Ford has meeting with God.
Don Devlin
Published Wednesday, May 10, 2000
Electric cars may hit dead end
Automakers say they're too expensive and too
limited in range, thus limiting consumer interest
By Seth Borenstein
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DETROIT -- The battery-powered family car seems to be going the way of
the personal jetpack -- a vision of the future that never quite materialized.
Eclipsed by new gasoline-electric hybrid cars and by the more distant
promise of vehicles powered by fuel cells, battery-powered autos are
quietly biting the dust.
They're too expensive and too limited in range, automakers complain,
urging California to scrap a law that requires the sale of large numbers of
such cars by 2003.
"God doesn't want us to have full-function electric vehicles," said John
Wallace, the executive director of Ford's TH!NK Group, which oversees
electric and alternative vehicles. "The laws of nature don't allow this."
Ford has changed its future electric dreams from the massive 1998
electric Ranger truck to something that's little more than a souped-up golf
cart.
Ford's Neighbor car can't go more than 25 mph and is intended by TH!NK
for running errands in planned communities. In other words, for a niche
market.
Think of all-battery cars as the microwave ovens of the roads, said Bob
Purcell, executive director of General Motors' Advanced Technology
Vehicles. "It comes as a complementary vehicle in your garage, not as a
replacement," he said.
Even environmental groups believe the future belongs to hybrids, which
use gasoline and batteries to get higher mileage, and fuel cell cars, which
use a chemical reaction to generate electric power.
Last week, when the Sierra Club was promoting the future of clean cars,
they had hybrid cars -- not all-electrics -- to test drive. The group gave its
only product awards to two new Japanese hybrids, Toyota's Prius and
Honda's Insight.
"You can't say the electric car is dead when the auto companies haven't
really tried to sell them," said Dan Becker, director of global warming and
energy for the Sierra Club. "They've deliberately gone out to sabotage the
electric car."
Automakers haven't really tried enough, insisted Roland Hwang,
transportation program director for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"The total (industry-wide) investment in full-function battery vehicles is over
$2 billion, and I'm sorry, that is hard enough," Ford's Wallace countered.
Academics outside the auto industry -- and even the electric vehicle
industry's association -- side with Wallace.
"GM put $350 million worth of research and development into (the EV-1,
its groundbreaking all-battery car)," said Lester Lave, a professor of
economics, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. "They were proud as punch when that vehicle came out. I don't
know what you mean by not trying.
"There are a series of problems with battery-powered cars. Every way you
want to look at it, in terms of performance, in terms of consumer
satisfaction, in terms of environmental attributes, these battery-powered
cars don't cut it and won't cut it unless you have some real breakthroughs
in electrochemistry ... but breakthroughs are scarce."
Dan Sperling, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC
Davis and a long-time battery-car fan, agreed: "The reality is that batteries
are expensive, bulky and heavy and will be into the foreseeable future."
Price is a big factor. Automakers say they can't put all-electric cars on
the market without subsidizing them heavily.
Five years ago, "people believed that we were going to be able to knock
the price (problems) out of the nickel-metal-hydride batteries a lot faster
than the industry has proven it's able to do," said Kateri Callahan,
executive director of the Electric Vehicles Association of the Americas.
That doesn't mean all-battery cars are dead, Callahan insists. Automakers
just have to revise their ideas to the small niche markets -- including
electric vehicles for the post office and airports.
"What you're seeing is an understanding that battery electric vehicles will
really be moneymakers as you go smaller in size," Callahan said. "If it's
to work in a regular family-size vehicle, it can only happen if we're
successful in all these niche markets first. That buys us time to improve
the battery and get volume."
The future of all-battery cars is about to be decided in California, the
nation's automotive trend-setter. California has rules requiring that 4
percent of new car sales in 2003 be zero-emission cars. (The term "zero
emission" does not include pollution from power plants that all-battery
cars depend on for charging.)
At the moment, only all-battery cars qualify. The state deferred its
deadline in 1998, and automakers are trying to get it pushed back again
this fall.
That mandate "kind of railroaded us into this path we were on," Ford's
Wallace said. "It was not the right path because it didn't meet the
customers' needs. ... You can't legislate your way out of a problem."
But if California loosens its requirements, Detroit will stop trying to
produce an affordable and marketable zero-emission car, Hwang said.
Unless California sticks with its zero-emission mandate, said Franklin
O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, the all-battery car
"may be on its last spin around the block." |
