It's extremely important that electric cars don't look like electric cars. I mean, if people wanted to buy George Jetson's one-seater bubble car, GM would be selling one-seat bubble cars. People don't want bubble cars.

Which is why it's so great to hear that Hybrid Technologies is building an electric vehicle that will look and act just like a Mini Cooper. Well, maybe it won't act exactly the same. It'll take five hours to fill up it's lithium polymer batteries and it will only go 150 miles on a full charge.

But I guess the most important difference is the price. This attractive EV costs about three times the base price of the Mini Cooper, almost $60,000. And that, my friends, is Who Killed the Electric Car.

Via Autoblog

The French postal service, know as La Poste, wants to trade in 10,000 of their delivery vehicles for electric cars. After testing various alternative vehicles on postal routes for the last two years, Le Poste has determined that switching to an electric fleet can save the nationalized service big bucks. Going green would slash fuel costs by an estimated $95 million.

What's more, since 80% of France runs on nuclear power, the energy to charge the new electric fleet won't come from dirty coal plants. Accordingly, Le Poste reports that the change to electric will keep 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year

The switch won't be a next-day-delivery, however. Now that the Le Poste has made their ambitions public, they'll start to accept proposals from (European-only) automakers for the right to manufacture the first 500 electric autos.