I am a week late on this one, but found it to be pretty interesting. The Long Tail blog has a brief post about a new venture that will sell electric cars for free and instead charge for the electricity.
The new company would use existing battery technology and increase the number of charging stations to extend the range of the useful range of the car.
This theme seems to be playing out in the household arena also. I came across this company a few weeks ago: http://www.citizenre.com/web/index.php
Time will tell if the business model works.
The parallel theory of free cell phones in exchange for the minutes contract never really caught on. Same will go for cars. If this were true then gas companies would have been giving away free cars long ago.
It’s several years later and I haven’t really heard about this taking off. All the same, I love the idea of it.
Maybe coming soon!