If you’re green-minded, you may be surprised that anyone needs to come up with a list of reasons to buy a plug-in electric car. After all, it reduces your carbon footprint, saves on gas, lets you achieve “ZAP” (zero air pollution), does your part in helping to put the greedy petroleum industry out of business, allows you to get from Point A to Point B while feeling virtuous and gets you dates with eco-hipsters.

In all seriousness, automakers understand who is buying their plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles right now: eco-conscious individuals with decent disposable incomes, people with a seething hatred of Exxon-Mobil and BP, and people who desperately want dates with eco-hipsters. Once they all have electric cars, the market for plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles at its current status-quo will be largely saturated until the vehicle prices start coming down and the battery life between plug-ins starts going up. Until then, the general public will be generally disinclined to sink $18,000 or more into a car that doesn’t go “vrroooom” when you hit the accelerator.

So in order to do my part to educate the masses, I’ve come up with some other reasons to buy a car that plugs into the garage wall outlet next to the cordless drill and the beer fridge, even in the face of the swirling, mysterious Electric Unknown.

Tesla is going to release an electric car you might actually be able to afford. Super-sexy Tesla Motors Inc., helmed by

The Tesla Roadster. Yes, it's sexy. No, you can't afford it. Source: Tesla Motors

Elon Musk, a guy who makes spaceships, will be offering something else in addition to its current and only model, the $109,000 Tesla Roaster, a favorite of celebrities and performance automobile enthusiasts everywhere. (Make that, “wealthy performance automobile enthusiasts” everywhere). The all-electric Tesla Motors announced in late May that it will be selling some more common stock in order to finance the development of the Tesla Model X, an SUV-like electric vehicle that will broaden the company’s appeal among consumers and sell for a mere $50,000 (nobody ever said being cool doesn’t cost money). Did I mention the Tesla guy builds SPACESHIPS?

You can stop handing your wallet over to your old car dealer’s service department. Let’s face it: cars based on internal combustion engines have a lot of moving parts. And where there are moving parts, there are opportunities for things to go very wrong very regularly. Electric cars have no traditional engine or exhaust system, and lack a lot of other moving parts that gas-powered cars have. They have a battery that needs to be changed every 100,000 miles or so.

No more reading two-year-old magazines in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube. No combustion engine, no oil. No oil, no oil changes. No oil changes, no hours spent sitting in a plastic chair in a stinky waiting room flipping through the November 2002 issue of Car and Driver magazine. And no slimy oil stains in the driveway.

Regenerative braking. While automotive research and development teams are still tinkering with it at the prototype stage, in the near future, we might begin to see electric vehicles that use regenerative braking. The concept, which involves re-capturing the kinetic energy of the car’s motion and the thermal energy generated from braking and feeding it back into the car’s battery as electricity, could potentially lead to longer ranges for electric cars and reducing the need for plugging-in. While the Toyota Prius uses regenerative braking on a very small scale, electric cars of the not-very-distant future could potentially make wide-scale use of the technology, making electric vehicles more palatable to drivers who would like an electric car but who suffer from “range anxiety,” or the fear that the electric car will run out of juice at dusk on a deserted stretch of highway, near a dusty, abandoned town full of tumbleweeds. With zombies closing in. And Mulder and Scully nowhere to be seen.

Special highway lanes. An increasing number of municipalities in North America allow electric vehicles to travel in special high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) highway lanes normally reserved for cars carrying two or more people. (You know…those empty lanes with the black triangle signs you long to be able to dodge into during rush hour but can’t since there’s no one in the car with you?) Some traffic-congested European cities even allow electric vehicles to drive in bus lanes.

Free and priority parking. Many municipalities are offering free reserved parking in parking-challenged parts of cities. At the Denver airport, electric vehicles can park for free at a specially designed garage and plug-in facility. BMW Group DesignworksUSA partnered with Canopy Airport Parking to create what the companies are calling “the world’s greenest parking facility. The garage opened at the end of last year, and has capacity for about 4,200 vehicles. It also showcases a variety of environmentally friendly transportation technologies, including the use of solar power, geothermal energy, wind energy, CNG, biodiesel and hybrid shuttles. The building, which is expected to attain LEED Gold certification, also features a juice bar charging station that will provide free charging.

Other cities that offer free or priority parking to electric vehicle drivers – or penalty-free parking for single drivers in carpool lots – include Cincinnati, Sacramento, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Oak Park, Illinois.

Tax credits. Everybody loves a tax credit. Municipalities and nations all over the world have instituted tax breaks for purchases of plug-in electric or hybrid-electric vehicles. In the U.S., the the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) created a special tax credit for new plug-in electric vehicles to the tune of $2,500 plus $417 for each kilowatt-hour of battery capacity over five kwh (up to $5,000). All in all, American electric vehicle owners can reap about $7,500 in tax credits from the federal government alone. (Gas-electric hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius can earn up to $2,500 in credits since it has a smaller battery than an all-electric plug-in vehicle.)

On top of the federal tax rebate rewards, residents of certain states can also claim state tax credits. Residents of California or Georgia, for example, can grab another $5,000 in tax credits from those states. New Jersey and Illinois offer $4,000 rebates. In Washington, D.C., electric car owners are exempt from vehicle excise taxes and receive a steep discount on their car registration fees. In Washington state, electric cars are exempt from sales tax at purchase.

Blissful quiet. Lacking internal combustion engines, electric cars are very quiet. While this may actually be a drawback if you’re a 17-year-old gearhead or someone who fantasizes about driving in the Indy 500, for the rest of us trying to sleep while the nurse next door fires up her poorly maintained 1997 VW Golf to leave for her 6:00 am shift at the hospital, the quiet of an electric vehicle would be a gift from the gods.

The so-called “EV Grin”. What is it? It’s the smug grin that drivers of plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles gain when they finally

The universal EV Grin.

begin cruising around silently, emissions-free and with as much as $12,500 worth of tax credits in their pockets. It remains fixed as they pass gas stations, cruise in highway HOV lanes and park in reserved parking spots, until the rest of us want to slap them silly.

Electric cars won’t be the height of eco-cool for much longer. Purchase an electric vehicle and enjoy your Green Giant status while you can. Once hydrogen fuel cell cars make a serious commercial debut, you and your electric car will be second-rate, at best, on the coolness chart.

Though fuel cell cars have been around, at least in prototype, for decades (the first was GM’s Electrovan, introduced as a concept car in 1966), the modern hydrogen fuel cell car still isn’t quite ready for its close-up. Efficiencies are still low: current fuel cell cars are still only about 17 to 22 percent efficient (meaning that 73 to 78 percent of energy is lost in the conversion from hydrogen to energy available to turn the wheels) and existing fuel cell vehicles – the Mercedes-Benz F-cell Roadster and the Honda FCX Clairty are two of the most recent – have fairly low top speeds. There are still other drawbacks, as well. The high weight and pressure of the hydrogen the car needs to carry is still very impractical, and refueling stations are pretty scarce, unless you live in urban Southern California or Tokyo.

While in the U.S. a cancellation of federal dollars formerly targeted for hydrogen fuel cell automobile research and development (the Obama administration has decided that federal dollars will be better spent thrown behind plug-in electric and hybrid car technologies) may cause some hiccups in fuel cell progress, automakers haven’t given up on the idea of a viable hydrogen fuel cell car.

“Yes, there are a lot of opportunities for battery-powered vehicles, but in many ways, the opportunities for fuel cells are much bigger,” Herbert Kohler, head of the Daimler AG research unit that is tasked with developing alternative-fuel cars, told the Wall Street Journal. Kohler hinted that Daimler AG is aiming to bring road-worthy hydrogen fuel-cell cars to the commercial market by 2015.

Why will hydrogen fuel cell cars be so disruptive? Consider that the average electric car on the road today can go about 30 to 60

The GM Electrovan, the world's first hydrogen fuel cell vehilce, circa 1966. Source: GM

miles on a low-cost battery and up to about 100 miles on a more expensive battery. After that, the vehicle needs to be plugged in and charged for as many as eight hours. A hydrogen fuel cell car, on the other hand, can go about 240 miles between hydrogen fill-ups – and the fill-up takes about three minutes.

So once the limitations of hydrogen fuel cell cars are dealt with by the world’s hydrogen geeks, your electric car will be about as cool as your father’s collection of Neil Diamond records.

You’ve been warned.

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