It’s good to see the first car-share program in Toronto begin to embrace plug-in vehicles. CarShare, which has about 10,000 members, is part of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund’s EV300 Initiative and announced yesterday that it will be introducing a half dozen plug-in vehicles — full electric, extended range and plug-in hybrid — to its citywide fleet. The first location is downtown at Mountain Equipment Co-Op’s King St. and Spadina Ave. store. This location makes sense, given the progressive and eco-aware nature of MEC’s customers. Members of AutoShare will get a chance to reserve the Mitsubishi i-Miev that will be based at the charging spot, giving Torontonians an easy way to test drive plug-in vehicles and get a feel for their performance. I’ve always thought that car-share programs and even car rental agencies are the best avenue through which electric vehicles can be introduced to the broader public, who may be curious about these vehicles but really have no other way to get a feel for the technology. As AutoShare president Kevin McLaughlin said, “This is the first step in letting Torontonians experience the future of the personal mobility.”

I use ZipCar myself, only because it has more convenient pick-up locations in my neighbourhood, but am a big fan of AutoShare and am eager to join up when the opportunity presents itself. I don’t know if ZipCar has plans to introduce plug-in vehicles to its fleet, but I hope it does — in fact, if it doesn’t, it could be the one thing that gets me to jump ship to AutoShare (or simply be members of both services).

Earth2Tech has an interesting post here (hat tip to Katie) about a company called Evatran that has developed a system for charging electric vehicles that doesn’t require a plug or a charging cord. The idea is that you would drive onto a parking block, which would sit permanently in your driveway or a parking spot. Once the front wheels are on the block it will establish a wireless proximity link with the vehicle and begin some form of magnetic induction charging. Now that’s convenient, and it would make it far easy for folks to dump their internal combustion engine vehicle and go electric. The only problem is that this form of charging is inefficient, and the idea of one day having millions of cars charging through this method but throwing away 10, 20 or 30 per cent of the energy for the sake of convenience is a non-starter (unless of course we’ve developed too-cheap-to-meter nuclear fusion and have more emission-free electricity than we need — i.e. a non-starter). Still, if we can get 95-plus per cent efficiencies some day it will be a welcome addition to electric-vehicle infrastructure.

BTW: For anyone looking for the latest assessment of wireless power transfer technology, check out this fairly recent and comprehensive study by the Electric Power Research Institute.