Hoopla Aside, Auto Manufacturers Not Anxious To Roll Out EVs
A quick note from the electric vehicle show in Los Angeles in early May:
It’s true that most of the credible car-makers have EV products scheduled for delivery in the not-too-distant future. But they’re obviously hedging their bets, delaying their market entrance as long as possible, so as to maximize the penetration of their pipeline of gasoline powered vehicles.
It’s pretty clear that their hearts are not in this. And why should this be otherwise? If you’re an auto OEM, you see nothing but an ocean of downside: billions of dollars of R&D, tons of a dozen different kinds of risk including exposure to tort attorneys from hell, diminution of sales revenues, huge costs of customer support and education (that will STILL wind them up with upset customers), the expense of supporting multiple platforms, shotgun weddings with charger suppliers and standards, etc. No profitable industry really embraces change, regardless of its rhetoric — and that’s true in spades here.
At conferences like these, I’m always amused by the hoopla that surrounds what is actually the routine, the clearest possible cases of business-as-usual. The car companies tout their new vehicles as game-changers, yet anyone can see that they’re anything but. The show’s second day’s antics happened to feature the unveiling of the Toyota RAV-4 Electric SUV, with all the loud music, pretty girls, and bright flashing lights with which every new car or truck announced at an auto show has been introduced over the past half century or so.
But its MSRP is just a hair under $50K, almost exactly twice the sticker price of the gasoline version of the same vehicle. How exciting is this, really? The customer gets to pay twice the price for an inconvenient car? Take a step back and ask yourself: Who really wants it at that rate? A few wealthy environmentalists?
So will this pre-ordained market failure bring disappointment or some sort of shock to Toyota? Not in the least. They win regardless of the success of the RAV-4 Electric. With this product launch, Toyota did what it was finally forced to do. After their unimaginable success in positioning themselves as the first eco-friendly auto company 12 years ago with the Prius, and having milked that cow far longer than anyone could have possibly expected, they’re finally back with a product in this space that they can promote. Regardless of how dismal the sales figures, they’ll be making a few of these pure battery EVs — while beating the living bejeepers out of the public relations angle to ensure they regain their former stature in the public’s mind as an environmentally conscious company.
Which they’re clearly not. With one of the largest and best staffs of automotive engineers, if they had chosen, they could have led the world to green transportation. Instead, they took more than a decade to introduce a $50,000 car that only a few people will buy. Their sales revenues in this space will represent a minute fraction of one percent of the gas powered vehicles they’ll be selling around the world for at least a generation to come — at a handsome profit.
The bigger picture: it looks like Big Oil and Big Auto will remain blood brothers for a long time to come. God’s in his heaven/All’s right with the world. — Robert Browning
It will probably be some time before EVs achieve their full potential. Even so, they do have considerable potential, but it probably will not be fully realized until conditions change. Improving battery technology, battery exchange systems to avoid impractically long recharging times on long trips, and increasing prices of gasoline would make a very big difference.
Predicting the future is fraught with peril, but EVs may well make an important contribution to our transportation system.
The only large car company that really seems to be betting big money is Renault.
I wish them the best; it’s all to easy to fall prey to first mover syndrome but if Carlos Ghosn keeps his wits and his nerve, he may end up changing the industry even if his companied don’t end up dominating it.
Last week, John Voelcker of Green Car Reports posted about which cars / manufacturers were for real and which were merely for compliance. Sad to say, it’s a pretty grim picture for EV enthusiasts
I have noted that the senior communities in
Florida are rampant with EV vehicles in the form of golf carts. They are legal on the roads within the confines of the gated parks.
These same people who put up with a 5 or 6 year Pb battery life on their cart are very hesitant to buy a higher tech Li-ion car and its not the price. These folks make a twice a year trek to or from the North. They, including me are unnerved by the prospect of running out of juice on the way to or from paradise. Until charging or battery exchange is as easy as pulling up to a gas pump, we may not see many of these marvels out on the interstate. The hybrid like the Prius has a better chance since you can always go with gas but if you have seen the loads that us seniors haul back and forth, a Prius just will not transport all the gear that seems essential for a 3 to 6 month journey. LL
A Simple but Regular Visit to the Websites that Show their own companies product, Like Coulomb Technologies – http://www.chargepoint.net/find-stations.php, or sites that share information on all the chargers, public, private (If you register as a member), level 1, 2, and yes – level 3 – like http://www.plugshare.com – will show the continual and steady increase of installed chargers, or higher power chargers being installed – like a Level 3 charger now installed beside a Level 2 Charger.
The Gaps between Places where you can charge up for local and cross country driving is getting smaller and smaller, and soon you will be able to drive the diminutive Smart Car in the E-Drive model, in a full cross country trip!
Already – a Tesla Roadster has been Driven (In Canada) From Ottawa to Toronto; and from Saskatoon to Vancouver. In the states – they have been driven 1,000 miles in a (long) Day!
Of course – the LEAF or iMiEV might not make such trips yet, but the Tesla Model S will do so easily in the Signature Series models with their packs designed for 300 miles range at 55 Mph (Today)! With their Chosen Cells, they have the advantage of gaining another 25 – 30% on those figures as the next generation of 18650 Cells comes on stream!
A University of British Columbia Student Electric Vehicle Club built an Electric Beetle – with 3X160 Ah cells in parallel, and 32 in series for a 96V pack x 480 Ah, and delivered 300 mile highway range also – in a lowly Beetle EV Conversion (Not your best purpose built EV)! They used the Well known (in EV Conversion Circles) AC-50 Motor, and ThunderSky Prismatic Cells! These are the least expensive LiFePO4 Cells in general, and there are higher performance Cells available in the same chemistry!
Of course – we are some time away from having a MACK Truck built as a pure EV that can Drive some 16 hours+ a day on one charge, but Hybrid Trucks are coming, and after that – Plug-in Hybrid Trucks, and then a whole new model becomes available – with battery packs under each Box-type Trailer, charged at each stop point along with the Cab’s Batteries being Charged, possibly even from Stored Solar Power, at the rate of cost reduction in Solar and steady cost reduction in Stored Energy Systems!
The World of the Plug-in Hybrid is just a bridging technology – while infrastructure catches up, and battery chemistry makes the next big leap – where your laptop can run on battery power – from one charge – for as little as 8 hours, and not long after – for as much as 24 hours!
Already Battery Power Model Aircraft Technologies are moving into Experimental Packs and Motor Designs for the lighter Ultralight Experimental Aircraft, and in the RC Model categories – the Electrics are beating the Top Fueled ‘Nitro’ categories in many aspects in competition! Smaller Lithium Polymer Batteries over 10,000 mAh (10 Ah) for Models – with Power Ratings of up to 50C! (That means the little 10 Ah pack can deliver – steady – until drained – 50X 10 Amps = 500 Amps, but weight about 1/2 a pound in a 2-Cell Pack, or about a pound in a 4 Cell (12V+) pack! In addition – these same cells can deliver 75C or 750 Amps for a Pulse requirement!
Soon – individual car owners will be switching out the Old Lead Acid Battery from their Gas & Diesel Cars in favour of the lighter Chemistries!
Solar and Wind Energy Storage – are also the new Battery Demand Technologies – the ability to now actually have a container or a trailer sized rig, to locate to your wind farm – for capturing overnight wind energy for later deliver, transformer station – for floating a few Mega-Watt Hours of energy to cover Peaks and Valleys in the loads dynamically; at a factory, or Mall, with a fully charged bank of batteries storing a few hours to a few days worth of energy! These are all coming on strong – some mixed with Fuels Cells fueled by natural gas, and some that are just Battery Storage units!
The facts that existing OEM Makers are reticent to make EV’s – is understandable – but – what does the buying public want: Cheap to buy and cheap to run vehicles, that are easy to fill, and easy to maintain! Well – EV’s cover the last two of those elements right now, while the other parts are changing fast – with the dropping prices of cells, production ramp ups, and limited though it might be – Competition, either from other OEM’s or the new upstarts (Tesla Motors)!
Nissan is making 150,000 LEAF EVs in TENN by next year. They also have an all electric work Van the eNV200 and a Infinity EV.
Other automakers are only making a few EV while Nissan is setting the pace for Everyone.
Tesla is also moving ahead in their new factory, with 20,000 Tesla S family sedans sold out for the next 2 years, a Tesla X small SUV due out in 2013 and a convertible S also in the works. They also do the electric part of the Smart-ED and Toyota RAV4 EV. This is pretty big for the first new car company in 50 years !
What also scares OEM automakers as well as consumers is the prohibitive price of Lithium batteries, which is proven not to go down anytime soon, if ever. They are also not trying to test the new improved Pb batteries, which could slash the price of EVs. in half and pose a threat to gas vehicles sales. There is a recipe on http://www.ev-motion demonstrating how they could put decent EVs. at $10,000 on showrooms with batteries included.
WAKE UP to the facts. Major automobile manufacturers are going to sell combustion cars (I am told this is what they call ICE cars in Europe.)and continue to try to make profits from their current investments in design and “Tooling” for as long as they can and to appease all of us who want Electric, they offer one of their models converted to an electric replacing the engine and transmission with an electric motor and a simple gear box. there are better and more sophisticated conversions on the http://WWW.EValbum.COM If you really want to make money in the EV trade, or any part of it come take my course. check out the info on http://www.electricvehicletechnicalinstitute.com
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I personally know of 2 Teslas here in Ottawa, Ontario; by now there may be more. I know of 18 Nissan Leafs; 17 are privately owned and one is owned by VRTUCAR, a car sharing company. As a member I can drive one, if I can get a booking (they will be scarce for a while, until they add more to the fleet). Another member did book it for an EVCO meeting; I rode in it, and was impressed.
Lithium battery prices ARE coming down, and will continue to do so. This will no doubt be helped by Honda’s development of a process for reclaiming the rare earth materials in Lithium and NiMH batteries.
But price is only a small part of the issue. Many people spend substantially more than the approximate $35,000 price of a Nissan Leaf on an automobile (price an Audi, or a Lexus, of a Mercedes and you’ll know what I mean). A larger part of the issue is infrastructure. The energy industry has literally tens of trillions of dollars invested in exististing fuel supply infrastructure for gasoline-powered vehicles, and spends a hundred billion every year in maintaining it; every gasoline-powered vehicle that leaves the factory today will depend on that infrastructure for an average of more than 15 years. It’s a highly profitable enterprise and a major part of our economy, and one that won’t go away soon. Meanwhile, we have to provide some sort of support for electric vehicles (including those of the fuel-cell powered variety) with a great deal less money available, at least until investors become more confident of money to be made there. Without what appears to be adequate availability of infrastructure (in the eyes of the average vehicle purchaser), there will be no mad rush to purchase the vehicles. Automobile companies are not dumb, and are aware of this, so are setting modest goals. We will, however, get there, and they intend to be ready.
I recall seeing figures indicating the $45k Volt pays off the difference in savings on gas over electric cost over its ICE brethren in six years. That’s not especially dismal. However, many people buy new vehicles within that span, so that needs to improve.
Good points. Please see: http://2greenenergy.com/analyze-break-even/23212/.
For people who do a lot of driving, mainly in heavy city traffic, that is entirely possible. But many of us who need a car don’t do anywhere nearly that much driving. My 2004 Mazda3 has only 17,000 miles on it, so spending that much on a battery electric vehicle would not make sense. But considering the little driving I do, my usage of fossil fuel is not much anyway.
We don’t all have the same automotive requirements.
First off, Toyota has always proclaimed that a pure EV is a dumb idea.
The Rav4-EV is clearly something just to pander to the green hype, but the Prius, the Prius C, and the Prius V are all the most efficient (and hence the most green) vehicles in their size class.
This year, the sales of Prii will save at least 10X the amount of gasoline as the sales of all EV’s combined… and unlike the EV’s that will be true savings, not merely shifting from gasoline to coal for higher overall emissions.
Toyota is the greenest car company, though GM is closing fast with some of the new small vehicles it is offering (not the Volt, which is a sideshow).
I don’t blame Toyota for giving in to the hype and running off a few BEV’s which won’t sell just to preserve their “green halo”, but the “green-ness” of a company has absolutely nothing to do with the number of cars with plugs that they have in the parking lot… the only possible correlation would be inverse.
What do you think of what Solar City and Tesla are doing, i.e., bundling a bunch of PV with an EV? Complete independence from the grid and gas pump.
At what price, you ask?
Touche’. But this model can be applied to less expensive cars, and the price of both components will fall steadily over time.
It takes quite a while to nurture paradigm shifts into the mainstream. Battery technology is doing quite well, thank you, regardless of the nay-saying in extent. One of the larger problems in the automotive world is its conservative nature, leading to long development and generational cycles. Changes in battery technology happen at considerably higher speed than the ability of the various manufacturers to leverage such change.
And yes, manufacturers need their marketing tools for the segment of the population (us!) that pays attention to such things. Honda Clarity is perfect case in point. Keeps Honda’s credentials up very nicely without having to solve any of the sticky problems associated with that technology.
I went to a nice Ford road show the other day. Entire lineup of the Ford Focus, from pure BEV to efficient ICE. All manufactured on the same line interchangeably. My hype-o-meter is fairly decent, and they struck me as genuinely serious. Of the many types of “life style” programs they are trying to come up with, I encouraged them to invent one that has a BEV for the urban dweller, and a Zip-car like program that allows for long range travel in those seldom cases it is (typically) needed.
Sure, we’ll have long range BEV’s in the not so distant future, and in the mid-term we will also get flow batteries that can have their electrolyte exchanged just like a gas fill up. My crystal ball, however, suggests to me that such schemes are not needed. We will come up with alternatives to long distance travel that don’t require the ownership of that capability.
I read a lot of interesting comments, but from my side having spent 40 years in automotive, including working for GM for 25 years with 5 on the EV1 and EV conversions, 6 year with Tier1 suppliers and now 9 years with my own EV company, I think there are some important issue to be stated. 1.) The auto-OEM’s don’t want EV’s. Ev’s are a disruptive technology that will change their business models drastically. EV’s done simply will last easily 10 years, change the battery pack and drive another 10 years. They are basically maintenance free, too. Both these items will destroy today’s car companies and their dealers.
All the auto-OEM’s are experimenting with EV’s, but it is done in the very expensive and uncontrolled R&D departments and not their production departments, except for Toyota. The Prius is not an R&D project and the costs have become very competitive. Nissan is one of few car companies really commited to EV’s. Watch when they start building batteries and Leafs in TN this year. You will see the price drop significantly, probably to under $20,000 with Fed tax credit. This is the value proposition the early majority buyers are looking for. Today’s early adopters are about filled.
What gives with everyone’s addiction to driving? How many times do you fill your gas car each wee? What is bad about filling your EV at home while you are sleeping. You do it with your cell phone and laptop computer and mostly figure out how to live with those limitations. EV’s may not be the do everything all the time vehicles, but with the right price, they fill in a very large and useful purpose. If gas were $10/gal would you be driving 300 miles per day? Probably not. So why is a 300 mile EV so estential? It only is for early adopters who are willing to pay excessive premiums for EV’s and demand everything they ever wanted.
And what is it with the needed infrastructure all the time. This has been blown out of proportion buy the auto-OEM’s who want to scare you away from EV’s. “Range anxiety” Today’s charge infrastructure has be heavily subsidize by us the US taxpayers. Tomorrow, these chargers are going to have to be paid by you when you use them. They will not be free and you will find most are considerd “emergency chargers” because if you plan your day ahead of time, you will find that your EV does everything you need 95% of the time. 5% of the time, you will be in an emergency and be willing to pay a $1 or $2 per kWh you need, vs. 10 cents kWh at home.
There is absolutely no need to drive an EV across country!!
Lastly about batteries. The costs are coming down, but the auto-OEM’s are reluctant to put in place standards because that will drive prices down faster. I proposed and lead for a while the SAE battery cell size standards committe but quit because none of the OEM’s wanted to participate. I was pushing for standards for battery modules (modules are not battery packs). Modules are the building blocks to build vehicle battery packs at much lower costs. Rather than assembling 288 cells in a Volt, you build with higher voltage, higher Ah modules, say 14.8V module 45 Ah and have 24 modules to assemble rather than 288 cells. Drastic cost savings. The Leaf uses a module, 7.2 V and 70 Ah, they build their pack with 48 modules, and it is less expensive. Why are the OEM’s not interested in modules and standardizing? It will drop costs drastically, speed time to market dramatically, and increase new technology development grreatly. But they are stuck on gasoline engines. Just look at the names of all these auto-OEM’s, don’t most have the word “Motor” in their names?
Lastly a quick comment on Toyota Rav4 EV. This is not a real production car, it is a compliance car to meet CA ZEV requirements. They have a rediculous price and plan to build 2,600 over next 3 years. That is an R&D project which is why they use Tesla parts to save time and money, while they develop their own. MB is doing the same thing with Tesla, it is a cost savings in R&D to build complance cars. If you take Tesla’s claim of $100M contract with Toyota, divide by 2,600 you get $38,000 for each Tesla supplied set of parts. My guess is that by the time you figure in the R & D costs, the cost of the parts, the assembly time, the warranty costs, profit, overheads, etc., you will find Tesla is not making anything on this, in fact they are probably losing money which they seem to do pretty consistantly.
Whether manufacturers like it or not, it may well be that EVs will eventually represent a significant percentage of the car market. Forward-looking wise manufacturers (that probably excludes some) will be prepare for the shift to EVs.