer for one hour, or if calculated at the peak rate of energy that any household in California would ever pay if it was charged on a hot day at 3pm, it would cost up to $1.2 if the battery was completely dead. But under most peoples household energy rates at $0.16 per Kilowatt, it would cost about 64 cents to charge the whole battery. After explaining the cost to her she said: "I never knew that about electric vehicles -- that's fantastic! And no worries about the cost anymore, I had no idea it was so cheap.
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