Electric Roadster.
I spoke with an oil exploration engineer and asked him
directly if we are really running out of oil. “Yes, definitely!” was his initial
response, but later in the conversation admitted that perhaps the real situation
was that we were running out of the oil that could be extracted at a reasonable
price. It seems that new oil field deposits are too deep or too difficult or too
expensive - currently.
In 2010 the “Future of Electric Vehicles” conference took
place in San Jose, California. This was an all-inclusive look at EVs,
incorporating all forms of electric vehicles - land, water, and air, and covered
new emerging technologies.
At the conference it was pointed out that cars make up only
about half the market for EVs, even though Nissan and Tesla produce the initial
mainstream EVs. The rest of the EV market covers two-wheelers such as scooters
and e-bikes constituting a significant portion of the other half.
It was predicted that about 5 to 18 percent of cars will be
pure electric or hybrid by 2020.
It was also admitted that some aspects of the EV technology
were not new, such as Dr. Ferdinand Porsche’s ‘in-wheel’ electric motors (and
the battery charge being continually topped up by an on-board internal
combustion engine).
The conference agreed that practical electric cars are going
to remain small in size for years to come as the batteries required to power a
larger vehicle will simply be too large and heavy.
However, this prediction is not necessarily shared by
everyone, with the battery technology revolution turning out smaller, lighter
and more powerful batteries every day. One only has to hearken back to the
batteries needed for the first mobile phones which required a suitcase and the
carrier to have gone to Thor’s gymnasium, and then compare them to the iPhone
battery of today.
Honda Insight - or out of sight?
The public’s range fear is a real one, and the opinion was
expressed that electric cars will require some sort of range-extending
capability before they will ever achieve mainstream acceptance. This is
undoubtedly true, with ranges generally under 100 km, making them city commuters
only, other than notable examples such as the Tesla roadster.
Range and charging time were the subjects of a research, and
of those respondents who were likely to buy an EV, two thirds expected a range
between 500 and 650 km.
Acceptable charge times for 70 percent of the group likely to
buy expected times between four to eight hours, but almost all would pay a
premium to enjoy faster recharging times.
Batteries have high energy density but they must be greatly
oversized in today’s hybrid vehicles to avoid deep discharges. Battery-only
hybrids also require a powerful internal combustion engine for hill climbing and
acceleration.
Despite all the touted advances in the development of
practical electric cars, would you actually buy one? Zpryme Research and
Consulting recently conducted a web-based survey of 1,046 men and women across
the U.S., asking how they felt about various aspects of buying an EV.
Only 8.5 percent of respondents said they were very likely to
buy an EV within the next two years, although 28.7 percent considered themselves
‘somewhat’ likely. Of the remaining somewhat or very unlikely respondents, 25.8
percent said they were ‘somewhat’ likely to buy an EV in the next five years.
The main consideration regarding purchase of an EV would be
the price of the vehicle, according to 66.8 percent of those surveyed, with fuel
savings coming in as the number two reason, at 50.4 percent. Of those who
indicated they were likely to purchase an EV (the 8.5 percent), 64 percent of
those (that is around 5 percent of the total) said that environmental concerns
were very important to them. Of those that were very or somewhat unlikely to
buy, only 32.4 percent of them were very concerned about the environment.
Whilst this article deals with road-going transport, there is
also research being done to see if electric power could be used in airplanes.
Model aircraft are already flying on battery power, so the possibility to power
small passenger planes will next be looked at.
NASA’s Ames Research Center, spoke on the limitations of
heavy batteries in electric planes. Smaller aircraft would be the ones best
suited to pure-electric propulsion, as batteries large enough to power bigger
aircraft would simply be too heavy.
However, trying to look at the results of the future
directions and unfolding technology, does show that whilst EV’s are here, it is
still a very small percentage of people who would actually take the plunge and
buy one this year or next. Most appear to agree that EV’s are the way to go, but
are happy to wait and see what ensues in the next decade.
Would YOU buy an all-electric vehicle? The last word comes
from Car and Driver. This magazine is noted as one of the better motoring
magazines in the world. A C&D report is generally very factual, and when they
reported on their long-term, 64,000 km test of the Honda Insight they wrote,
“Some things get better with age. This is not one of those things,” you know
their testing panel was not impressed.
They went on, “….even with the additional output of the
electric motor the Insight is slow ... and it got slower in 0-100 km
acceleration times with age.” They would obviously not be clamoring to buy an
EV.
