According to this article, from Green Car Reports, "In their third full year of sales, more plug-in electric cars were sold in the U.S. than ever before.
The 2013 total of roughly 96,000 90,000 electric vehicles didn't quite double the 2012 total of about 53,000, but with 16 different plug-in cars offered for sale as of this month, the numbers seem likely to grow again this year.
And last year's total was more than five times the total first-year sales of 17,500 in 2011.
As it has been since going on sale in December 2010, the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car was the plug-in leader, with a total of 23,094 sales last year--just slightly down on the 23,461 deliveries in 2012, though far ahead of the first-year total of 7,671 in 2011."
There were 16 electric car models of the market in 2013 -- 16! True most were so-called compliance cars being made in small numbers for sale in California. But that doesn't make the cars any less real. So now we have Teslas and Volts and SmartForTwo and Fiats and Minis and lots of other options on the roads, greening the planet as they go. And not one of them is as ugly as the EV-1.
The electric car transition will be far more important for reducing our carbon footprint than any commuter trains or streetcar projects will ever be. And their power source is shifting from coal (already cleaner than gasoline-powered cars) to cleaner natural gas. In some areas a lot of power is coming from the growing wind and solar power sectors; with some people able to install their own solar car re-charging stations.
Now if we could just get those solar roads going...