Dynasty, GEM, Zap!, ZENN, Phoenix.

Certain readers in our audience will see this list and think, "What about Tesla? And Miles?" I'm not sure why those last two companies were not part of the electric vehicle panel at AFVI on Tuesday, but they weren't. Miles even had a presence at the show (Tesla didn't).

Whatever the case, representatives from those five electric car companies gave nice State of the EV Market/Industry presentations and if there was one overwhelming idea from the panel it was Let's Work Together (which, as I mentioned yesterday, might as well be the unofficial slogan of AFVI right now).

The best representation of this idea came from Gary Starr, chairman and co-founder of Zap! Starr talked about The Zap! Challenge (good branding, there) which wants to sell 100,000 EVs – any EVs, not just Zap!'s – each year by 2010. Sales of a hundred thousand a year would make up less than one percent of the new vehicle sales in the US but eliminate about a billion tons of CO2 each year. The other part of the Zap! challenge is to plant a million trees by 2010. Zap plants 200 trees in a third world country for each car it sells. Starr said a teacher once told him that there are two things you can do to help the environment and the economy: drive an electric car and plant a tree. The Zap! Challenge is an obvious embodiment of this advice from years ago.

there's much more (too much?) after the jump

The San Francisco International Auto Show starts tomorrow (and runs through November 26) at the Moscone Center and Zap! will be showing off their newest car. Zap! will be publicly introducing the Xebra Xero, their first electric car with solar charging. They have taken their existing plug-in EV Xebra, and bolted a panel of solar cells to the roof to allow the battery pack to be charged anytime the car is in outside during the daylight. Zap! is also offering a larger solar panel charger that customers can mount on their rooftop to charge the car while it's parked in the garage. It's great to see vehicles like this being developed, but it would sure help to attract more customers if the design looked a little more integrated, instead of like one of Bre Pettis's weekend projects (no disrespect to Bre, because I love trying his projects).

[Source: Zap]