Yesterday at the Plug In conference in San Jose, CA, technology company Ecotality and design firm Frog Design announced a new line of electric-vehicle chargers. The chargers, which will be rolled out in demonstration projects in 16 states with funding from the US Department of Energy, have a color touchscreen and are connected to the internet. A user can program the chargers to charge a vehicle by a certain time and when prices reach a certain level; the connectivity will also allow utilities to display messages and provide data to the charger about fluctuating electricity prices.

With its black and white color scheme and rounded edges, the Blink looks like it was designed by Apple. The cord-winding station below the touchscreen even resembles the clickwheel of a classic iPod. (Not surprising, since Frog famously created the look or "design language," called Snow White, used by Apple for its computers from 1984 to 1990.) Frog representatives explained that the chargers are meant to look friendly and approachable. They're also ready for co-branding--Starbucks or Best Buy might offer a free charge in their parking lot to get electric vehicle owners to spend money there, and could add their logo to the Blink on a skin. The company will offer a wall-mounted residential version and a free-standing version designed for parking lots.

Lee Slezak, a representative of the US Department of Energy vehicle technology program, and conference attendee, said Blink offers capabilities other chargers lack. "One thing we've been pushing for as we roll out charging infrastructure is to make sure it has the smallest possible impact on the grid."

Enabling communication between the utilities and the consumer, as the blink does, will help both: the utility can offer lower rates when demand is lower and users can program the charger to take advantage of this.

This video shows how the Blink system works:

The National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is out to change the perception of electric vehicles (EVs).

"EVs are more than glorified golf carts," says Chip Gribben, the NEDRA's PR Director. "Our whole mantra has been to dispel the myth that EVs are slow and we have been pretty successful."

Founded in 1997, NEDRA organizes drag racing competitions to show off the speed that vehicles powered by electricity can reach. As interest in electric vehicles has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of NEDRA's drag racing competitions.

This isn't only reflected by growing crowds. Gribben cites major sponsorship deals and notes that several NEDRA drivers have begun getting sponsorship from battery companies. NEDRA was also recently invited to the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series in July. "The fact that we have been invited means that the racing community is beginning to take a serious look at electric drag racing and NEDRA," he says.

Check out some videos of electric vehicles burning rubber at various NEDRA competitions below.

In last September's competition, the "KillaCycle" set a new NEDRA record by going a quarter of a mile in 7.864 seconds (reaching 169 miles per hour).

At the same competition, another electric bike, the ElectroCat, set a new NEDRA record for a 48-volt street-legal motorcycle by an eighth of a mile in 13.24 seconds (reaching 52.97 miles per hour).

The video above shows a Tesla roadster racing an in OBS junior dragster in a competition held earlier this year.

In this race, a Tesla roadster goes up against an electrified 1972 Datsun 1200, called White Zombie.

In this clip another electric drag bike, AGNS, makes a run.

Autolib imagined. Credit: Paris City Hall, 2008

The concept of selling mobility on demand rather than cars themselves may be finally gaining some traction. Remember the stackable urban rental cars proposed by GM-funded researchers at MIT last fall?

Well, Paris is working hard to make that vision a reality. The French capital is gearing up to offer the auto equivalent of Vélib, a distributed bicycle-rental scheme that provides more than 20,000 bikes at more than 1,400 sites across the city and the suburbs. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced in June that the city will place 4,000 small electric cars at 700 Autolib pickup points around Paris and the suburbs starting in 2010. And according to business daily Les Echos (story en français), train giant SNCF is vying to operate the Autolib points out of its train stations, which are distributed across and around Paris.

And now, the city may finally have a solution to a potential game-killing problem: the uneven distribution of vehicles as cars pile up at popular destinations. Parisians are well aware of this problem. By midmorning, for example, as Vélib stations at the periphery of the city empty out and those downtown jam up, it's not unusual to see trucks redistributing the bikes to counter the tide. That's easy enough with bicycles but harder to envision with even small electric vehicles.

The city's solution? According to a leaked document reported by auto-news website Caradisiac (again, story en français), the plan is to simply have users declare their destination upon checking out a car. In response, the system will determine the closest Autolib point with a free spot for drop-off and reserve that space. No news on solving another potential problem for Paris's Autolib scheme: the name. Lyon, which beat Paris to the bike-share program with its own vélo'v, already sports a conventional car-share program called Autolib.

Could a similar scheme work in the U.S.? Issues of Forbes magazine that will appear on newsstands next week tout the MIT City Car concept as the embodiment of a new car-sharing direction for troubled automakers. City Car codesigner Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group adds to the drumbeat in a recent editorial for architecture website BD. "People don't want cars, they want personal mobility," writes Mitchell. He argues that, rather than bailing out car firms, governments should be radically rethinking urban transport around ultralightweight battery electric vehicles (EVs). To provide mobility most efficiently, says Mitchell, we should

. . . organise urban electric cars in mobility-on-demand systems like the Vélib bicycle system in Paris. Racks of public-use cars would be provided at closely spaced sites across the service area. If you want to go somewhere, you walk to a nearby rack, swipe a card, pick up a car, drive it to a rack near your destination, and drop it off.