Electric Transportation: Short-Term Challenges, Long-Term Promise
I wrote a piece yesterday about the struggles of Project Better Place, the attempt to sell large populations of car drivers on the concept of adopting electric vehicles, and paying a certain price per mile driven, using leased batteries that, when discharged, are swapped out for fresh ones.
The entire concept has never appealed to me, frankly, except under ideal logistical, economical, and political conditions, e.g., Israel. OK, you’re a small country that desperately wants to disallow another ounce of gasoline within your borders? All right, I get that. But most of the places that Better Place wishes to sell its solution boast far from these optimal conditions.
And consider how unappealing the consumer value proposition is: another monopoly dictating the terms of our survival. Who wants that? We already have huge companies with mega-billion profits per quarter selling us per-minute plans for our cell phones, and per-month data plans for our Internet, land-line telephones, and cable TV. Sorry to sound like my teenage daughter, but all of this is irritating. Obviously, we don’t want another plan like this, especially if it doesn’t save us any money in our daily driving.
So, bottom line, Better Place probably was a loser in any case, even if I hadn’t gotten this remark from bright guy and frequent commenter Don Harmon, who wrote earlier today: “(I’m) not surprised at all (that Better Place is struggling) because until there are uniform battery configurations this concept was doomed from the start.
Wow, that’s such a good point, Don. I had forgotten what an outrageous idea this was on that basis alone. The concept that the automotive OEMs would come together and do something positive for the overall expansion of the EV category (something they’d all much rather see disappear in the first place) was, to be sure, fanciful in the extreme.
When the OEMs saw the new generation of the EV a few years ago, I have to think that the directors of the auto industry were divided.
A couple may have seen this as the way of the future, and did everything they could to usher it in; I have to think that Nissan/Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn was one of very few; in fact, he might have been alone.
Most recommended that they keep this phenomenon from happening for as long as possible, and for obvious reasons: profits disappear. EVs mean an immediate and ugly divorce from Big Oil, and they mean the end of the parts and service industry (EVs run 500,000 miles before they need their first major tune-up) which dramatically changes the whole dealer model.
But some looked at the great fortunes that were made in the last 50 years in IT, based on defining and maintaining platforms that became proprietary standards to which others needs to conform. They saw an analogy, and they drooled. They looked at the hardware and software standards dictated by IBM, DEC, Apple, Microsoft, etc., and thought perhaps there could be a way toward untold riches by doing the same thing in electric transportation.
My point is that Don Harmon is exactly right; this is a compelling reason that things look bleak for Better Place.
It’s also true that the adoption of electric transportation has been disappointingly slow, though I believe it truly is the way of the future. I predict that the next 20 years will show a steady reduction in costs, improvement in range, and thus the consumer value proposition. Simultaneously, we’ll see a better, smarter grid, and more wind energy at night to charge up.
I’m bullish long-term. Again, the only questions are how much damage we’re going to do to our ecosystems in the meanwhile, and who’s going to make a buck in the process.
There is no reason that battery exchange systems and battery leasing programs would have to be monopolies. If such programs make electric vehicles more acceptable to the public, they should be encouraged.
Range anxiety is a valid reason for people to avoid buying electric vehicles, depending on how they use their vehicles. If an electric vehicle is used only as a second vehicle in an urban area, the range problem can be avoided. But if people have to exceed the range from time to time, it is understandable that they would not buy an electric vehicle. Battery exchange systems could circumvent that problem.
Uniform battery configurations do not necessitate a monopoly. Indeed, the most common battery systems in place today are competitively produced by multiple firms within uniform configurations that were developed decades ago.
Battery switching, if it were supported by a sufficiently widespread infrastructure, would represent a viable method to extend range. That technique would need to form part of a viable business model, providing demonstrable value to both the consumer and the producers and distributors.
One major challenge to that proposition is the non-holistic – and therefore unrealistic – cost/benefit arrangement fossil energy entails. Another (related) is the consistent subsidization fossil energy still reliably enjoys, from lease forgiveness and tax subsidies to boots on the ground and drones in the air across the globe.
There was an EV design a few years ago, back before Honda dropped out of the EV competition the first time, of an electric vehicle swapping station. The first step of the solution, though was hot-swappable chassis components. Two popular designs put forth were a whole rolling chassis that essentially pinned to the underside of the shell with the battery and running gear interchangeable just by pulling 4 or 6 bolts. The second design involved a panel that was secured in place on the underside of the chassis that was accessible using a trolley system and a pit similar to what you see when you use an oil change service. In both cases, they required that EV producers buy into a uniform battery compartment that was common to all vehicle types. If that had happened, I could see a battery exchange being a viable solution, but with the current design, there’s really too much that is different from one car to the next to have an efficient battery exchange service. Having said that, in 5-10 years, when the current crop of deep cycle batteries start to wear out, I can see more people start clamoring for a battery exchange service, and complaining about how much it costs to pay for new batteries.
Actually, battery swapping would not require one standard. There could be a few, but very limited, number of standards. That would permit EV manufacturers to have more flexibility.
There have been many standards established without either having monopolies or government intervention. Nuts and bolts have standards. Tires have standard sizes. No doubt others could find dozens of industry standards that have been accomplished without government intervention or monopolies.