[Update 23-Apr-2010: I originally intended to follow this post a week later with another one, but got too busy so it'll have to wait. Also I realized after I posted this that I completely forgot to talk about two other big topics: my covert attendance of a class at Georgia Tech on hybrid electrics, and the general topic of DIY conversions and used EVs. Well, I'll get to it sooner or later. Certainly the market is heating up so there will be lots to talk about.]
[see part 1 from Sept 2008, part 2 from April 2009 and part 3 from Jan 2010]
Here in part 4, I will be gathering together and organizing a grab bag of random information I've collected over the past year or so, since the part 2 entry where I similarly collated a bunch of information (part 3 was just a quick entry about the Nissan Leaf). This is so I can clear the decks for a higher level view that I'll be taking in the next post, very soon, as my research into all this reaches a milestone.
Analogies
All this electric vehicle activity is very reminiscent of the internet buzz in 1992-1994. That was well before nearly anyone reading this had heard of the internet, much less actually used it (I got into it in mid 1993), but some of us were there and could see the tidal wave coming. I think what we're seeing here with the Tesla Roadster is like UIUC/NCSA's Mosaic, and this fall we could be seeing the equivalent of the Netscape browser that would storm the world in early 1994. The mystery is to what extant the GM Volt or Nissan Leaf will catch on; and keep in mind that both will be in limited production for the first year. Will the GM Volt be analogous to Internet Explorer, with bugs and broken standards but backed by an enormous marketing operation and a corporate behemoth prone to dirty tricks? I think the analogy falls apart there, and in fact right now it's looking like GM is playing its cards right, engineering (promoting) a truly groundbreaking car. Certainly by late 2010, with both the Nissan Leaf and GM Volt coming to market, all this is going to start getting a lot more attention in the mainstream media and public mindshare in general.
Another good analogy, if perhaps overreaching, comes from a magazine article:
"The electrification of the automobile has been called the auto industry’s 'moon shot,' an analogy that works because of both the technology involved and the cost to develop it."
They also point out how important final price is to the entire enterprise ... We don't know yet what the price points for the Leaf and Volt are going to be. In both cases, the makers are going to be losing money at first, so it's going to be very much a business decision for them when it comes to pricing -- how much money are they willing to lose in order to get sales and early mindshare? By summer we should know what the numbers are; right now it looks like the Leaf will be in the high 20's and the Volt will be in the low 30's (and that's including the $7500 federal tax credit). Check out the article in Wired: The EV Moon Shot.
As I continue to struggle with pure EV (aka battery EV aka BEV) vs hybrid EV (aka plugin hybrid aka PHEV), I'm struck by this quote from Bob Kruse, GM Director of EVs and Hybrids, talking about the 100-200+ mile range of BEVs versus the 40 mile (or less) electric range of PHEVs:
"Its analogous to a flat screen TV. What is the diagonal? 52 inch. It replaced something with a 25 inch diagonal. So if you spent all this money on a flat screen television could you imagine only using a quarter of it and displaying a 25 inch picture on it? If you buy a 200 mile range electric vehicle and you're only going to drive 40 miles a day that's the equivalent of watching a 25 inch picture on a 52 inch TV."
So most of the time you're wasting energy lugging around the unused dead weight of 160 miles of battery. This is an interesting flip of the argument against plug-in hybrids like the Volt: most of the time you're wasting energy lugging around the unused dead weight of a gas engine. Source
General observations:
Electric motors are inherently far simpler and more reliable than internal combustion engines. Could we be on the verge of dramatically cheaper cars and much higher performance? And the corollary to that: is the Tesla going to look hugely overpriced 5 years from now when EV prices plummet with scale? This is one reason why I'm hesitant to pile $50,000 into one of these cars; it would be fun to get all the attention at first, but after a couple years these cars could be down to $20K -- with no tradeoffs. That $50K purchase, and indeed any $50K car, is going to look pretty silly by then.
An interesting concept that I came across: gasoline engines are so wildly inefficient (i.e. waste heat) that those cars are less sensitive to other inefficiencies such as aggressive driving, high speeds (wind drag), operating all the accessories, etc. Electric motors are far more efficient, so when you size the motor to the car, you actually end up with less margin for all the other things -- you have less of a monstrous energy wasting machine to throw around. So you become more sensitive to things like driving behavior affecting your range.
Also, this means that the impact of all these EVs to the electric grid will be less than I've written about (in Part 1). We wouldn't need to convert all of those imported oil joules to electric generation and transmission -- only 20-30 percent.
For one simple illustration of one way that electric motors are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines, check out these pictures of the engine bays of cars that have undergone EV conversions. That little motor does the same work as the gigantic internal combustion engine that used to occupy that engine bay.
An interesting article in the New York Times: Toyota: Plug-in Hybrids Will Have Limited Appeal Keep in mind that Toyota doesn't have any plug-in models on the market, and won't in volume anytime soon, so this is really them just spinning the story in their favor. Some argue that Toyota is dismissing PHEVs because its next Prius will have little to no plug-in capability.
NY Times article on the rare earths situation. The OPEC of the future could be a OREEC -- Organization of Rare Earths Exporting Countries. And by the way, I think this is more of a real concern than any lithium shortages might be.
Standards The biggest problem is, there are half a dozen different charge connector standards, such as the inductive paddles as used in the late/lamented GM EV1, or the conductive connector used by Tesla.
Fortunately, all the major (current and future) makers of plug-in EVs last year agreed on a new connector standard, called SAE J1772. Wikipedia has the overview, and Evan Tuer has a technical drawing of the connector and some context including the competing European standard.
Here's a long feature article in Inc magazine about how the electric car will revolutionize our domestic manufacturing economy, transform our electrical grid, and even how the humdrum SAE J1772 plug standard will itself jumpstart new businesses. This piece really sings, of "technologies so transformative that it seems a privilege to be alive just to witness their diffusion." Read it!
SAE J1711 is a proposed standard for determining the miles-per-gallon of an electric vehicle. Google / SAE / DoE
The Inc magazine article also mentions the SAE J2847 communications standard, which not only enables smart charge scheduling, but in the future could enable reverse power flow from the car to the grid. This is heady stuff and illustrates why I'm so excited about it all. I'm telling you, this is like the internet in 1993 ...
Tesla news and owner experiences
A nice, short interview with Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the opening of their London dealership.
Great overview article in the New Yorker (PDF), very readable for the average non-technical person.
Here's a nice little piece by a new owner about life with his new Tesla Roadster.
Which indirectly led me to this EV drag racer called "White Zombie", 0-60 in 2.9 seconds and the quarter mile in well under than 12 seconds.
Further to that, here's a great video piece from Oregon about the car and how it's flattening the opposition at the drag strip.
Fantastic and technically detailed interview with the CEO of eTec, a charging-infrastructure company. He details their plans on the trial/study that they are doing in 5 cities with Nissan on the new LEAF EV car. GREAT info also about the challenges in general of designing a charging infrastructure.
Podcasts / news sources / resources
Plug In America
is an organization that has been advocating for electric vehicles for a
long time. these people are overjoyed to finally be seeing the fruits
of their labors, with the first two mass-produced cars coming to market
and countless more in the next couple years. Well, not countless, they
are counting! They maintain an excellent Plug-In Vehicle Tracker
that lists everything they know of, from concept cars to models on the
road now. I thought they also maintained a listing of federal and state
tax credits, but I can't find it now. When I do I'll edit this post and
put it here.
Chelsea Sexton is an EV fan based in Southern California (aka EV heaven) who is quite active in the EV community and seemingly appears everywhere. She's got a blog (as "evchels") but doesn't really post to it that often; instead she posts frequently on Twitter and appears on other podcasts and the like, where she definitely raises the quality of the discourse. So I keep an eye on what she says because it's usually insightful and backed up by data. When I have time to immerse myself in this some more, there's the EVcast podcast, somewhat amateurish and frequently overly long.
Public charging stations for electric vehicles are starting to
become more widespread, especially in California. EV Charger Maps maintains a crowd-sourced database of public charging locations.
It shows how far ahead California is from the rest of us, especially us
yahoos in the Deep South. They just launched an iPhone app, and
hopefully Android support is not too far behind. This kind of
infrastructure is going to absolutely explode over the next 12 months,
and over the long term will make range anxiety a non-issue.
An on that note, just last week Clipper Creek announced they are now offering for sale their first charging station that will include the new standard SAE J1772 connector (more on that below). Typically this kind of charging station will be used in public locations, like shopping mall parking lots / decks.
Atlanta / Georgia:
The EV Club of the South -- a small group of Atlanta EV guys that meet monthly at a local bar to chew the fat and occasionally have an actually presentation, but mostly to sit around and nerd it up with like minded folks. These guys have suffered for many years with no real progress, and now with the coming tidal wave of mass market products, they are positively giddy!
EVAmerica is trying to put together a listing of EV conversion shops nationwide. There's only one shop listed in Georgia and its website doesn't work. I may do a drive-by the next time I'm up there. I suspect that this database is just a list of businesses that distribute EVAmerica's products.
See listings of USED electric vehicles for sale at EV Finder and EV Tradin Post.
As you might have figured out from these last few links, I'm also considering doing a conversion (taking a used car, ripping out the engine, putting in electric motor) or buying a used EV, if I'm not satisfied with what's on the market by the end of this year. More on that in next week's post.
Getting closer!