Electric cars - the way to go

Cars are to me a very visible reminder of our incredible consumption of fossil fuels in the form of oil.  Of course, oil gets refined into different grades of which petroleum and diesel are just two.

When one stands over a motorway or observes traffic in a city, one can hardly fail to be struck by the sheer volume of cars and lorries and the amount of fuel they are burning their way through.  When they're stuck going nowhere because of congestion the fuel isn't even being used to move them - it's just heating the atmosphere.  The oil industry has gotten very efficient at distributing fuel - and cars have gotten good at going reasonably long distances between refills.  There are however an awful lot of cars out there.

There have been previous experiments in electric cars.  GM's impact car of 1990 was a very promising looking prototype.  There's a GM video on this site showing  the early vehicle - and it's very impressive.  Twenty years on and there are almost no electric vehicles on the road.  What happened?  There's a film, made in 2006, called "Who Killed the Electric Car?".  You can watch a trailer here.  Being a little wary of any films that have a political axe to grind in terms of their balance (particularly eco films), it still seems incredible that GM killed off their electric vehicles in 1999.  As a result I have little sympathy for the problems they now find themselves in as a result of the credit crunch.  (Now I'm getting political :-)).

Sinclair's C5 was rather less successful - a good idea but not well enough executed.  Sinclair did however show vision, as he had done before with watches, calculators and personal computers.

It seems that the time is right for a resurgence in electric vehicles.  Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister recently announced just before the April 2009 budget that the UK would move to electric vehicles - although I haven't seen much follow up on this yet.

There are plenty of well documented challenges with moving to electric vehicles.  Battery technology being one, support infrastructure for recharging being another.  If you are unfortunate enough to run out of fuel in a combustion engined car then it is usually possible to carry a gallon or two of fuel from a fuel station to the stranded vehicle.  If you run out of electric power then your options are rather more limited - perhaps a solar cell on the roof would eventually give you enough charge to move again - that could require many hours of daylight - so don't run out in the dark!

Just plugging in to recharge may be ok for people who use their car for commuting relatively short distances or nipping to the shops - but it isn't likely to work for people travelling longer distances or who live in remote rural areas.

I saw a video somewhere (if I can find it again I'll post a link) showing a conceptual battery replacement  station where the car drives in and the battery is replaced automatically in about 2 or 3 minutes.  No longer than it takes to fill a car at a pump today.  How many such stations would be needed across the UK?  How far apart could they be?  How do you ensure that there are enough replacement batteries available at any one station?  How do you ensure enough standardisation of batteries to ensure compatibility?  How do you maintain the quality of the batteries?  How long would they take to recharge?  How would you pay?  Who would own the stations?  What do you do with the batteries at the end of their life?  There are a lot of practical questions to be answered here.  Whatever the answers there needs to be a practical business model.

It has been pointed out that electric vehicles are charged with electricity from the grid which is generated from fossil fuels.  This is of course true (although nuclear and renewables will contribute more in the future), but the power stations are far more efficient at burning those fossil fuels than vehicles - perhaps 75% more efficient.

Today the electric cars available for purchase are either very expensive (e.g. the Tesla) and/or of very limited range - suitable for urban use perhaps, but little else.  That's not to say they shouldn't be used - they may well suit a very large percentage of the populations' primary vehicle use pattern - but they are not a complete solution.

There are intermediate vehicles becoming available in the form of hybrids such as the Toyota Prius - but they are pretty expensive and effectively only increase the miles per gallon of fuel rather than offering a choice of electric or fuel power.  (According to the Toyota website, they can cover a mile at 31 mph on electric power only - not even enough for the school run.)

All that said, it seems to me that electric vehicles offer great promise, even if initially only in urban environments where the infrastructure to support them can be more easily deployed.

We just need to make sure that nobody kills the electric car again!