Electric Cars: Where to Plug In Away From Home?

From: Business Week

Plug-in electric vehicles have an edge over hydrogen-powered cars for a simple reason: The infrastructure to support them, the electric grid, is already in place. At night, you just connect the car to an outlet in your garage.
Unless of course, you don't have a garage. Now, Coulomb Technologies of Campbell, Calif., wants to provide service to city-dwellers and other drivers who lack handy access to an outlet for their cars. It's testing a subscription-based network in San Jose called ChargePoint, whose members use special key fobs to access outlets mounted on lamp posts, parking meters, or in parking lots. The power isn't free. Subscribers must register a credit card when they sign up for the service. Then, when they swipe the key fob, their usage is metered and charged to the card.
China is taking a different, top-down approach. It's starting to build a nationwide network of charging points to speed the adoption of electric vehicles. Electricité de France is working with carmakers on a similar idea.

—By David Kiley, Edited by Adam Aston