Cannot find out if the Leaf will get a yellow, or white, or any HOV carpool-lane sticker from California DMV. I have had one on my 2004 Prius since 2004, and it is set to expire in June 2011, as far as I know. No carpool lane privileges, no deal.
White sticker, good to 2015. Yellow sticker doesn't go through June '11, it expires January 1 just as it was supposed to do before they started messing with the legislation renewal.
Minor point- assuming SB535 gets signed by the Gov (and no reason to believe it won't, despite the fact that it's not a great bill), the hybrids do indeed get extended another 6 months. Then there's a 6-month "cleansing period" during which the hybrids get pulled out before the PHEVs go in on Jan 1, 2012.
Re: electric rates- the reason Nissan can't give this info, as illustrated in this thread, is because there are literally several thousand utilities in the country, and then a bunch of individual situations on top of each. Utilities in this go-round don't really want to deploy whole separate meters for EVs, but they are aware of the issue of the vehicles pushing the rest of the house into a higher tier, and are working on ways to alleviate that (looks like they're all leaning toward sub-panels and/or sub-meters). PG&E does already have an EV rate (E-9), which, combined with any of the meter separation technologies actually gives you some of the cheaper off-peak rates in the state.
For info about PG&E's EV programs:
www.pge.com/electricvehicles/
877-743-7782
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