Hey, I’m a practical guy. When it snows, I’ll take my Jeep.
Invisible Wombat: Hey, I’m not trying to harsh your mellow here. I’d love to put up a windmill and some solar panels, just for the sheer fun of it and as a personal statement of independence. And to help the environment a bit. Sure.
I was taking exception to some of the statements you made about it, such as that powering your car would be cheap because you already had the power system anyway, or that you could feasibly power a daily-driven electric car with your system without supplementing it from the grid.
At this stage of the game, there is no way that you can make driving electric from your own power generation cheaper than driving a gas driven car. So accept that you’re choosing to drive in a much more expensive way for your own valid reasons. Just don’t try to justify your system on a cost basis. The math doesn’t work out. If it did, you’d see wide-scale adoption of alternative power all through the country.
The EV-1. Jeez, I hate these conspiracy theories. Oh yes, it was the oil companies that killed the EV-1. Or the evil government. Or GM was just paying lip-service and never intended to pursue electrics at all. Uh huh.
Here’s the real scoop: GM was investigating electric cars. As part of their research plan, they wanted to put a few hundred on the road and see how they stood up in daily driving. They made those cars at a loss, and leased them at a loss. They probably only got insurance coverage for them by agreeing up-front with the insurance company that they would pull them out of service once the experiment was over. So they carried out the experiment, found out what they needed to know, and pulled the cars back in as planned. No evil conspiracy needed.
Sure, the owners offered to waive liability. Think that would have stood up in court? Or with a third party had an EV1 killed someone who didn’t sign the form? Or with someone who bought the car from the original purchaser and knew nothing about the agreement with GM?
GM also has a policy of stocking parts to repair any car it sells for a minimum of 10 years. Selling those cars would have meant having to set up a service network, with repair manuals, parts, training, whatever special shop tools were required, etc.
For 800 units, the cost and hassle just didn’t make any sense to GM. Those owners who are so royally pissed at GM for taking their beloved EV1’s away should instead be grateful that GM heavily subsidized them and allowed them to drive the cars for a few years for way under cost in the first place. Ungrateful whiners.
Dude! 
There’s a lot of core infrastructure required for an alternate-power home. If I’m already buying a decent windmill, the battery storage system, the switching system, the backup generator, and a pile of panels, and designing to make sure I produce enough power even during still, cloudy years, then I think the incremental cost of producing enough excess for the car most of the time isn’t that high.
Well, my cost estimates didn’t include all the infrastructure stuff - just the raw cost of panels required to produce the power for the car alone. It’s a LOT. At .3 kW/h per mile, and a $500 panel producing 100W, you’re looking at $1500 of solar cells required to provide enough power in one hour to get you a mile down the road. If you have a 36 mile commute, call it 50 miles of range required. If you can charge five hours a day, that’s $15,000 in solar cells alone, just for the car. Then double it to account for the charging losses since you’ll be charging a storage battery, then charging the car from the battery. Now you need $30,000 in cells, just for your car. I imagine buying in bulk you could shave some cost off of that, and by sharing power with the house you could probably use some excess power you’re generating for the house, assuming you are sizing for peak loads. But it’s still hella expensive. And those cells need maintenance and don’t last forever, and the up-front investment carries a time-value cost of money penalty. You’ll never, ever make that money back in gas savings.
In comparison, if you just bought something like a smart car that gets 60 mpg, you can make your trip to work and back on roughly half a gallon of gas. At $3/gallon, that’s $1.50 per day in gas costs. If you work 300 days a year, that’s $450 a year for gas. You’ll pay more than that in interest on your solar cell investment. And you don’t have to plug in, worry about long cloudy stretches, worry about your charge running low, maintain the car batteries, clean the solar cells, repair the system, yada yada yada.
Do it as a hobby. Do it as an experiment in self-sufficient living. Because if you’re doing it to save money, you’re in for a rude shock once you start adding up all the bills.