I bought an electric lawn tractor several years ago. It was a Ryobi RM480e from Home Depot. I think it was about $4,000 and it was great until it wasn't.

During the second year the batteries started going and early in the third year it had a catastrophic failure (main ECU/motor controller+) and I haven't been able to get it to work since. It had 72 hours on the clock.

Rainman is never gonna let me live that down.

I can see the advantage of a small & light electric car, basically a go- kart, for 2 people and a couple bags of groceries just for taking the kid to school a mile away or making a quick run to the grocery store where gas cars are inefficient in barely getting warmed up by the time the trip is over.

But that's about the only real vehicle application advantage I see for electric cars. Nothing heavy duty.

I did some contract work for clients around 2010 looking into Alt-E and "green" BS. The only thing I found with any potential was rain water reclamation. It really worked well in the prototype in my basement for flushing toilets, etc.

The thing was pretty slick. I put a 5,000 gal 9' X 18' foot Intex pool in my basement, built scuppers to divert leaves etc, made a filter using a carpet cleaning brush to catch roof gravel and the pump and filter that came with the pool on timers.

I used a big float valve (like a toilet) to keep it from over filling and made a low limit switch to keep from burning out the pump if things got too low.

I had a toilet that was leaking and it drained the works, the low limit switch failed and burnt out. I never repaired it.

Putting storm water in the sewer is illegal as hell. They measure your sewage bill by your metered water intake. At the time, water was a penny/gal, sewage two cents/gal. It wouldn't take much to re-up the system, but now that I'm here alone, my water usage is less than one unit (100 cuft/748 gal) per month.