Who Killed the Electric Car?
I don’t generally watch documentary films. Lately though, I’ve seen a few. I started with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, then An Inconvenient Truth, and now Who Killed the Electric Car?
Anybody see a pattern here?
I rate The Smartest Guys and Electric Car as the best of the three. They were both entertaining enough, filled in some missing facts, and also reminded us of the timeline beneath each story.
I think Electric Car showed that while EVs (electric vehicles) were having a hard time in the 90’s, it was the long-term decision to drop the EV path that was so wrong. Sure, few people wanted a car with 100 mile range when gas was $1.50 a gallon … but we didn’t know how that was going to change as gas climbed from $3 to $4. Actually gas prices are rising as battery technology improves, closing the gap.
An interesting tidbit is that the average American driver covers 29 miles per day. An EV already works as a commuter car, especially in a multi-car household.
The movie also gets some digs in about the hydrogen lobby. It pretty much confirmed my view that hydrogen has been championed by people who either (1) make money off the research now, or (2) would benefit from (far) future hydrogen filling stations. Remember, if we went to EVs we wouldn’t need gas stations (be that gas-oline or hydrogen-gas). It wasn’t too surprising to hear that gasoline companies helped with “grassroots” efforts to fight electric car charging stations. How were they going to make their money when chargers were installed at home and office?
Arianna Huffington has a pretty entertaining review of the movie playing up the conspiracy aspects, but maybe Joel Makower has taken the best move forward with his article Who’s Reviving the Electric Car? There are a lot of interesting things in the works, and that’s in line with the closing words of the movie: EV foes might have won the battle, but not the war.
One car Makower mentions is the Tesla Roadster, which I linked to a few days ago. I saw a glimpse of one and thought “hey, that looks like a Lotus.” Indeed it is, as Makower writes:
They claim that the Tesla Roadster, built on the chassis of a Lotus Elise, will go from 0 to 60 mph in just four seconds, travel 250 miles before needing to be recharged (by plugging in to a regular AC outlet), and retail for about $80,000. They intend that Tesla’s second-generation car, due out in 18-24 months, will be somewhat more popularly priced at around $50,000.
The EV folks seem forced into the performance market at this point. They don’t have the volume to produce a low-cost commuter car, so the path is to add more batteries and make a sport car. Well that, and the available low-volume bodies are already sports cars.
We can only hope that higher volumes will allow these manufacturers to bootstrap their operation and produce more mass-market cars.
July 8th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Seven thousand of “the same lithium-ion batteries found in cameras and cell phones”!
Oy vay! Run for your life!
Check this out. And there are numerous other examples, not all caused by knockoff batteries. Search “lithium battery fire hazard”.
Each cell in today’s lithium packs must be electronically regulated and protected individually, in order to prevent a conflagration. The circuit is relied on at the end of every charge and discharge, it doesn’t just kick in under extreme conditions.
So I can just see it now. Every time there’s even the most minor fender-bender, we have to evacuate the neighborhood out to a quarter-mile radius.
After all, there just might be a short circuit created by the mechanical shock. And with seven thousand protective circuits, however well shielded and packaged in the cells, one of them just might fail, sending the whole shooting match up in a glorious conflagration.
At least with gasoline and diesel tanks, we never had huge quantities of fuel and highly concentrated oxidizer located only a few hundred microns apart under conditions of sometimes dubious chemical stability – to say nothing of poor maintenance. Think of all the rusted-out jalopies making their way somehow down the roads.
If seven thousand common lithium cells is how we have to create a reasonable-range EV right now, then, to paraphrase an old saw, the EV is the vehicle of the future, and it really ought to remain the vehicle of the future for a few more years while we work on the batteries a little more. Given the kind of maintenance cars often get, we need these batteries intrinsically reasonably stable, rather than reasonably stable only if bolted-on kludges work perfectly every time.
Note: reasonably-stable lithium cells exist. But, for the time being, they only deliver small amounts of current. So even a D cell of this sort (lithium thionyl chloride, lithium polycarbon monofluoride, etc.) cannot really deliver enough continuous current to be used even in a flashlight. They are not rechargeable, and are typically used in watches, smoke alarms, calculators, and other low current applications.
July 8th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Exploding EVs would definitely put a crimp in the movement.
July 11th, 2006 at 9:25 am
The issue of fire hazard with regard to lithium-ion batteries has already been solved by changing the cathode material.