Wouldn’t it be great if we had the technology to make cars right now that don’t run on gasoline, are affordable, and use already existing infrastructure? If we had that kind of technology, we could wean ourselves from our politically and economically dangerous dependence on foreign oil. We could save tons of money and improve the environment. We could stop, or at least slow down, the financial death spiral the entire US seems to have been in since right around November 2007.

Too bad this technology is decades away. It is decades away, right?

Wrong!

It might surprise you to learn that electric vehicles were invented before cars with internal combustion engines back at the turn of the century. Electricity was fairly new and not everyone had easy access to it. So when the internal combustion engine was combined with the new ‘horseless carriage’, the modern car automobile as we know it today was born. Everyone except a few moldy historians forgot all about the electric car.

Last year however, Canada remembered. The result is the new Canadian Zenn Car, which is an acronym for Zero Emission No Noise, an electric subcompact you can buy right now for an affordable price. The three-door hatchback Zenn is built on a standard auto chassis and weighs in at a mere 1,200 pounds. Because it is not carrying around a heavy engine or most of the other internal parts of a gas-powered car it is lightweight and remarkably durable.

You can plug the Zenn into any standard electrical outlet and charge it completely in about four hours at a cost of between 1-3 cents per mile, depending on the cost of electricity in your local area. Compare that to the 12 cents per mile (if gas is at $4 per gallon) you will pay on a highly-efficient gasoline-powered vehicle that gets at least 35 MPG.

But electric vehicles are slow and have a short range, right? The Zenn’s top speed is 25 miles per hour, and it will go 35 miles on a single charge. Obviously, it’s not the car of choice for a long commute. But if you regularly drive 5 to 10 miles to work in city traffic in a gasoline-powered automobile, it won’t take you long at all to save money driving a Zenn instead, even if you recharge it right off the grid every night after you come home.

If you install solar panels or a small wind generator to provide your own electricity, fueling the Zenn is free. If you live in an area of the country where you can also sell your self-generated electricity back to the local power company (not all states allow this, but many are working on it as we speak), you can actually drive your Zenn car for free and make money on any leftover power too.

Right now, the Zenn car has a sticker price of between $12,000 and $15,000, but it is being produced in such small quantities that price isn’t representative of its actual cost were it to be mass produced the way Fords, Toyotas, and Hondas are. Even at $15,000, its price is definitely at the low end for a new vehicle, and because the innards of an electric car have almost no moving parts, it is not costly to maintain like a gasoline powered car, requires no oil or fluids, and very little in the way of routine maintenance.

Want something with a bit more testosterone? If a 2008 Tesla won’t make you happy, nothing will make you happy! With a design guaranteed to make lithe, high-maintenance women fall at your feet, and the capability to go from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds, the Tesla has everything a motor addict needs except the noise. The ride is smooth and completely silent, and the mileage is equivalent to about 135 MPG or a penny a mile. Unlike the timid Zenn, the Tesla has a range of 220 miles per charge and recharges in as little as 3.5 hours. You’ll need all those pennies you save on gas: The base sticker price on a new Tesla is currently $109,000 and they are only available by special order.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, but what if I want something less nerdy than a Canuck-mobile and a tad less pricey than an eco-chic car for movie stars? Well, if you’re one of those people who feels that “they also serve who only sit and wait,” you can sit and wait for Nissan to come out with their electric car line-up, which they promised (just yesterday in fact) to have showroom-ready and available no later than 2010. Nissan announced that the final production vehicle will have a top speed of 75 MPH, a range of about 100 miles, and a recharging time of about 8 hours. Two divisions will build the cars: one will supply electric cars for the Japanese market, and the other (in partnership with Renault) for the European and US market.

If you just can’t wait that long, you can check out what three ordinary guys did to three ordinary vehicles to turn them into cars which cost nothing to run. A recent Sierra Club article tells the stories of Darryl Dickey, Stephen Weitz, and Alex Beamer, three ordinary guys sick of paying high gas prices who took matters into their own hands and converted ordinary vehicles into cars that run on solar and/or wind-power. It wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t expensive, and now each of them own cars that will run for a lifetime for free.

Cars that will run for a lifetime for free? If you are the paranoid type (and who isn’t these days?) you may be smelling a bit of a conspiracy here. What would it profit the oil industry or the auto industry to provide people with such cars?

Filmmaker Chris Paine wondered the same thing after GM confiscated his EV1, an experimental electric vehicle they tested with customer volunteers between 1998 and 2003 to show the state of California that electric vehicles were impractical and customers would reject them. When people fell in love with their EV1s and began to beg GM for the right to purchase them outright (they were tested as part of a lease program), GM recalled all the EV1s and destroyed them.

The result is Chris Paine’s groundbreaking 2004 film Who Killed The Electric Car which chronicles EV1’s popularity, GM’s attempts to hush that popularity up, and the resultant destruction of all remaining EV1s at the very same time various states were clamoring for low-carbon-emission vehicles.

Electric cars won’t please everybody. But why are American carmakers not producing them? They do have the technology. They produced a wildly popular, easy to run and cheap-to-make electric car as recently as 2004 and then pulled it right off the market when they discovered people would buy it. Electric cars have been in existence for almost 100 years now. In fact, the sexiest car available on the market today is an electric car. So why are Chrysler lots still clogged with vans and SUVs that won’t sell, and why is Ford giving up on the US to move overseas and sell cheap, badly-made gasoline powered cars to China?

I’m no conspiracy theorist. But it does make you wonder, does it not?

In the meantime, this blog post should be enough to get you started kicking your own petroleum habit, or at least thinking about it. Now if we could just get our government on board…