Electric Avenue
Whatever happened to the battery powered electric car? I was still too struggling a writer to get my dream car, the EV1, my Honda Insight's sexy predecessor. And I still can't get one, because GM's yanked them back from heartbroken leaseholders, and is secretly crushing and shredding them. Andrew Gumbel tells the tale for City Beat, in Not For Sale At Any Price:
We’ve all seen electric vehicle recharging stations in mall parking lots. Most of us will have seen actual electric vehicles over the past few years, too. Some are still kicking around: the city of Santa Monica, for example, owns a handful of electric Toyota RAV4s, as do a select group of private owners. But conventional wisdom would have us believe that the great electric vehicle experiment of the late 1990s failed. It failed, we’ve been told, because the cars could not travel far enough on a single charge to be practical for most drivers. It failed because the cars, in our impatient consumer culture, took too long to recharge. In short, it failed because people just weren’t interested enough.This conventional wisdom, though, is almost entirely wrong. As a new documentary out in limited release next week makes clear, electric vehicles didn’t die of consumer indifference. They didn’t even die – as some of the more arcane arguments would have it – because of concern about California’s electrical grid capacity in the wake of the 2000-2001 blackout crisis. Rather, they were deliberately and meticulously pulled out of circulation and destroyed by the companies who manufactured them. The car makers, along with the oil companies and the gas pump operators and their political allies, first sabotaged and then strangled the electric vehicle, not because it had no future but because it threatened their core livelihood and short-term profit margins.
The story told by Chris Paine’s film, Who Killed the Electric Car?, starts in 1990, when the California Air Resources Board (CARB), worried about L.A.’s out-of-control smog problem, ordained that 10 percent of vehicles on the state’s roads needed to be emission-free by 2003. That meant, in practice, the development of electric vehicles. GM, Ford, Toyota, and others duly complied, because they had no choice, and came out with models which they began leasing to the public in the late 1990s.
At the same time, though, they launched a major lobbying effort to roll back the CARB ruling. By 1996, the requirement was modified so the pace of production of zero-emission vehicles would be linked to market demand. That, in turn, offered the car makers and oil companies a loophole: If they could only demonstrate that consumers weren’t interested in the new vehicles, they might not have to produce them after all.
Corporate interest in electric car production duly dwindled to nothing. Advertising became non-existent. The car companies went back to CARB to say they couldn’t muster public interest in electric vehicles, and CARB duly caved with a watershed ruling in April 2003 that gave the manufacturers a new deadline of 2008 and a much more flexible range of options to explore, from hybrids to fuel-cell vehicles.
That was when the killing of the electric car began in earnest. GM and the other companies started recalling their leases and yanking electric vehicles off the roads. Chris Paine lost his own GM EV1 when he took it in for a routine tire rotation and was told he would never see it again, even though his lease had two months left to run.
...From a 2006 perspective, it’s clear that a huge opportunity was lost. Sure, we have hybrids, which go some way to improving fuel efficiency, and alternative fuel options like biodiesel and ethanol. But these solutions mitigate the problem; they don’t really solve it. We can probably look forward to plug-in hybrids, which would feature a much larger, rechargeable battery, and use the gas-powered engine strictly as a backup on long journeys. But even the Japanese are wary of bringing plug-ins to market any time soon – for reasons that have not been articulated but are probably very similar to the old misgivings about EVs.
In the meantime, Iraq continues to go to hell, oil prices head toward $100 a barrel, gas prices pose a significant economic threat, and hydrogen – if it is feasible at all – remains a distant pipe dream. As Paine told me: “If this car hadn’t been dismantled by the oil companies, the car companies and the federal government, we would be up to about a million electrics on the road right now … . Instead, we are in a crisis situation with no immediate options.”
But, how about truly clean electric power...like, if you had an electric car, could you power it with the sun? Check your chances of doing that here. Or how about the wind? Hmmm...maybe what we have is not really an energy crisis, but a lobbying crisis?
As the world economy depends on oil, the use of electric cars would cause an upheaval. At least, that's what the oil-rich fat-cats would have us believe. My own thought is that families like the Bushes and the Cheneys would actually have to work for a living while someone else gets rich. And the middle east sponsors of terrorism can learn to support their economies some other way, or regress back to the stone age. Boo-freaking-hoo.
Patrick at June 23, 2006 8:10 AM
I've always figured distributed generation will be doomed until someone figures out how to centralize the profits.
I'm just bummed because I work 542 feet from an EV chaging station where, I believe, you can charge your car for free. But I cannot afford the car to take advantage of the free juice. Once they start producing new vehicluar technology there will be a 5-10 year wait before the technology trickles down to my price point.
Back in college I had the opportunity to drive an EV1 lent out by CARB. Awesome car, definately did not leave you wanting for more. But I also recall they had an executive price tag.
I guess that's just another way they killed the electric car, introduce it at a price point way beyond what the expected target audience can borrow.
smurfy at June 23, 2006 11:57 AM
Can someone give us a physics rundown here? What exactly do we get for moving the energy generation from internal combustion to distant electrical plants? Batteries are inefficient, and transmisison has costs too, no?
So when buying an electric, we're moving the burden to oil, coal or nuclear plants. Right? Wrong?
Crid at June 23, 2006 12:51 PM
Here's a primer:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/factsheets/evsummary.pdf
smurfy at June 23, 2006 4:24 PM
Of course the EV1 was expensive. It wasn't a converted car of a different type, the car had to be designed from scratch and had fewer overlapping parts than traditional gas burners (so you lose the economies to scale). Also, the EV1 was designed to comply with the crash-safety and equipment regulations in effect at the start of the project in the early 1990's. By the time the cars came to market in 1996, the designs no longer conformed to NHTSA regulations, as GM felt the cost of re-engineering late in the development cycle could not be defrayed by a limited run of experimental vehicles, so they got a temporary exemption. The EV1 was never compliant with safety regulations for 1997-1999 model cars, it was never legal for sale which is why production levels were strictly limited and why the cars could not be sold second-hand at termination.
It's not a huge conspiracy. Honda and Toyota have shown time and time again that they are willing to invest in technology that will give them a leg up on American car companies. If they saw electric vehicles as a profitable endeavor, they would go for it. They did that with hybrids, efficient sedans and coupes and other chances that Detroit would never take. Just because there was high demand for the experiment does not mean that there is enough demand to make a profit.
Even if we shift to electric, doesn't mean oil is going anywhere. First, demand in other nations is still rising. Second we need oil for everything from plastics to agriculture to electricity generation. So the oil sheiks will still be bankrolled.
Crid,
Yes, when you buy electric, it's coal, natural gas, petroleum or nukes. However, these plants are all far more efficient than internal combustion (though Honda is making huge leaps in clean emmisions and efficiency). The biggest problem is that battery technology S-U-C-K-S. Not to mention that using a hybrid or an EV means you have a bigger battery that has to be replaced more often (and all of the assorted environmental issues dealing with battery disposal.
Mo at June 26, 2006 2:37 AM
Wow, all the the usual disinfo is here. A few things to set straight:
Electric cars are cleaner and more efficient, even considering the presence of coal-fired plants on the electric grid. Gas cars are only 20-25% efficient.
Even coal-fired plants are at least 40% efficient, and account for only half of the electricity generated. There are cleaner energy sources on the grid, too. Much of the electricity generated overnight is wasted, as many plants can't be ramped all the way down. Charging EVs would make use of this wasted energy.
Electricity transmission is better than 90% efficient. Batteries and electric motors are also close to 90% efficient. Don't forget, also, that electric vehicles reclaim energy while braking.
Did you know: battery technology exists RIGHT NOW to give electric cars a 300 mile range? Here's a real example:
http://www.acpropulsion.com/ACP_tzero/SEMAtrip2003.htm
Also, the EV1 wasn't pulled because of safety regs. This is a red herring. See the movie.
Dave at June 28, 2006 12:33 PM
Dave, did you read what Andrew wrote? He noted that they weren't pulled for safety regulations or because of any of the other excuses. I suggest you go to the link and read the piece with your eyes open. And thanks for the link. I'd buy an electric car in a second. I currently drive a Honda Insight hybrid. I was madly in love with the EV1, and once tried to climb naked on the hood of one and mate with it. Well, okay, so I liked the car a whole lot.
Amy Alkon at June 28, 2006 1:09 PM
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