Ask a Tesla Roadster owner why he drives one and invariably you'll be told it's for the environment.
Mother Nature, you think. Climate change. Polar bears.
And that's half true. Maybe even three-quarters true. But drive a Tesla Roadster - especially the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport - and you soon learn about the other environment, the one few motorists know. Here are a few examples of what that environment looks like:
In the next lane, at a stoplight on a road that skirts Stanford University, a smirking Corvette ZR1 owner revs his otherworldly 638-horsepower 7.0-liter V8. You twist the key in your ignition forward an eighth of a turn, which instantly switches the drive mode from Standard to Performance. The traffic signal changes, you and the 'Vette driver floor it. Three seconds later the powerful Chevrolet is occupying space in your rear-view mirror. Traction-control limitations. The Chevy salesman probably forgot to mention them to the now-frowning ZR1 owner.
Then there's the blue Infiniti G37 Sport 6MT with the close-ratio six-speed manual transmission and the short-throw shifter, one lane over on the 101 Freeway approaching San Francisco, Candlestick Park on the right. He's playful, as are you, and just like the Corvette driver soon he, too, is a shrinking part of the landscape behind you despite his best efforts to outpace and then just keep up.
And then there's the Miata owner, poor thing, taking a sweeping onramp as quickly as possible, white-knuckling it all the way and hoping his newer baby dressed in stormy blue mica paint doesn't lose traction and become roadkill. While he struggles, you race up behind him, drop back, race up behind him again, raise a hand to your mouth as if to cover a yawn.
People who own Roadsters absolutely buy them for the environment: Mother Nature on the one hand, and it's-amazing-how-truly-awesome-the-environment-is-as-seen-from-a-Tesla-cruise-missile on the other.
Electric-sports car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, Reuters reported today, citing two sources familiar with the matter said.
An IPO filing from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric, zero-emissions Roadster, is expected any day, the news agency quoted one of the sources as saying. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.
Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad, in an interview with Green Car Advisor, declined to comment on what she called "rumor or speculation."
Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since the Ford Motor Co. debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric-car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.
The company's chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.
But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.
Tesla's IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on Sept. 25.
Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green-technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.
More to the point, if Tesla does go public and experiences the kind of financial boost A123 did, the investor acceptable will be a huge shot in the arm not only for Tesla but for electric vehicles and EV-related technologies in general.
In addition to the success A123 experienced with its IPO, Tesla has another good reason to prepare an IPO now: The automaker is flush with cash from recent federal low-interest loans, which makes investors more comfortable than pumping money into a flat-broke startup.
Production of the Smart ForTwo ED plug-in electric vehicle began this week at Daimler AG's factory in Hambach, France, the automaker reported today.
The first 1,000 of the zero-emissions ForTwo EDs (electric drives) will be provided to customers participating in various mobility projects in major cities in Europe and the U.S. in order to generate broad feedback on electric driving under everyday conditions.
That said, the current, second-generation ForTwo ED equipped with the most modern lithium-ion battery pack won't be available to the general public until 2012. At that time, it will be produced as a regular part of the Smart product portfolio and be sold through the Smart sales network.
The Smart brand has taken a pioneering role in electric mobility since 2007. Back then, 100 ForTwo EDs of the first generation went into practical customer operation under everyday conditions of city traffic in London.
Feedback from that project was very positive and a year later Daimler introduced the second-generation ForTwo ED with a more advanced electric drive and a better lithium-ion battery pack.
As for the Hambach plant, it was inaugurated in 1997 and a year later began building Smart ForTwos. By September 2008, more than 1 million ForTwos had been manufactured at the plant.
Today, the ForTwo is present in 41 countries. Most of the ForTwos are sold in Germany, Italy and the U.S., and those markets are expected to be big ones for the electric version.
Car is Heavier Than Chief Engineer Would Like, but There's Time to Slim Down
Video of Volt battery pack crush test shows just one of the scores of indignities the packs have been subjected to in an effort to find any flaws before they go into production cars.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
With a year to go before production begins on the 2012 Chevrolet Volt, General Motors has 80 prototypes running around the country to test the critical battery and power electronics systems and program managers say they're happy with what they re seeing - except, perhaps, around the car's waistline.
There have been problems - mostly small ones that have been resolved - Volt's new chief engineer, Andrew Farah, said in a media briefing this afternoon.
One ongoing concern is weight - the battery pack still weighs in at more than 400 pounds, and the car is heavier than Farah would like. Although not critical to the launch, it's an important issue as every pound of weight eats into fuel economy and battery range.
Farah (left, with pre-production Volt model) wouldn't say what the actual or target weights are for the car, GM's first extended-range, plug-in hybrid.
He did say that efforts to slim down the Volt are ongoing.
Farah also continued to support the company's controversial claim that the Volt could qualify for a 230 MPG city-cycle rating under an early proposal for one of the new federal fuel economy tests being developed for cars that use rechargeable batteries and electric motors some or all of the time.
We continue to shake our heads, suspecting that the claim is likely to come back and bite GM, hard, when real drivers get out there and find that a lot of fancy slow-motion driving tricks will be needed to come close unless then never drive hard or far enough to deplete the batteries and religiously charge them up every night
Among the lesser, and resolvable problems has been that the car's quiet operation in the all-electric mode revealed some noise and vibration issues that would not have been apparent in a noisier car with a conventional powertrain drowning out some of the exterior road and wind noise and mechanical humming and thrumming that affects every vehicle.
With governments at home and around the world vigorously pushing development and deployment of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, Japanese battery manufacturer GS Yuasa says it plans to build a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant to increase its output.
The company already is aligned with Mitsubishi in the Lithium Energy Japan joint venture to supply the Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric city car and with Honda through the Blue Energy Co. joint venture for hybrid batteries.
It also has designs on becoming a global supplier to a variety of automakers, the Nikkei business news service reports.
The new plant is expected to cost about 50-billion yen ($559 million) and could supply companies such as PSA Peugeot Citron, which recently announced a pair of electric city cars - one for the Peugeot brand and one for Citroen - based on the i-MiEV (right).
GS Yuasa also has said it is talking EV and PHEV battery supply deals with automakers in the U.S.
The company has said it expects its lithium-ion battery sales to top $1 billion a year by 2016, up from around $34 million this year.
Dana Holding Corp., which specializes in making truck frames and axles as well as sealing and thermal products for vehicle makers, has been tapped by electric-roadster maker Tesla Motors to supply a proprietary EV battery-cooling system said to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.
---------- Tesla's rear-mounted battery pack (in purple, above) is made of thousands of tightly packed lithium-ion cells and requires a sophisticated cooling system to prevent thermal problems and cell failure. ----------
Dana's system, called the Long Heat Exchanger, helps maintain optimum temperature levels in lithium-ion batteries by transferring heat generated by the battery into the car's climate-control system, the company said.
Dana is debuting the system in Tesla's 2010 Roadster Sport.
While battery failures haven't been a significant problem for any electric-car manufacturer yet, lithium-ion batteries - the type preferred by most for all-electric and plug-in electric cars because of their light weight and high power density - are prone to heat buildup than can cause individual cells to break down.
An inexpensive but effective battery cooling system would be a major boon to the EV industry.
Ohio-based Dana is looking to benefit from the expanding electric-vehicle market as sales of its truck frames, driveshafts and axles fall. Dana's third-quarter revenue dropped 31% from a year earlier to $1.33 billion.
Closely held Tesla estimates the Roadster's battery life at 100,000 miles, or about seven years. The company, which in September received an $82.5 million equity investment to expand its number of showrooms, has delivered more than 900 Roasters, almost a third of that total since mid-September.
Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp. has unveiled its first self-developed electric vehicle, joining domestic rivals to tap potential demand for clean-energy cars.
The zero-emissions model, known as the BE701, is capable of going 120 miles between charges and has a top speed of 100 miles an hour, BAIC said in a statement over the weekend.
The company did not provide a timetable for mass production of the plug-in BE701.
BAIC reps disclosed details of a new clean-energy-vehicle development and manufacturing facility it had just set up, involving total investment of $334 million. The funding would come from the government and other sources, the statement said without elaborating.
The facility, just outside Beijing, will be able to make 50,000 electric vehicles and 100,000 hybrid models, it said but did not specify the timetable.
BAIC, a partner of Daimler AG, meanwhile, has set up a company focused on clean-energy vehicles only. It has said it expects to make 20,000-40,000 vehicles a year starting in 2011.
Other domestic automakers, such as Chery Automobile and BYD Co., are also investing in "green" cars.
Chery unveiled in February its self-made electric car, the S19, which it said was capable of going 75 miles between charges and has a top speed of 75 mph.
BYD Auto, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-listed rechargeable battery maker, launched its plug-in hybrid car, the F3DM, in China late last year.
Additionally, BYD has announced plans to ship the e6, an all-electric crossover, to the United States next year. That vehicle go reportedly go 250 miles per charge.
Toshiba expects to sign up about five car companies as customers for its new lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles, the head of the business told the London-based Financial Times said in an interview published Sunday.
Shoshi Kawatsu, general manager of the Super Charge Battery (or SCiB) division, also said that Toshiba was preparing for the possible manufacturing of batteries in the U.S. and Europe and would make a decision on whether to go ahead in 2011, depending on market growth and the needs of its customers.
Toshiba joined the race to mass produce lithium-ion batteries for zero-emissions electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids last year, announcing then that the Japanese electronics giant aimed to make 3 million lithium-ion battery cells a month starting in 2010.
Battery packs for hybrid cars can contain hundreds of cells. In the fall of last year, the company was making 150,000 cells a month, mostly for electric bicycles; a current production figure was not immediately available.
Kawatsu's comments highlight Toshiba's confidence in its battery technology and the growing number of new entrants fighting for a share of the potentially huge market in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
"No confidence, no investment," Kawatsu told the Financial Times. Toshiba is spending $279 million to build a second SCiB factory as it pushes into the market with the goal of reaching $2.2 billion in sales by 2015.
Pricing has not been set yet on Nissan's Leaf electric car (pictured), which will see limited distribution starting late next year, but the automaker's top marketing executive for North America told us today that the monthly cost to the consumer should be equivalent to the monthly cost of a fully loaded Honda Civic plus its fuel.
(Article updated 11/13/09 to correct pricing.)
That means the purchase price (about $28,000) or comparable monthly payment for a high-end Civic plus the cost of the gasoline it would need to cover 1,200 miles (at 30 MPG and $3/gallon, about $120), said Brian Carolin, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Nissan North America.
Although Nissan's global plan is to sell the zero-emissions car without battery and to lease the battery to car buyers at a cost roughly equal to the $120 calculated above, both Carolin and Mark Perry, Nissan's director of product planning and advanced technology strategy for North America, told GreenCarAdvisor that Nissan has not yet decided how to price the package in the U.S.
"We may sell the car and battery together, we may lease it as a package, or we may sell the car and lease the battery," Carolin said. "We just haven't decided yet."
The 2010 Detroit auto show will include a 37,000-square-foot exhibit devoted to electric vehicles, organizers announced today.
The exhibit, called Electric Avenue, will be on the main floor of Detroit's Cobo Center. The display will have about 20 of the zero-emissions vehicles from both conventional automakers and startup companies, a statement said.
The electric-minded presentation will illustrate "the long-term viability of the auto industry using a subject that is top of mind globally these days," Doug Fox, chairman of the auto show, said in a statement.
The auto show, scheduled for January 11-24, also will reprise last year's EcoXperience exhibit, which allowed attendees to drive a variety of electric vehicles around a landscaped quarter-mile track in Cobo's basement.
That exhibit again will be sponsored by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
Electric Avenue's sponsor is Dow Chemical Co., which is developing batteries for electric vehicles.
A joint venture between Dow and South Korean battery-maker Kokam Engineering Co. Ltd. received a $161 million federal grant this summer.
Construction has begun on an 800,000-square-foot development and manufacturing plant near Dow's headquarters in Midland, Michigan. The plant is expected to cost about $665 million.
Peugeot has begun pre-bookings for the i0n (pictured), its i-MiEV-derived electric car developed in partnership with Mitsubishi and scheduled for production next year.
The company says that it has already signed letters of intent with nine companies and various government agencies for car sharing and large fleets in Europe.
For individual customers, pre-bookings are open on the websites of Peugeot Germany, Great Britain, Spain, France and Italy.
Like the Citroen C-Zero, which like the iOn will basically be an i-MiEV with a different badge, the four-seat, zero-emissions iOn will contain a lithium-ion battery pack that can be charged in six hours from a standard 220-volt outlet or get a charge to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes at special rapid-charge stations.
Peugeot has said the EV will develop a maximum power output of 64 base horsepower and top out at 81 miles per hour. That's good enough for European cities and Europe's increasingly speed-restricted autobahns, which currently have an "advisory speed limit" (or richtgeschwindigkeit) of 80 mph.
The iOn will also incorporate a number of innovative services, in particular through its "location and communications" box.
The box will not only handle liaison with an emergency call service, for which Peugeot is a leader throughout Europe, but will also provide feedback of technical data (including state of the battery, distance covered and kilometers before maintenance) for the professional management of vehicle fleets.
The California company also reports the installation of chargers in San Diego and Iowa.
Coulomb Technologies, the mostly unchallenged leader in networked charging stations for electric vehicles, announced today that it has signed an agreement with a Sydney-based company to distribute Coulomb's charging stations throughout Australia.
The agreement is exclusive to ChargePoint Pty Ltd, which Coulomb says is in "advanced discussions with a number of government and private sector partners for pilot projects in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, which are all due to commence in the first half of 2010."
The pilot projects will be used to evaluate charging behavior, energy grid load analysis, and environmental and societal impacts.
The first mass produced electric vehicles will arrive in Australia in 2010, with most manufacturers expected to release models down under in 2012. Coulomb is clearly hoping to have its charging stations in place in time to meet demand.
Meanwhile, Coulomb announced today that the Elk Horn, Iowa, will be getting four of its charging stations this week. That's significant because at present there are no EV charging stations between Denver and Chicago.
Coulomb says the stations will be the first of many along the I-80 corridor through Nebraska and Iowa.
And in California, Sequoia Solar, a San Diego company that designs and installs grid-connected solar systems, has announced plans that it will unveil the first of many networked solar-powered EV charging station this week.
Powered by a combination of the sun and Coulomb's charging stations, Sequoia said it plans to extend Coulomb's network and their own solar technologies throughout San Diego County.
In little over a year, Coulomb Technologies of Campbell, California, has gone from zero installed charging stations to chargers installed in many cities and on several continents. Our hats are off to CEO Richard Lowenthal (pictured), the driving force behind the spread of the stations.
Authorities today are trying to determine the exact cause of a spectacular fire at a lithium-battery-recycling facility in Trail, Canada, owned and operated by Toxco Inc., an Anaheim, California, company that has a recycling agreement with electric-car maker Tesla Motors and recently received $9.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to expand its recycling operations.
Fire officials and Toxco executives said today that they believe Saturday night's blaze, which set off a series of explosions witnesses described as resembling a fireworks show, likely started with an internal short in one of the used lithium-ion batteries stored at the 70,000-square-foot facility.
The 52 firefighters who responded to reports of explosions at the plant were forced to let the fire burn itself out because lithium is highly reactive to water.
Trying to douse the flames would only have made them worse, fire official John MacLean said, adding that environmental authorities were called in because lithium emits lithium oxide and the corrosive lithium dioxide.
According to the company's Website, Toxco is the only company in the world "that can recycle any size or type of lithium battery."
The company's credentials no doubt contributed to Toxco receiving a DOE grant in August to expand its battery-recycling operations in preparation for the mass production of large-format lithium batteries expected to occur in coming years as gasoline-electric hybrids and pure-electric vehicles enter the market in great numbers.
Like spent nuclear fuel rods, used large-format lithium-ion batteries pose a serious environmental problem, because their disposal carry various risks, including the threat of fire and explosion.
Nissan is ready to pump $220 million into its existing Japanese battery joint venture and an additional $330 million into a new lithium-ion battery factory in France that it would own with partner Renault, the Nikkei news service in Japan is reporting.
---------- Renault Fluence ZE concept is stylized version of EV the French automaker plans to start selling in Israel in 2011. ----------
Renault-Nissan Alliance chief Carlos Ghosn said just last month that the two companies were considering France as the location for a new battery plant, so the news from the Nikkei seems reasonable.
One of China's major oil companies - already a partner in the joint venture that will supply lithium-ion batteries for California-based Coda Automotive's upcoming electric sedan - is now considering a network of battery swap stations in China, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
China National Offshore Oil envisions a national network of stations where motorists can swap discharged EV batteries for full charged packs. "We can't build" electric cars, "but we can supply the energy," the oil company parent's strategy director told the newspaper.
Such a program, if it were to be launched, its success would be predicated on a number of Chinese automakers building their electric cars with swappable batteries.
----------
A Renault EV prototype sits on battery exchange platform in Better Place demonstration, while machinery pulls new battery pack from storage.
----------
The company is thinking along the same lines as California's Better Place, which plans national networks of battery exchange stations in Israel and Denmark for EVs to be built and sold in those countries by the Renault-Nissan Alliance starting in 2011.
Batteries, batteries, batteries. That's looking like the name of the game these days.
Automakers have shown they can build decent conventional hybrids, and are about to show how well they can do on all-electric and extended-range, gas-electric hybrids - but the wall they all run into is how far their cars and trucks can go before the electrons run out.
That's in the batteries, and with few exceptions (Nissan and Hyundai come to mind) automakers don't make batteries. They may assemble the individual cells into battery packs designed for their specific vehicles, but it is at the level of the cell - and the chemistry incorporated into that cell - that the ability of a battery to store and release energy is controlled.
So its good to see so much activity in the battery development world.
Latest is in South Korea, where Hyundai Mobis and LG Chem have announced a joint venture agreement to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrids. The $34-million venture is scheduled to start producing in the second half next year, with a goal of building batteries for as any as 200,000 vehicles a year.
Sanyo Electronics, which wants to be the world's biggest EV and hybrid battery supplier, has put another notch in its belt as it signs France's PSA Peugeot-Citroen as a client for nickel-metal hydride batteries.
The automaker will use Sanyo's NiMH batteries in its upcoming (not for U.S.) diesel-electric hybrids -the Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4 crossover (right) and the Citroen DS5 Hybrid 4 - which are slated to go into production in 2011.
Sanyo, which also supplies hybrid batteries to Ford and Honda and has a joint venture deal to produce nickel-metal hydride batteries with Volkswagen, has said it wants to capture 40 percent of the global market share for both NiMH and lithium-ion batteries by 2020.
The company has agreed to become subsidiary of electronics giant Panasonic Corp. and even as it boosts it hybrid and EV battery operations reportedly is looking to sell part of its rechargeable battery business to a unit of Fujitsu Corp. to avoid anti-trust problems.
Plans Change after Smith Electric Vehicles, Ford Mutually Dissolve Prior Agreement
Ford Motor Co. says it has selected Azure Dynamics to build the upcoming Ford Transit Connect electric delivery van after the automaker and Britain's Smith Electric Vehicles mutually decided to sever their longstanding ties.
Smith, which has been using Ford truck chassis in Europe for its electric trucks, had been named last year as builder of the Transit Connect battery-electric vehicle.
The word we hear is that Smith, which has a North American offshoot, Smith Electric Vehicles U.S., decided the small-EV market is getting too competitive and is going to concentrate its resources on the large-truck segment.
The change won't delay the planned launch of the electric van, though, said Ford spokeswoman Jennifer Moore. "We're still on track for late 2010," she told Green Car Advisor.
Azure, which already works with Ford on the hybrid version of the E450 commercial van due next year, will used its proprietary "ForceDrive" battery-electric powertrain for the Transit Connect EV.
Hoping to avoid running into anti-trust problems with their proposed merger, Japanese battery giants Panasonic and Sanyo are busily trying to shed a few resources.
News reports in Japan say that Panasonic is reducing its ownership stake in Panasonic EV Energy, the hybrid-car battery venture it shares with Toyota, while Sanyo Electronics is considering selling a piece of its rechargeable battery operation to a unit of Fujitsu Corp.
---------- Battery Monster: U.S. and China fear Panasonic takeover of Sanyo would give combined companies a near-monopoly on hybrid batteries. ----------
Panasonic has proposed a friendly $70 billion take-over of Sanyo and without unloading some of their assets the combined companies would control 80 percent of the world's nickel-metal hydride battery market.
NiMH batteries are used in all hybrids made today, and are likely to continue being the main type of battery used in conventional hybrids even after the industry starts using lighter lithium-ion batteries for plug-in hybrids.
Both companies also have growing lithium-ion battery operations.
U.S. and Chinese regulators have been withholding their approval of the takeover, citing anti-trust concerns.
Monopolies and near-monopolies are rarely good news for consumers (and in this case the consumers are the automakers as well as the general public), but there's one positive note in all this: You know the future is looking bright for advanced batteries and the cars that will use them when two giants like Panasonic and Sanyo want to combine forces to take advantage of future growth.
Anticipating a boom in rechargable electric vehicles, Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corp. said today that it will build a second lithium-ion battery factory in Japan, with capacity for as manty as 6 million hybrid and EV battery cells a year. A single vehicle can use hundreds of cells.
Toshiba's rapid-charging SCiB batteries use a lithium-titanium oxide chemistry that, the company says, makes them more stable and less prone to overheating than other types of lithium batteries.
The company said it will invest up to 215 billion yen ($274 million) in the new factory, which is scheduled to be built next year with battery manufacturing to begin in the spring of 2011.
When both Toshiba battery plants are in operation, the company said, it expects annual sales of the battery cells to top 200 billion yen ($250 million).
Nissan and Renault, which plan to be the first major car makers to launch mass-produced electric vehicles for sale globally, also are planning on building their own battery packs using technology developed in Nissan's Japanese R&D center.
The companies so far have formally announced plans to build battery factories in the U.S., Portugal and England to support their EV effort, and now France -home to Renault - has been added to the list, kind of.
Carlos Ghosn, who heads both automakers (each owns a piece of the other and Renault has controlling interest in Nissan) said during a management forum in Tokyo this morning that it would be logical to "suspect that France is also a place where we are going to build some batteries" to support the 2012 launch of the companies' global EVs.
AutoObserver contributing editor Bill Visnic hung around the first annual Plug-In Vehicles (and batteries) conference in Detroit on Monday and filed this synopsis of the day's goings-on for Green Car Advisor.
DETROIT - As the inaugural "Business of Plugging In" conference proceeded here earlier this week (it ended Wednesday afternoon) participants from the auto, energy and regulatory sectors generated intriguing discussions and exchanges of important information and ideas.
The conference attracted a sellout 600 attendees and offered more than a dozen panels, keynote speeches and sessions.
Some highlights from the first day of the conference:
The situation for the supply of lithium for lithium-ion batteries is a topic of frequent discussion. Experts here say lithium - which is produced mainly in South America and Russia - should remain reasonably priced and in good supply "for many years to come." Lithium is claimed to be the thirty-third most abundant element in the earth's crust.
For those attending college or preparing to attend college: consider an engineering degree in materials science. Executives from several of the key battery-development companies say there is and will continue to be high demand for people with such expertise, which combines knowledge from many of the fields crucial to battery development.
Automakers or suppliers - who's best to make batteries? The consensus seems to be that suppliers eventually should take the wheel on this one, although for many crucial first-generation production vehicles, automakers seem anxious to keep battery development as close to home as possible. As the industry progresses, though, most believe suppliers should handle ongoing battery development and manufacturing to insure that all automakers have access to the most up-to-date innovations and chemistries.
To be effective replacements for conventionally powered vehicles, electrified models are going to have to get a lot lighter. Duh.
Many Cost Reductions Due to Subsidies, Not Manufacturing Efficiencies; Goals Uncertain
By Bill Visnic, Contributor
DETROIT - A shocking fact from the Business of Plugging In conference here: At today' s prices, the raw materials needed to produce the advanced lithium-ion batteries for plug-in hybrids or extended-range electric vehicles with energy capacity similar to General Motors' Chevrolet Volt will cost at least $8,000 per vehicle.
---------- GM engineers work on T-shaped lithium-ion battery pack for Chevrolet Volt. ----------
It gets deeper when the experts here start talking about the manufacturing investment required for all manner of electrified-vehicle components that at this moment don't exist. A plant to manufacture enough batteries for 10,000 large-battery-capacity electric vehicles will cost $60 million to $80 million.
Participants in the conference point to these figures as evidence that the Obama administration's goal of one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015 probably isn't going to happen - despite word from many with battery interests that costs are dropping.
J.E. Robertson, chief technical officer and executive vice president of new-product creation for Canada's Magna International Inc. (the same Magna that's buying GM's Adam Opel car-making operations in Europe), did say that plants designed to make the batteries in high volume could reduce costs.
But for now, somebody's got to build a plant to address even 10,000 vehicles.
It's 76 minutes long and chock full of up-to-date info on electric and hybrid-electric vehicle battery technology, chemistries and manufactuing.
If you are at all interested in what makes electric vehicles run, and the obstacles still out there to development of the "perfect" battery, it's well worth the time.
The video comes courtesy of GM, whose "battery guru," Denise Gray, moderated the session at the Business of Plugging In conference held this week Detroit and sponsored by the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research.
Panelists on the video are:
Yet Ming Chang, co-founder of battery developer A123 Systems and a professor of ceramics (for electrical use) at MIT;
Dania Ghantous, vice president of technology and battery development for Imara Corp.;
John Patten, director of Western Michigan University's manufacturing research center;
Jeffrey Sakamoto, a lithium-ion batterey specialist and assistant professor of materials engineering at Michigan State University;and
Ann Marie Sastry, CEO of battery development firm Sakti3.
Nissan, Renault Also Planning to Lease Batteries for Their EVs in Most Markets
There are all sorts of hopes and plans for lowering the cost of electric cars - most hinging on government subsidies and increased sales volumes that will power component costs - but one that doesn't lean of outside help is the idea of leasing the batteries with the car rather than including them in the sales price.
---------- Reva NXR is slated for 2010 launch in Europe, Asia. ----------
We first heard the idea from Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place. He suggests looking at the batteries as the principal part of the fuel system and thinking of leasing in terms of how we pay for fuel in our gasoline cars.
We don't buy a lifetime's supply of gas when we buy a new car now, he says. We pay for it as we need it. Why not the same with batteries and electricity?
Pay a monthly fee for the batteries and the few pennies it costs to recharge them each day and if the lease price is figures properly your "fuel" costs are likely to be the same or less than if you were driving a car with an internal combustion engine.
Among other things leasing means the car makers, not you, are responsible for fixing problems and for providing updated batteries when improvements are introduced.
Now we know the analogy doesn't hold up all that well - the electrons are the fuel and the batteries more like the fuel tank - but the idea still sounds pretty good.
South Korean battery make LG Chem says it will spend more than $300 million over the next three years to build a manufacturing plant in Michigan for advanced technology batteries.
---------- Basic design for Chevy Volt battery pack shows it contains more than 200 individual lithium-ion cells. ----------
The company is one of four battery makers approved for generous state tax incentives this summer as Michigan bids to become the nation's battery-making center.
At least three other battery groups, from Germany, South Korea and the U.S., also have expressed interest n locating plants in Michigan, state officials say.
LG plans to make batteries for a variety of applications and customers, but is linked closely with General Motors because a subsidiary, Compact Power, earlier this year won separate contracts from GM to build the lithium ion battery packs for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in hybrid and an as-yet-unnamed 2011 Buick plug-in hybrid.
The LG plant is to be located in Holland, Mich., about 180 miles due west of Detroit.
Compact Power which has a facility in Troy, Mich., near Detroit, apparently will build the completed battery packs using lithium-in cells made by parent LG Chem at its new plant.
Wheego Electric Cars says it has selected traction battery specialist Discover Energy Corp. as supplier of the traction batteries to be used in its low-speed Wheego Whip neighborhood electric vehicle.
Discover produces a power-dense type of lead-acid battery called a dry cell or absorbent glass mat (AGM) battery in which the electrolyte is absorbed into a mat of fine composite fibers.
An AGM battery has no liquid to spill the event of an accident and because of its design and components handles the higher operating temperatures of an EV system better than other lead-acid batteries and holds its charge longer.
In California, support for government-mandated regulation of private industries tends to go south with the geography. And when it comes to the idea of regulating electric-car charging systems planned for the state, the public utilities are following suit, leaving the state regulatory commission with little guidance as it begins considering the issue.
Bay Area-based Pacific Gas & Electric, in a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission published last week, said that private charging system companies such as Coulomb Technologies and Better Place need to be closely regulated as they build out and operate electric charging station networks.
At issue, the utility said, is the stability of the power grid as more and more EVs and extended-range hybrids become available and need places to recharge their batteries.
Also at issue - but unmentioned - is whether and how much private companies should profit from providing electric car owners with power that the utilities originally provided.
At the far end of the state, San Diego Gas & Electric argued against such regulation, saying that the Public Utilities Commission was formed to regulate public utilities, not private companies.
Tesla Motors Corp. reportedly has selected Panasonic to supply the batteries for its Model S electric sedan (left), scheduled to go into production in late 2011.
Tesla wouldn't comment on the deal - initially reported by GreenTech Media and based on information from unidentified sources.
It makes sense, though, especially based on today's other Panasonic news - that the electronics giant is developing a way to mass produce low-cost EV batteries using commercial lithium-ion cells made for laptop computers.
The battery pack in the Tesla Roadster EV uses 6,800 laptop cells, individually wired together and protected from runaway heat buildup by an internal liquid cooling system and use of thousands of fuses meant to isolate an overheated cell so it can't spread its thermal overload throughout the pack.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has estimated the present cost of the hand-built pack at $36,000, accounting for a third of the roadster's base price.
Despite the expense, use of the commercial laptop cells is favored by Tesla over purpose-built EV batteries, and the company plans to use the same or a similar system for its Model S battery packs.
If Panasonic can build them on an automated line in its existing battery plants, as it has claimed - the cost savings for Tesla would be significant.
In an interesting development on the EV battery front, electronics giant Panasonic Corp says it has developed a technology for linking mass-produced lithium-ion cells (right) into bundles large and stable enough for hybrid and all-electric cars, Reuters news service reports.
The system sounds like an automated, mass-production version of the Tesla Motors method of linking thousands of conventional laptop battery cells into a hand-assembled power pack for its speedy Tesla Roadster EV.
Because the Panasonic system would use existing battery plants and production equipment it could dramatically reduce the cost of EV batteries - presently the most expensive component on an electric car.
The report doesn't mention them, but the Panasonic technology presumably includes a battery management system and a cooling methodology to keep the volatile cells from overheating and to protect the entire pack from damage if a single cell does experiences what the industry likes to call a "thermal event."
Panasonic said it hopes to have a commercial EV battery ready as early as 2013. In addition to use in autos, an affordable, compact lithium-ion battery pack could be sold as an energy storage device for solar- and wind-generation systems and for fuel cells.
Daimler chief Dieter Zetsche says he's still is betting on a hydrogen future for the automobile.
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Mercedes B-Class fuel cell cars are being used in long-term road tests in Europe and U.S.
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But in a round-table interview with reporters form a variety of media including (subscription only) Automotive News during the recent Frankfurt Auto Show, Zetsche said that hybrids and battery-electric cars will be long-term interim technologies until hydrogen fuel cell cars and hydrogen fueling technology are ready for market.
Daimler is investing heavily in both electric and fuel cell technologies, he said, and has banded together with other German automakers to boost hydrogen fueling technology.
Asked if Daimler would consider four-cylinder engines for its Mercedes-Benz cars as U.S. fuel economy regulations tighten, Zetsche said that he wouldn't rule out the option .
He also said, according to an interview transcript posted today by Automotive News, that he sees a continued weak U.S. market for luxury cars for several years and that the Chinese market is likely to step in to gill the void.
Fuel efficiency for luxury cars is becoming a necessity rather than an afterthought, Zetsche said, adding that he is convinced that many customers continue to want a comfortable and spacious car but "would not like to be called callous by their neighbor because the fuel consumption is astronomic."
Daimler - indeed, the entire auto industry,- is at the "tipping point now" for electric cars, he said, pointing out that hydrogen fuel cell cars use all-electric drivetrains.
Research Could Lead to Better Electrical Storage for Hybrids, EVs, and Much More
Microscopic carbon nanotubes may have the potential to transport electricity faster and over greater distances with minimal loss of energy, according to Honda Research Institute USA. In this image, the 10 tubes grown on red. pink or peach-colored substrata have metallic conductive properties while the one growing on a blue substrate has semiconducting properties and could not be used to replace metallic conductors such as copper. The empty substrata on either side of the center section are particles too small or too large to grow usable nanotubes.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
By themselves, carbon nanotubes don't do much - don't look like much, either (in fact, you need a pretty powerful electron microscope to see 'em).
But shoot a jolt of electricity into them and it's a new ball game.
They conduct electricity faster, over greater distances and with less energy loss than just about anything else, and they are so small that you can pack an enormous number of them - and an enormous amount of high-efficiency conductivity - into a fairly small package.
Huge application possibilities exist, especially in the search for lighter, cooler-running and more powerful electronics and electrical storage devices for hybrid and electric vehicles.
That's why America Honda Motors is so excited about the announcement today from its R&D unit that researchers there have devised a way to grow carbon nanotubes so that 91 percent of the tubes gown have the necessary metallic properties, nearly double the best efforts of of other research efforts, the company says.
Commercial in Five Years?
A Honda spokesman told Green Car Advisor the research could result in commercial applications for carbon nanotubes in five years or less.
The project was led by Honda Research Institute USA, in Columbus, Ohio, in conjunction with researchers at Purdue University, in Indiana, and the University of Louisville, in Kentucky.
The research, to be published in Friday's edition of Science magazine, opens "new possibilities for miniaturization and energy efficiency, including much more powerful and compact computers, electrodes for supercapacitors, electric cables, batteries, solar cells, fuel cells, artificial muscles, composite material for automobiles and plane, energy storage material and electronics for hybrid vehicles," Honda said in its announcement.
Arizona-based Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. today signed a $99.8 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to join Nissan in the biggest deployment of electric vehicles -- and creation of the largest charging infrastructure -- ever undertaken.
That eTec was earmarked to receive the contract is not news; we reported that in August. But along with news of the signing today, eTec provided further details regarding how it intends to use the money.
In a statement, eTec said the final scope of work will include the deployment of 10,950 Level 2 (220-volt) chargers, 260 Level 3 (440-volt) fast-chargers and 4,700 Nissan LEAF zero-emissions electric vehicles in five states: Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington.
In conjunction with the contract signing, The EV Project (as eTec and Nissan call it) officially commenced today. ETec marked the commencement of the project with creation of the project's official Website.
The Website is designed to provide general information about The EV Project and it provides information about how to purchase a Nissan LEAF and how to apply for a free charger at a home or work.
Balqon Corp., an emerging developer of heavy-duty electric vehicles, today announced the release of its battery-powered Mule M150, a pure-electric truck designed for use in on-highway short-haul applications.
The Harbor City, California, company expects the plug-in delivery vehicle with a 7-ton capacity to appeal to businesses and agencies seeking a zero-emissions cargo solution for inner-city routes, port facilities and airports.
Powering its fully integrated heavy-duty electric drive system are lithium-ion batteries capable of propelling the truck up to a claimed 150 miles on a single charge without cargo and 90 miles fully loaded at speeds up to 55 miles per hour.
Features include: a 6-speed automatic transmission, a quick-change battery module, a high-efficiency AC-induction motor, liquid-cooled traction controls, and wireless performance monitoring.
Balqon said the Mule M150 will go on sale the third quarter of next year. Visit the company's Website for further details.
Honda announced today that it will display at the Tokyo Motor Show next month a near-production version of the CR-Z (right), which will likely be the world's first hybrid sports car to employ a six-speed transmission when it goes on sale next year.
Alongside the CR-Z Concept 2009 will be the EV-N (below left), a small, four-seat battery-electric vehicle inspired by the N360, the twin-cylinder, air-cooled 360cc micro car launched with a plastic trunk lid in the 1960s. The revival vehicle has solar panels on the roof that could be used to charge the battery. Honda said the EV-N is "purely a design study and there are no plans for production."
The show will also see the debut of the Skydeck Concept (below right), a six-seat hybrid MPV/minivan, similar to the Ford S-Max. Honda said this design study is a great example of how hybrid technology can be placed in a range of different cars for different needs.
"To give the Skydeck the practicality of a conventional MPV, many of the hybrid system components, including the high-power battery, are housed in the car's center tunnel (rather than behind the rear seats or under the floor, as with previous production hybrids). This allows for greater cabin space, and the room for three rows of two seats. It also gives a lower center of gravity."
Bob Kruse, who recently led a team that played a key role in the development of the Chevrolet Volt and who crafted the automaker's long-term electric-vehicle strategy, has resigned effective today.
Kruse, executive director of global vehicle engineering for hybrids, electric vehicles and batteries since early last year, left to focus on an EV consulting company he founded last month.
He will provide automotive and vehicle electrification expertise for companies looking to seize a piece of more than $1.3 billion in federal grants available to Michigan and Detroit's major automakers.
"My departure from General Motors has nothing to do with my view of the future success for the Volt," Kruse said. "I've left on very good terms. I have a lot of respect for the leadership of General Motors."
GM spokesman Rob Peterson told Green Car Advisor that Kruse's resignation, coming only 13 months before the Volt's scheduled production launch, "won't have any impact" on the gasoline-electric hybrid sedan.
"There's never a good time to lose good people, but there's a deep bench with the Volt and that team was working together before Bob joined and they will continue to march on," he said.
Kruse's resignation comes at a crucial time for GM, which is banking on the Volt extended-range electric vehicle to help it meet stringent new government fuel-economy rules and to change the public's perception of the company as being an electric-car killer and a proponent of gas-guzzlers.
Canadian NEV-maker Zenn Motor Co. says it will stop making and marketing its $16,000 (U.S.) cityZenn low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle (right), drop plans for a highway-legal Zenn car and is switching its business plan to become distributor of an EV drivetrain.
The company said it is partnering with EEStor, a secretive company that claims to have developed an ultracapacitor-based EV battery that can deliver up to 300 miles of highway-speed range on a single 5-minute charge.
Zenn CEO Ian Clifford told the Toronto Star that it no longer makes business sense for the small company "to go into the distribution and sales" of EVs because of "the way things have really changed over the last year."
He was referring both to the growing number of large automakers announcing electric vehicle plans and to tough new safety rules in Zenn's home province of Ontario that would have required a number of expensive changes to Zenn's cars to make them street legal. Zenn also took a financial beating - along with the rest of the auto industry - as the recession slowed sales this year of its low-speed EV.
While Texas-based EEStor has not yet shown a working model of its ultracapacitor-cum-battery, Clifford said Zenn, which owns a 10.5 percent stake in the company, is "working on a daily basis with EEStor on this final milestone" in battery development that "takes us to commercial viability."
In an obvious move to shore up its access to state-of-the-art advanced batteries for electric vehicles, Volkswagen is setting up a joint venture with Varta Microbattery to develop EV power packs, Europe's biggest carmaker said today.
Volkswagen already collaborates with Japan's Toshiba and Sanyo as well as with China's BYD on battery technology.
The announcement comes less than a month after VW presented a prototype of the e-Up! plug-in electric vehicle at the Frankfurt Motor Show with the intention of launching the vehicle in Europe in 2013.
Only days later, VW said it was also planning on introducing a slightly larger electric vehicle in the U.S. The company, which was slow to jump on the EV bandwagon, was quickly forming pacts with battery-makers and announcing bold plans for EV production.
In a statement issued today, VW said the project with Varta aims to undertake research and development of highly advanced and yet cost competitive lithium-ion batteries.
The four-year project still requires approval from German authorities.
South Korea's CT&T Co. intends to make neighborhood electric vehicles at two production and distribution facilities in Pennsylvania, Governor Ed Rendell announced today at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
CT&T makes low- and mid-speed, short-distance NEVs that the company claims passes the crash tests required for passenger cars. The vehicles sell for about $12,000 apiece.
Although the media focuses on highway-capable EVs, it's worth noting that most of the EVs in the U.S. and the rest of the world today are NEVs such as the CT&T plug-in and zero-emissions vehicle pictured here.
Indeed, CT&T has a contract to supply 4,000 NEVs to California police organizations for parking enforcement and it sees a strong market for NEVs across the U.S.
The company says cities with large municipal fleets offer a considerable initial market opportunity, with the electric car as a low-cost option for parking authorities, parks and recreation departments, and similar agencies with short-distance, low-speed vehicle needs.
CT&T President Young Gi Lee said in a statement that the company's long-term business plan calls for 40 regional assembly and sales systems in North America. CT&T has been exporting to China, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and America since 2005.
The company is focusing on sites on the Delaware River in Philadelphia for its initial Pennsylvania location. Company executives visited five prospective sites in the Pittsburgh region Thursday, including two within the city.
While in Pittsburgh, CT&T executives also met with experts in battery and fuel technology from Carnegie Mellon University, which is engaged in a range of research initiatives to support the growth and development of electric vehicle technology.
General Motors and India's Reva Electric Car announced today that they will jointly produce a battery-powered vehicle for South Asia based on the Detroit carmaker's best-selling mini-car, the Chevrolet Spark (pictured).
Under the alliance, GM will provide the vehicle platform and manufacturing facilities for the zero-emissions car, which will begin production next year, while Reva will supply the technology for the battery, electric drivetrain and power management systems.
They did not provide forecasts for production, but GM has the capacity to produce 225,000 vehicles of all types at its two plants in India and has plans to scale up its factory in Maharashtra state by an additional 160,000 vehicles.
GM, which is also due to launch its plug-in Chevrolet Volt in the U.S. next year, joins a growing list of the world's major carmakers that are due to launch electric cars over the next three years as part of their carbon-cutting strategy.
Some, including Japan's Mitsubishi Motors, have already launched them.
Last week at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Renault announced that it was launching four electric vehicles in 2011-12. Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz showed planned battery-powered luxury models.
Lithium-ion car battery maker A123 Systems Inc. increased the number of shares in its initial public offering and priced them for $13.50 apiece, above the estimate range.
The upsized deal helped the Watertown, Massachusetts, company raise $380.4 million, far above what it had expected. On Tuesday, facing strong demand, A123 had raised the price estimate range of the IPO to between $10 and $11.50 apiece, up from the original range of $8 to $9.50.
A123 sold 28.1 million shares, 9.3 percent more than expected.
A123, which was founded by scientists linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, develops batteries and battery systems for hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and all-electric vehicles and works with such carmakers as BMW, Chrysler and General Motors.
"The fact that they have received several hundred million dollars from the government and have strong venture backers and corporate partners like Motorola and Qualcomm clearly reveals the confidence in this intriguing cleantech story," said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner with advisory firm IPO Boutique.
A123 won a $249.1 million grant in August from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of a competition for $1.5 billion in federal stimulus funds for companies that make advanced automotive batteries.
The IPO's underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have the option to buy another 4.2 million shares, which could bring the deal's total proceeds to $437.5 million.
Tesla Motors' forthcoming all-electric Model S sedan (pictured) has been designed so that its battery pack can be switched with a fresh battery pack in five minutes or less, the company's outgoing director of vehicle engineering and manufacturing said in an interview today.
Speaking with Green Car Advisor shortly after his resignation was announced, Michael Donoughe said the plug-in electric vehicle has been designed in such a way that its lithium-ion battery pack can be removed and replaced with another one in the amount of time it takes to fill the gas tank of a standard automobile.
"When you install the battery pack for vehicle assembly and when you're running at line speed, you have to do it in a fairly quick fashion," Donoughe said. "So you design for manufacturing and assembly, and as long as you're designing for manufacturing and assembly you can also design for manufacturing, assembly and swap. That's basically what we're looking to do."
Telsa, he said, is looking to ramp up quickly once the zero-emissions Model S enters production, which is still on target for late 2011. Six months from assembly of the first Model S, Tesla expects to be producing 400 a week, or roughly 20,000 annually, he said.
Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad said today that the company has already received more than 1,600 reservations for the Model S, including one from Donoughe.
Mike Donoughe, currently head of vehicle engineering and manufacturing for Tesla Motors, will join the Detroit management consulting firm St. Clair Consortium as senior partner effective Oct. 1. His last day at the automaker will be Friday.
Tesla has not publicly named Donoughe's replacement. Tesla Chief Engineer Peter Rawlinson is head of engineering on the all-electric Model S sedan and will retain his responsibilities in that capacity.
Donoughe joined San Carlos, California-based Tesla 15 months ago, shortly after Tesla had begun production of its first product, the all-electric Roadster sports car. Donoughe helped the company achieve fully ramped-up production this summer, when Tesla hit its target of 25 cars built per week.
Tesla, the only automaker producing and selling highway-capable EVs, has delivered more than 700 Roadsters in the United States and Europe so far. Donoughe also focused on enhancing Roadster quality and helped execute a cost-down program that helped Tesla achieve a significant financial milestone and reach profitability in July.
Donoughe is leaving voluntarily and in part for personal reasons. He plans to dedicate more time to the Rochester, Michigan-based Cornerstone Youth Development Fund, which he co-founded with his daughter, Kelly.
Cornerstone is a non-profit organization focused on making facility infrastructure, student tuition and teacher salary investments in Uganda and Detroit to advance the education and development of youth.
Donoughe's planned departure comes at the most logical and least disruptive time for the automaker -- after the successful completion of the Roadster ramp-up but before the start of production of the all-electric Model S sedan.
"Mike joined the company shortly after we had begun manufacturing the Roadster, and his enthusiasm and expertise helped Tesla achieve fully ramped-up production," said Tesla CEO Elon Musk. "He's leaving the company on very solid footing and at a logical time in Tesla's phenomenal growth curve. We wish him a ll the best."
In a statement, Donoughe described Tesla as "a company populated throughout with excellent and enthusiastic people. It has been a wonderful experience for me to have been a part of this talented team."
California took the pulse of the zero-emissions vehicle industry this week and found plug-in electric vehicle manufacturers worried about charging infrastructure and public expectations.
The California Air Resources Board is hearing from fuel cell and EV manufacturers in preparation for releasing regulations for its Zero-Emissions Vehicle Program. Targets for 2015 and thereafter are due out by Nov. 10, with final targets due by early next year.
In its fifth major revision of the program since 1990, it voted last year to reduce the 2014 sales target from 25,000 to 7,500 vehicles.
A philosophical difference emerged between conventional car manufacturers and electric-only car companies.
Nissan, which is shooting for a 100-mile range for its Leaf EV, is playing down its perks. When asked to compare gasoline-powered and EV batteries, a company executive said not to expect comparable performance.
"Since the battery's not part of the emissions, it's not required to last 10 years and 150,000 miles," said Brian Verprauskus, senior manager of corporate planning for Nissan North America. "The issue's going to be the degradation. If the customer is OK with reduced range after 10 years, it'll definitely last that long, but after 10 years, we think there'll be more advanced batteries and the customer's going to want to swap it out with a next-generation battery."
Tesla Motors, on the other hand, is emphasizing the ways EVs differ from conventional cars. "We're trying to market cars based on the new attributes of EVs themselves," said J.B. Straubel, Tesla's chief technical officer. "It's an offensive technology shift. We can offer some new competitive advantages to customers."
EV manufacturers said the installation of charging infrastructure remained the biggest bottleneck to widespread implementation. BMW, which ran into charging issues with its MINI E pilot program, said the industry needed to agree on a standard for in-home charging infrastructure.
A British publication reported today that luxury-car crafter Rolls Royce is thinking about producing an all-electric Phantom similar in appearance to the gasoline-powered Phantom pictured here.
Auto Express News, citing an unidentified RR spokesman, said that of the brand's entire lineup a battery-powered Phantom made the most sense because, at more than 5,600 pounds with a heavy 6.75-liter V12 under the hood, replacing the engine with an electric motor and a lithium-ion battery shouldn't create a major weight issue.
The greatest problem RR engineers anticipate is coming up with an electric Phantom that gives the vehicle a respectable travel range between charges. But then, there'd be nothing preventing the engineers from adding a small range-extending gasoline- and diesel-powered engine to serve as a generator to keep the juice flowing.
With the base price of the 2009 Phantom set at $350,000, an additional EV or plug-in hybrid EV premium wouldn't likely be an issue for prospective customers. And there's something awfully cool about being able to prowl the nights in a silent Phantom.
Volvo cars and trucks have always been designed to withstand the rigors of Sweden's rough roads and cold temperatures, with particular emphasis on surviving a collision.
This is why Volvo has invented so many safety features since the making its first car in 1927.
Those features include a safety cage for occupants, laminated windshield, three-point safety belts, padded instrument panel, crumple zones, anti-locking brakes, inflatable curtain and lane-departure warning. The full list of Volvo safety innovations is quite long.
Now the Swedish automaker is applying some of those inventions to protecting the batteries that propel electric vehicles.
In a statement released today, Volvo said it conducting "extremely wide-ranging and thorough analysis of a variety of safety scenarios for cars with electric power.
"Through advanced automatic monitoring of battery status and by encapsulating the battery and protecting it effectively in a collision, the result is a comprehensive safety package of the very highest class."
Volvo's safety tests take place in several different stages. First at component level, then for whole systems and finally the complete car is safety-tested -- both virtually in the computer, and physically in Volvo's technically advanced crash-test center.
At present Volvo is conducting tests at component level to see how the electric-vehicle's battery is affected by harsh braking and the subsequent collision.
"We are also carrying out, for the first time, advanced crash tests in full scale to evaluate the technology in electrically powered cars," Volvo Cars' safety expert, Thomas Broberg, said.
One week after Volkswagen made a splash at the Frankfurt Motor Show with the world debut of its E-Up! electric vehicle (pictured), the German automaker has announced that it will likely sell a larger version of the cute compact in the U.S.
"The reason we are working on an electric vehicle is the American market," Ulrich Hackenberg, board member in charge of product development at Volkswagen AG, said today.
Hackenberg said a production version of the plug-in battery-electric zero-emissions E-Up! will go on sale in Europe in 2013. He said U.S. sales would start later.
The E-Up! is based on VW's new modular small-car family, scheduled to debut in 2011. The four-seat E-Up!, which measures 125 inches long (or 19 inches longer than the tiny Smart ForTwo), has a range of up to 80 miles on lithium-ion battery power.
For the United States, Hackenberg said, he envisions a front-drive model about 146 inches long (the 2009 MINI Cooper is 145.6 inches long). Electric versions of the Smart ForTwo and MINI Cooper are planned for the U.S.
VW will launch its first hybrid vehicle next year -- a version of the Touareg SUV. Hackenberg said the Touareg hybrid will debut at the 2010 Detroit auto show in January.
To date, very few details have been released regarding this vehicle.
Silicon Valley's venture capitalists believe the Detroit 3 automakers cannot become competitive again unless they scrap their traditional business model and embrace new, innovative ways of doing business.
Speaking of the Detroit 3, Ray Lane, a managing partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Buyers, said that "for years they have been led by accountants and lawyers, not engineers and entrepreneurs. That's OK if the industry isn't changing."
So what do Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group need to do to regain marketplace dominance?
"Start over," said Marc van den Berg, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, which backs upstart electric carmaker Tesla Motors and electric-vehicle infrastructure firm Better Place.
The only way the Detroit 3 can succeed is by completely overhauling the business model, moving beyond just designing attractive cars, Silicon Valley venture capitalists say.
"There is room for business model innovation and technology innovation," said Vinod Khosla, managing general partner of Khosla Ventures.
Khosla said U.S. automakers need to embrace innovation at all levels. He pointed to Better Place, which is building charging infrastructure and battery-swapping stations for electric vehicles.
"Better Place is saying,'Don't let the consumer buy the batteries,' " Khosla said. "That's a business model innovation."
Japan's GS Yuasa Corp. said it is in talks to supply overseas automakers with lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, and GS Yuasa's venture with Mitsubishi Motors may begin sales next year, Reuters reported today.
In an interview with the news service, GS Yuasa President Makoto Yoda said his company, the world's third-largest car-battery maker, aims to boost annual lithium-ion battery sales more than 30-fold to $1.1 billion by March 2016.
The company is banking on strong growth for gasoline-electric and pure electric vehicles amid concerns about climate change and as government subsidies offer consumers subsidies.
"Demand for electric vehicles is particularly strong in the United States and Europe as they have stringent regulations against carbon-dioxide emissions," Yoda told Reuters in an interview.
He reportedly said the company was in talks with automakers in the United States, Europe and Japan.
The venture, Lithium Energy Japan, is 51 percent owned by GS Yuasa, with trading house Mitsubishi Corp. holding 34 percent and Mitsubishi Motors holding 15 percent. Mitsubishi Motors launched i-MiEV, the world's first mass-produced electric car in July.
GS Yuasa, which also runs a joint venture with Honda Motor Co. to make lithium-ion batteries for gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles starting late next year, said it may begin sales of such batteries to other carmakers beginning April 2012.
GS Yuasa is reportedly planning to build a lithium-ion battery plant in Kyoto Prefecture of Japan for Mitsubishi's i-MiEV car, which is expected to produce batteries for 15,000 vehicles a year from the second half of 2010.
The American safety testing and certification company Underwriters Laboratories announced today that it intends to release a new set of requirements for large batteries in electric vehicles, UL Subject 2580.
UL said in a statement that with interest in electric vehicles on the rise, the "new requirements will help mitigate the potential risk of fire and electrical hazards and enhance the overall safety of batteries for electric vehicles."
In other words, the company is hoping that once it creates a set of requirements for EV batteries, the government will require battery-makers to obtain UL certifications for them. UL has conveniently come up with a name for the certificate: Subject 2580.
"Before becoming a standard, these requirements will undergo a comprehensive review process by a global Standard Technical Panel (STP). An STP is a consensus body of individuals representing consumers, government agencies, regulatory authorities, manufacturers and other knowledgeable interested parties that develop and maintain effective product safety standards," UL said.
According to the international consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the estimated number of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) that will be on the road globally over the next decade range from 1 million to 5 million new vehicles per year.
German model-car maker Herpa Miniaturmodelle, which announced last month that it would debut an all-electric version of the Trabant compact car at this week's Frankfurt Motor Show, kept its word and unveiled a baby-blue electric vehicle concept it calls the Trabant nT (right).
Company officials said a single 64-horsepower motor turns the front wheels and a lithium-ion battery pack supplies the juice. The plug-in EV can go approximately 155 miles between charges and has a top speed of 80 miles an hour, the officials said.
The company is hoping to bring the vehicle to market in 2012. No further details were available.
The old Trabant was a smog-spewing, two-stroke icon of communist East Germany. Exactly 3,096,099 of them were built between 1957 and 1991.
The photo at left shows the very last of the original Trabants being assembled. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, thousands of the smoky, boxy four-seaters streamed into West Germany.
Despite its mediocre performance and dreadful emissions, the car is regarded in Germany today with derisive affection as a symbol of the failed former East Germany.
Toshiyuki Tabata spent 30 years as a Nissan Motor Co. engineer trying to make gasoline-powered cars quieter. Now he's consulting music composers to make electric cars noisier -- and safer.
An article published by Bloomberg news service today addresses the efforts Tabata in particular and automakers in general are making to make electric and hybrid cars, with little or no engine noise, safer for pedestrians.
Some of the automakers are simply seeking sounds that resemble conventional engine noises. But as we learn from Tabata, Nissan is doing something completely different.
The company consulted Japanese composers of film scores. What Tabata and his six-member team came up with is a high- pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in "Blade Runner" (pictured), the 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott portraying his dystopian vision of 2019.
"We wanted something a bit different, something closer to the world of art," Tabata said.
The article is well worth the time it takes to read it.
In Los Angeles County, where police struggle with illegal street racing, "The Jay Leno Show" tonight will air the first in a season-long series of races featuring an electrified Ford Focus and a string of celebrities who hope to finish year one of the show with the fastest time.
In a statement issued by NBC, the network emphasized that the vehicle used in the "Green Car Challenge" and pictured here is a battery-electric Ford Focus, suggesting that, perhaps, the energy needed to fuel the product- and celebrity-promoting joy ride did not in any way contribute to global warming.
But, hey, this is late-night television and the first celebrity is actress Drew Barrymore (below left), who famously exposed her breasts to David Letterman during a videotaped segment of his show and who immediately won the hearts of various male talk-show hosts -- not, say, Paul Hawken, the well-read environmentalist who has devoted much of his life to speaking out against wasting energy.
At the risk of raising reasonable doubt against what's supposed to be a light-hearted (and albeit light-brained) scheme to promote electric cars, we are reminded to inform that Leno's new show airs Monday through Friday from 10 till 11 p.m. Eastern.
The car pictured here is the very same one Ms. Barrymore will be driving. NBC would like us to emphasize that it is a one-of-a-kind Focus EV "tuned to perform on a racetrack that was specifically designed for 'The Jay Leno Show,' " so don't you be trying this at home.
Lest you not focus on whether Ms. Barrymore will flash Leno, we remind you that "Celebrities who accept the challenge will be at the wheel, driving quickly to establish a fast lap time that future guests will try to beat." And, "the 'Green Car Challenge' will be a regular segment on 'The Jay Leno Show.' "
Although the car is one-of-a-kind, NBC and Ford would appreciate it if we mention that the Focus appearing in the smackdown is based on the European five-door production Focus ST and modified into a battery electric vehicle, or BEV, as part of Ford's BEV test fleet.
That said, "The Focus BEV foreshadows many of the same systems that Ford will begin selling to consumers in an all-new electric Ford Focus, scheduled to go on sale in North America in 2011. The new Focus BEV is one of four electrified vehicles Ford is introducing now through 2012."
We commend Ford for the EV development. And our thoughts, prayers and dreams are with Ms. Barrymore.
GOTHENBURG, Sweden - Volvo Cars unveiled its new C30-based prototype electric car today and said that Indianapolis-based battery maker EnerDel is supplying the lithium-ion battery pack for the vehicles, which will be used in a series of on-road test programs in Europe over the next year.
The deal is EnerDel's second with Volvo, following this summer's announcement that the subsidiary of New York-based Ener1 Corp. was teaming with the Swedish automaker to supply batteries for a pair of plug-in diesel-electric hybrids.
The C30 BEV, or battery-electric vehicle, uses a 24 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack with 22 kilowatt-hours of usable energy and a predicted range of 75 to 93 miles depending on driving conditions.
Test Track Trial
Green Car Advisor got a chance to take one of the two existing C30 BEVs on a short spin around Volvo's demonstration track outside Gothenburg in southwest Sweden earlier today and found the four-seater - based on Volvo's smallest car - to be a sprightly, well-mannered package.
The nearly 700-pound (estimated) battery pack, made of hundreds of flat lithium-ion cells for easier cooling, is tucked beneath the C30's sporty body, fitted between the frame stiffeners to give the small car a low center of gravity and to protect the battery from damage in an accident.
Volkswagen AG this week rolled an electric car it calls the E-Up! onto the world stage, and told onlookers that the never-before-seen plug-in EV will likely enter production in 2013.
---------- Above and below: Volkswagen's E-Up! battery-electric vehicle debuts in Frankfurt. ----------
Furthermore, the German carmaker said it expects the zero-emissions compact car to approach production level on par with it other compact cars by 2020.
The company said the front-wheel-drive vehicle's lithium-ion battery will have 18 kilowatt hours of energy capacity enabling a driving distance of around 130 kilometers, or about 80 miles, depending on driving style.
"One of the basic milestones on this timeline is the mass-produced electric car," Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn said in a statement.
He said only in high volumes and on all continents could one truly speak of the beginning of the electric age in automobiles and a perceptible reduction of their environmental impact.
"The concept car now being presented in Frankfurt very realistically shows how we envision such a Volkswagen with pure electric drive --- technically, visually and with regard to a practical size," Winterkorn said.
Targeting more federal money to support the auto industry, the House on Wednesday approved an expansion of government-led research into making cars and trucks more fuel-efficient.
The House plan would allow the Energy Department to spend up to $200 million more each year on research and development for advanced-technology vehicles and auto parts.
Lawmakers' aides said the additional $200 million would boost government-supported research in this area to around $550 million if Congress, as expected, funds the request later this year.
The measure passed on a 312-114 vote, attracting dozens of Republican votes, even though some GOP lawmakers questioned its cost.
Wednesday's House action represented the latest move by Congress and the Obama administration to aid the auto industry. The White House stepped in with billions of dollars to rescue General Motors and Chrysler and led the companies through bankruptcy, and Congress approved $25 billion last year to help the industry retool assembly plants to meet tougher fuel economy standards.
Congress also created a $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program of incentives that successfully spurred new car sales over the summer.
Fuel-efficient technology is in great demand because of higher gasoline prices and the expectation of tightening auto regulations. Administration officials on Tuesday released plans to raise the gas mileage standards to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 and link greenhouse-gas emissions and fuel-economy requirements.
Democratic Representative Gary Peters of Michigan, who sponsored the green vehicle technology bill, said "there is no doubt that in the years ahead more Americans will be driving hybrids, plug-in hybrids, battery electric vehicles, and cars and trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells."
"The only question is whether these new technologies will be researched, developed and manufactured here in the United States, creating American jobs, or whether this technology will be built overseas," Peters said.
An article in the current issue of The Economist asks: "After many false starts, battery-powered cars seem here to stay. Are they just an interesting niche product, or will they turn motoring upside down?"
As the smart British weekly is wont to do, it hints at an answer. For that, you will need to read the article -- or at least the last two paragraphs of it. In fairness to the publication, we won't provide them. But the article is just a click away.
That said, here's a brilliantly crafted teaser -- the first four graphs of the article -- which provides a feast for thought:
In 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: "disruptive technology." This is an innovation that fulfills the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.
The example Dr. Bower and Dr. Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.
REVA Electric Car Co. presented the NXG to the world today, and announced the pricing for the 2011 NRX, at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
---------- Pictured, the REVA NXG electric car. ----------
Styled by Dilip Chhabria, the REVA NXG is a two-door, two-seater car with a targa top with a top speed of 80 miles an hour and a range of 125 miles per charge, and it can be fully charged in as little as 90 minutes using an optional fast charger.
The Indian automaker says that the plug-in electric NXG has "an effective range" of 250 miles per day due to the relatively short period of time required to fully fuel the vehicle using one of its fast chargers. The NXG was billed as REVA's 2011 model.
REVA executives took the opportunity to announce that today marked the official launch of the NXR, an electric car that is scheduled to enter production early next year. It will be available with either a lithium-ion battery or a lead-acid battery.
The NXR is a three-door, four-seater hatchback family car. The version with a lithium-ion battery is called the NXR Intercity and it has a top speed of 65 miles per hour and a range of 100 miles per charge. Using the 90-minute fast charge -- normal charging is eight hours -- the NXR Intercity offers an effective range of 192 miles a day.
Prices of the NXR Intercity will vary across Europe depending on taxes and subsidies, and there is the option of purchasing the car and batteries separately, or at an all-inclusive price.
That said, REVA announced the average price for the NXR Intercity in Europe will be around 14,995 euros (or $21,000), plus a monthly mobility fee for the batteries and other services.
French automaker Peugeot today introduced the BB1 Concept, telling a crowd at the Frankfurt Motor Show that the compact zero-emissions electric car was inspired by motorcycle technology.
Peugeot CEO Jean-Marc-Gales said that the BB1 Concept exists "between the two- and four-wheel worlds," adding that its frame is based on a tubular chassis designed by Peugeot Motorcycles.
But instead of one electric motor, the BB1 Concept is equipped with four -- two inside each of the car's rear wheels. These would be Active Wheels supplied by French tire-making giant Michelin.
The electric motors get their power from two lithium-ion battery packs, which are placed under the rear seats.
Gales said Peugeot will decide within the next six months whether or not it makes commercial sense for the company to bring the BB1 to market, adding that he hopes it does.
The car weighs 1,320 pounds, has a range of 72 miles between charges and a top speed of 54 miles an hour.
Ford of Europe has chosen the Frankfurt Motor Show as the venue to introduce the first in a fleet of battery-electric-vehicle prototypes based on the European Ford Focus and specially developed to participate in a study of super-clean cars sponsored by the British government.
Ford of Europe says the study will help the automaker decide whether to use the technology in their European passenger-car lineup.
A consortium of Ford, utility and university employees will use the fleet of 15 prototype zero-emissions Focus BEVs and a charging infrastructure in and around the London borough of Hillingdon starting early next year.
The prototype features a new all-electric powertrain provided the Canadian parts supplier Magna International. Ford says the technology is based on technology being developed for Ford's new-generation C-sized global vehicle architecture and which will be launched in North America in 2011.
Under the skin of the prototype is a state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery pack with the capacity of 23 kilowatt hours, and a 100-kilowatt (134-horsepower) permanent-magnet electric traction motor.
Ford officials say the BEVs will have a range of up to 75 miles and a top speed of 85 mph. Charging the batteries will take between 6-8 hours using 230-volt outlets.
The prototype incorporates key components from Ford's proven North American hybrid technology, including the electric climate control system. The high-voltage air-conditioning compressor is a key feature of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid, recently introduced in the North American market.
Opel debuted the Ampera at the Frankfurt Motor Show this week, but one question lingered when the crowd shuffled off to another unveiling: Would the gasoline-electric hybrid -- the Chevy Volt's European twin -- actually launch?
---------- Pictured, Ampera meets the press in Frankfurt. ----------
Or would it be shelved as a result of a controlling share of Opel being sold to Canadian autoparts supplier Magna International and the Russian financial institution Sberbank?
The answer, we learned today, is that the Ampera program is very much a go.
In an email exchange with Dan Pund, who writes for Edmunds.com's Inside Line, Dave Darovitz said the Ampera is still slated to launch in Europe. As communications manager for the Volt and Chevy fuel-cell Equinox, Darovitz would know.
General Motors last week agreed to sell 55 percent of Opel to Magna and Sberbank in a 50-50 split. GM will keep 35 percent, the biggest single stake in Opel, and Opel workers will hold 10 percent.
The deal still hinges on conditions that could take weeks or months to work out, such as final agreement for government financing and union support for what could be painful cuts.
Additionally, Belgium has asked the European Union to investigate the deal to make sure Germany was not violating antitrust rules.
Audi, the German automaker that has repeatedly voiced concerns about battery-electric power while simultaneously touting the benefits of diesel, delighted a crowd at the Frankfurt Motor Show today with the dramatic world debut of its plug-in e-Tron electric-car concept.
The apparent design offspring of an R8 and TT, the e-Tron sports four electric motors, one at each wheel. Combined, they generate 230 kilowatts (or 313 horsepower) and 4,500 Nm (or 3,319.03 pound-feet) of torque -- enough to shoot the lipstick-red two-seater from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.8 seconds.
The zero-emissions vehicle's lithium-ion battery provides enough juice, Audi claims, for the electric ladybug to cover 149 miles between charges. All in 4-wheel drive, of course.
While Audi made it clear that the e-Tron is a concept car, the automaker also said some prototypes will likely be on the road next year and "a small build" of series production models could be jazzing up blacktop in 2012.
The same day Tesla Motors delivered its 700th all-electric Roadster -- to a German law student on the opening day of the Frankfurt Motor Show, no less -- Porsche's new president and CEO Michael Macht (right) announced that his company was working hard on an electric-powered sports car.
Sadly, he had no automobile to display.
Standing in front of reporters Tuesday, Macht said "that one day Porsche will have an electric sports car in its line-up."
Why didn't it?
Available battery technology is not "sufficient to meet Porsche's strict requirements," he said.
Tell that to the German law student.
Macht pointed out that Porsche has a long legacy with hybrid technology as it was exactly 109 years ago that Professor Ferdinand Porsche built the first fully functioning car with hybrid technology.
It was a nice little speech. One that would have gone well with an all-electric 911, and even better with a gasoline-electric hybrid 911. Only Porsche hasn't invented either.
Renault SA today introduced a lineup of electric cars at the Frankfurt Motor Show and committed to making at least 100,000 of them by 2016.
---------- Right, the Fluence Z.E. Concept. ----------
Declaring a break with the long dominance of the gasoline engine, Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn presented four electric cars that he said would go on sale in 2011 or 2012.
They "will bring environmental soundness at a price everyone can afford," he told an audience at the auto show.
The move is a gamble by Ghosn to carve out a big future market for the two companies he leads, Renault and Japan's Nissan Motor Co., which own large parts of each other and share technology. Most other automakers are proceeding more cautiously with electric vehicles.
Underlining Ghosn's remarks were the world debut of four electric vehicles at the Renault display area: the Fluence Z.E. Concept, the Kangoo Z.E. Concept, the Zoe Z.E. Concept and the Twizy Z.E. Concept.
Renault spokesmen said the four electric concept cars provide a preview of Renault's range of vehicles due to be released from 2011. To underscore that statement, they announced that the French automaker and EV-charging-solutions proponent Better Place signed an agreement today whereby Better Place will start importing and distributing Renault's first passenger electric vehicle -- the Fluence ZE, a five-seat sedan -- in the first half of 2011 in Israel and will offer recharging services to customers buying this car from the Renault network in Denmark.
Both companies committed to a volume of at least 100,000 vehicles for both countries by 2016.
EV Services Company Working With Intel, Microsoft for On-Board System
Sample screen shows how Better Place AutOS software would locate and display battery exchange station.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Turns out Better Place is not just about EV charging stations and battery swapping.
The nascent electric-vehicle charging services provider has been working with Microsoft and Intel since its inception in 2007 to develop software that would link charging and battery swap stations and individual vehicles.
The system, which Better Place engineers call an "information train," is to be introduced today at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show, just a few hours after sometimes partner Renault unveils the electric car - with swappable battery pack - that will be sold in Israel and Denmark in 2011 as part of the two companies' previously announced EV-and-battery package program.
Better Place, the California-based brainchild of high-tech entrepreneur Shai Agassi, has shown prototypes of its battery charger for fixed-battery plug-in hybrids and electric cars, and a battery exchange station for EVs, such as the upcoming Renault, that have replaceable battery packs.
The new software package, called the Better Place AutOS, is the third leg of the pyramid.
With the premature appearance of some photos of the current L1 Concept in the German media over the weekend, Volkswagen today distributed information and multiple images of the ultra-high-mileage carbon-fiber two-seat diesel runabout ahead of its scheduled debut at the Frankfurt Auto Show.
The German automaker announced that the L1 Concept is powered by a new two-cylinder 0.8-liter turbocharged direct-injection engine -- the smallest diesel engine intended for production applications ever built by Volkswagen.
That engine is mated to a 10-kilowatt/14 horsepower electric motor and a 7-speed direct-shift gearbox (or DSG, an electronically controlled multiple-shaft dual-clutch manual gearbox without a conventional clutch pedal) -- all situated at the back of the car. Together, the three components create the "most fuel-efficient road-legal car hybrid drive in the world," according to Volkswagen.
The L1 -- which takes its name from 1 liter of diesel will provide 100 kilometers of driving, although in reality 1.38 liters are required to go that distance -- is operated in two different modes depending on the load conditions.
In the standard "ECO mode," the TDI engine develops a power of 20 kilowatts/27 horsepower at 4,000 revolutions per minute. In sport mode, the car's power rises to 29 kilowatts/39 hp at 4,000 rpm. The TDI's maximum torque is 73.7 pound-feet at 1,900 rpm. A stop-start system automatically shuts down the engine when vehicle has stopped and restarts when the accelerator or "E-pedal" is pressed.
A Little History
This isn't the first L1 VW has come up with. Seven years ago, Dr. Ferdinand Piech, at that time chairman of the board of management at VW Group, drove a prototype L1 from Wolfsburg to Hamburg "that was unlike any other car before it: the Volkswagen 1-Litre car -- the world's first car with fuel consumption of one litre fuel per 100 kilometers," as VW tells it.
Mitsubishi Motors Corp. has received pre-orders for all of the 1,400 electric i-MiEV plug-in electric vehicles scheduled to be made this model year, according to someone close to the matter.
The urban electric, zero-emissions i-MiEV launched in Japan in July of this year with the delivery of about 50 i-MiEV four-seaters, running on newly developed lithium-ion batteries, to government, utility offices and companies around Tokyo.
They represent the first of 1,400 of the eye-catching EVs that Mitsubishi expects the sell through the end of this year, when it will ramp up for sales to the general public, first in Japan and then globally. Mitsubishi has said it expects to sell 5,000 i-MiEVs in Japan and export 1,000 in 2010.
Mitsubishi began taking pre-orders for the i-MiEV through its dealer network on July 31 and within one month had received 900 pre-orders, the source said.
The company has said it wants to start selling the i-MiEV in the U.S. sometime in 2011. The automaker sees an opportunity to gain major traction in the zero-emissions-vehicle, or ZEV, arena at a time when many other car companies are focusing on hybrids or fuel-cell vehicles.
Toyota Motor Corp. is sticking with nickel as the preferred battery material for most of its hybrid vehicles after three years of secretly testing Prius hatchbacks with lithium-ion packs, Bloomberg reported today.
Toyota last month ended road tests of 126 Priuses in the U.S., Japan and Europe that began in 2006, Jana Hartline, a company spokeswoman said in an interview with the news service. Details of the program, in which the cars' nickel metal hydride batteries were replaced with more expensive lithium models, weren't released.
Automakers are introducing models all or partly powered by lithium-ion batteries holding twice the energy of nickel packs. While Toyota's lithium version performed well and gave "small" fuel-economy gains because of lighter weight, nickel is favored for conventional, mass-market hybrids for its cost, said Kazuo Tojima, the carmaker's senior staff engineer for batteries.
Lithium's "durability, stability and safety are assured," the company's tests showed, Tojima told Bloomberg.
The tests appear to be among the most thorough done by companies planning to introduce the batteries, said Menahem Anderman, president of consulting firm Advanced Automotive Batteries in Oregon House, California.
"We now know that a lithium-ion battery can work; that's not really the question," he said. "Cost is critical, and we still don't know enough about long-term durability."
Renault today distributed this teaser drawings and an accompanying press release to whet our appetites in anticipation of the Renault Zero Emission line-up of four electric vehicle concepts the French automaker has announced it will unveil during the Frankfurt Motor Show next week.
Judging from the images, it would appear that Renault will debut the following, from left to right:
A one-seat hyper-urban runabout, a three-door vehicle with capacity for four normally sized people, and then either another three-door car or two four-doors. Renault went to a good bit of trouble to cloak the occupant compartments of the last two vehicles.
In any event, here's the short statement the automaker put out today, which will have to do for a few more days:
RENAULT - THE SPARK OF IMAGINATION AT FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW 2009
* Renault set to shock in Frankfurt with four electric vehicle concepts previewing new Renault Zero Emission product range.
* Renault Press conference 11:45-12:00 (CET) on Tuesday 15th September, Hall 3.1.
Following a raft of unveilings at European motor shows in recent years, Renault's range expansion shows no signs of abating with news today that it will preview the launch of the new Renault Zero Emission product range by taking the covers off of four electric concepts at next week's Frankfurt Motor Show.
The Renault Press conference, hosted by CEO, Carlos Ghosn, will be aired live on its global media site, www.media.renault.com at 10:45 (GMT), with edited video highlights available to view later the same day. Full information on each of the new concepts will be available on www.press.renault.co.uk immediately after the Press conference. Unregistered users for both sites are invited to sign-up now in advance.
When Jon Favreau, director of the Marvel superhero film Iron Man, needed a corporate executive for actor Robert Downey Jr. to use as a role model for the flick's hero Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk.
Like the fictional Stark, an engineering genius who runs a weaponry company and designs many of its armaments, the 38-year-old Musk is the CEO and top technologist for electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors and rocketmaker SpaceX.
The two tech execs even tool around in flashy cars: Stark in a superpowered Audi, Musk in a $109,000 zero-emissions battery-electric sports car that was the first vehicle off the assembly line at Tesla Motors, one of his two companies.
Musk appropriately got a smallish role as a scientist in Iron Man. In fact, throw in Musk's one-third interest in SolarCity, a company started by two cousins that has become a leader in solar panels for homes and business, and you have a guy who is probably as close to an industrialist as the Internet has ever spawned.
The son of an electrical engineer, the South African-born Musk holds both economics and physics degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he was 31, Musk had started and sold off two tech companies -- the second being PayPal, which was snapped up by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
That made Musk worth about $350 million, but over lunch recently he was very cagey about what he's worth now. "I have a very thin net worth outside my companies, maybe 5 percent of that."
That's because Musk has decided to plow much of his fortune into the areas he figures will most transform mankind over the next few years -- and perhaps not so incidentally make him another fortune. The areas are the Internet, space travel, and improving the environment, he says, "and I've already done the Internet."
If you find any of this interesting, go to Business Week. It's where all the above and much more can be found about the always compelling and often controversial Elon Musk.
If it already seems to you that China is positioning itself to exercise substantial control over the green-car market through its natural resources -- and you don't like it -- you're not likely going to like this story one bit.
That's because Bloomberg news service is reporting, and we are relaying, that Alcoa Inc., the largest U.S. producer of aluminum, is speaking with unidentified automakers to develop and supply metal for lightweight, energy-efficient vehicles in China as passenger-car sales in that country surge.
"The automobile sector is a strong consumer of aluminum and I believe it will become more so if you combine lightweight and energy efficiency" needs in the future, Chief Executive Officer Klaus Kleinfeld said today. "There are some companies we're talking to, and that's an area we're seeking to build activities," he said, without giving details.
Passenger-car sales in China soared a record 90 percent last month as tax cuts and subsidies spurred demand, bringing the nation closer to overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest automobile market. Rising vehicle sales in China, as well as building demand, will drive aluminum consumption, Kleinfeld said.
"China is ahead of the curve, and I'm positive of things that are going on," Kleinfeld said while attending the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China.
The Asian nation consumes about seven kilograms of aluminum per capita, compared with 35 kilograms in the U.S., he said, according to Bloomberg. Kleinfeld on Sept. 3 raised Alcoa's forecast for global aluminum consumption because of demand from China.
China's demand will rise 4 percent this year, compared with a previous prediction of no growth, Kleinfeld had said. That changes the company's outlook for global demand to a decline of 5.5 percent from a previous forecast of minus 7 percent.
SB LiMotive, the EV battery venture of South Korea's Samsung SDI and Germany's Robert Bosch, says it will invest 500 billion won ($408 million) in its new South Korean lithium-ion battery plant.
The investment, to be made over the course of the next five years, is aimed at fostering the company's effort to become one of the planet's largest manufacturers of batteries for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.
The new plant, announced last month, is scheduled to begin production in 2011.
SB LiMotive has said it wants to hold a 30 percent share of the market for lithium-ion batteries by 2015.
We love the idea of using existing infrastructure to serve as a basis for electric-vehicle charging stations.
---------- Right, a phone booth n Madrid. ----------
You may recall that Coulomb Technologies last year began experimenting with using existing light poles in San Jose, California, as power sources and props for some of its charging stations.
Now we're delighted to report that Spain is looking at dozens of telephone booths in Madrid, long left dormant by the rise of cell phones, as possibly having a second life as recharging stations for electric vehicles.
That proposal can be found in the Spanish government's plan to establish 546 charging points in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville to serve some 2,000 EVs Spanish officials hope to see cruising the cities' streets within two years.
The telephone booths are often located close to curbs and already have their own electricity supply, making them relatively easy to adapt. According to Madrid's city council, some 30 phone booths could be converted to chargers with little difficulty.
The government has committed $2.2 million to subsidize electric-car charging points over the next two years. Barcelona plans to install 191 points, many of which will be attached to "intelligent lampposts" in the street following the lead of Coulomb Technologies.
Coulomb Technologies, which is headquartered in Campbell, California, near the throbbing heart of Silicon Valley, just this week installed its first ChargePoint networked charging station for plug-in EVs in Germany.
In Madrid, electric-car owners will not only be able to charge for free (at least initially), but they will be able to park for free and have their auto taxes cut by 75 percent. Those would be carrots. The mayor of Madrid recently said thought has been given to limiting access to city centers, including Madrid's, to EVs. That would be a stick if you drive an ICE vehicle.
Mercedes-Benz is expected to debut a Vision S 500 plug-in hybrid concept at next week's Frankfurt Motor Show, looking much like the one pictured here.
Although company spokesmen won't discuss it publicly yet, we've been told the concept will feature a V6 gasoline engine connected to a lithium-ion battery that has a storage capacity of more than 10 kilowatt hours.
That's enough to enable the car to go about 19 miles on electricity only before an onboard gas-powered engine-generator kicks in to feed juice to the lithium battery.
Acceleration is said to be 5 and half seconds from a standstill to 60 miles an hour. Mileage is said to be 73.5 mph, but it wasn't at all clear how that number was reached.
We expect to learn a lot more about this concept next week.
Lithium-ion cells provide the same power at half the weight of the current standard, nickel-metal hydride, so it's no surprise that automakers, battery manufacturers and automobile parts suppliers the world over are racing to develop Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
---------- The first production-intent Chevrolet Volt is fitted with a lithium-ion battery pack. ----------
But as The Wall Street Journalreports today (subscription required), with automakers already sensitive about costs, adoption of the advanced batteries might not be so quick.
Lithium-ion batteries cost three to four times as much as the existing nickel-metal-hydride variety. Moreover, the price of the older technology is dropping fast. In Honda's latest Insight model, for example, the nickel-metal-hydride battery is 40 percent cheaper than the one in the previous model, the Journal noted.
Increased supply should resolve that issue, but it brings a longer-term risk: That the rush to production will overwhelm demand -- driving prices so low that the batteries aren't a money-maker after all.
Unlike flat panels and semiconductors, lithium-ion batteries aren't standardized, which means they won't be commoditized right away. This'll break down soon enough, as the needs of one particularly large buyer, like Toyota Motor, eventually set a standard.
Stock traders aren't thinking that far ahead, the Journal reported. Japan's GS Yuasa, which has joint ventures to supply both Honda and Mitsubishi Motors, has seen its shares rise 62% so far this year. The stock trades at 87 times expected earnings.
Even shares of large companies, like South Korea's SK Energy and Samsung SDI, have surged recently amid hopes for their budding lithium-ion operations. Samsung SDI -- a flat panel maker at heart -- now trades at more than double its historic valuation.
There's no doubt that lithium-ion is a promising advance in battery technology. But at these prices, the Journal reports, investors are surely setting themselves up for a jolt.
Ford Motor Co. will plug a specially made battery-electric vehicle as part of a running gag on comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno's new television program, the automaker announced Wednesday.
The plug-in Ford Focus will be driven by celebrity guests competing in a green-car challenge on NBC's new "The Jay Leno Show," which is set to debut on Monday. A different version of the Focus goes on sale to the public in 2011.
In a statement issued today, Ford said the battery electric vehicle foreshadows elements of the electric Focus that Ford will begin selling in North America in two years.
Basically, it's a high-profile PR move -- and a very smart one. As Lisa Drake, chief engineer of Ford's Hybrid and Battery Electric Vehicle Programs, put it:
"Having our Focus battery electric vehicle on the show is a great way to demonstrate how fun to drive these cars really can be. Beyond the immediate excitement of driving, it demonstrates that Ford is investing in this technology and that we're committed to electric vehicles."
Ford plans to put at least four electrified vehicles on the road in North America by 2012 -- including the Focus BEV in 2011 -- as well as new hybrids and a plug-in hybrid.
Ford's hybrid and BEV program team worked together with Ford Racing to develop the special Focus for Leno's show. It took three weeks to build the car and another couple of weeks to properly tune the suspension so it could be driven fast on a racetrack.
Developed at Ford's Michigan Proving Grounds in Romeo, Michigan, the Focus BEV built for the show has a split battery pack, with one battery in the cargo area and one underneath the car in the space normally occupied by a fuel tank. Because the car was built to race, it is equipped with a roll bar and five-point harness for the driver.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated new product categories of recent years, a research firm reported today, with 48 percent of the American consumers surveyed stating that they would be "extremely" or "very" interested in purchasing a PHEV with a 40-mile range on a single charge.
"Plug-in hybrids match the driving requirements of most consumers we surveyed," said Clint Wheelock, managing director of Pike Research, which conducted the Web-based survey of 1,041 U.S. consumers. "82 percent of respondents drive 40 miles or less per day, with an average daily driving distance of 27 miles."
The upcoming Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle and other EREVs under development promise the ability to travel 40 miles on electricity only. Thereafter, a small onboard internal combustion engine-generator, likely fueled by gasoline, would come on and supply electricity to the vehicle's battery, electric motor or both.
Other findings of the survey:
85 percent of consumers stated that improved fuel efficiency would be an important factor when choosing their next vehicle.
65 percent of survey respondents interested in PHEVs expressed a willingness to pay a premium price, over and above the price of a standard gasoline vehicle, with an average premium of 12 percent.
Consumers indicated that the availability of workplace, private, and public vehicle charging stations in their local area would be very important.
79 percent of consumers would be interested in investing in a fast-charging outlet for their home; however, willingness to pay is out of line with industry expectations.
Coulomb Technologies today announced the first German installation of one of the company's ChargePoint networked charging stations for plug-in electric vehicles.
The public utility in Bochum has activated five charging stations installed by distribution partner 365 Energy Group. The ChargePoint charging stations are intended to ensure that in the future battery-reliant EVs can easily be charged in the Ruhr area metropolis.
Germany is not the first European country to install Coulomb Technology charging stations. The Netherlands has that distinction, as we reported in May.
Coulomb, which is headquartered in Campbell, California, said in a statement that Bochum selected Coulomb's ChargePoint charging stations for their advanced networking technology after testing the stations of three other suppliers.
One charging station was installed in the customer parking lot at the headquarters of the public utility. Another charging station was located at the housing association VBW in the Matthias-Claudius-Strabe. The locations of the other three ChargePoint stations have not been determined.
Coulomb Technologies' charging stations are used in homes, municipalities, office buildings and parking garages to allow consumers to charge their EVs wherever they live, work and shop.
Consumers subscribe to the ChargePoint Network and receive a ChargePoint Smart Card that allows them to charge their car at any charging station worldwide. More information can be obtained at the Coulomb Technology's Website.
Lotus Engineering announced today that it will unveil a range-extending engine-generator for series hybrid vehicles at the Frankfurt Motor Show, held later this month.
Attached to the hybrid's electric motor via the crankshaft, the Lotus Range Extender sustains vehicle operation beyond the range provided by the vehicle's batteries.
Lotus said in a statement that the 1.2-liter, three-cylinder engine-generator can use gasoline or alcohol-based fuels, was designed for maximum fuel efficiency and can recharge the batteries of a series hybrid as well as provide direct power to the electric motor that propels the vehicle.
The Range Extender features an innovative architecture comprising aluminium monoblock construction, integrating the cylinder block, cylinder head and exhaust manifold in one casting. Lotus said this results in reduced engine mass, assembly costs, package size and improved emissions and engine durability.
The engine-generator is optimized between two power generation points, giving 15 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,500 revolutions per minute and 35 kilowatts at 3,500 rpm via the integrated electrical generator.
Lotus said the Range Extender's low weight (123 pounds) makes it ideal for the series hybrid drivetrain configurations for which it is designed. The engine uses an optimized two-valve port-fuel injection combustion system to reduce cost and mass.
Much fuss has been made this year about General Motors' claim that the Chevy Volt extended-range electric vehicle due out next year will be able to travel 40 miles on electricity only, and the fact (often heralded by GM) that most American motorists drive fewer than 40 miles a day.
The General hopes you'll connect the dots, but he's been saying it loud and clear for more than a year anyway: Unless you drive more than 40 miles between charges, you probably won't need to put any gasoline in the plug-in automobile.
But if you should happen to go as far as the Volt can take you on a single charge, the General says, don't fret. As an extended-range EV, the Volt is packing a small gasoline-powered engine-generator that can keep juice flowing to the electric motor that propels the vehicle.
Now imagine this: You open a report from the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service on the feasibility of electric vehicles in the USPS and you read that (1) only about 3 percent of the service's 146,000 delivery vehicles travel more than 40 miles a day, and (2) those vehicles average a lousy 10 miles per gallon.
No doubt your heart would race if you read those factoids, just as ours did when we read the 23-page report, released last week with little fanfare.
Now comes word from the South Korean automaker that it will be debuting two advanced fuel-efficient vehicles at the Frankfurt Motor Show - the ix Metro gasoline-electric concept CUV (right) and the i10 Electric (below).
The ix Metro smallish hybrid crossover is designed for the European sub-B segment and, according to Hyundai, achieves carbon-dioxide emissions of only 80 grams per kilometer.
The vehicle is powered by an inline three-cylinder, 1.0-liter gasoline engine cranking out an impressive 125 horsepower. It's mated to some kind of hybrid drive system Hyundai is unwilling to discuss publicly now.
The other Hyundai vehicle to make its world debut at Frankfurt is the i10 Electric, a plug-in all-electric urban commuter that, the automaker says, will see limited series production beginning in 2010 with the South Korean market.
The i10 Electric is powered by a 49 kilowatt motor and a 16 kilowatt per hour battery. Hyundai says the vehicle achieves a top speed of 81 miles an hour and a driving range of 99 miles.
The i10 Electric will be sold to government ministries, state corporations and utilities in the first stage. The retail sales date is not decided
Back in March, Jim Press, vice chairman and president of Chrysler, was quoted in a Business Week report as saying, "The Japanese government paid for 100 percent of the development of the battery and hybrid system that went into the Toyota Prius."
Toyota quickly denied the allegation, stating that it got no such help in developing the gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle.
Well, it took the Japanese government more than five months to respond, but today it announced that Press (pictured) was wrong.
Sosuke Tanaka, an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said today that Toyota had not received financial aid from the government in developing the Prius, according to ministry records.
"Toyota developed its own technology," Tanaka said in an interview with The New York Times. "So please talk to Toyota about research and development."
Chrysler defended Press, who worked at Toyota for 37 years before joining Chrysler in September 2007.
On its media blog, Chrysler said Press "was not speaking negatively of Toyota" but "referenced the close cooperation between the Japanese government and Japanese industry."
Chrysler said Press would like to see similar cooperation between government and industry in the U.S.
Didn't the U.S. government just save Chrysler's trunk, so to speak? For a second time? Jim Press, this would be a good time to reflect on the proverb, Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
China's moves to tighten control on the mining and export of a class of metal ores called rare earth are aimed at attracting high-tech manufacturing to Inner Mongolia, and not at dominating the market, The Wall Street Journal reported today, citing a senior Chinese official.
---------- The rare-earth element lanthanum, right, is used in the manufacture of hybrid-car batteries. ----------
As we reported earlier this week, a number of those rare metals are used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Fusion. Others are major ingredients for batteries used in hybrid cars.
Wednesday's comments by Zhao Shuanglin, vice chairman of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, appear aimed at quelling concerns that China is trying to dominate the global market for rare-earth resources.
China produces more than 90 percent of the world's output of the metals. Recent steps by Beijing toward tightening export restrictions have sparked concern in other countries.
There also appear to be concerns about China's investment in rare-earth producers in other countries.
In Australia, the government has delayed yet again consideration of a $210 million investment by China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group Co. in Lynas Corp., an investment that would give the Chinese company a majority stake in the biggest new rare-earth mine currently under development.
Lynas, which unveiled the planned investment in early May, said Wednesday a 30-day review period by the Australian government's foreign investment review board had again been reset so that the board has until early October to consider the deal.
The Toyota Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods.
.......... Neodymium: A key component of EV motors. ..........
That makes Toyota's market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world's dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells, Reuters news agency reported today.
Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tons annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine slated to reopen in California by 2012.
Among the rare metals that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Fusion Focus, as well as in generators for wind turbines.
Close cousins terbium and dysprosium are added in smaller amounts to the alloy to preserve neodymium's magnetic properties at high temperatures, Reuters reported. Yet another rare earth metal, lanthanum, is a major ingredient for hybrid car batteries.
Toyota has 70 percent of the U.S. market for vehicles powered by a combination of an internal-combustion engine and electric motor. The Prius is its No. 1 hybrid seller.
Reuters reported that Jack Lifton, an independent commodities consultant and strategic metals expert, calls the Prius "the biggest user of rare earths of any object in the world."
Each electric Prius motor requires 2.2 pounds of neodymium, and each battery uses 22 to 33 pounds of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota's plans to boost the car's fuel economy, he said.
The factory where Tesla Motors will make its all-electric, zero-emissions Model S sedan will be located in the Southern California cities of Long Beach or Downey, with a decision possibll as early as next week.
The plant, which is expected to bring 1,000 to 1,200 engineering and assembly jobs to the recession-plagued state, is scheduled to open in 2011. California has a 12.1 percent unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In an interview with the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said both cities were finalists for the plant. Musk said the possible locations were Long Beach's former Boeing 717 aircraft plant, which ceased production in 2006, or a former NASA production site next to Downey Studios.
Possibly complicating the Long Beach deal is an alternative city plan to convert the Boeing plant into a movie studio. Musk did not comment on which city had the inside edge. A Tesla source told Green Car Advisor today not to expect "any news on Model S facility this week, but we are close."
The Tesla source said the company is very serious about hitting the publicized $57,400 base price for the Model S and would reconsider an otherwise suitable site for the EV's production if the cost of leasing the site would jeopardize the base price.
Funding for the plant for the Model S, which is expected to have a 300-mile range between charges, will likely come from a recent $465 million low-interest loan Tesla received from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Community leaders in the Northern California city of Fremont, home to the soon-to-be-shuttered NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, also have appealed to Tesla.
But the company said NUMMI's 5 million square feet is far too large for Tesla's needs. Both Southern California sites are about 1 million square feet.
3 Executives Named
Tesla, which currently has about 150 job openings, named three executives today.
Arizona-based Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. today announced receipt of $8 million from the government of California to aid in development of an electric-vehicle charging infrastructure for San Diego.
The same company earlier this month landed a $99.8 million grant from the Obama administration to join Nissan in the biggest deployment of EVs - and creation of the largest charging infrastructure - ever undertaken.
The $8 million from the California Energy Commission is among the roughly $15 million in funds the agency is in the process of awarding to EV projects that received federal funds from the U.S. Department of Energy on Aug. 5.
With the two grants and others it expects to get from regional project participants, eTec has pledged to install about 2,550 charging stations in each of five selected markets: the states of Tennessee and Oregon, the cities of San Diego and Seattle, and the Phoenix/Tucson region.
Those approximately 12,750 charging stations will be used to recharge up to 1,000 LEAF EVs that Nissan will provide for each of the five markets, for a total contribution of up to 5,000 EVs.
Whether the zero-emissions vehicles will be donated, leased or sold by the automaker has not been determined, according to a Nissan source familiar with the collaboration.
In a statement released today, eTec said its project will collect and analyze data characterizing vehicle use and charging patterns in diverse topographies and climate conditions; evaluate the effectiveness of charge infrastructure; and conduct trials of various revenue systems for public charge infrastructure.
By testing and analyzing electric vehicle usage and charging patterns in a simulated mature charging environment, eTec hopes the project will foster the expansion of the EV infrastructure and widespread EV use throughout the country.
ETec is a subsidiary of ECOtality, a Scottsdale, Arizona, company that has been involved in every major electric vehicle initiative in North America since the 1990's. ETec is known for its Minit-Charger line of battery fast-charge systems for on-road EVs.
South Korea is rapidly becoming lithium-ion central.
In support of the national government's encouragement of alternative green-vehicle production there, South Korean component giant Hyundai Mobis and battery maker LG Chem are discussing a joint venture to build batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles and, according to a report in AsiaPulse, could announce a deal early next month.
Additionally, Samsung SDI and German parts and components giant Robert Bosch have inked an agreement to build a joint-venture lithium-ion battery plant in Ulsan, South Korea's industrial center.
The country's Ministry of Knowledge Economy said the joint venture, called SB LiMotive, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ulsan city government earlier this week and that construction of the battery plant should begin in September with the plant slated to begin operation in 2011.
The race among South Korea, China, Japan and late-starting U.S.A. to become leading suppliers of advanced batteries should help lower battery costs as volume increases.
An airline pilots union is calling for a government ban on shipments of lithium batteries aboard passenger and all-cargo planes after a series of fires in recent years involving aircraft.
This development might have an adverse affect on electric vehicles and most hybrid vehicles because lithium batteries are widely regarded as the best type to propel the vehicles.
At the very least, reports of a link between lithium batteries and fires aboard aircraft won't help public perception that such batteries are safe.
In statement released Tuesday, the Air Line Pilots Association said that federal regulators have been slow to act on the issue and that "the evidence of a clear and present danger is mounting."
The ban would not apply to devices containing batteries brought aboard by passengers, but as you can read in the adjacent boxed text, there has been at least one instance of a passenger reporting that his laptop computer was emitting smoke.
Since March of last year, six fires have been reported on board passenger and cargo jets linked to lithium-based batteries, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. None of the incidents resulted in deaths or serious injuries.
In a recent letter sent to Cynthia Douglass, acting deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Captain John Prater, head of the pilots' union, pointed to three recent incidents as proof positive of the urgent need to prohibit lithium-battery shipments.
During just the past two months, fire, smoke, or evidence of fire associated with battery shipments has occurred aboard three separate U.S. airliners, he wrote in the letter.
The incidents, which took place in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Minnesota, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Honolulu, Hawaii, were similar to a 2006 battery fire aboard a DC-8 in Philadelphia, he wrote.
Beijing is drawing up plans to prohibit or restrict exports of rare earth metals that are produced only in China and play a vital role in cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons, according to a reputable British newspaper.
A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tons a year, far below global needs, The Telegraph reported.
China mines over 95 percent of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.
Alistair Stephens, from Australia's rare metals group Arafura, told The Telegraph his contacts in China had been shown a copy of the draft -- "Rare Earths Industry Devlopment Plan 2009-2015." Any decision will be made by China's State Council.
"This isn't about the China holding the world to ransom. They are saying we need these resources to develop our own economy and achieve energy efficiency, so go find your own supplies," he said.
Stephens said China had put global competitors out of business in the early 1990s by flooding the market, leading to the closure of the biggest U.S. rare earth mine at Mountain Pass in California -- now being revived by Molycorp Minerals.
New technologies have since increased the value and strategic importance of these metals, but it will take years for fresh supply to come on stream from deposits in Australia, North America, and South Africa. The rare earth family are hard to find, and harder to extract.
Stephens told The Telegraph that Arafura's project in Western Australia produces terbium, which sells for $800,000 a ton. It is a key ingredient in low-energy lightbulbs. China needs all the terbium it produces as the country switches wholesale from tungsten bulbs to the latest low-wattage bulbs that cut power costs by 40 percent.
No replacement has been found for neodymium that enhances the power of magnets at high heat and is crucial for hard-disk drives, wind turbines, and the electric motors of hybrid cars. Each Toyota Prius uses 25 pounds of rare earth elements. Cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters for diesel engines. Europium is used in lasers.
Better Place, the American-based electric-vehicle services provider, today announced that it has received an award from the Japanese government to conduct a pilot project in Tokyo for the world's first plug-in electric taxis with switchable batteries.
Better Place will partner with Tokyo's largest taxi operator, Nihon Kotsu. The project, which comes on the heels of the company's successful battery switch demonstration earlier this year in Yokohama, is slated to begin in January 2010.
Japanese taxis represent a mere 2 percent of all passenger vehicles on the road in Japan, yet they emit about 20 percent of all carbon dioxide from vehicles due to their average distance traveled in a given day.
In Tokyo alone, there are approximately 60,000 taxis, a far greater number than in New York, Paris and Hong Kong. Clearly, the outcome of the Tokyo pilot program for electric taxis could point to opportunities in other urban centers.
Additionally, success within the heavy-use taxi industry likely would help to ensure technology transfer to the mass market, where daily mileage is far less on average.
The electric-taxi pilot will showcase the everyday use applications of the Better Place model - switchable-battery stations, as opposed to battery-refueling stations - and will involve the construction of a Better Place battery switch site in central Tokyo.
Up to four newly modified and fully operational zero-emissions electric taxis will be operated from an existing taxi lane for environmentally-friendly vehicles near the switch site.
China's BYD Auto is finalizing plans for all-electric plug-in vehicle - the e6, pictured - that would be sold in the U.S. next year, roughly a full year ahead of schedule, The Wall Street Journal reported today (subscription required), citing an interview with BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu.
In an interview at a BYD factory in Xian, China, Wang said the company aims to use money from a planned new-share sale in China to help pay for the U.S. push, as well as for a second production line for automotive lithium-ion batteries near BYD's Shenzhen headquarters.
The Journal described the e6 as a five-seat passenger car that can be fully charged in seven to nine hours when plugged into a standard (presumably 110-volt) home outlet.
According to BYD's Website, the e6: can receive a quick charge (presumably from a 220/240-volt outlet) to 50 percent capacity in just 10 minutes; is capable of accelerating from zero to 60 miles an hour in 8 seconds; has a top speed of 100 mph; and can travel 249 miles on a single charge.
The Website also says that four power offerings are planned for the e6: 75 kilowatts (101 horsepower), 75+40 kilowatts (101+54 horsepower), 160 kilowatts (215 horsepower) and 160+40 kilowatts (215+54 horsepower). The "+" signs indicate the presence of two electric motors.
Wang said BYD wants to build up its brand name in the U.S. by offering one of its most advanced cars, the five-seat e6 pictured here, before eventually expanding its offerings.
He said the company plans to pick a specific region within the U.S. and initially market "a few hundred" e6s, priced at slightly more than $40,000, through a small number of dealers.
"In the beginning, our target customers are going to be government agencies, utilities and maybe some celebrities," Wang said, according to the Journal. He added that BYD hopes to enter Europe with a similar strategy in 2011 or later.
Toyota Motor Corp. has developed a new technology that may dramatically boost the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries and thus open the door to more practical electric vehicles, according to a Japanese press report.
The advance - the fabrication of single crystals of lithium cobalt oxide - grew out of joint research with Japan's Tohoku University, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said.
The new technology is a step toward creating a more powerful battery, but Nolasco declined to estimate the potential increase in a battery's storage capacity or an electric vehicle's range.
Japan's Nikkei business newspaper said the technique eventually would allow lithium-ion batteries to store 10 times the energy of current ones. The development would roughly translate into a tenfold increase in driving range, the newspaper said.
The greater storage capacity could also enable Toyota to reduce the size, weight and possibly the cost of the battery pack.
Lithium-ion batteries are seen as key to the mass marketing of electric vehicles because they are lighter and more powerful than the nickel-metal hydride batteries now used in hybrid cars.
Yet Toyota has largely steered clear of electric vehicles, arguing that the current generation of lithium-ion batteries is still too weak to provide a sufficient range for all-electric drivetrains.
The cathodes of Toyota's current lithium-ion batteries are typically made from a polycrystalline form of lithium cobalt oxide that connected with grains of graphite, the Nikkei said.
By using a single crystal form, however, Toyota can use less graphite and create more room for the storage of the lithium ions that create the electrical charge.
The newspaper said it will take another decade to develop a cathode that contains no graphite and that version should be able to store 10 times today's electrical charge.
Second-generation all-electric Smart ForTwo ED minicars will start rolling off a production line this November at the factory in Hambach, France, parent company Daimler AG announced today.
Daimler says that unlike its predecessor, the second-edition zero-emissions Smart ForTwo ED (pictured) is fitted with an innovative and highly efficient lithium-ion battery housed in a space-saving position between the axles. That "means that space is not compromised in any way in the intelligent two-seater vehicle," the company said.
That's a big deal, Daimler and Smart salespeople are fond of saying, because one of the major selling points of the vehicle is its size. At only 98.4 inches long, the vehicle is shorter than the width of most curbside parking spaces, allowing two or three ForTwos to park in a space intended for a single car.
What they usually don't mention is that this type of parking has been banned in Munich, amongst other European cities, and such parking in parallel-designated spaces is illegal in most American jurisdictions. But the vehicle's size often permits the car to be parked in legal parking spaces in which few other models could fit.
A 30-kilowatt (40-horsepower) electric motor is housed at the rear of the new ForTwo ED and provides "for good acceleration and high agility" with 88.5 pound-feet of torque that's immediately available.
By good acceleration the company means 0-60 kilometers per hour in 6.5 seconds, which equates to a respectable 0-36 miles per hour in the same amount of time. A 0-60 mph time was not available.
Daimler says the ForTwo ED can be charged at "any normal household socket" and says that in Germany, a full battery charge costs approximately $3 and is sufficient for a range of about 69 miles from the Tesla Motors-sourced 14-kilowatt lithium-ion battery.
It was unclear, and no Daimler was immediately available to confirm, if by "normal household socket" the automaker meant 110-volt outlet (standard in the U.S.) or 220-volt outlet (standard in Europe).
The availability of the new ForTwo ED will initially be limited to leased customers in Berlin and other cities in Europe as well as some American cities for real-world testing in tough everyday conditions. Daimler says that from 2012, the ForTwo ED "will be available to anyone interested."
In related news, the American-spec 2009 Smart ForTwo today achieved the "strongest roof" rating among competing minicars in tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
German leaders, echoing a goal espoused by Barack Obama during and since his presidential election bid, have agreed on a plan to get 1 million electric cars on the nation's roads by 2020, Reuters news agency reported today.
The plan of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet includes $705.1 million of funding for the construction of electric charging stations and programs to boost battery technology in Europe's biggest auto market.
"Our goal is to make Germany the leading market for electro-mobility," Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told reporters at a news conference in Berlin.
BMW welcomed the plan, as did the VDA, the German carmakers' association, whose president Matthias Wissmann called the program's success of "great importance" for Germany.
An industry expert and another automaker were more skeptical, pointing out that demand for electric cars is weak and that mass-produced models are still years away.
"It is indeed helpful, but don't expect to see a sales rush like with the cash-for-clunkers program," said Willi Diez, head of the Automobile Industry Institute in the southern city of Nuertingen.
The government supported its car-scrapping subsidy with $7.35 billion - roughly 10 times more than the money now being allotted to develop the electric-auto sector.
Audi CEO Rupert Stadler lowered expectations in a newspaper interview.
"In 20 years there will be mass-produced electric cars, but they should only make up around five to 10 percent of all overall automobiles," he told the Austrian Wiener Zeitung.
There are 250 million vehicles on U.S. roads, according to Edmunds.com. Steps promoting development of EVs in America include Department of Energy grants and stricter fuel-economy standards.
Toyota Motor Corp. will buy hybrid-car batteries from Sanyo Electric Co. as the automaker struggles to meet growing demand for the fuel-sipping vehicles due to a shortage of battery supply, Reuters news service reported today, citing an unidentified source familiar with the matter.
Toyota now procures its batteries from Panasonic EV Energy Co, a joint venture with Panasonic Corp. Panasonic plans to take control of Sanyo and is awaiting regulatory approval.
Demand for gasoline-electric vehicles has surged in Japan, helped by tax breaks and subsidies under a government initiative to promote fuel-efficient automobiles, but Toyota has said production of its hybrids is being held back by a supply bottleneck for batteries.
Its Prius hybrid was Japan's best-selling car in July for a second straight month, but customers placing orders have to wait about eight months before delivery.
Toyota also said this week that it had received about 10,000 orders for the Lexus HS250h sedan, the premium brand's first dedicated hybrid car, in its first month of sale in Japan. It aims to sell an average 500 units a month.
Toyota, the world's biggest automaker, will first use Sanyo's lithium-ion batteries from around 2011, said the source, who confirmed a report in the Nikkei business daily and spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is not yet public.
Toyota will first procure about 10,000 battery units per year from Sanyo, the world's biggest rechargeable battery maker, the source said. Toyota aims to sell at least 1 million hybrid vehicles a year in the early 2010s.
A Toyota spokeswoman said nothing had been decided about procuring lithium-ion batteries from Sanyo. A Sanyo spokesman declined comment, citing company policy on deals with potential and existing customers.
Toyota Improves Batteries
In a related development, Toyota announced that has developed a new technology that may dramatically boost the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries and thus open the door to more practical electric vehicles.
American electric-vehicle services provider Better Place and French automaker Renault plan to produce tens of thousands of EVs a year beginning in 2011, with initial sales to occur in Denmark and Israel, the companies reported this week.
The carmaker is developing three wholly electric models: a sedan, a compact car and a panel van. In Denmark, the cars will cost up to $38,000, and drivers will also need to sign up for a monthly subscription with Better Place for its battery service.
The cost of the zero-emissions vehicles in Israel was not disclosed.
"We expect the production of electric vehicles to be in the tens of thousands per year for the Danish market from 2011," said Jens Moberg, chief executive of Better Place Denmark, the Danish subsidiary of the transport company developing the lithium batteries fitted in the vehicles.
Electric-car drivers will need to sign up for a monthly subscription with Better Place to get access to the batteries. "It will be like signing up for a mobile phone contract," said Moberg.
He declined to say how much a subscription would cost, but he said the battery would cost $11,760 to manufacture in 2011-12. By comparison, the battery in the Tesla Roadster costs about $30,000, and Moberg said he expects the cost of the Renault battery to fall as production expands.
Drivers can recharge the batteries at home, which would take several hours, or switch batteries at a "swap station", taking three to five minutes - less time than it takes to fill a petrol tank.
In Denmark, close to 100 battery swap stations will be available around the country, with plans to expand further. Drivers will also be able to top off their batteries at charge spots installed at car parks and on the streets.
Copenhagen is working to install up to 60 by the time of the U.N. climate change summit in December, when world leaders will attempt to broker a worldwide deal to reduce carbon emissions.
Better Place is in discussion with a number of European countries, as well as Australia, Japan and the U.S., about expanding the plan further from Israel and Denmark.
Tesla Motors announced today that Tesla Motors will develop and manufacture electric vehicle components in a renovated building (pictured) in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, California.Tesla, the only automaker that is producing and selling highway-capable electric vehicles in North America, will lease an 350,000-square-foot building on a 23-acre parcel less than 3 miles from Stanford University. The automaker said the new facility will supply all-electric powertrains to Tesla and to other automakers, greatly accelerating the availability of mass-market EVs.
Tesla will also move its corporate headquarters from nearby San Carlos to the site later this year. Roughly 350 employees will work in Palo Alto initially, with space for up to 650 people at the facility.
In an interview with Green Car Advisor, Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel (left) said selection of the site was based on various factors, among the most important being convenience for existing employees and access to future ones.
He said the location "will give us great access to top engineering and technical talent, and it's also a very central location for all of our existing employees so that we don't have to risk losing some employees just because of moving our headquarters and our operations."
He said the new site will be where Tesla performs powertrain research and development, not automobile assembly. He clarified some reports that suggested Tesla's next model - the Model S sedan - would be built there, stating "We're not going to built the sedan vehicle here. That'll be a separate facility."
"This is more focused on electrical engineering and mechanical engineering rather than something you would traditionally think of as industrial processes," said Straubel, who earned a bachelor's degree in energy systems engineering and a master's in energy engineering from Stanford.
Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford (pictured), in an interview with Edmunds.com reporter Bill Visnic earlier today, suggested the EPA's methodology for electric-vehicle fuel economy figures was meaningless.
"This question devolves into madness," he said in response to a question regarding General Motors' and Nissan's recent claims that their Chevrolet Volt and Leaf plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will have government fuel economy ratings of 230 and 360 miles per gallon, respectively.
"The government will have to come up with a meaningful number for customers - a user-friendly label. And I think they will. I can't dispute that number, but I'm not sure it's relevant to the customer either," he said.
GM announced last week that it is investing $43 million in a Detroit-area factory that will make lithium-ion battery packs for the Volt. Asked if Ford intends to make batteries for its EVs, the grandson of the company's founder said, "Initially, we should just buy batteries. We don't have any particular expertise in batteries. We'll probably stick to the vehicle-integration part of the puzzle."
On GM and Nissan huge claims for mpg for Volt and Leaf: "This question devolves into madness. The government will have to come up with a meaningful number for customers - a user-friendly label. And I think they will. I can't dispute that number but I'm not sure it's relevant to the customer either."
Only 19 months after being unveiled as a concept car, a prototype of the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid electric vehicle made its public driving debut today (pictured above and below), silently rolling out of a staging tent and onto the track at the legendary Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California.
Under partly cloudy skies, the swoopy luxury-sports sedan accelerated quickly up hill and into Laguna Seca's famous Corkscrew - a plunging left-right corner - en route to making one lap on the 11-turn course before a large crowd that had gathered primarily to watch the annual Historic Automobile Races, held this weekend.
Like the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt, the Karma will be able to travel up to 50 emission-free miles on electricity from a single battery charge (or 10 miles more than the Volt) and extend its overall range to more than 300 miles with aid from an on-board gasoline-powered internal combustion engine-generator (same as the Volt).
Two 201.5-horsepower electric motors send enough traction through a single-speed differential to reach 60 miles per hour in about six seconds and a top speed of 125 mph. Together, these components make up a powertrain exclusive to both Fisker automobiles (the other being the Karma Sunset hardtop convertible).
In press releases, Fisker Automotive has said the powertrain can deliver fuel economy of 100 miles per gallon. Company founder Henrik Fisker told journalists covering today's event that he believed the powertrain would be capable of achieving 140 mpg.
EPA fuel-economy figures for the Karma are likely to be weeks if not months away.
Henrik Fisker said the Karma is still on track for a May 2010 showroom launch. Initial production is anticipated to be 15,000 vehicles annually, with pricing to start at $87,900.
The Trabant - a smog-spewing icon of communist eastern Germany - will make a comeback as an electric car concept at the Frankfurt auto show in September.
German manufacturer Herpa Miniaturmodelle GmbH plans to show a "New Trabi" prototype in Frankfurt in the hope of attracting investors willing to help relaunch a modern, environmentally friendly version of the classic city car in 2012.
Herpa's updated Trabi has the square, boxy look of the original car, of which about 3 million were built between 1957 and 1991, but company spokesman Daniel Stiegler said it will not be a retro car.
"The New Trabi will be a stylish car with a history," he told Automotive News Europe (subscription required). "It will be electrically powered because that is the trend."
Herpa has released few technical details on the new Trabant. The company said it will have a rooftop solar panel for recharging its battery, a range of about 156 miles and weigh less than 2,200 pounds.
Stiegler said IAV Automotive Engineering, based in Berlin, is its partner for an electric powertrain.
Herpa is located in in Zwickau, the same German county where the original Trabant factory was. The company, which makes model cars and airplanes, bought the Trabant copyright in 2007.
Herpa also is working with IndiKar for the Trabant project. IndiKar is a maker of specialty vehicles, vehicle components and prototypes, also based in Zwickau.
Coulomb Technologies announced today that Nashville has become the latest in a string of cities to install the company's ChargePoint networked charging stations for plug-in electric vehicles.
---------- Right, a ChargePoint charging station on display this week at Plug-In 2009. ----------
The charging stations, located in a new parking garage in downtown Nashville, are available for city employee and fleet use, Coulomb CEO Richard Lowenthal said in a statement.
Judging from the company's ChargePoint Subscriber Portal, which shows the locations of ChargePoint charging stations, it appears that Nashville is the 19th or 20th American city to deploy at least one of the stations.
While that hardly counts as infrastructure, in our opinion it is a fairly big deal. That's because it means that cities are investing in the charging stations ahead of widespread deployment of electric vehicles.
Indeed, at the just-concluded Plug-In 2009 conference in Long Beach, California, Lowenthal told us that only 4 percent of the charging stations are being purchased by people or entities that own EVs.
That means that a whopping 96 percent of the chargers are being purchased by people or entities buying infrastructure in anticipation of electric cars. Now that's saying something.
Lowethal described his business as being "completely on fire." By that he meant that Coulomb Technologies has sold more than $3 million in charging stations in the past month, "and we get new prospects every week."
Just how serious is this? Well, it's enough that the company has hired someone to create an application for cellphones that will enable iPhone users to see the locations of the closest ChargePoint charging station to them, much like iPhone users can see the location of the nearest Starbucks.
We'll be elated when the locations of charging stations matches the locations of Starbucks in number, but we're already impressed that the two-year-old Coulomb is on its way.
General Motors Corp. announced today that is investing $43 million in a Detroit-area factory that will make lithium-ion battery packs for the Chevrolet Volt and other extended-range electric vehicles.
---------- Right, GM President and CEO Fritz Henderson announcing the new GM Subsystem Manufacturing facility, south of Detroit, earlier today. ----------
It will be the first lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in the U.S. operated by a major automaker and it demonstrates GM's commitment to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles.
The automaker said the plant, which will be located in Brownstown Township, Michigan, will provide more than 100 advanced technology jobs and will be part of a wholly owned subsidiary called GM Subsystem Manufacturing LLC.
Local and state incentives, along with Recovery Act funding announced last week by the U.S. Department of Energy, are helping to make the facility possible.
The investment includes renovation and lease costs for the 160,000-square-foot landfill-free facility, new machinery and equipment, and special tooling.
With the exception of specialized battery machinery and equipment, GM will be reusing equipment from other GM facilities. Equipment installation is under way and production will start in the fourth quarter of 2010 to support the launch of the Volt, GM said.
General Motors is planning on adding electric motor development and manufacturing to its list of electric-vehicle specialities that it hopes to bring in-house, in order to further its expertise in the field as the electrification of the automobile continues.
---------- Right, a pre-production Chevrolet Volt is loaded with a lithium-ion battery. ----------
GM reps attending the Plug-In 2009 conference in Long Beach, California, this week said the automaker wants to begin making its own electric motors in-house in order to use its own technology to try and save money, weight, and power consumption, while boosting performance.
The first application of the GM-designed and -built motors is likely to be in the Two-Mode hybrid powertrain system for the upcoming front-wheel-drive Buick CUV that was originally slated to be a Saturn.
Breaking With Tradition
Traditionally, automakers have relied on their varying expertise in powertrains to differentiate themselves from one to the other. GM's expertise in automatic transmissions, for instance, or BMW's in straight-six engines has provided notable selling point discriminators between vehicles that companies can point to as sources of excellence when selling a vehicle.
But with powertrains changing so dramatically with the onset of electrification, a whole new skill set must be learned to the point of expertise - and in some ways, GM is behind.
Coulomb Technologies, which makes electric-vehicle charging stations, is partnering with GridPoint, which develops networking software that allows for more efficient delivery of electricity, to build the fit "smart grid" enabled EV charging stations.
Coulomb and GridPoint unveiled the new charging stations Tuesday at the Plug-In 2009 Conference in Long Beach, Calif.
The companies said the stations will use GridPoint software to direct power to the various chargers in a network in a manner that factors-in grid-wide demand to help prevent outages caused by overload.
John Clark, head of marketing for GridPoint, declined to say when or where the first charging stations using GridPoint software would be deployed, though he did say they would need to be installed within a municipality that already uses GridPoint products for utilities management.
The stations will be built for government-owned vehicle fleets as well as for the general public, he said.
GridPoint, whose customers include Seattle City Light, Austin Energy and Duke Energy in North Carolina, is looking to boost business in the alternative-fuel vehicle market by reaching agreements with companies that are developing electric-vehicle charging networks.
The Arlington, Va., company, founded in 2003 and backed by a range of investors including Goldman Sachs, said its software will be used in a vehicle-charging network, being developed by Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. (ETec), that will support almost 13,000 charging stations as well as the deployment of as many as 5,000 Nissan LEAF electric vehicles.
Since unveiling its first ChargePoint charging stations a year ago, Campbell, Calif.-based Coulomb has deployed more than 140 worldwide and estimates that it will have shipped more than 1,000 by the end of the year. San Francisco, Chicago and Amsterdam are among cities that use Coulomb's charging stations for their fleet of government cars.
A spokeswoman said all of Coulomb's stations can use GridPoint's software. She declined to say when the first ones will be operational. Danny King, Contributor
In response to a request from Green Car Advisor seeking clarification and confirmation of General Motors' claim that the Chevrolet Volt extended-range hybrid achieves 230 miles per gallon in city driving using tentative EPA test technology, the agency issued the following statement:
"EPA has not tested a Chevy Volt and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM. EPA does applaud GM's commitment to designing and building the car of the future - an American-made car that will save families money, significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create good-paying American jobs. We're proud to see American companies and American workers leading the world in the clean energy innovations that will shape the 21st century economy."
We at Green Car Advisor cannot be certain, but we strongly suspect that the person who wrote that statement was waving an American flag with one hand and holding a humongous slice of apple pie in the other. If the writer had used American in the statement just one more time, he or she surely would have qualified for some type of prize.
But seriously, we're still trying to figure out exactly how GM came to conclude that the Volt will get 230 mpg in city driving. And we're wondering what the automaker will say or do when initial Volt buyers discover - probably, but we're hoping we're wrong - that they aren't achieving anywhere near 230 mpg in city.
An advertisement blanketing billboards across the U.S. that features "230," today's date and a smiling electrical outlet, we can now report, is an attention-rousing teaser referring to GM's announcement this morning of the miles per gallon its engineers expect the Chevrolet Volt extended-range hybrid to achieve in city driving using tentative EPA test methodology.
A General Motors spokesman attending the Plug-In 2009 convention in Long Beach, California, told Green Car Advisor early today that the gasoline- and electric-powered Volt four-door sedan will attain a city fuel economy of "at least 230 mpg," based on development testing using a draft EPA federal fuel economy methodology for plug-in electric vehicles.
GM representatives have repeatedly said that the Volt, which is scheduled to start production in late 2010 as a 2011 model, will be able to travel up to 40 miles on electricity from a single battery charge and extend its overall range to more than 300 miles with its on-board, flex- fuel internal combustion engine-generator.
"From the data we've seen, many Chevy Volt drivers may be able to be in pure electric mode on a daily basis without having to use any gas," GM Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson said in a statement that repeats clams GM executives have been making since the Volt was introduced as a concept car at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show.
However, it's unlikely many of those attending the plug-in convention - ourselves included - place much credence in the 230-mpg figure.
Several engineers and battery specialists asked about the claim Monday - while it was still a rumor - said that the EPA test figures for EVs are unrealistically optimistic.
GM itself dampened the news with a press release that said "Volt drivers' actual gas-free mileage will vary depending on how far they travel and other factors, such as how much cargo or how many passengers they carry and how much the air conditioner or other accessories are used."
On the other hand, Volt drivers who driver sensibly on unremarkable roads without hauling a carload of people or cargo - and who don't exceed 20 or 30 miles between charges - could avoid having to buy any gasoline for the on-board generator. The generator, a four-cylinder gasoline engine, feeds juice to the Volt's electric powertrain after the battery is discharged..
You've likely seen the advertising blitz featuring the number 230 and a friendly electrical outlet.
Below the number appears two more: "8-11."
And if you're of right mind, you've probably asked yourself: "What the heck is that about?"
The folks at Advertising Age did some virtual sleuthing and believe they know the answer.
According to them, the marketer behind the effort is General Motors. But no one at GM is willing to confirm that.
However, AA quotes an ad man for GM agency Starcom as saying, "I'm glad it's getting out there." He would not elaborate except to hint that all would become clear on Tuesday. As in tomorrow. As in August 11. Make that 8-11.
Since Advertising Age came out with that tidbit, bloggers worldwide have speculated that 230 stands for: the 230-volt outlets from which the Volt will get its juice; the miles it can travel on a gallon of gas (and electricity); and last but not least, something having to do with the Volt and Apple.
The suspense is killing us. We've not been this anxious since the "Who shot Mr. Burns?" Simpsons episode.
The advanced transportation world was mostly thrilled that the Energy Department parceled out big bucks Wednesday for advanced battery manufacturing and plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicle demonstration projects.
But now, with a day to digest and ruminate on what actually happened, some of the praise is being tempered with criticism over what didn't happen.
Start-ups such as California-based Imara Corp., which claims to have a breakthrough lithium-ion battery were largely ignored in DOE grant program.
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Now the Wall Street Journal points out that the $2.4 billion in grants all but ignored proposals from smaller, cutting edge, venture-backed companies.
The grants went mainly, critics point out, to established automotive and battery companies and were concentrated in heartland states such as Michigan and Indiana.
Felix Kramer. founder of CalCars, a major advocacy group for plug-in vehicles, lays it out in a column he wrote today.
In it, he says CalCars has begun hearing from "a number of smaller battery and automotive companies that feel their constituency was overlooked."
One correspondent, he writes, "made the comparison to funding dinosaur land-line companies at the birth of the cell phone age."
Kramer says he's hoping there may be a second round or funding that will get money to some of the smaller, more innovative players.
The public is invited to attend two major plug-in electric vehicle events in California in coming days.
The more newsworthy of the two will likely be the Plug-In 2009 Exposition held at the Long Beach Convention Center. It's there that green-car reporters from around the world will descend for more than three days of speeches, discussions and demonstrations revolving around plug-in electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The public is invited to attend a slice of the event - from 5:30 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 11. The public portion will consist of vehicle displays (Chevy Volt, Ford 550 plug-in hybrid truck, Ford Escape plug-in hybrid, and a plug-in Toyota Prius to name a few), followed by a panel discussion.
Panelists will include: Peter Horton, writer/director, "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Philanthropist"; Bill Nye, "The Science Guy"; Chris Paine, director, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and "Revenge of the Electric Car"; Chelsea Sexton, founder, The Lightning Rod Foundation and a former General Motors EV1 specialist.
Cost is $10 and tickets can be purchased at the door. Visit the Plug In 2009 Website for additional information.
The lovelier of the two events will be the 2nd Annual Benefit Party for Plug In America, a respected nonprofit organization that promotes PEVs and PHEVs, held this coming Sunday from 4 p.m. till 8 p.m. at the Thomas Fogarty Winery in Woodside.
Among the vehicles on hand will be the pre-production Aptera 2e, a Tesla Roadster, a BMW Mini E, a Tango, a Tzero, an A123 Hymotion Prius conversion, electric motorcycles from Mission Motors and Zero Motorcycles, plus some one-off conversions and plenty of RAV4 EVs.
The event, titled "Plug-Ins, Pinots and Progress," will make for an excellent and informative afternoon-evening and, as benefits often do, will contain a spectacular auctions portion. Among the items that will be going to the block: a week's stay at a Hawaiian resort for 2-3 people, a Zero X electric motorcycle, and an A123/Hymotion L5 Plug-in Conversion Module (a $10,000 value) for all you Prius owners.
Bids can be submitted online. Tickets to the event start at $120. Visit the Plug In America Website for more information.
A battery bottleneck is hurting efforts to boost output of the Prius to meet booming demand for the hybrid, and the problem will likely persist into next year, according to a senior Toyota official.
"The new Prius model has been excessively popular, inconveniencing some of our customers, and the factories are working overtime at full capacity," Takahiko Ijichi, Toyota senior managing director, said Tuesday at the company's quarterly earnings announcement.
"Unfortunately, the batteries are not catching up with demand. Production of the batteries needs to be increased in order for our production to go up."
Toyota has an annual Prius capacity of 500,000 cars. Panasonic EV Energy Co., which makes the nickel-metal hydride batteries for the gasoline-electric hybrid car, can't churn out more than that right now, Ijichi said.
The third-generation Prius hybrid is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy year for the world's biggest automaker. The car is facing months-long waiting lists at dealerships and is easily outselling Honda's rival Insight hybrid in Europe and the United States.
The success of the Prius in Japan is one reason Toyota says it will post its first domestic sales increase in five years.
"The new Prius model is selling quite well," Ijichi said.
Administration's $2.4 Billion Helps U.S. Catch Up; We Should Be Aiming For Leadership
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
It took a massive recession and a change of administrations to do it, but a light-bulb finally went on in the White House.
America is woefully lagging the competition in development of the technologies that will keep personal transportation alive long after the world's oil supplies are no longer available for anything but essentials such as defense, power generation and movement of goods.
Advanced batteries are the missing link in the chain of progression from internal combustion to all-electric, and for years the U.S. has played second fiddle to Japan.
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Manufacturing, deployment support needed, but so is federal backing for continued advanced battery and charging infrastructure R&D.
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We've let Japan, South Korea and China all get ahead of us.
There is, as of this writing, no commercial-scale advanced battery manufacturing in the U.S; and far fewer people and dollars being devoted to advancing battery technology than should be the case in the world's leading consumer of oil for transportation.
Chump Change?
It's only $2.4 billion that was handed out in advance battery, plug-in and electric transportation grants this morning - barely a catered lunch for the banking and Wall Street crowds that were bailed out previously - but it's a start; much-needed government support of a critical technology.
Perhaps the most notable of the stories within a story stemming from today's $2.4 billion grants announcement is the $99.8 million the Obama administration awarded to a little-known company that, together with Nissan, has pledged the biggest deployment of electric vehicles - and creation of the largest charging infrastructure - ever undertaken.
With the grant and matching funds provided by regional project participants, Phoenix-based Electric Transportation Engineering Corp., or eTec, has pledged to install about 2,500 charging stations in each of five selected markets: the states of Tennessee and Oregon, the cities of San Diego and Seattle, and the Phoenix/Tucson region.
Those approximately 12,500 charging stations will be used to recharge up to 1,000 LEAF EVs (pictured) that Nissan will provide for each of the five markets, for a total contribution of up to 5,000 EVs. Whether the zero-emissions vehicles will be donated, leased or sold by the automaker has not been determined, according to a Nissan source familiar with the collaboration.
The project will: collect and analyze data from vehicle use in diverse topographies and climate conditions; evaluate the effectiveness of the charging infrastructure; and, conduct trials of various revenue systems for the infrastructure.
As for eTec, it's a subsidiary of ECOtality, a Scottsdale, Arizona, company that has been involved in every major electric vehicle initiative in North America since the 1990's. ETec is known for its Minit-Charger line of battery fast-charge systems for on-road EVs.
President Obama announced the winners today of $2.4 billion in stimulus grants aimed at spurring the development of electric vehicles and the advanced batteries they need - with Detroit's Big Three securing more than $400 million for plug-in projects.
The cash was divvied up among 48 projects in 25 states, with General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC together grabbing some of the biggest grants. Still, the Big Three's tally was less than the combined haul of battery makers Johnson Controls Inc. and A123 Systems Inc., who together took home nearly $550 million.
"If we want to reduce our dependence on oil, put Americans back to work and reassert our manufacturing sector as one of the greatest in the world, we must produce the advanced, efficient vehicles of the future," Obama said at an event in Elkhart, Indiana, the hard-hit town he visited six months ago to drum up support for the $787 billion economic stimulus package.
The announcement comes as the administration continues its push to convince the public that the stimulus package has been a success, despite poor employment figures and other economic data showing a less than robust economic revival. As part of the grant rollout, Vice President Joe Biden was scheduled to speak in Michigan and Energy Secretary Steven Chu in Charlotte, N.C., later today.
The $2.4 billion is divided into three separate programs aimed at enticing U.S. manufacturers to produce more plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and the components and infrastructure that will support them. The first $1.5 billion is to help companies produce highly efficient batteries for plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars and trucks; $500 million is for the production of other necessary components, such as electric motors; and the final $400 million is for demonstration projects that evaluate electric infrastructure concepts.
Unlike the separate $25 billion Energy Department loan program aimed at helping retool U.S. manufacturing plants to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, the stimulus grants do not need to be repaid. The winners do, however, have to match the federal cash with their own investments, mostly on a one-to-one basis.
GM received the largest haul of the major carmakers, receiving three separate grants totaling $241.4 million, most of which was earmarked for the high-volume production of battery packs for the company's plug-in Chevy Volt and for the deployment of a 600 strong demonstration fleet.
Ford received two separate grants, totaling $92.7 million, a third of which will go toward a commercialization project with 15 electric utility companies. Chrysler received one grant for $70 million to develop and deploy 220 advanced plug-in pickups and minivans.
The Obama administration today will award $2.4 billion in grants to 48 projects that promote advanced battery and electric vehicle manufacturing, according to administration officials.
The grants are designed to boost U.S. manufacturing jobs in an industry that has so far seen the leading technology come from Japan and elsewhere in the Far East.
"Today, almost all of these technologies are overseas," said Matt Rogers, a senior adviser at the Energy Department. "These are really about creating manufacturing capabilities in the United States."
The Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative was funded by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The funds are to advance and lower the cost of technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries, necessary to commercialize electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
President Obama has pledged to have 1 million plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads by 2015.
Only one in every five applications won funding, representing about a third of the total dollar amounts sought, said Rogers. While one-fifth of the funds went to small businesses, a number of major auto manufacturers will also benefit.
Twenty-five states will see money from the pool, with the most going to Michigan, followed by Indiana. Eleven and seven projects, respectively, will be funded in these two states, where unemployment has soared as the auto industry licks its wounds.
Information about specific project winners, dollar amounts and jobs created will be released today, Rogers said. One of the applicants is a struggling Chrysler LLC, which plans to develop a plug-in hybrid version of its Dodge Ram pickup truck.
The money is divided into three pools: $1.5 billion will go toward expanding battery and battery component production, as well as recycling capabilities; $500 million will be for manufacturing electric drive and power electronic components; and $400 million will help purchase and test thousands of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles, install vehicle charging infrastructure, and provide education and work force training.
The administration plans to roll out the funds as part of today's full-court press highlighting the economic recovery.
Vice President Joe Biden (pictured) will announce the first round of $2 billion in federal battery research grants during a speech in Detroit Wednesday, according to a report in today's edition of The Detroit News.
As part of the $787 billion stimulus package approved in February, Congress agreed to include $2 billion in battery research grants.
Development of advanced batteries remains the last big technological hurdle preventing mass production of affordable, highway-capable electric vehicles.
Unlike the $25 billion advanced vehicle-retooling program, the grants for battery research do not have to be repaid.
Ed DeSeve, the president's special advisor on the stimulus program, said on July 21 that an announcement on the first round of battery grants would happen shortly. But he declined to say which automakers, suppliers or battery companies might be receiving the grants.
The chairman of BMW Group announced in a statement today that the Megacity electric vehicle the Bavarian automaker is developing will, like MINI, be sold under a sub-brand.
Without elaboration, Dr. Norbert Reithofer (pictured) stated:
"This auto will be launched on the market as a sub-brand of BMW. As BMW is the innovation driver within the Group, the decision for a sub brand under BMW is the most logical step. Details on this topic will be made known later this year."
It would, we think, be most logical if the vehicle is one in a string of electric vehicles (or at least zero-emissions vehicles) that the BMW group produces.
Later on, Reithofer provided some details about BMW's decision Monday to tap SB LiMotive, a joint venture between Bosch and Samsung SDI, to supply lithium-ion battery cells for the Megacity EV, is has a vague launch date of the first half of the next decade.
"This cooperation," Reithofer said, "gives us access to state-of-the-art lithium-ion storage technology. Both partners of this joint venture Bosch and Samsung SDI have the competence and ability to handle the entire battery lifecycle up to the stage of re-use or recycling."
That's interesting, because it means that BMW considered the final disposition of its EV batteries in its decision to work with SB LiMotive. It's more evidence that when BMW talks about sustainability, it backs up its words with actions that are consistent with them.
The state government of Victoria in Australia has become the latest entity to form a partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance to explore the development of a zero-emissions vehicles program.
The state and the alliance announced today that they have signed a memorandum of understanding under which representatives from Victoria and Nissan will identify potential areas of co-operation in promoting the use of electric vehicles in the state.
Nissan is hoping to bring its new LEAF EV (pictured) to Australia by 2012.
The alliance has formed partnerships with about 30 governments, cities and other organizations in the U.S., Japan, Europe and Asia to advance the deployment of electric vehicles worldwide.
Well-designed thermal management systems are needed for the safe and optimal performance of battery packs for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.
It doesn't matter if the batteries are valve regulated lead acid, nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion; for them to function at their best, their ideal temperatures must be maintained.
That's a fact all automakers that are developing EVs and HEVs have come to realize. And it is with this realization that cooling specialist Behr America has formed a "battery cooling group" at its headquarters in Troy, Michigan.
According to a statement the company released today, the group will focus on meeting the thermal management needs of EV and HEV makers as well as makers of battery packs and cells.
Behr America has nearly 2,500 employees at facilities in Troy and Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; Fort Worth, Texas; and Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.
Additional information is available at www.behrgroup.com.
SB LiMotive, a joint venture between Bosch and Samsung SDI, will supply lithium-ion battery cells for BMW's Megacity zero-emissions electric vehicle due in the first half of the next decade.
---------- Right, BMW's Megacity EV concept. ----------
"The decision is a major milestone along the way to serial production of the Megacity Vehicle. The battery is a key component in any electric vehicle -- it determines the range and performance of the car," BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer said in a statement today.
"With SB LiMotive we have selected a supplier who offers the best available technology, combining leading German automotive expertise with future-oriented Korean battery know-how."
The Megacity car is an offshoot from BMW's Project i, which was tasked to develop new mobility concepts for cities with more than 10 million inhabitants.
SB LiMotive, which recently acquired General Motors' hybrid battery supplier Cobasys, is a 50-50 joint venture between autoparts maker Bosch and Samsung, a South Korean lithium-ion battery supplier that specializes in consumer electronics applications.
BMW last week announced it would pull out of the Formula 1 circuit at the end of this season, after management decided to focus its efforts on sustainability issues and reducing carbon emissions.
The invention of safe, reliable and lightweight batteries that can propel a car hundreds of miles on a single charge is the last major technological hurdle in electric-vehicle development.
Nissan Motor Co. has tapped U.S.-based lithium-battery maker EnerDel to help develop a material designed to improve electric- and hybrid-vehicle efficiency and cut battery costs, marking at least the fifth agreement in the past two months involving EnerDel's efforts to either make lithium-ion batteries or do research on them.
Nissan, Japan's third-largest carmaker by number of vehicles sold behind Toyota and Honda, is working with EnerDel, a division of Ener1, on improving conductivity between battery electrodes by creating a new electrolyte, the conductive liquid material between battery electrodes, EnerDel said in a statement today.
The research will take place at Argonne National Laboratories in Chicago.
The agreement signals Nissan's continued effort toward selling electric cars on the global market within three years. The company said last week that it would build battery plants in the U.K. and Portugal to make as many as 120,000 lithium-ion battery packs per year for Nissan and partner Renault.
Nissan, which is already is manufacturing advanced batteries in Japan, earlier this year announced plans for a U.S. battery plant in Tennessee and is making a limited launch of EVs in the U.S. and Japan next year.
Earlier this week, EnerDel said it was working with former Ford drivetrain-making unit Th!nk Global on converting about a quarter of Japan's 22,000 postal trucks to electric from gasoline.
Last month, EnerDel was awarded $3.3 million to do research at Argonne for the U.S. Energy Department related to improving the safety and efficiency of batteries earmarked for hybrid-electric vehicles.
Since May, the company has also won a contraact to make batteries for buses of Northern California's Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District while signing a letter of intent to make batteries for Fisker's Karma plug-in hybrid vehicle.
Ener1, which releases second-quarter results next week, said in May that its first quarter revenue was $8.19 billion, up from $97,000 a year earlier.
The company, which last year announced that it would expand the manufacturing capacity of EnerDel's Indianapolis plant, last October acquired a controlling stake in South Korea-based Enertech in a move designed to allow Ener1 to meet automakers' rapidly growing demand for lithium-ion technology.
U.S.-based lithium-battery maker EnerDel
and former Ford electric drivetrain and electric city car unit Think Global
are collaborating on an effort to convert about a quarter of Japan's 22,000 gasoline-fueled postal trucks to battery-electric power.
Japan's postal service is road-testing two electric vehicles in the Tokyo and Kanagawa areas, EnerDel and Think said in a joint statement. The service has stated its intention to convert its entire fleet to electric by 2016, according to Rachel Carroll, spokeswoman for EnerDel parent Ener1.
EnerDel and Think had previously worked together on developing a 26 kilowatt-hour battery system for the Think City vehicle starting in 2007. The same system is being used for the Japan Postal trucks, the companies said.
Now considered an off-the-shelf package by the companies, the electric drive system was delivered to Zero Sports, a Japanese automotive specialty company that is one of several under contract with Japan Postal to do convert its gass trucks to electric.
While Carroll declined to estimate the horsepower, top speed and range generated by the postal prototype's 26 kilowatt-hour battery, which weighs about 600 pounds, the much smaller Think City EV has a range of 100 miles with a top speed of about 65 miles per hour.
EV battery development efforts in the U.S. may be getting a boost soon - the federal energy Department is getting ready to hand out close to $2 billion in grants aimed at getting a domestic advanced-battery industry rolling.
---------- A rack of advanced lithium-ion batteries at Argonne National Laboratory. ----------
A total of 122 companies have applied for the grants, according to the Washington Post
. Among them are giants like Dow Chemical and Johnson Controls, and niche firms including A123Systems.
"We've had 20 years of bad behavior in the United States in terms of developing ideas into products," Mary Ann Wright, CEO of Johnson Controls' hybrid battery systems effort, told the Post.
Also: Illinois, Colorado, Austria announce plans to invest heavily in plug-in infrastructures.
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
When it rains, it often pours. That's certainly the case now, as the U.S. Department of Energy, the states of Illinois and Colorado, and an Austrian utility all announced in recent days that they will invest many millions of dollars to create recharging networks for electric vehicles.
That's wonderful news, because it brings electric-vehicle makers and potential EV makers a step closer to solving one of the two major problems they face: That being a lack of infrastructure to support pure EVs and plug-in gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles.
The other problem remains development of inexpensive, safe, reliable, lightweight and energy-rich batteries to power the vehicles. Many companies and governments are working on a solution to that problem.
The Energy Department on Monday awarded $47 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to eight ongoing smart-grid demonstration projects. The $47 million investment will add to the $17 million in funds DOE had awarded these eight projects last year, thereby accelerating the timelines for the projects.
Most of the projects relate to technologies to help transmission and distribution systems operate better, but a few are directly related to clean energy. For example, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, will research, develop and demonstrate a coordinated and integrated system of mixed clean energy technologies and distributed energy resources, allowing the city to reduce its peak electrical demand by at least 15 percent.
Meanwhile, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago will focus on implementing distributed energy resources and creating demand-responsive microgrids, which are small power networks that can operate independently of the utility power grid. In addition, the University of Hawaii will explore the management of its electrical distribution system to better accommodate wind power.
The Energy Department also just released the first Smart Grid System Report, which examines smart-grid deployments nationwide. The findings show that while many smart-grid capabilities are just beginning to emerge, the adoption of various technologies such as smart metering, automated substation controls and distributed generation are growing significantly.
The report also notes that smart-grid capabilities are socially transformational. As with the Internet or cell phone communications, smart-grid technologies have the potential to dramatically change how we experience electricity in the country, but improvements in physical and cyber security and information privacy will require consumers, manufacturers and utilities to closely follow a range of best practices for the smart grid.
Additionally, the Energy Department has begun the development of a Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse, tapping Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for the $1.3 million initiative to develop and maintain the clearinghouse Website, which will provide information to the public about smart-grid initiatives happening nationwide. The Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse was mandated by the Recovery Act.
Automakers have toyed with turbines for decades, but the powerful engines, widely used in the aircraft industry, have never found a place in the car.
An Israeli company hopes to change that - not with a honkin' big turbine a la the GM Firebird concepts of 1953-1959 or the1963 Chrysler Turbine Car concept (right)
, but with a microturbine that generates juice for an extended-range plug-in hybrid.
---------- Chrysler tested turbine-powered concept in 1963 but never sold it. ETV's system uses small turbine to power an electric motor. ----------
The system - which still is a year or more from production - mates the microturbine to a battery pack using newly developed high-density lithium manganese nickel oxide cells.
Each cell stores 4.7 volts, versus 3.2 volts in the lithium-ion batteries just now coming into use for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles.
Privately-owned ETV says that its batteries, with their higher-density cells, are lighter and smaller than the present generation and can power an electric car for 35 to 50 miles before the charge would be depleted and the microturbine generator would kick on.
"It took over sixty years and six generations of gasoline engines for the Chevy Corvette to accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in under four seconds. The first version of the Tesla Roadster, which is the world's first Lithium-ion battery powered car, achieved that feat immediately. Whereas earlier generations of electric cars were plagued by poor performance, high cost, and short ranges, a new generation of affordable, high-performance electric cars is about to enter the U.S. market."
---------- Right, click on the image to enlarge it. ----------
Thus begins a very readable and interesting report commissioned by U.C. Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology entitled, "Electric Vehicles in the United States: A New Model with Forecasts to 2030." Its author is Thomas Becker, a U.C. Berkeley economist who specializes in international and environmental economics.
The paper estimates the rate of market adoption of EVs in the U.S. through 2030 and analyzes the impact of electric-car deployment on the trade balance, business investment, employment, health care costs and greenhouse-gas emissions. And, the paper forecasts three electric-vehicle adoption scenarios based on two oil price scenarios and possible purchase price incentives for electric cars.
Before moving on to a summary of the paper, there are some things we feel you ought to know about it. In response to a query from Green Car Advisor, the university acknowledged that Better Place - a huge advocate of electric vehicles in general and the major proponent of battery switching technology in particular - helped fund the program that conducted the study, which found that the U.S. can greatly benefit from EVs and battery switching.
The study's premise is that electric vehicles would be sold without batteries at a cost similar to conventional gasoline or diesel cars, and the batteries would be leased at a cost approximating the monthly cost of gasoline for a conventional vehicle.
That is a big part of Better Place's business model. The company envisions itself as a major battery leasing enterprise and operator of quick-change battery swapping stations.
We queried the university and Better Place after both issued reports Monday that shed an attractive light on electric vehicles. The timing of the reports seemed coordinated; the university and Better Place denied that the same release date was anything more than a coincidence. Click on "5-Nation Survey by Electric Vehicle Backer Shows Strong Consumer Interest in EVs" to read our piece on the report issued by Better Place.
Now, without further adieu, click on the "Continue reading" button, below, to read a summary of the U.C. Berkeley study.
Japan's Nikkei business news says the two intend to jointly build powertrain components and are likely to supply finished hybrid vehicles to each other.
The partnership reportedly would benefit Mitsubishi's development of a plug-in gas-electric SUV and PSA Peugeot-Citroen's work on a diesel-electric car.
Mitsubishi, which declined to comment, also would supply high-capacity lithium-ion batteries to PSA through an affiliate, according to the Nikkei report.
Mitsubishi is already developing a plug-in hybrid car for commercial release by 2013 and intends to begin leasing its I-MIEV battery-electric city car in Japan later this month, with retail sales expected to follow sometime next year.
Collaborative agreements such as the Mitsubishi-PSA deals can only help speed the day when electric and electric-assisted vehicles are no longer curiosities but a significant part of the mainstream automotive marketplace.
Less than a week after Hitachi said it will increase production of lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in anticipation of a flood of new business, Sanyo Electric says it will quadruple its production of nickel-metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries for hybrids as demand for the fuel efficient vehicles rises.
---------- Sanyo sees big jump in demand for batteries like this nickle-metal hydride pack for a Ford Escape hybrid. ----------
Ford and Honda have increased their orders for Sanyo batteries while a pair of European car makers with plans to launch hybrids after next year are two of Sanyo's newest customers, the head of the company's rechargeable battery division said in an interview with Bloomberg news.
Mitsuru Honma wouldn't identify the European car makers that have ordered Sanyo batteries for their future hybrids, but Fiat, Volkswagen, Jaguar and PSA Peugeot Citroen all among those known to be planning to launch hybrids in 201l and beyond.
Ford Motor Co. with two Ford and two Mercury hybrid models, and Honda Motor Co., with two hybrids, are Sanyo's present nickel-metal hydride battery customers. The company also is developing advanced nickle-metal and lithium-ion batteries for Volkswagen.
Analysts at JPMorgan Securities Japan have said they expect the global market for batteries for hybrid vehicles will top $6 billion by mid-decade.
Lithium-ion batteries are ideal for EVs and plug-in hybrids because they are lighter and hold far more energy - thus providing more range - than nickle-metal hydride batteries; nickle batteries, though, provide for quicker bursts of energy, a must for conventional hybrids that use their batteries primarily to augment their internal combustion engines during periods of rapid acceleration or heavy demand - such as climbing hills.
General Motors has announced its intention to abandon its 25-year-old California joint venture with Toyota -- a move the Japanese automaker said would add to its own financial woes -- and Bloomberg has reported that Toyota may produce a hybrid for GM.
Only two weeks ago, Bloomberg reported that GM and Toyota were considering possibly of building Prius hybrids together at an existing plant in Fremont, California.
But in a statement released Monday, GM said it will place its 50 percent ownership stake in New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. -- or NUMMI, the GM-Toyota joint venture that consists chiefly of the Fremont factory -- in the "old GM."
The "old GM" will contain parts of the company that will remain in bankruptcy after a "new GM" exits court protection.
GM filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 1 and plans for its profitable assets to emerge, possibly by the end of summer, as a "new GM" with about $50 billion in financing from the U.S. Treasury.
"After extensive analysis, GM and Toyota could not reach an agreement on a future product plan that made sense for all parties," Troy Clarke, GM's president of North American operations, said in statement.
"Accordingly, NUMMI will end production of vehicles for GM in August, and there are no future GM vehicles planned for the joint venture at this time."
Earlier this month, GM said that production of the Pontiac Vibe at the NUMMI plant would end in August as the Pontiac brand is being eliminated. Toyota builds the Corolla small car and the Tacoma pickup truck at the plant.
In a statement released Monday, Toyota said it was sorry GM was withdrawing from NUMMI, "ending a long, successful partnership spanning 25 years."
"Our hope was for the 50/50 joint venture to continue," the statement said. "While we respect this decision by GM, the economic and business environment surrounding Toyota is also extremely severe, and so this decision by GM makes the situation even more difficult for Toyota. We will consider alternatives by taking into account various factors."
Michelin recently gathered a group of auto designers to discuss what the electrification of the auto will bring in terms of performance, safety and interior and exterior design and function.
Rather than boil that day down into a long posting, we thought - given that Michelin video-taped the entire proceeding - that you might enjoy seeing and hearing for yourselves what the designers, representing Ford, GM, Nissan, Volvo and Fisker Automotive, had to say.
Click on any of the pictures above and you'll jump to the Michelin Challenge Design site, where the seminar is broken down into videos of the opening remarks, the keynote talk on "EV Design, Then and Now" by Ford Americas design chief Moray Callum, and a dozen individual segments in which some of the world's leading designers talk about the seismic shift electric propulsion is bringing to the auto and to auto design.
Among the topics they tackle are changing public perceptions of the EV; battery charging systems; designing for occupant safety; EV battery swapping,and how design affects battery packaging.
There's also a segment to help consumers understand electric vehicle design issues and, our favorite, a section on "the EV and passionate design."
The U.S. government has set a goal - via Executive Order 13423
, signed by President Bush in 2007 - for federal agencies to use plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs, as they become available at a reasonable cost.
In response to a request from several key U.S. representatives, the federal Government Accountability Office examined the potential benefits of PHEVs, factors affecting the availability of plug-ins, and challenges to incorporating plug-ins into the federal fleet.
The GAO, in a report released this week, found that increasing the use of plug-ins could result in environmental and other benefits, but also that realizing these benefits depends on several factors.
Although plug-ins could significantly reduce oil consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, the electricity used for charging the batteries would need to be generated from lower-emission fuels such as nuclear and renewable energy rather than fossil fuels - coal and natural gas - for PHEVs to reach their full potential.
Nothing there we've not reported time and again. Same can be said for the GAO's conclusion that for plug-ins to be cost effective relative to gasoline-powered vehicles, the price of batteries must come down significantly and gasoline prices must be high relative to electricity.
Indeed, the GAO study didn't veer much from common knowledge until it turned to the topic of the future makeup of the federal fleet. To incorporate plug-ins into the federal fleet, the GAO concluded, agencies will face challenges related to cost, availability, planning, and federal requirements.
Plug-ins are expected to have high upfront costs when they are first introduced, the study concluded, and agencies vary in the extent to which they use life-cycle costing when evaluating which vehicle to purchase.
Agencies also may find that plug-ins are not available to them, especially when the vehicles are initially introduced, because the number available to the government may be limited.
Chevy Volt Vehicle Chief Engineer Andrew Farah takes the first pre-production Volt for a drive earlier today.
After all the spy pics and autoshow rollouts of the so-called Chevrolet Volt, you might have thought you'd already seen the real deal. More than once probably.
But until today, the closest thing to a Volt that General Motors had unveiled to the masses was a mule - the not-so-flattering reference of an autobody married to a powertrain and other systems that aren't Volt-like at all.
The images you see here are an entirely different matter. They are, in fact, the very first photos of the pre-production Volt gasoline-electric extended-range hybrid.
What you see here is what some of you will get, with the exception of a few chiefly cosmetic items such as light clusters that designers and/or engineers are still tinkering with.
And somewhat remarkably - given all the turmoil GM has been through lately - the vehicle was completed a week ahead of schedule. That's right: GM had a July 4th deadline for the pre-production Volt.
AltCar this week became the first car-sharing service in the U.S. to provide members with access to a fleet of plug-in electric vehicles and gas-electric hybrids on an hourly basis.
The service, which is funded at least in part by ExxonMobil, launched in Baltimore on Tuesday with nationwide aspirations.
Although AltCar said it intends to make a mix of all-electric and hybrid-electric available to its members, at least initially the company is offering only one model.
That would be the Maya 300 (pictured), made by Maya Electric of Mississauga, Canada, and featuring a lithium-ion battery produced by Electrovaya. The zero-emissions, five-door, four-passenger EV is classified as a low- or medium-speed vehicle.
Depending on battery size, each car can travel a distance of up to 60 or up to 120 miles. Each battery contains an ExxonMobil separator film that supposedly enhances the power, safety, strength and reliability of the battery.
The big oil company has made no secret of the fact that it has invested more than $500,000 in the car-sharing program.
AltCar's Baltimore program launched with five Maya 300s. Plans call for another five cars to be added to the program in coming weeks.
The Maya 300 charges in about eight hours, plugs into a regular household outlet and will be available to consumers within a year, promised Electrovaya Chairman and CEO Sankar Das Gupta.
Yesterday we reported
that Nissan, Ford and Tesla will be the first auto companies to receive factory retooling loans under the $25 billion federal program to speed production of fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.
Today, President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu confirmed that the administration has granted $8 billion in conditional loan commitments to the three automakers for the development of vehicle technologies that, as the president put it, "will create thousands of green jobs while helping reduce the nation's dangerous dependence on foreign oil."
The loan commitments include $5.9 billion for Ford to transform factories across Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio to produce 13 more fuel-efficient models; $1.6 billion to Nissan to retool its Smyrna, Tennessee, factory to build electric automobiles and an advanced-battery manufacturing facility; and $465 million to Tesla to manufacture electric drivetrains and EVs in California.
The loans represent the first in a series of conditional loan commitments reached as part of the Energy Department's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. Chu said the department plans to make additional loans under this program over the next several months to large and small automakers as well as parts suppliers.
In a statement, Ford said it plans to invest nearly $14 billion in advanced-technology vehicles over the next seven years. "Our partnership with the Department of Energy also will help retool our U.S. plants more quickly to produce fuel-efficient vehicles and help meet the new, rigorous fuel-economy requirements," it said.
In its statement, Nissan said construction at Smyrna was scheduled to begin by the end of this year, with production slated to start in late 2012. It said modifications at the plant include a new battery-production facility and changes in the existing structure for electric-vehicle assembly.
"When fully operational, the vehicle assembly plant will have the capacity to build 150,000 zero-emissions vehicles a year and the new plant will have an annual capacity of 200,000 batteries," it said, adding that Nissan's EV "will comfortably seat five people, drive on any American road or highway, and have an initial range of 100 miles before recharging."
Model S News
And Tesla said it will use $365 million of the $465 million it received for production engineering and assembly of the Model S, an all-electric family sedan that will supposedly carry seven people and travel up to 300 miles per charge.
The Model S has an anticipated base price of $49,900 after a $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit. According to Tesla, it will have lifetime ownership costs equivalent to a conventional car with a sticker price of $35,000, thanks to the lower cost of electricity versus gasoline and a relative lack of service and maintenance.
The federal Energy Department has awarded lithium-ion battery maker EnerDel $3.3 million for research related to improving the safety and efficiency of batteries earmarked for hybrid-electric vehicles.
EnerDel said in a statement that it will work with Chicago-based Argonne National Laboratories on development of a chemical additive that prevents lithium-ion batteries from overcharging.
The award is the largest in a new group of projects under the auspices of the Energy Department's Vehicle Technologies program, said EnerDel, whose New York-based parent Ener1 has applied for further DOE funding to expand its manufacturing capacity under the Advanced Battery Manufacturing Initiative grant and Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan programs.
EnerDel has been trying to boost revenue with a combination of grants from the U.S. government and contract awards from private companies.
Since the beginning of may, the battery maker has won a contract to make batteries for buses of Northern California's Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District and signed a letter of intent to make batteries for Fisker Automotive's Karma plug-in hybrid vehicle, which is scheduled to reach the market next June.
No matter how one cuts it, the road rally Tesla Motors held for owners of its all-electric, zero-emissions Roadsters earlier this month in curvaceous countryside northwest of downtown L.A. was a glorious trip.
The route mostly wound through 60 miles of breathtaking canyons, beginning at Tesla's West Los Angeles showroom and making a stop at The Rock Store diner/bar/hangout before ending with a barbeque in Malibu at Greener Pasture Ranch, a stunning spread overlooking the Pacific that's the private home of a wealthy Tesla customer.
Held to commemorate the EV-maker's 500th Roadster delivery and the one-year anniversary of Tesla's first retail store, much of the journey took place on Mulholland Drive, a nicely banked mountain road that's appeared in countless Hollywood movies and is a local favorite with bullet-bike and sports-car enthusiasts.
Just behind the Kawasaki Ninjas and Honda Hurricanes in quickness on Mulholland two Saturdays ago were the Roadsters, which accelerate silently from a dead stop to 60 miles an hour in under 4 seconds, are six times as fuel efficient as rival sports cars and have a driving range of 240-plus miles per charge in ideal conditions.
Standard Roadsters - as if there's anything "standard" about them - redline at 248 base horsepower at 14,000 rpm, wear Yokohama AD07 tires on cast alloy, uni-directional, split 5-spoke wheels and start at $109,000. For another $19,500, buyers get an even quicker Roadster with custom-tuned suspension and ultra-high-performance Yokohama A04k tires on black forged-alloy Tesla-designed wheels.
Tesla Motors, based in San Carlos, California, is the only production automaker selling highway-capable EVs in the United States or Europe. The Roadster - the young EV-maker's first model (two more are in the works) - beats nearly every other car on the road in quickness yet is twice as energy efficient as a Toyota Prius. It costs roughly $4 to refuel and can be completely recharged in as little as 3.5 hours.
In addition to the West L.A. store, which opened a year ago, Tesla has a showroom in Menlo Park in the heart of Silicon Valley, about an hour's drive south of San Francisco. The company expects to open regional sales and service centers within months in New York, Chicago, London, Seattle, Miami, Washington, Monaco and Munich.
Go to the jump page to see a gallery of click-to-enlarge images from the road rally. Return to the gallery Tuesday afternoon to see additional pics and the inclusion of caption information.
(Note: 4th paragraph typo re range goal corrected 6/15/09)
The Japanese government wants the nation's researchers to come up with a next-generation lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids that will deliver triple the power of the current crop of lithium-ion batteries, according to news reports from Japan.
To help move things along on the advanced battery front, the government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization has called for a 22-member research consortium to be funded by about 21-billion yen ($215 million) in government grants over a seven-year period.
Major automakers, power companies and universities would be members of the research consortium.
The consortium's ultimate goal is a new type of battery, or an incredibly advanced li-ion chemistry, that would enable a conventional passenger car to travel more than 3000 300 miles on a single charge.
The ability to build and sell large numbers of such batteries could help position Japan to become the Saudi Arabia of the advanced energy world as electric drive systems begin taking over from internal combustion engines in the future.
Tesla Motors founder Martin Eberhard (right
) has filed a lawsuit against the automaker's Chairman Elon Musk, the electric-car company and 20 yet-to-be-identified defendants for libel, slander, breach of contract and eight other complaints arising from a slew of allegations that include wrongful damage to Eberhard's reputation and intentional damage to his Founder's Series Production Roadster, which Eberhard estimated to have a future worth of several million dollars.
In the 146-page lawsuit filed May 26 at the Superior Court for San Mateo County, where Tesla Motors maintains its headquarters, Eberhard portrayed himself as a "technological entrepreneur who has spent his life studying and creating innovative technology to improve human society and the environment,"
Musk, Eberhard alleges: "began a campaign to appropriate control of Tesla Motors and of Eberhard's legacy as the company's founder and visionary"; defamed and disparaged Eberhard in the news media; falsely accused Eberhard of being responsible for the Roadster's production delays and for Tesla's financial instability; and a many other not so nice things.
"These actions are remarkable, but they are also part of Musk's broader personal history of misrepresentation - his educational degrees and professional affiliations being symbolic samples - and of the extent of his involvement with other companies, such as PayPal," the complaint alleges.
Musk (left
), who is widely regarded as having co-founded PayPal, SpaceX and Zip2, in a brief email exchange with Green Car Advisor tonight, directed questions to Tesla Motors spokeswoman Rachel Konrad.
Konrad, reached by telephone, described the lawsuit as "an inaccurate account of history, as well as a personal attack. It's twisted and wrong."
She said Tesla Motors expects to file a counterclaim against Eberhard.
In a statement sent to the media late Wednesday, she elaborated:
"This lawsuit is an unfair personal attack and, more importantly, paints an inaccurate picture of Tesla's history. This lawsuit is a fictionalized account of Tesla's early years - it's twisted and wrong, and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight.
"Martin was unanimously fired by the board, largely over the fact that the cost of the car was more than twice what Martin portrayed it to be at the time. Incidentally, Tesla will also be filing counterclaims and in the process present an accurate account of the company's history."
Green Car Advisor intends to return to this story in coming days, when we've had a chance to sort the fact from fiction and get beyond all this he said, she said stuff (although we'd be first to admit, it does make for compelling reading).
LG Chem Ltd., South Korea's leading producer of chemicals, broke ground today on an $802 million factory that will be used to build lithium-ion polymer batteries for electric vehicles.
The ground-breaking took place in Ochang Techno Park, some 60 miles south of Seoul, with officials from both General Motors Corp. and Hyundai Motor Co. witnessing the event.
Robert Kruse, GM executive director-global vehicle engineering, and Yang Woong-chul, Hyundai president of research and development, were on hand as both automakers have contracts with LG Chem to supply batteries for their electric-vehicle and hybrid programs.
LG Chem will begin shipping LPI batteries for GM's Chevrolet Volt program in November 2010, company officials said. A subsidiary of LG Chem in Troy, Michigan, will assemble the batteries into packs for use in the car.
South Korea's Minister of Knowledge Economy Lee Youn-ho told reporters that the "government plans to grow the Korean green-car industry to be one of the world's Big Four by the mid-2010s."
The government will provide research and development funds to LG Chem, he said. No figure was given.
In a regulatory filing, the company said it expects global demand for EV batteries to reach 3.3 million units by 2013 and 4.6 million by 2015.
The company's revenue from battery sales is projected at more than $1.6 billion by 2015, when the global market is estimated to be more than $8 billion, the filing revealed.
Ford Motor Co. this week delivered an Escape SUV plug-in hybrid electric vehicle to Canada's largest electricity producer, Hydro-Quebec, as part of the automaker's North American demonstration and research program on PHEVs.
Ford, in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute, which conducts research and development relating to the delivery and use of electricity for public good, is undertaking a three-year test program on the Escape PHEV designed to evaluate how the vehicle might best be integrated into existing electric grids.
In all, Ford will provide 21 vehicles for the real-world trials. EPRI has identified nine utilities across North America to test drive the vehicles and collect data on battery technology, vehicle systems, customer use and grid infrastructure. Hydro-Quebec is the only Canadian company participating in the North American program.
The standard Escape Hybrid is EPA rated at 34 miles per gallon in the city and 31 on the highway. However, the PHEV version can achieve up to 120 mpg during the first 30 miles following a recharge. After that, it behaves like a standard Escape Hybrid, consuming gasoline for energy.
The Ford Escape PHEV is a research vehicle that uses high voltage, lithium-ion batteries and common household current (120 volts) for charging. Full charge of the battery takes six to eight hours.
This week's annoucement came one week after Toyota announced that it would begin leasing 500 PHEVs globally by the end of this year as part of a test program, and less than three months since President Obama announced a $2.4-billion plug-in stimulus package to promote research into and develop of PHEVs.
The aftermarket business for the plug-in battery-electric Tesla Roadster is heating up.
In a strange twist, one of the aftermarket entrepreneurs is Martin Eberhard, the deposed co-founder of the electric-car startup who blogged nearly 18 months ago that "I am sad not to be part of Tesla anymore, and I believe that Tesla would be a lot better off with me than without me."
Writing recently in his blog, Eberhard noted that he has been busy making mobile chargers for the Roadster.
"I originally intended to build one for myself," Eberhard wrote. "Then for a few friends. Now I am swamped with requests from Roadster owners who want a more flexible mobile charging solution. I plan to write a blog about my little charger one of these days. But then there is my 'real' job that already takes 110 percent of my time!"
For more on the subject, visit our sister site Edmunds' Inside Line.
Until now the only color General Motors has allowed us to view the production 2011 Chevrolet Volt in is silver.
But John McElroy over at Autoline Daily (subscription required) has managed to take some of the first pics of the Volt in another color, as you can see for yourself.
Complementing the jet-black paint is a stingy (some might say subtle) amount of chrome. Some cars look awesome in black, but we think the Volt looks better in the original color.
General Motors has yet to disclose the various colors the Volt will be available in when it enters the marketplace 18 months or so from now.
Below, we've used a photo-editing tool to show you how the car would look in other paint colors, namely metalic copper, misty green and pale purple. Click on the pics for enlargements.
Plug In Conversions Corp. has completed a breakthrough software upgrade to its plug-in conversion kit that for the first time will allow all-electric mode driving at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour in a converted Toyota Prius.
Previous Prius conversion kits have been limited by Toyota programming to a top speed of 34 mph in all-electric mode.
The software upgrade also will allow Prius drivers with PICC conversion kits to boost highway fuel efficiency to 170 miles per gallon until the rechargeable battery is depleted, as recently measured by Argonne National Laboratory.
Chicago-based Argonne reported even higher all-electric mileage in city driving tests of vehicles equipped with the software upgrade and PICC's nickel-metal hydride battery conversion kit.
"What we're essentially offering is all-electric performance for about 25 miles at highway speeds," PICC President Kim Adelman said Tuesday. "The car is no longer limited to 34 miles per hour, all-electric. This also allows a Prius to perform much like the Chevy Volt, but for a much lower cost."
Fuzzy Math
Not so fast. A 2010 Prius starts at $22,000. Add the cost of the conversion kit ($12,500) and the software upgrade ($2500) and the cost of this impressive Prius starts at $37,000.
The Volt, which won't be available for at least 18 months, is expected to carry a price of about $40,000 before a hefty $7,500 rebate from Uncle Sam, which would bring its price down to $32,500 - or $4,500 less than the modified Prius.
When GreenCarAdvisor reached Adelman by phone Tuesday afternoon to point out the discrepancy, he said that most Prius owners who convert their vehicles don't do so when they are new.
He said their Priuses are generally used and worth $14,000 to $15,000 at the time of conversion, but we don't see how that changes things if the owner paid $22,000 for it new. The car has depreciated, but the out-of-pocket expense remains the same.
Adelman also said he believed that the conversion kit will soon be eligible for a 10 percent rebate, which would reduce its price to $11,250. That would still make the converted Prius $3,250 more expensive than the Volt.
You could say that Robert Q. Riley is a driven man.
For 30 years, Riley (below) has been designing alternative vehicles, and always they adhered to a simple yet effective design approach: Minimize mass to achieve fuel economy.
Out of that approach he created the XR3 (right), a plug-in hybrid that combines low mass with state-of-the-art technology to achieve 125 miles per gallon when its 23-horsepower diesel engine is engaged, and up to 40 miles while running only on its lithium-ion battery pack.
The trike is an all-wheel-drive, ground-connected parallel hybrid, meaning there's no mechanical transmission between the two power systems. Instead, the XR3 relies on the ground to provide the connection.
When the two systems are used in series, with half the miles driven on battery power and half on diesel power, the average fuel economy shoots to 225 mpg equivalent. For local trips of up to 40 miles, the XR3 can run on battery power alone.
The choice of operating mode - diesel-only, battery-electric-only, or hybrid - is operator selectable by flipping a pair of switches. And there's not a single computer in the power system.
"We needed a simple way to integrate two very different power systems, and I wanted to avoid computer controls and costly transmissions that are common to today's hybrids," Riley said Monday. "So I designed a $10 throttle integrator mechanism... Amazingly, it works better than my wildest dreams!"
Power system integration is handled by a simple electromechanical throttle integrator - one of the many features for which patents are pending.
Connecticut-based Yardney Technical Products Inc. and California-based Coda Automotive announced today that they have entered into a joint venture, Coda Battery Systems LLC, to design, make and sell automotive grade lithium-ion battery power systems in the U.S.
Coda Battery Systems has submitted a proposal under the Recovery Act stimulus grant program to the Department of Energy for funding to build a manufacturing facility in Enfield, Connecticut, that would employ about 600 people.
Oddly, not a one of the four people authorized to discuss the announcement was available to answer some key questions, such as "how much money is the joint venture seeking?" and "what will become of the JV if it doesn't receive a grant?"
According to a statement issued by the JV, the 600-person workforce would develop a battery that could be used in the four-door, all-electric Coda Automotive sedan (pictured) that the company says is scheduled for delivery to the California market in the fall of next year.
If realized, the vehicle would be the product of a joint venture between Coda Automotive and China-based Tianjin Lishen Battery Co., one of largest suppliers of lithium-ion batteries in the world.
If Coda Battery Systems receives an Energy Department grant - and the department is expected to begin announcing recipients next months - the company will begin supplying the power battery system for the Coda sedan as soon as the new U.S. facility can be brought online.
"It is anticipated that Lishen, Coda's battery partner in China, will participate in the U.S. manufacturing joint venture," the statement said.
That China would benefit, albeit indirectly, for Energy Department money is OK under the Recovery Act. What's important for grant eligibility is that the jobs be located in the U.S.
Based in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, Yardney has been providing batteries for the U.S. military since 1944. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Coda Automotive is said to be safety and durability testing its all-electric, zero-emissions highway sedan.
But the Ohio State Highway Patrol is fitting its entire fleet of Ford Crown Victoria patrol cars - more than 1,100 units statewide - with a small solar panel the OHP says will help conserve fuel and limit the potential for vehicle downtime.
The $37 panel will generate a max of about five watts. Crucially, that's enough to power the patrol-car radios, enabling the troopers to sometimes engage in stationary traffic monitoring without the car's engine idling. Police cruisers spend a lot of time with the engine running, even when stationary, because of the potential for electrical-equipment drain to discharge the battery.
The OHP said it increased its stationary patrol time in fiscal-year 2007-08, saving some 16.4 percent on fuel costs - or about $1 million. The new solar panels will increase the fuel-consumption savings because the cruisers now will be able to spend a portion of their stationary time with the engine off.
The solar panel is wired directly to the patrol-car's battery, also helping to extend the life of the battery and further cutting costs, the OHP said.
The panels are expected to last about five years. Brackets to mount the panel on the cruisers' rear deck were fashioned from misprinted license plates.
General Motors expanded its battery research and development capabilities today with the opening of the largest and possibly most advanced battery laboratory in the United States.
---------- Right, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and GM CEO Fritz Henderson prior to press conference announcing the opening of GM's newest battery lab. ----------
The new Global Battery Systems Lab in Warren, Michigan, will lead GM's advanced-battery engineering efforts and expedite the introduction of electrical-powered vehicles, including the Chevrolet Volt, as well as plug-in hybrid and hybrid-electric vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles.
In a statement released today, the automaker described the lab's opening as the latest move in GM's comprehensive battery strategy, which includes ramping up in-house responsibility for advanced battery technology and a broad portfolio of supplier partners.
At 33,000 square feet, the lab is four times larger than the automaker's previous battery laboratory on the same GM campus and will be used by the automaker's thousand-plus engineers assigned to developing advanced batteries and electrically driven vehicles.
Low-cost, lightweight and powerful batteries are widely regarded as the final piece of the puzzle to an affordable all-electric vehicle, so the importance of the lab to GM at a time when the automaker is in deep financial trouble cannot be overstated.
Miles Rubin has carved out a nice little business, Miles Electric Vehicles, marketing low-speed electric vehicles to commercial and government fleets and now wants to begin selling full-size, full service EVs to you and me.
But not as Miles EV.
As we reported last month, that name will be reserved for the 5-year-old low-speed electric work truck business.
The new business - Coda Automotive - was announced today at a press conference at Coda's Santa Monica headquarters. The name wasn't derived from the Led Zepplin album of the same name but comes from the musical notation for an independent passage that sums up or concludes what came before it.
The company, which plans to start selling a $45,000 (before a $7,500 federal tax credit), 5-seat, mid-sized battery-electric sedan in the last half of 2010, also showed off a prototype of the car (above), which is based on a sedan built by Hafei Motor Co., a smallish Chinese automaker.
Coda chief executive Kevin Czinger also announced that the company has formed a "global" joint venture with its Chinese battery supplier to develop, manufacture and market lithium-ion batteries for transportation and stationary power storage uses and has applied for a federal grant in partnership with a so-far unidentified U.S. battery development company to build an EV battery factory in this country.
Price Matters
Entering the battery business will enable Coda to leverage its core expertise in battery systems design and create revenue stream that can help the company lower the admittedly steep price of its first car, Czinger said in an interview with Green Car Advisor.
Part of the company's marketing message, to help overcome the price, is that a battery-EV has far fewer part than a conventional car or a hybrid-electric car. It needs no engine maintenance, no oil changes and relatively little routine maintenance. Coda figures that will cost the average owner $3 per 100 miles to operate the EV, versus $17 per 100 miles for a 20 mpg conventional car.
The annual savings help lower the total cost of owning an EV, Czinger said, and should help make the Coda more competitive with other EVs such as the model to be launched next year by Nissan Motor Co., and with extended-range plug-in hybrids such as General Motors Corp.'s similarly-priced Chevrolet Volt when they begin appearing in the market in 2011.
Tier 1 Team
Acknowledging that start-up automakers face a tough battle in pursuing consumer acceptance, Czinger said that Coda's marketing strategy will stress its electric sedan's safety and heavy use of components and systems supplied by top-tier companies such as Delphi Corp. (power electronics), Borg-Warner (the single-speed transaxle), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (heating and air conditioning) and Continental (electronic stability control system).
The Coda's 333-volt battery pack, now supplied by the Tianjin Lishen Battery Co., a manufacturer of lithium ion batteries used in laptop computers, cell phones and power tools, will come from the new Coda-Lishen Battery joint venture.
Magna International Inc. is prevented by an agreement with General Motors Corp. from selling Opel cars in the United States and, for now, in China, according to the chairman of the Canadian auto parts company.
That's significant because Opel has a number of low-emissions, fuel-efficient vehicles in its lineup and more in the works, including the one pictured here.
"The agreement with General Motors does prevent us from selling Opel in the United States," Frank Stronach told reporters at a news conference in Ottawa on Tuesday. A Magna-led consortium has agreed to buy European automaker Opel from GM.
Asked if the agreement applies to China too, he said, "Yes, for the moment, but keep in mind that General Motors - we've been working together for 50 years, we've been great partners, and they still own 35 percent (of Opel)."
He suggested the prohibition on Opel sales in China might be flexible. "If it makes economic sense you might persuade people to change something."
Stronach also said he expects Opel to break even in three years, and to turn a profit in four.
Magna's chairman was in the Canadian capital to seek government funding for a project to produce electrical systems for electric cars and, eventually, electric cars themselves.
Toyota Motor Corp. on Wednesday announced that it would begin leasing 500 plug-in hybrids based on the Prius model globally by the end of this year, primarily for government and corporate use.
Toyota, the world's biggest automaker, said in a statement it would lease 200 in Japan and 150 each in the United States and Europe, including 100 in France.
Plug-in hybrid cars can be cleaner than regular hybrids because they can be charged to run purely on electricity, but the need for more batteries makes them expensive. Many companies are working to bring the price of the batteries down, which in turn would reduce the price of the low-emissions, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Toyota's plug-in cars would be the brand's first to employ lithium-ion batteries, which are costly but can store more energy than nickel-metal hydride batteries used in most gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles.
Among other carmakers, bankrupt General Motors Corp. is planning to launch its much-hyped Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid next year.
In the statement, Toyota said it is developing a plug-in hybrid vehicle based on the third-generation Prius and capable of being recharged via external power sources such as household electrical outlets.
A plug-in hybrid vehicle typically operates as an electric vehicle when used for short distances and as a conventional hybrid vehicle when used for medium- to long-distance trips. This means it can be driven regardless of remaining battery power or the availability of a battery-charging infrastructure.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and BASF, the world's largest chemical company, have signed a worldwide licensing agreement to mass produce and market Argonne's patented composite cathode materials to manufacturers of advanced lithium-ion batteries.
BASF will conduct further lithium-ion battery material application development in its current Beachwood, Ohio, facility, the laboratory said in a statement released today. Contingent upon winning a DOE grant under the Recovery Act, BASF plans to build one of North America's largest cathode material production facilities in Elyria, Ohio.
The patented cathode materials are part of a large and diverse suite of lithium-ion battery inventions and patents developed at Argonne with funding from the Energy Department's Vehicle Technologies Program.
Argonne said the further development and commercialization of the cathode materials will result in advanced batteries that are higher-performing, longer-lasting and safer when compared to the existing technology that has dominated the market for nearly two decades.
That's a big deal because it brings us one step closer to affordable zero-emissions, all-electric cars; the high price of batteries for vehicle propulsion is now keeping EVs out of reach of most people.
Indeed, BASF spokesman Joseph Breunig said the company's goal "is to make lithium-ion battery use realistic, affordable and widely available. Partnerships like this are exactly the type of public-private investment commitment that will create a more sustainable environment, help move the economy forward, and create new jobs."
The partnership has the potential to bring the U.S. much closer to reaching President Obama's goal of having one million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
Austin-based Valence Technology, which ultimately hopes to reap millions of dollars from making and selling lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, signed a memorandum of understanding today with Siemens Drive Technologies Division to develop batteries for Siemens' ELFA hybrid-drive marine propulsion system.
Yes, that is a mouthful. And if you're wondering what it has to do with green cars, you're thinking clearly.
Here's the answer: While this MOU was for marine applications, the more lithium-ion batteries are ordered the cheaper they'll become for everyone, automakers included. And as the cost of the batteries falls, so too should the cost of plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and battery-electric vehicles.
Besides that, the ELFA hybrid drive range is already in use in buses, cranes and boats with over 8 million hours recorded on systems from leading bus and boat manufacturers.
In a statement released today, Valence CEO Robert L Kanodeaid said his company's batteries have been in operation with Siemens' hybrid drivetrains for more than three years in double-decker buses in London.
Under today's memorandum of understanding, Valence and Siemens Drive Technologies agreed to develop modular and scalable energy storage systems for marine applications that incorporate Valence's lithium-ion batteries.
Siemens' executives said that extending its deal with Valence comes as Siemens looks to grow its share of an increasing market for hybrid drivetrain products.
In what is yet more proof that Tesla Motors is on its way to becoming a major automaker, the company announced today that it had reached an important milestone for the electric-vehicle manufacturer - the delivery of its 500th Roadster.
The lucky recipient is New Jersey philanthropist Martin Tuchman, chairman of The Tuchman Foundation, shown here beside his twilight-blue Roadster. Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad said he plans to charge his zero-emissions Roadster partly with solar energy, thanks to photovoltaic panels he helped install throughout his hometown of Kingston, N.J.
"My Roadster drives like a dream. It's amazing," Tuchman, a former automotive engineer and owner of a 1967 Mercedes 250, said in a statement. He said he plans to use his Roadster as his primary commuter car.
Tuchman took delivery of his Roadster last weekend, a few weeks before the anticipated opening of a Tesla showroom in New York's Chelsea Art District. Greater New York is Tesla's largest market outside of California, and local EV owners enjoy numerous incentives.
Zero-emission vehicles are exempt from New Jersey sales, use and luxury taxes. Single occupants of alternative-fuel vehicles may also use the high-occupancy commuter lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike.
These incentives are on top of a $7,500 US federal tax credit, which fully applies to all Tesla Roadsters.
Tesla will also soon be opening stores in Chicago, London, Seattle, Miami, Washington, Monaco and Munich. Tesla will begin deliveries in Europe this summer.
Valence Technology, an Austin-based manufacturer and supplier of lithium iron magnesium phosphate batteries, has submitted a grant application to the Department of Energy seeking $225 million under the Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative.
The initiative supports the construction of facilities to make advanced battery technology components for electric vehicles. The company's proposed facility would manufacture lithium phosphate cathode material, high-capacity advanced cells and battery packs for electric-drive vehicles and other applications.
Funds totalling $2 billion for grants under this initiative have been appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which aims to stimulate the economy and create new American jobs by specifically utilizing renewable energy technologies that will shift the nation to a low-carbon economy.
Valence's application came one day after Boston-Power Inc., a Massachusetts-based laptop battery manufacturer, announced it had developed a new lightweight, high-performance lithium-ion battery for plug-in hybrids and electric cars and sought funds from the same money pool to help produce the batteries.
Tesla Motors and partner Daimler AG plan to launch two plug-in electric vehicles in the near future. And Tesla on its own will be replacing the current-generation Roadster -- its first car -- with a larger, four-seat sports car in 2013, company chairman, product architect and CEO Elon Musk said in a freewheeling e-mail exchange Monday night with Green Car Advisor.
Tesla and Daimler, working as partners, will come out with not one but two new plug-in electric vehicles in the next few years, starting with the already announced Smart EV roadster (pictured) late this year, followed by another affordable, zero-emissions electric vehicle. That second EV has never before been discussed publicly.
Additionally, Tesla will independently replace the current two-seat Roadster with a larger, four-seat sports car sometime in 2013, Musk said, adding that that vehicle will be available in hardtop and convertible models, and with rear-wheel drive or optional all-wheel drive.
With regard to the Smart EV, Musk disclosed that Tesla and Daimler "have been working on an 'everyman' car for over one and a half years. It is the Smart EV and the first of those vehicles will be on the road by the end of this year."
Final pricing on the battery-electric Smart car "is up to Daimler, but I know that this car will cost a lot less than $30,000 once it achieves mass production. The reason we originally started working with Daimler was because we saw this as the fastest path to putting affordable electric cars on the road," Musk said in the interview by e-mail.
The Indiana-based startup, founded by battery system designer John Waters (Segway, EV-1), said today that it has applied for $35 million in federal grants to "accelerate production" of its truck, called the Bright IDEA (left)
.
The funds also would help Bright develop advanced battery systems for industry clients, the company said.
In announcing the grant applications, Waters said the company plans to build 50,000 trucks annually.
Bright has applied for an $18 million grant from the Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative, the funds to be used to help finance a technical center and a battery manufacturing plant, the company said.
The factory would be designed to produce as many as 75,000 hybrid vehicle battery packs a year.
A second application, for a $17 million grant from the Transportation Electrification Program, would be used to help fund the Energy System Network's "Project Plug-In," designed to demonstrate and evaluate the real-world charging needs of plug-in and all-electric vehicles.
A Massachusetts-based laptop battery manufacturer says it has developed a new lightweight, high-performance lithium-ion battery for plug-in hybrids and electric cars and is asking the federal government for funds to help produce it. Boston-Power Inc.
, a four-year-old private company that supplies batteries for Hewlett-Packard laptops, has applied for a $100 million grant to finance a 455,000-square-foot battery manufacturing plant in a vacant warehouse in Auburn, Massachusetts, about 50 miles southwest of Boston.
The company said that the state government has agreed to prove up to $9 million if the grant from the federal Department of Energy comes through.
Boston-Power executives said in a press conference this morning that the factory would be used both for the company's laptop batteries and for its new EV and plug-in hybrid batteries.
The company, which is operating on $125 million in private investment capital, said the battery factory would not be built if the federal funds, from the advanced cattery and battery cell manufacturing grant program, are not forthcoming.
Boston-Power is one of several battery makers that has proposed a U.S. factory since the government announced its intent to help finance a domestic advanced battery industry.
Like most, it has been manufacturing its lithium-ion batteries in China. The company said it would continue operating the Chinese factory whether or not it can build the Massachusetts plant.
Battery developers and automakers have raised concerns as electric vehicles have become more feasible that the absence of a domestic battery-making industry would leave the U.S. vulnerable to the policies and politics of foreign suppliers.
As a result, Congress endowed the battery manufacturing grant program as part of the $787 billion economic recovery bill, and various state governments including Michigan and Kentucky have added their own battery manufacturing grant and loan programs in hopes of attracting new industry.
Boston-Power said it is in discussions with several automakers but would not identify any, nor has the company disclosed specifics of its automotive battery technology.
Volvo today presented a new concept car that combines a plug-in charged lithium battery with a diesel engine, technology the Swedish automaker aims to have on the market in 2012.
"This is a significant leap compared to our earlier plans of offering a regular full-hybrid on the market by 2012," Volvo CEO Stephen Odell said at a press conference in Stockholm.
The plug-in hybrid car, developed in partnership with Nordic power utility Vattenfall, can run on battery power for up to 50 kilometers (31 miles), Odell said.
He said emissions would be below 50 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer (about half the emissions of the best hybrids currently on the market), and he called for politicians to offer consumers incentives to make the new technology affordable.
"We do of course expect that the purchasing price will be higher," he said. "In this area we are keen to see further subsidies and incentives from the political arena to promote green choice among customers."
In a press release issued today, Volvo said the car could be fueled with electricity from a 220-volt wall socket.
365 Energy Group announced today that Amsterdam has become the first European city to install Coulomb ChargePoint networked charging stations for battery-powered electric vehicles.
The 45 stations deployed in the capital and largest city of the Netherlands are part of a two-year public demonstration project and the first of 200 charging stations planned for the city by 2012.
Energy company Nuon will provide renewable energy for the charging stations and Coulomb's international partner 365 Energy Group, a venture with Germany's Estag Capital AG, will manage the ChargePoint Network for subscribers.
Coulomb, which is headquartered in Campbell, California, makes pole-and wall-mounted recharging systems, which were designed for installation in public spaces where drivers of plug-in battery-electric vehicles would have easy access.
Once a unit is operational, Coulomb's customers see its location on their GPS-enabled devices and navigational systems. Purchase of electricity is made by way of a charge card (pun intended).
There's nothing like $2.4 billion in federal grants to attract lots of applicants.
In one of the U.S. government's biggest efforts at shaping industrial policy, the Energy Department has been soliciting applications since mid-March for $2.4 billion in funding aimed at turning America into a battery-manufacturing powerhouse.
At the deadline last week, the department had received 165 applications. Companies vying for the money include General Motors Corp., Dow Chemical Co. and Johnson Controls Inc. Michigan, Kentucky and Massachusetts are among the states weighing in with applications.
When the winners are decided - as soon as the end of July - the Energy Department may anoint Livonia, Mich., or Indianapolis or Glendale, Kentucky, as the future U.S. hub of car batteries.
Given the availability of these funds, and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's May 7 proposal that more than $100 million be cut from his department's hydrogen program in the 2010 budget the administration is submitting to Congress, you might think the National Hydrogen Association would wonder if funds needed for fuel-cell development are being diverted to electric vehicles.
"That's not the case," Debbi Smith, the trade group's executive vice president told us today. "The recent actions by Secretary Chu are actions that he had to make in a tough fiscal climate, but it is not the opinion of the automakers at all and it's not the opinion of our members here at the National Hydrogen Association or of the U.S. Fuel Cell Council."
Smith noted that there have been statements by various automotive executives that it is "not as though one technology is ready more than the other right now. Batteries are also not ready for prime time."
It's going to take biofuels, batteries and fuel cells - "all three of them, if we're serious about reducing our nation's dependence on oil and if we're serious about reducing greenhouse gases," she said. "It's going to take just about everything we can throw at these huge problems."
Volkswagen AG will consider forming a partnership with China's BYD Auto in the area of hybrids and zero-emissions all-electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries, Europe's largest carmaker said on Monday.
The announcement comes exactly one month after we reported that BYD and VW confirmed that they will cooperate on the development of lithium iron phosphate batteries.
Volkswagen is the first major industrial partner for BYD, a battery specialist and the fledgling maker of the F6DM plug-in hybrid. Last September, BYD sold a 10 percent stake to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway for $230 million.
"Particularly for the Chinese market, potential partners such as BYD could support us in quickly expanding our activities," Ulrich Hackenberg, head of research and development at the VW brand, said in a statement.
In addition to Volkswagen, BYD is also talking to Ford Motor Co. and another European automaker about similar arrangements, The Wall Street Journal reported today (subscription required), citing people familiar with the VW-BYD negotiations.
The status of those negotiations, however, was not immediately clear. "We are always in discussions with many suppliers as a standard course of our business, but we have nothing to share at this time," Whitney Small, a Ford spokeswoman in Bangkok, told the Journal.
If you tuned into Late Show With David Letterman
last night you saw the 62-year-old talk show host do a good impersonation of Sam Donaldson, the longtime reporter for ABC News famous for asking hard-hitting questions.
Letterman's subject: None other than Bob Lutz, the 77-year-old vice chairman of General Motors Corp. The interview came three weeks after Letterman had Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the show and the two shared considerable laughter at GM's expense.
In perfect Donaldson style, Letterman didn't pull many punches, asking "Maximum" Bob pointed questions such as why GM seems incapable of building a battery-electric car like Tesla's Roadster and why don't U.S. automakers do the patriotic thing and make more fuel-efficient vehicles so we're less dependent on foreign oil. Letterman all but said American troops are dying in Iraq over oil.
Lutz responded with his usual song-and-dance, variously blaming the U.S. government for stupid regulations, and successive administrations for making bad policy -- such as keeping the cost of gasoline in America low and yet expecting Detroit to produce fuel-efficient vehicles when little demand exists for them.
But perhaps sensing that Letterman wasn't about to let him off the ropes, Lutz said something he's not wont to say unless pushed:
"Let's face it. During the '70s, '80s and up through the early '90s, the U.S. car companies built some really bad cars. And a lot of people still have that memory from their family -- 'My dad said don't ever buy an American car because they're all crap.' -- and of course that was true at one point but it's no longer true."
Jay Leno isn't easily impressed, but in a recent episode of "Jay Leno's Garage" the comedian, talk-show host and car aficionado had nothing but great things to say about the Aptera 2e battery-electric vehicle.
In an on-camera interview with Aptera President and CEO Greg Wilbur, Leno said the "problem with most electrics is that they look dorky. You know, they just have that kinda Volkswagen that's been gutted and put an electric motor in.
"This is a car that from the ground up was designed to be an electric car and was designed to be as aerodynamic as a car can possibly be. This is an exciting-looking vehicle. It looks like it's going 200 miles an hour just sitting still."
Leno invites Wilbur to discuss the vehicle's aerodynamics and light weight (a mere 1,700 pounds) and, as he often does when sizing up a modern battery-electric vehicle, he compares it to his century-old Baker Electric. Wilbur does a nice job of presenting the 2e's talking points.
One of the first things Leno notes is that the front-wheel-drive Aptera has only three wheels and is viewed by Uncle Sam as a motorcycle, yet the government doesn't require its driver to wear a helmet (or obtain a motorcycle license).
"What you're actually driving here is a helmet. You're actually sitting in a helmet. The whole thing is a helmet, in other words," Leno remarks, displaying some of the uncommon perspective that has served him well as a comedian.
We've written extensively on the Aptera 2e, but the 10-minute video is worth watching as much for the chuckles as anything else.
South Korea's leading technology university is researching ways to embed power strips in roads that could recharge electric cars as they pass overhead, potentially eliminating the need for drivers to stop and recharge their batteries.
The plan would use a non-contact power transfer technology known as inductive charging, similar to what is used in electric toothbrushes.
Power strips about 8 inches to 35 inches wide and up to several hundred meters long would be built on top of roads. Vehicles driving over the strips would be able to suck up power without ever making direct contact with the devices.
"If we place these strips on about 10 percent of roadways in a city, we could power electric vehicles," said Cho Dong-ho, a manager at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
A prototype of the technology has been built at the university in Daejeon for electric-powered golf carts. A pilot program later this year will apply the technology to bus systems in Seoul.
The technology is already employed in some electric toothbrushes that do not need to be directly plugged in to recharge, but rather use a magnetic connection to receive energy while resting in a cradle.
The strips being tested by the university would be placed in bus lanes and roads running up to intersections to maximize the amount of time vehicles can recharge.
Toyota Motor Corp., which recently posted its first financial loss in decades, said U.S. consumer demand for plug-in hybrids may be limited by the vehicles' price, recharge time and battery durability - nevermind their popularity with President Obama.
Toyota estimates sales of hybrids that can be recharged at household outlets may be 50,000 vehicles a year at most and could be as few as 3,500, Bill Reinert, the automaker's U.S. national manager for advanced technology, told a National Academy of Sciences panel in Washington, D.C., Monday.
Sales of Toyota's Prius - the best-selling gasoline-electric hybrid on the road, and a vehicle Reinert helped design - were almost 159,000 last year.
A market for the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles "will emerge, but their success depends on advantages over existing hybrids," Reinert said. "There is a great deal of variation on how current PHEVs perform in real-world conditions."
Interest in plug-ins surged after gasoline prices reached record highs last year and Obama campaigned on a goal of getting 1 million such vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. The Energy Department has said it plans to begin awarding a portion of $25 billion in low-cost federal loans to companies that build plug-ins and other fuel-efficient vehicles at U.S. factories.
The German Auto Giant Acquires a 10 Percent Equity Stake in the California EV Maker
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
Daimler AG, parent company of Mercedes-Benz, inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile, and Tesla Motors, the California newbie that remains the only automaker currently producing highway-capable battery-electric cars, announced today that they will partner to manufacture electric vehicles.
As part of the agreement, Daimler has acquired a 10 percent equity stake in the San Carlos, California-based EV maker.
The deal provides Daimler with advanced lithium batteries, a seat on Tesla's board of directors and the know-how needed to bring an electric car to market "at the highest possible speed," Thomas Weber, a member of the board of Daimler AG, said at a news conference at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart today.
In exchange, Tesla will receive "a double-digit million sum," Weber said, and the parts and engineering expertise it needs to mass produce its second plug-in battery-electric vehicle, the Model S sedan. Tesla's $109,000 Roadster is the only highway-capable production plug-in battery-electric vehicle on the market.
"Tesla brings expertise in the battery-electric front," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the news conference, which was carried live via Webcast. "Daimler brings expertise in everything else. This will be a very productive relationship where both Tesla and Daimler benefit."
The announcement comes as the Obama administration is due to propose stricter fuel-economy standards in a bid to reduce automotive greenhouse-gas emissions.
Darryl Siry (left
), Tesla Motors' former chief marketing officer, blogs that he sees a troubling pattern emerging in how the most critical aspect of electric vehicles - range - is discussed by companies and the media alike.
"These are problems that could have a significant negative effect on the way the public responds to electric vehicles if manufacturers don't change the way they communicate expectations about range," wrote Siry, who is now a senior analyst for clean technology at Peppercom, a strategic communications firm.
The basic problem is that when an EV is described, it usually has a single "range" number associated with it, Siry wrote.
For example, the Tesla Roadster has a range of 244 miles. When people talk about the range of a car that is planned in the future, they also offer a single number. For instance, the media has reported that several car companies plan to come to market with EVs that have "a 100-mile range."
"Every time a single range figure is given, it should have about three asterisks next to it," he wrote.
One week has nearly passed since Energy Secretary Stephen Chu proposed slashing more than $100 million from Uncle Sam's hydrogen research and development program, and all of us should still be mystified and bothered by his proposal.
In other words, Chu's litmus test for funding a technology that might avoid or at least delay the catastrophic effects of global warming is that the technology must be developed within, say, the lifetime of an old house cat.
If Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius applied the same rationale to drug research, she'd propose slashing federal funding for cancer, AIDS and influenza research, because cures for them are probably 20-plus years out. But tossing in the towel on those problems would be nutty, wouldn't it.
And just think where we'd be today if the Wright brothers, Ladislo Biro, Stephen Poplawski, Willis Carrier, Percy Spencer, and the banjo-playing, 3M engineer Richard Drew decided not to invent anything because it'll take too much time. We might never know airplanes, ball-point pens, kitchen blenders, air-conditioning, microwave ovens and, God forbid, Scotch tape.
Other things that took years to invent include: the telephone, the light bulb, the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the personal computer, television, the camera and, lest we forget, the automobile.
Shucks, a whole lot of things that shape the lives we lead today took a long time to develop.
Japanese electronics giant Sanyo Electric Co. says it sees batteries -- for hybrids and possibly electric vehicles -- as a key to future profits and despite a $978.5 million loss for its just-completed 2008 fiscal year will be spending billions (of yen) on new battery plants and plant expansions this year and next.
In a conference with analysts this week, the company said that it has revised its long-term plan to include spending 30 billion yen ($314 million) by early 2012 to increase production of lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries for hybrids.
Sanyo said it will open new lithium-ion battery factories this year and next at its complexes in Japan's Hyogo and Tokushima prefectures and is aiming at producing the advanced batteries for as many as 120,000 new vehicles a year.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are made with a number of different chemistries, are lighter and store more energy than the nickel-metal hydride batteries used in hybrids today. They are considered a must for next-generation plug-in hybrids and for all-electric EVs as they begin coming on line.
In addition to the lithium-ion battery factories, Sanyo said it also will invest in an expansion of its Sumoto nickel-metal hydride battery plant in Hyogo, to more that double annual production by the end of this year to 30 million battery cells -- enough for 150,000 conventional hybrids.
Sanyo supplies both Ford Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. with nickel-metal hydride batteries for their present hybrid models and previously announced a joint venture with Volkswagen to produce advanced lithium-ion batteries for VW and Audi hybrids.
The electronics company said last year that it envisions a huge increase in hybrid production by 2015 -- including rechargeable, or plug-in, models -- and wants to capture a big chunk of the market for its batteries.
To that end, Sanyo has budgeted about 80 billion yen ($837 million at today's exchange rate) on hybrid battery production improvements through 2015.
Sanyo sees hybrid production increasing from around 600,000 last year to 4.5 million by 2015 and plans to be able to produce enough batteries to supply 40 percent of the market.
Meantime, the U.S. is just beginning to promote domestic battery manufacturing.
Without a concerted national battery development effort, and a federal energy policy that points the way, we can look for Japan, and China, to become the new Saudi Arabias as global oil production flattens and begins shrinking and electricity -- which needs batteries for storage -- becomes an increasingly important fuel for our personal vehicles.
Here is a Tesla Motors sales update for those of you who have been keeping score at home.
The upscale electric vehicle manufacturer reports that it has booked more than 1,000 advance order for its Model S sedan that has an anticipated base price of $57,400 (before a $7,500 federal tax credit but not including taxes and fees).
Each potential customer is paying a $5,000 refundable reservation fee.
That adds up to $5 million in deposits that the San Carlos, California-based company can use to help fund operations and secure additional funding from investors.
Here's how Tesla explains why a deep-pocketed customer should be plunking down $5,000 for one of its plug-in electric vehicles: "If you account for the much lower cost of electricity vs. gasoline at a likely future cost of more than $5 per gallon, the Model S is equivalent to a gasoline car with a sticker price of about $30,000, such as a Ford Taurus, Honda Accord or even a Toyota Avalon or BMW 3 Series."
Tesla, which has yet to say where the sedans would be produced, also is waiting to hear whether it will receive a $350-million federal advanced technology vehicle development loan that is available to automakers upgrading or retrofitting existing manufacturing facilities rather than building new ones.
Tesla plans to begin production of the "S" late in 2011. The vehicle can be ordered with one of three battery packs that will travel between 160 and 300 miles between charges.
And, as we reported earlier, those with a bit more cash to spare can put down $40,000 deposits on specially priced, specially equipped "Mosel S Signature Edition" cars.
General Electric is building a $100-million plant in upstate New York to manufacture sodium-chemistry batteries that initially will be used to power locomotives, tugboats, mining trucks and other heavy service vehicles. The plant will be located in the Albany area and will generate about 350 manufacturing jobs, according to GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt.
Information Week reports that "the most technologically interesting aspect of Tuesday's announcement may be the potential it holds for automotive batteries. If the power of lithium-ion batteries and the storage capability of sodium batteries were to be combined, they might yield a superior battery for hybrid cars."
And, as we've reported, General Electric has invested $70 million in A123 Systems, which is developing lithium-ion batteries. Mark Little, GE's global research director, has joined the board of directors at Massachusetts-based A123, which will provide battery packs for Chrysler LLC's proposed fleet of extended range hybrids and all-electric vehicles.
Now the Silicon Valley Start-Up Has To Do It a Couple Hundred Thousand Times More
Model of Better Place battery exchange station shows cars on top level waiting for service while new battery (blue) is being installed in bottom car. Underground storage facility (center) is where charged batteries are kept and depleted batteries are recharged after being removed from cars.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
YOKOHAMA, Japan - Better Place strutted its stuff here Wednesday and it was a production well worth watching.
The would-be leader of the nascent electric-vehicle charging industry trotted out its battery switching technology at a demonstration project in downtown Yokohama and showed that, with a national network of battery exchange stations and vehicles designed to properly interface, EV ownership wouldn't have to be subjected to any significant limitations.
The battery exchange station - the first in the world to be shown to the public - ought to come with a knife and fork so those who've said that battery-electric vehicles' usefulness always will be constrained by lengthy recharging times can eat their words.
An End to Range Anxiety
In Better Place's better world, a depleted battery could be swapped for a freshly charged one in less time than it takes to pump 10 gallons of gasoline into the family sedan.
At the demonstration station, which will be open for the next six weeks in this bustling port city just south of Tokyo, a battery exchange was deliberately slowed down so those in the audience could follow it step-by-step. Even so, the exchange took just under 90 seconds.
If this kind of station were readily available, a cross-country trip in a battery-electric car wouldn't have to be interrupted every 200 miles or so to complete 4- to 6-hour battery charging sessions.
Better Place's founder and chief executive, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi, boasted that the engineering mule at the company's R&D center in Israel can do the job in as little as 40 seconds. That would get most of us into the station and back out with a fresh load of electrons in about a tenth of the time it takes to gas up a car with an internal combustion engine.
Though he's best known for his screen exploits
, Tom Hanks also counts himself as a green car guy.
He still owns a Toyota RAV4 electric vehicle (like the one shown here) that has crossed 50,000 miles on the odometer. We know this courtesy of a letter that Hanks recently wrote to The New Yorker.
Hanks explains that he still has the car, which is driven daily (albeit by one of his employees) and that the vehicle still has its original battery.
Hanks wrote the letter to the editor to clear up a mistake made when Peter J. Boyer recently wrote about the country's financially troubled automobile industry. In his The New Yorker article (registration required), Boyer incorrectly stated that Hanks once owned a General Motors Corp. EV1.
Hanks said that there were no EV1s to be had in 2003 when he started looking for an electric car.
"Instead, I found what was purported to be the very last electric car available for sale in the state of California -- a Toyota EV," Hanks wrote. "It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine."
There was a bit of green news along with the river of red ink that Nissan Motor Co. reported earlier today in Tokyo.
---------- The Denki Cube, a concept Nissan EV. ----------
Nissan reported a $2.85 billion net loss for its fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31. The Japanese automobile company reported a full-year loss of $2.4 billion, down from a $4.9 billion profit for fiscal 2007.
Last week, Toyota Motor Co. reported a $4.5 billion loss, while Honda Motor Co. Ltd. posted a $1.4 billion profit.
"The global economic recession and financial crisis continue, but we are beginning to see some signs of improved access to credit, the impact of government stimulus packages and a gradual return in consumer confidence," Nissan President and CEO Carlos Ghosn said in a statement. "We remain cautious about the economic environment and fully focused on our company's recovery efforts."
Now for the green.
Nissan said that the tough times in the automobile world won't slow its plan to start building electric vehicles at its Oppama plant outside of Tokyo in the fall of 2010. The plant's initial production capacity will be 50,000 units, but that volume will "continuously increase for the start of EV mass-marketing in 2012," according to Nissan.
ExxonMobil Chemical
is now manufacturing a commercial version of lithium-ion battery separator films that are designed to meet the safety, reliability and power performance requirements for use in hybrid electric vehicles and plug-in electric vehicles. The films were developed by ExxonMobil's Japanese-based Tonen Chemical Corp. affiliate.
The films are manufactured using a proprietary process that creates high heat resistant polymers that combine enhanced permeability, higher melt-down temperatures that, the company said, "ensure consistetent separator quality" for use in PHEV and hybrid vehicles.
"Separator quality and safety and supply reliability are critical considerations for battery and automotive manufacturers to support the rapidly developing HEV/EV market," said Jim Harris, senior vice president of ExxonMobil Chemical. "Producing these next-generation separators on our commercial lines positions us well to meet the growing market needs."
YOKOHAMA, Japan - We're in Japan for a few days this week to take a look at the city's electric vehicle test project, more specifically to witness the first demonstration of the battery exchange technology that Better Place founder Shai Agassi has been talking about for more than a year now.
Better Place, the Silicon Valley-based company that wants to lead the way into vehicle electrification by providing a global network of battery charging and exchange systems (working country by country, not all at once) is part of a consortium working with officials in Yokohama to establish a real-world center for assessing EV operation.
Mitsubishi Motors and Subaru are providing the cars, Tokyo Electric Power is supplying the juice, and Better Place is providing the means for getting it into the cars.
A temporary exhibit aimed at educating Japan's decision-makers, auto industry leaders and common citizens about electric cars, car charging and other issues is being inaugurated later today and a Better Place battery station will be part of it.
The company's buisness plan envisions some EV owners using on-street charging stations to "top up" the vehicles' batteries for a little extra range during the day when making short trips but exchanging entire depleted battery packs for fresh new ones in automated "battery swap" centers - think of them as full-service gas stations for EVs - when trips are longer and a single charged pack won't do.
Better Place intends to sell prepaid charging and battery swap plans, much the way cell phone companies sell minutes of air time in a v
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
