Today, you are probably correct, the patent has expired. But in 2003, it was a major issue…Also, today, the point is moot…NiMH batteries have been replaced with Lithium batteries. The latest version, Lithium Polyester, is both more powerful and weighs only half as much as the obsolete NiMH it has replaced…
The limiting factor now is obtaining enough Lithium to mass-produce car batteries using this technology…There is a massive deposit in Chile but the Chilean government is not interested in exporting Lithium. They want the battery plants to be built THERE, employ Chilean labor and export the finished batteries…
You are right for many, but like my $30K SUV, if it could tow 5000 lbs go off road and seat 7, I’d buy it. I don’t think the average guy is ready to put down $34K for a second or third car in many locations.
If it sold for a competitive price to a Corolla/Focus/Civic, you’d have to beat the customers away with a stick. Right now, the profit isn’t there without lots of govt (our tax dollars) help. It’s a shame as the technology isn’t that great. It’s just an electric car with a range extender. (Volt)
I guess I am looking at a near guarantee after 10 years you will have a $3,000 battery replacement cost. That factor is not included in the cost of ownership.
To whose calculations of “cost of ownership” are you referring?
When I looked at the “cost to own” a Camry hybrid on edmunds.com, it shows $0.44/mile. I looked because we have a company car that is a Camry hybrid. Ironically, the reimbursement for using your own car is $0.445/mile.
Do you really think Edmunds’ estimate doesn’t include the cost of a replacement battery back?
Much of the overseas sales are driven by large government subsidies, not forward thinking.
Personally, I think government subsidies of renewable energy are a reflection of forward thinking. It’s certainly more forward thinking than oil subsidies.
For these cars to sell in large numbers, gasoline and diesel fuel prices need to move north of $5.00/ gallon. In Europe, fuel is selling for $7.50 a gallon NOW…That’s $75.00 to fill a 10 gallon econocar gas tank…
I suspect the automotive industry sees those kind of fuel prices coming and is building these cars to get the technology and production cost sorted out with low production cars first…
Battery development, stagnant for over 100 years, has literally exploded over the past 15 years… In the latest issue of The Economist, a company is developing a process where a metallic ion battery cell can be PRINTED on a high-speed press, cranking out thousands of high-capacity, low weight cells per hour…These new batteries will have a 10,000 cycle life which in an EV translates into “life of car”…
The oil companies have already sold half of the oil that can be easily recovered, much of it for $2-$6 dollars a barrel…They have great hopes of selling the remaining oil for $100-$200 a barrel. A viable electric car would be a BIG disappointment to them…
We’re back to simple economics. Spain is now finding the subsidies unsustainable, and folks are now stuck with major investments that will cost them millions. You can’t cheat economics, either it makes economic sense or it doesn’t. Should governments support basic research? Yes. Should government provide long-term props to otherwise uneconomic projects? No, particularly when there are better places to put that money.
Basically it was the consumer who killed the electric car. CARB FORCED the big three to build and sell electric vehicles,(yes ford and Chrysler had electric cars, well a truck and van, for sale in cal.)
The EV1 was facing some safety issues mainly do to a very short R&D basically the car was becoming unsafe to drive, GM was also looking at supplying parts for a small run car for the next twenty years. So given the liability issues and low demand GM took the safe course and kill the car.
Was it the smart move, at the time yes, once the restriction of CARB was lifted it didn’t make sense to keep producing a car that they losing money on. The EV1 cost more than a Caddie to produce.
But in a nut shell the demand wasn’t there for even a small run of cars, by small I’m talking less then 5,000 per year. And many a car has been killed because the demand just wasn’t there.
I think you did a good job describing what happened. It’s not like GM had some super car on their hands. We’re now seeing practical, if expensive EVs with seats for 4 people and adequate (not great) range. The EV-1 pales in comparison.
Should governments support basic research? Yes. Should government provide long-term props to otherwise uneconomic projects? No, particularly when there are better places to put that money.
I agree. Subsidies should only be for research and development, and possibly initial infrastructure, not to sustain a business.
There are plenty of people who want to be “chic” or green. They have money.3/4ths of the people who own SUV’s or trucks haul one kid or nothing with them.
Porsche has up with a car that stores energy in a flywheel.Chrysler is using compressed air technology. This was first used around 1905, but technology has improved so much that it is now feasible.Both do not use batteries.
I even designed a compressed air system. There is alot more going on in vehicle changes than most people realize.
In its search for villains, the documentary misses some key points:
Manufacturers quickly withdrew their vehicles because they were a public relations disaster. Drivers who expected greater range were stalling on freeways. This angered both the vehicle owner and other folks stuck in traffic. And the problem could not be fixed by a highway patrol officer with a quart of gas.
Electric vehicles were justified by the need to reduce smog in cities. Modern emissions controls have solved that problem, so there is no environmental justification for going electric.
There is nothing ‘green’ about an all-electric vehicle. Considering all of the pollution from coal-fired power plants, our main source of electricity, all-electric vehicles produce about the same carbon emissions as (and far more mercury and heavy metals pollution than) the average gasoline-powered car.
The real benefit of electric vehicles comes from their ability to capture the energy wasted when a driver uses the brakes (regenerative braking). If you add a battery and regenerative braking system to any vehicle you’ll almost double the urban fuel efficiency.
Electric vehicles lose all claim to being ‘green’ the instant they are plugged into the nation’s grid.
I’ve spent the past year looking into the environmental implications of all-electric cars and industrial wind energy. Without any doubt, both result in the emissions of more greenhouse gasses than do standard, existing technologies. Does anyone have any idea why environmentalists support either? Or why the Feds are spending so much to subsidize both?
Coal-fired plants must operate all night when the demand is low…The pollution is there whether people are charging their electric cars or not…The electric car being charged at night would not present a NEW demand for many years. It is incorrect to assume the new plants would be coal-fired…Chargers could be connected to time-demand meters to encourage owners to charge off-peak when rates were low…
While zero emissions is a worthwhile goal, reducing dependence on foreign oil is equally important and becoming more important every day…When fuel costs reach the tipping point, the drawbacks of the electric car will seem far less onerous to consumers than they are today…
I don’t believe conspiracy theories as they’re applied to the marketplace. IMHO economics rules. The things we currently need to make EVs commonplace are a better storage technology, affordability of the EVs, and a recharging infrastructure similar to the gasoline infrastructure. There need to be convenient plug-ins everyehere, like there are gas stations everywhere.
Interestingly, I was watching a Nova special on the subject yesterday evening. Jay Leno took the filmmaker on a ride in a restored Baker Electric. According to Jay Leno, and I absolutely believe him, electrics were much more common than gas autos before Ford came out with the Model T. There were charging stations all over New York. Of course, they were cost-prohibitive for the working class.
The model T was, when it was introduced, considered to be a Godsend, especially in the cities. According to Jay, Model T was considered the answer to the health issues caused by the countless tons of horse manure in the urban streets. Diseases related to the horses were commonplace. According to him, the NY Sanitation people even used to pick up hundreds of rotting horse corpses. When a horse died the owner would just curt the reins and leave the corpse in the street.
Around 1900 they had studies (similar to recent ‘peak oil’ studies) talking about the coming disaster: horse manure! They did some simple extrapolations, and showed that, given the rapid increase in the amount of horse-drawn traffic, major cities would soon not be able to keep up with the manure generation, becoming buried in the stuff.
That study also concluded that the amount of pasture land required for all those horses would use up most of the arable farmland!!
Linear forcasting gives you all sorts of crazy results. When the so-called tipping point comes near, technology usually arrives with a solution the avoid the impending “disaster”.
When Ralph Nader started to study car safety in the late 50s, the very rapid inrease in highway and city traffic deaths made an uncomfortable projection as to what the future would hold. As luck would have it, today’s fatalities are about the same as in 1955-1956, and have the potential for dropping further, in spite of a 16-fold increase in vehicle miles driven.
Ralph Nader deserves some of the credit in his endless crusade for safer cars.
Read the fine print
"The result is an estimated total ownership cost for a five-year period."
So no the cost of replacing the battery to the tune of 3k for a 10 year ownership is not included.