We hear that the Electric Car Corporation will be launching a new baby in London on April 30.

ECC plans to offer a pure-electric conversion of the Citroen C1 city car, with a promised range of 60 miles and target top speed of 60mph. For which you might expect a whopping £30,000 price tag, to match the e500 Fiat conversion shown off by the Nice Car Company at last year’s British Motor Show (before Nice ran out of juice and changed hands). But no, the ECC C1 is aiming to come in under £15,000, apparently.

ECC C1 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so we’re relieved to learn that the car will be called Evie.

Electric vehicle, EV, Evie, geddit? Oh never mind, we’ll tell you more about the car when we know more.

ECC describes itself as “a well financed public limited company with its headquarters in Park Lane, London”. Not far from where Tesla’s new shop is due to open up, in Knightsbridge. Both cars probably aim to provide second or third-car transport for the well-heeled, but attack the problem from different ends of the spectrum. You will be able to buy six Evies for the price of one Tesla Roadster, after all.

No doubt BMW, Smart, Renault-Nissan and other makers of electric cars that you can’t actually buy are delighted by the government’s mooted plan for subsidies, which will see taxpayers coughing up cash to help with the crippling likely cost of their long-awaited wares. We are promised a £2,000 to £5,000 windfall when we buy an electric or plug-in hybrid car but, much like the Mini-E or Smart ED, we can’t actually have one yet.

Today Reva, maker of electric car-like objects that you can actually buy and drive, has cried foul. It complains that the government’s announcement, designed to promote interest in electric motoring among the great unwashed, will actually do the reverse. In a statement Reva’s European top dog Keith Johnston said, “The Government’s announcement that a UK grant will be available, but not until 2011, will only create a sales vacuum for two years and cause widespread damage to the fledgling UK EV business, already fragile as a result of the recession.”

We can’t help but see the logic behind Johnston’s stance, particularly given that the government has said currently available vehicles like the G-Wiz won’t qualify for the handout, presumably for being not enough like a proper car.

If our leaders had set out to create a plan designed to promote the interests of the large automakers and to kill off innovation and entrepreneurial spirit among the little guys, they could scarcely have done a better job.

And even when judged by the yardstick of politicians’ promises, this postponed pledge appears especially empty. Does anyone seriously expect that the Labour government will be in power to enact its incentive in 2011? And, as we saw with the transition between red Ken and blue Boris in London, even well-developed and imminent changes to transport policy can be scrapped without justification by an incoming administration.

So forgive us for not breaking out the champagne just yet.

You don’t see many Segway scooters in the UK, and we’re not sure that the prospect of the Segway Puma is likely to change that situation. UK Segway riders exist in a legal limbo – their upright, lawnmower-like ride is not legal for road use and shouldn’t be used on the public pavement either – and the £4,800 price tag of the standard Segway i2 is steep enough to deter all but the most ardent technophile.

So the Puma (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) could change all that, but probably won’t. Puma takes the Segway concept of two-wheeled, self-balancing, gravity-defying, zero-turning-circle electric transport and adds a pair of seats and a roof. Like other Segways, the Puma uses weight shifting to trigger acceleration and braking in a smooth and uncanny fashion. Instead of standing on a platform and shifting your bodyweight, though, you slide the whole cab backwards and forwards on runners by pushing and pulling on the kind of steering-wheel-on-a-stick usually seen in the cockpits of airliners.

As well as carrying twice as many people as a standard Segway i2, Puma will also travel twice as far and go twice as fast, which means 25 to 35mph and a range of 25 to 35 miles. At about 135kg it is three times as heavy as the i2, and is clearly much more road biased than the sidewalk-suited original.

But all of these things are academic, because the Puma looks as unlikely to change the world as the original project “Ginger”. It’s currently a one-off prototype, it faces a thicket of legislative and safety brambles, and it already has the whiff of death about it – the Puma is being co-developed by that shambling animated corpse called General Motors.

But despite all the above negativity, we really would like to see the Segway Puma make it onto the market. We can’t help thinking that driving the Puma looks like quite a lot of fun, in the same way that hanging onto the neck of a startled horse can be fun, especially when viewed in hindsight.

So if someone offered us a ride or a drive in a Puma we’d bite their arm off. And we’d worry about emergency stops and crash protection 35 miles later, after the batteries had run out.