Still Dreaming Of The Electric Alternative
The Age
Wednesday March 8, 1995
QUOTES from the past: ``An Australian engineer is set to challenge the might of the giant automotive manufacturers in his bid for a $300 million contract to supply electric-powered cars, buses and vans to Los Angeles."
(BHP Steel press release, December 1988).
``The importers will have electric cars in the US by 1985 or 1986.
If that date holds up they will be competing directly with General Motors, which has an electric car scheduled for wide-scale production in 1985."
(Detroit Automotive News, March 1980).
``Just a few months ago the largest motor manufacturer in the word, General Motors, admitted to having set up a complete infrastructure for a small electric vehicle; by 1985 more than 25 per cent of all its passenger cars would be electric."
(Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial, December 1980).
Where have they gone? What has happened to the dream of the environmentalists, the car-haters, the conspiracy theorists who believed Big Oil would never allow the electric car to happen? After all, we have less than three years left before any car maker who wants to flog vehicles in California (and probably 13 other states who look like enacting copy legislation), will have to offer a minimum of 2 per cent of its range as ZEVs, or zero emission vehicles, better described as electric-powered battery cars.
The simple answer is that we are as far away as ever from a car you can drive around the city during the day and plug into your home power at night to recharge while you sleep. Governments have followed a predictable path of legislation-forced technology, but it hasn't worked.
Every car maker in the world has an electric car or cars. Every one has to have a pack of storage batteries. Some are the heavy lead-acid type we grew up with; others are expensive and exotic combinations of things like sodium, sulphur, lithium and the rest. Some are dead-set nasties when it comes to recycling. Some will explode if they overheat. Some will dissolve you if the car does a roll-over.
You can't blame the car makers or the power companies or the battery manufacturers. All of them have combined to spend billions of dollars to find the holy grail of a battery that costs about the same as a lead-acid unit, but which is much lighter, easily recyclable, that will last more than three years and that will survive all the crash testing the world now demands.
The United States Government even did the unthinkable by allowing the Big Three car makers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to form a consortium in defiance of the country's rigid anti-trust legislation to start a quest, with Government money, to find the magic battery. In Japan, the Government pulled together the major power and battery companies and bankrolled them for a similar crusade.
THAT was years ago. There is no conspiracy. The first company to market an electric car that will match today's Volkswagen Golf in performance, mileage, running costs, passenger comfort and the ability to handle a variety of comfort items like central locking, air- conditioning and audio system, will go down in history as the Henry Ford of the new millenium.
California has set the start line at 1998, and the US car makers, after kicking and squealing and finally failing to get the state to modify its approach, have thrown everything at the problem. But, as of right now, the 1998 electric cars will have a range of about 150 kilometres before recharging and a purchase price about twice that of a comparable car with an internal combustion engine.
And the battery packs will probably cost something like $2000 to replace every couple of years, because today's batteries still don't tolerate too well the process of being depleted and recharged.
The car makers aren't blameless, of course. Even their senior research engineers admit they have dragged their feet while trying to get California to change its 1998 legislation to allow at least what's called ``hybrids" cars with electric motors for city use and small diesel engines to recharge them or be used as power for highway work.
There's no denying the US car makers have always used all the dirty tricks in the book to deflect any legislation-forced technology to improve safety, fuel economy, emissions, crash performance and low- speed impact-resistant bumpers. At the same time, they rightly say much of the air pollution problem would be met much faster if the US legislators would simply increase the tax on what is the cheapest petrol in the world but no political party has that kind of courage.
The big three car makers have tried to block proposed ZEV laws on the basis they don't know how to build an electric car the public would want to buy.
That's pretty true. However, there are a lot of complaints from energetic companies outside the automotive industry, including some military and aerospace contractors hurt badly by loss of billion- dollar contracts following the end of the Cold War, who believe they can fast-track a ZEV with ideas and technology the motor industry has never considered.
It's been different in Europe. Alternative motive power has long been attractive there, because of the cost of fossil fuels. Makers like Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, BMW, Peugeot and the rest have for three decades now been running experimental cars on hydrogen, natural gas, alcohol and its derivatives, biomass mixes, kerosene and, of course, electric power.
Peugeot maker PSA seems to be among the boldest. Early last year it was signalling that it would produce two electric cars to spearhead its return to the US market it abandoned some years ago. It was talking of cars about $4000 dearer than the average cheapest Peugeot, seeing the Californian market as ideal for people who wanted an electric car as a second or third vehicle, to do about 80 kilometres a week.
PSA has demonstrated its aggressive approach by forecasting that the European Union will be home to 200,000 ZEVs by 2000. And the vast Japanese conglomerate, the Itochu Corporation, seems to agree. It has signed a joint venture agreement and handed over seed money of $20 million to US Electricar, forming Japan Electricar Corporation, to handle the exclusive Japanese distribution rights for ZEVs.
THE Malaysian national car maker Proton has signed a similar agreement with US Electricar to build Malaysia's first ZEVs. US Electricar currently fits Chevrolet pickups and Geo Prism sedans with electric power.
Honda has signed with two Californian power companies to evaluate the use of electric vehicles in real-world situations, handing over several of its CUV-4 (clean urban vehicle) prototypes. The four-seater runs lead-acid batteries with an on-board charger that can replenish the pack in about eight hours. The charge gives the car, based on the Civic hatchback, a range of up to 110 kilometres and a top speed of about 130 kmh fairly typical for today's best electric cars.
Mercedes-Benz, which is utterly familiar with propulsion systems like hydrogen and gas turbines, believes electric drive still has the brightest future. Its latest electric prototype is based on the current C-class and is barely distinguishable from the road car.
But while the storage battery is Benz's own latest high-energy unit, code-named ZEBRA, it still gives the car an operating range of only about 110 kilometres in city traffic. The sodium-nickel-chloride battery cells must be hermetically sealed and thermally insulated, can run properly only at 260-350 degrees centigrade, and need a micro- processor to control temperature. Service life is about 100,000 kilometres.
Other advanced storage systems include nickel metal hydrid accumulators and lithium-polymer. However, even the best of emerging battery technology doesn't come anywhere nearing petrol's energy density, when one kilogram of petrol contains about 300 times the potential energy of the same weight of a fully charged lead-acid battery.
The problem isn't the battery, however. It's the recharging time.
Nissan developed an electric car that can be recharged in under an hour. The trouble is it uses three-phase power and as one US critic put it: ``If you plugged that sucker into your house you would black out the entire neighborhood."
However, there does seem to be one experimental system that has great promise. It's a 20 kilowatt-hour battery than can be fully recharged in under two minutes and has about 10 times the energy density of a lead-acid battery, but costs about half as much. A pack of four would be enough to run an ordinary small family car.
It's called the EFL, because it was developed by the Electric Fuel Limited company in Jerusalem. The German post office, Postdienst, is running a two-year trial using it in 64 electric 180 Mercedes vans.
Early tests showed a 650-kilogram pack gave a range of around 270 kilometres per charge, where a 900-kilogram lead-acid pack did only 65.
It's based on the principle of a zinc-air cell, actually patented in 1894. The battery isn't recharged electrically. The zinc cells are replaced by fresh ones, with the old electrodes reborn by electro- chemical treatment. However (with batteries there's always one ``however"), it needs to be made of special materials with an entirely new and complex cathode. And it costs so much to build the special plants to replace and renovate the zinc cells that large numbers of orders would be needed.
If you thought you'd heard all these forecasts before, you're right.
That Australian BHP PR handout we started with was not even the most optimistic. It was detailing the work of Sydney engineer Roy Leembruggen, who built a large and ugly vehicle he called the ``Townobile". He claimed he spent $1.6 million over 19 years developing it.
Even then, at the end of 1988, it was claimed to have a range of 80 kilometres per charge and a top speed of 80 kmh.
``Just as our winged keel put us ahead in the America's Cup, our down-to-earth but simple technology puts us in the lead again in this race," he said. The new Henry Ford of electric cars is not with us yet . . .
© 1995 The Age