Car Charger Station

This is pretty cool:

Electric car charger.

Today, for the first time, I saw an electric car charger.  It was in front of the Manassas Museum in downtown Manassas.  It's pretty crazy looking and I had to do a double-take in the form of a second, and third, drive-by in my old-fashioned gas-powered engine car.  I finally stopped to get a closer look:

Five-month old Leo was asleep in the backseat, so I did not take the time to get a good picture or really look into how it works.  I assume there's a card swiper somewhere on it.  I did watch the electronic message long enough to learn that each charge is $5.  I'm not sure what exactly that means, but if it fills up your battery and then you can get 100-miles plus, it's a heck of a deal.  $5 in gas would take my car about 40 miles, and I have a Honda Civic, a pretty fuel-efficient car.

Anyways, this wasn't intended to be a save-the-world, go-green post, but I do really like the idea of rethinking the car.  A recent post about how much I spend on gas going to the Lake Where I Eat Lunch Often got me searching for how much I spend on my 50-mile daily commute to and from work.  With current prices at $3.65 for my area, I spend over $6 a day on gas... almost $7 if you include my lunch break.

Electric cars have always been neat inside my head.  They somehow were always in the distant future, though... alongside space elevators and helicopter hats. But now that I've seen a handy-dandy charger in a nearby small-town, they seem much more real.  The future is here.