Bay State’s first charged-up SmartCar

(NECN: Peter Howe, Somerville/Cambridge, Mass.) After years of talk, 2011 is shaping up as the year all-electric mass-market cars finally hit the U.S. market, cars that run 100 percent on rechargeable gasoline, zero gasoline or diesel.

On Monday, Eric Giler of Boston didn’t just pick up a new car but made some history, taking possession of the first all-electric SmartCar sold — or in this case, technically, leased — by the Herb Chambers Smart Center in Somerville.

“The fact that it’s not dependent on fossil fuels for running it, I mean, that fundamentally is what’s interesting to me,” Giler said.

It helps that Giler is a big-time techie: Founder of Brooktrout Technology, a Needham communications software and hardware technology maker that was bought by Excel Switching in 2005, and since mid-2008 CEO of Witricit, a Watertown, Mass., maker of plug-less recharging systems (“wireless electricity”) for cell phones, laptops, tools, and maybe someday cars.

After joining Witricity, Giler vowed, “My next car, no matter what, it was going to be an electric car, and by that, I mean a full electric car.”

The SmartCar he picked up and drove home Monday was one of only 250 being made available in the U.S. this year by Mercedes-Benz — at a price of $2,500 down and $599 a month for a lease. (At that price, you could easily lease three regular cars.)

Herb Chambers Smart Center brand manager Todd Whitelaw says the company is deliberately starting slowly, with committed early adopters, before moving to mass-market sales next year. “It’s a small initial group going out there — obviously no company wants to go all in to make 10 thousand of these to sell in a marketplace — but as a small sort of ‘test the waters,’ see how the public will embrace it. I think it’s a long-term commitment that society has to make towards the electrification of transportation” to supplant gasoline and diesel.”

Something industry advocates expect will speed adoption of all-electric vehicles is deployment of recharging stations, like the “free juice bars” the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, Cambridge, offers in its parking garage. Late last year then-Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian A. Bowles said the state planned to deploy 80 to 100 recharging stations in 2011. They would be paid for with $200,000 from an air-pollution settlement with power-plant owner AES.

The battery-powered SmartCar goes 80 to 98 miles on a single charge. That’s way more than enough for Giler, who drives just 5 miles from his Back Bay home to work in Watertown and will recharge his SmartCar at Witricity’s offices while he’s working. As a technologist, Giler is confident that as the price comes down, electric-car adoption will depend really on how many Americans have, like him, short commutes.

“That’s got a lot to do with how far you can go. The electric car people call your fear of running out of battery ‘power-range anxiety,’ so that becomes a driving factor” in determining how many people want to count on an all-electric car to get to and from work.

That, and of course, price. The two other mainstream all-electrics set to hit the road today (not counting the $120,000 Tesla roadster), are the $33,000 Nissan Leaf and the $40,000 Chevrolet Volt, which purists say doesn’t count as a true all-electric because it has a backup gas engine on-board but is designed to be operated under normal circumstances as an all-electric rechargeable car indefinitely. Both cars come with a $7,500 federal electric-car rebate, but like the SmartCar, for now they’re likely to be cars for true believers with some money, not affordable mainstream vehicles.

With videographer Sean G. Colahan

Herb Chambers smart center Boston, MA - CLICK HERE