Infrastructure Électrique: France Spends $2.2 Billion on Charging Stations

Andrew Price on October 5, 2009 at 2:58 pm PDT

While San Francisco and Portland race to build America's first city-wide electric car infrastructure, France (which already beat us to bike sharing) may have just lapped them both in an electric Citroen. The French government just announced it will spend $2.2 billion on a network of electric car charging stations:

The government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012.

The plan is being coordinated with various fleet operators and electric car manufacturers so that there's actually a demand for the stations as they get installed. Peugeot-Citroen says it'll have “four small electric vehicles ready for sale in 2010, including two small city cars.” They won't even need our Teslas. 2 responses|

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Ed Stenger 8 months ago
Interesting and very nice post.I would like to point out that the other French car maker - Renault - plans to sell not one but four electric car models for all kinds of public.You can check them out there : http://www.renault-ze.com/uk/#/uk/home.htmlMeanwhile, Nissan - which is associated to Renault - plans to sell the LEAF, another electric cars.I agree with

jrdx we need electric cars ASAP as they can really help us - with the help of bikes and buses - get around in cities without polluting our beautiful planet.Keep up the GOOD work, I just joined yesterday. ;)
jrdx 9 months ago
Clearly this is good since electric cars are better than fossil fuel cars in almost every way. However, this is only attacking a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the fact that we are even using cars so much in the first place, regardless of whether or not they are electric, gas, diesel, bio-diesel, etc. The real breakthrough will be when we stop using personal motorized transit (the car) for our day-to-day lives and instead rely on walking, biking, and public transit. Cars should be for special occasions, just like airplanes are. It drives me nuts that some of the biggest problems with cars (in addition to their environmental destruction since they are a very inefficient way to travel (thousands of pounds are needed to move ~200 pounds of "cargo")) are almost always overlooked, those problems being 1) they are a huge part of the reason we are obese since we use them to get everywhere rather than getting off our butts and walking, biking, etc., and 2) they dehumanize urban interaction since everybody is self-contained in a little shell and treats everyone else as an inanimate annoyance (in other words, cars turn you inwards and make you more self-centered than does being "exposed" for everyone to see like when you are walking, biking, and even taking public transit). We need to stop designing our urban areas around the car and design them around people