Green cars

The politics of electric vehicles

Hilton Holloway — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:23:06 GMT

In the last blog, I speculated on the likely response of SUV-hating activists when faced with a hybrid Range Rover made from recycled drinks cans. But this is already becoming a real issue for the car industry.

Interviewing Henrik Fisker in 2011 about the new Surf, he told me he’d run into problems with a Scandinavian politicians who were not happy with the idea of large, heavy, executive car that could spend all day driving around a capital city on zero-emission electric power.

A car like the Surf was not what they had in mind when building a greener future. Displays of conspicuous consumption are not popular in Scandinavia, nor with many European politicians. The political classes have got used to kicking a slow-moving auto industry, but they are increasingly being blindsided.

Shortly after former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s suggested charging cars emitting over 225g/km of Co2 be charged £25 per day to drive in central London, Porsche launched an entry-level 911 that emitted 224g/km.

Today, luxury carmakers are rapidly bringing plug-in hybrid drivetrains (or range-extenders, like Fisker’s Karma and Surf) to market, because the battery packs are big enough for a day’s urban driving. Indeed, a recent report from the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board confirms these driving habits for most motorists.

A three-month study, using on-board data collection, of 340 EV vehicles across the UK shows that over 40 per cent of individual journeys are under 2.5 miles and 60 per cent under five miles.

This proves, says the TSB, that battery-only EVs are entirely suitable for the typical driver. But weren’t politicians trying to get us to stop making short journeys by car? Isn’t that the whole point of trying to stop us making urban journeys? When it dawns on some politicians that, very shortly, it will possible to do a zero-emission school run in a executive car such as the new Volvo V60 Hybrid or giant SUV, how will they react?

After all, packaging a battery in a hybrid that’s big enough for a day’s running about is easier in a bigger car and the cost of a plug-in hybrid transmission is more easily absorbed in upmarket models.

But I’m sure that’s not the eco-future the activists envisaged and I’m nor sure they’ll take the news lying down. Perhaps we should take a stab at guessing what mad new rules they conjure up to try and stop the new generation of expensive plug-in hybrids becoming the default city cars of the affluent?

Why the new Range Rover should be 'canned'

Hilton Holloway — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:29:03 GMT

Do you have a large pile of empty aluminium drinks cans nearby? At this time of year you probably do. And they’re more precious than you might imagine.

At the launch of the current-model Jaguar XJ, I was told the body contained around 235kg of aluminium, but only ‘around 50 per cent’ was recycled. Aluminium drinks cans are ideal for recycling, partly because they made of pure aluminium, but they’re hard to obtain in big quantities, according to JLR engineers.

The UK may well be putting well over a billion cans per year into landfill, madness in terms of reducing energy use. According to BMW, using recycled aluminium emits just 2kg of Co2 per kilo as opposed to 10kg for fresh production. By my maths, there’s around 14 grams of ally in a standard issue drinks can, so Jaguar XJ only needs around 17,000 cans (suitably melted down and upgraded to 6000-series grade with a few alloying elements) to build one new XJ.

If, by the end of the decade, JLR is making 300,000 aluminium cars with an average bodyweight of 270kg the company would need to buy over 82 million tonnes of aluminium. That’s around one billion cans, rather more than the 5 billion cans sold in the UK each year, but an entirely re-cycled range of cars is not impossible.

Perhaps the idea is more applicable to the sometimes environmentally controversial Range Rover brand. I asked a senior Land Rover boss whether the company would consider making the next-generation Range Rover entirely from re-cycled drinks cans. Or did he think such a move wouldn’t be considered ‘premium’ by customers? He grimaced at the conundrum.

Last year I pitched the idea of using re-cycled cans for the New Bus for London project (150,000 cans per bus) at the Mayor’s office, to some enthusiasm. Although Wrightbus say the production bus is already over 70 per cent recycled, the idea of it being made entirely from Londoners’ own waste cans – which would otherwise be binned – is compelling.

But what would be better than a hybrid Range Rover made entirely of re-cycled cans? That would turn most Greens red with fury.

Why France is betting on battery power

Hilton Holloway — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:17:06 GMT

In yesterday’s blog I outlined the case against the battery-powered car and how some are arguing it will always remain a niche vehicle. EU legislation would mean that, by 2020, the average Golf-class car would probably match a battery-powered car in terms of levels of exhaust pollution and not be far away from the average Co2 released in charging a battery-powered car.

The French, however, have other ideas. Early in 2010, I was at an automotive conference in Qatar where Dominique Venet, executive vice president of French power giant EDF, explained just why the French state was holding out such hope for EVs.The key new acronym we’ll all have to learn is WTW – ‘Well to Wheel’.

This is a calculation of the Co2 footprint of the energy chain – from, for example, the extraction of crude oil to the wheels of your car being powered.

According to Venet, charging up an EV via a fossil-fuel fired power station means that the WTW Co2 calculation is between 140g/km and 200g/km, with gas and coal at each extreme.

However, in its French home market, EDF reckons it can get that WTW figure down to between just 15 and 20g/km because 95 percent of EDF’s power will come from either Nuclear or Hydro-electric.

Venet, showing the French enthusiasm for state-planning, told the conference that he expected to see 1.5 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2020, a third of which would be pure battery vehicles and two-thirds Hybrids with battery packs big enough to be charged from the mains.

He also estimated that such vehicles would account for 4.5m vehicles by 2025 – some 27 per cent of all the vehicles on French roads.

Still, there will be some disadvantages. EDF reckons only 3 per cent of French EVs will be attached to fast charging points and the rest will, like it or not, have to be charged overnight, to take advantage of the France’s Nuclear power stations, which are generating permanently.

It’s pretty clear why France sees electric cars as being ideal for dovetailing into the country’s Nuclear power generation network, especially for France’s large rural population who are making long commuting journeys.

But for the rest of Europe, the EV is looking less attractive, as internal combustion cars become ever more efficient.

Range extending

Hilton Holloway — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:47:07 GMT

Two days, two range-extenders. Last Friday, I travelled to Ballymena in Northern Ireland to see the first production example of the new London bus (powered by a 4.5-litre diesel engine/generator and 17kWh battery) and then immediately hot-footed it (via taxi, plane, Nissan Leaf, feet, train and feet) to Brighton to drive the Chevrolet Volt (1.4-litre petrol engine/generator and 16kWh battery) in the Future Car Challenge.

It’s a year since I drove the first Chevy Volt at the launch in Michigan and my view of the car hasn’t changed. It still looks and feels like the future, even if this first-generation powertrain is not without its conceptual flaws.

The Brighton to London run in the Volt was a game of two halves: the 65.8 mile drive was conducted almost exactly 50:50 between the battery and the petrol-powered engine/generator.

The battery pack was actually charged up last Monday, before the Volt left GM’s care in Germany, so when we fired it up before 06:00 on Saturday morning there was a suspicion it wasn’t operating from the full 100 per cent.

Even so, we got 35 gently-driven miles out of it (including getting to the start line) before the battery charged dropped to around one-third (the Volt never fully de-charges its battery) and the engine/generator started to kick in.

The engine/generator used 0.85 gallons to cover 33.6miles (of which about half was busy urban driving), so the actual fuel consumption was 39.5mpg. In the weird world of the EU economy cycle, the battery power is Co2-free, so our ‘official’ economy was 78.4mpg.

And we were one of the first cars to arrive in central London, because we didn’t exactly indulge in extreme eco-driving techniques.

Clearly, although it works amazingly well, there’s room for plenty of future development with range-extenders. The engine in this Volt is pretty much a standard-issue supermini engine/generator . The next-generation motor will be smaller and engineered to work better as a generator.

Moreover, from an economy point of view, this engineering solution is not ideal for the UK sport of hoofing up and down motorways at 80mph. Perhaps, one day, the ultimate solution will be a version of the Volt with an engine that can fully drive the wheels at motorway speeds (today’s Volt engine/generator does assist the from wheels at very high speeds) and, at town speeds, decouple itself and work as a generator.

Meanwhile, Autocar is looking forward to spending a bit more time behind the wheel of the first right-hand drive Volts.

To the future and back on one road...

Steve Cropley — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:56:26 GMT

I spent a lot of time on the Brighton Road this weekend, taking part in two motoring events that were closely related but vastly different. The first was The Future Car Challenge, which runs on Saturday from Brighton to the Smoke: there my mission was to accompany Land Rover chief engineer Peter Richings in a Range Rover Sport Range_e prototype as part of this year’s Future Car Challenge (55mpg estimated, 89g/km CO2).

Next day I headed back the other way as part of a four-person crew in Daniel Ward’s fine 107-year-old, 20HP Renault, as a participant in the traditional Brighton Run for veteran cars, all made before 1905.

This was the second time the Royal Automobile Club has associated its new future car event with the following day’s traditional blue riband festival for the world’s oldest cars, and I’m convinced they’ve struck a wonderful formula which will rapidly grow into one of the most important world motoring events of the year.

The original Brighton Run was born to commemorate the repeal of the UK’s infamous Red Flag Act (which required all cars to be preceded by a man on foot, carrying a red flag). That did much to lift the British motor industry out of its torpor, to become a world leader 50 years later.

Today’s Future Car Challenge provides the same kind of stimulus: it is a way for car manufacturers to display the shape and capability of the cars we will drive in future, if we are to cut CO2 emissions and save fuel reserves. The parallels are dazzlingly clear.

Better still, the atmosphere surrounding the two events is amazingly similar. Saturday’s FCC has a competitive element, but its main function is as a technology show, a way for the world’s best engineers to show that tomorrow’s cars should be desired, not feared. The pervading mood is optimism for the future.

Sunday’s Veteran Car Run brings strong elements of nostalgia into the mix, but its emphasis is also on success. It is no small undertaking to drive a chuntering, oil-spewing 110-year old car successfully to a destination 56 miles away. The many thousands of British people who turn out every year to smile and cheer know this well. They are happy, I like to think, about the many improvements brought into their lives by 100 yards of automotive progress...

Together in electric dreams

Jim Holder — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:38:00 GMT

So I lied. Ahead of this year's Future Car Challenge I described it as the best way of gauging the real world energy use of the latest low emission cars.

What a load of twaddle. Before I'd crossed the startline yesterday morning my blood was pumping and my mind concentrating. I wasn't there to drive normally, I was there to do the best I could.

So it was I dropped into looking as far ahead up the road as possible as I tried to conserve the battery power in the VW Golf Blu-e-motion electric car I was driving (last year's winner, no less). I rolled up to traffic lights, timed my arrival at roundabouts and coasted down hills. Yes, I was a little slow for some people's liking, and perhaps more occasionally than normal I rolled through some 'cherry green' traffic lights a touch after they'd switched from amber.

Truth is, we've all got an eco driver hiding inside us, just waiting to be brought out. On the entire 60-mile journey I only used the foot brake five or six times (yep, rally drivers rejoice, the handbrake is a legitimate eco driving tool in competition) and I cursed having to pull up at traffic lights and waste hard earned momentum.

The full results have yet to be announced, although the best overall entry has been confirmed as Gordon Murray and his T.27 design. As for me, despite my best efforts and a winning car, I have low expectations. The inboard readout suggested I'd used 11kWh/100km of energy, close to last year's winning figure, but with the benefit of far clearer traffic conditions.

The electric Golf goes on sale in 2013, and whether you like it or not there's a growing momentum about alternatively powered cars. It's taken a competition for me to embrace eco driving, but what do you think will convince you? The day you can actually save money, the day you can go faster for no extra cost or the the day hell freezes over?

Let me know, and keep an eye on the site for when we get the official results through.

A challenge with a difference

Jim Holder — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:19:00 GMT

As the sun comes up tomorrow morning, I’ll be setting off from Brighton to London as part of the second RAC Future Car Challenge.

The event is interesting because it pits electric, hybrid and low emission combustion engined cars against each other on real roads – everything from a free-flowing centre to winding country roads and then the choked traffic of our capital.

Adding a frisson of excitement (and justifying that future tag in the event’s name) some of the cars, including the electric VW Blu-e-motion Golf that I’ll be driving and the Murray 25 and 27, for example, aren’t even on sale yet.

Even better, after last year’s first run, when some manufacturers were reluctant to make their consumption figures available to the competitors, let alone the public, this year the majority of cars will have their economy measurements published.

All being well, that will allow some sort of real world comparison to be made between these sorts of cars for the first time, albeit with the caveats of slightly variable start times and different drivers (ranging in talent from the likes of me to 1996 F1 world champion Damon Hill, no less).

As well as providing accurate figures, which we’ll publish on autocar.co.uk, over the coming years, the competition should become a useful benchmark for how far manufacturers have progressed with their chosen technologies.

Now, here’s your challenge.

Have a look at the entry list by following the link below, and tell me which type of technology will win, and which current on sale production car will head the pack:

http://www.futurecarchallenge.com/downloads/2011-downloads/Entries%20-%202011/2011%20FCC%20-%20Official%20Entry%20List,%2002%20Nov%20(FINAL).pdf

My money’s on a repeat win for the Golf Blu-e-motion that doesn’t have me at the wheel (its driver, Folko Rohde, just happens to be an incredibly talented development engineer for the car) and the Vauxhall Ampera, which is just about on sale now if you’re prepared to bend the calendar a bit.

The cost of electric motoring

Tim Dickson — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:48:44 GMT

Like many of you, I’ve read Matt Burt’s recent first drive of the all-electric Renault Fluence ZE. The car looks to be a well resolved, refined contemporary saloon, albeit one powered by batteries rather than petrol or diesel, which is all very exciting for the future of motoring.

Now, I should make it clear at this point that I am in no way against electric cars, but I am against paying a penny more for anything than I have to. So when I came across the figures for charging costs and battery leasing at the end of Matt’s report, I decided to do a few sums.

(I should also state at this point that I failed my maths O-level not once but twice, so feel free to rip the following calculations apart and make me look as stupid as my apparent lack of academic ability did 26 years ago.)

Anyway, Matt says that the Fluence ZE can cost “as little as £3 to ‘fill up’”, which I have no reason to doubt. Matt also tells us that the Fluence’s batteries are leased, at a starting cost of £69.90 a month, but that this cost goes up the more mileage you do. In fact, that £69.90 per month is for a minimum-term lease of 36 months, and up to 60 months.

So, that means you’re paying £70 a month plus charging costs. Those 6000 miles a year work out at 115 miles a week. Assuming, let’s say, an average 80-mile range and £3 per charge to fill the batteries, you’re looking at £4.33 a week in charging, or £17 or so a month, totalling £87 a month combined with battery lease costs.

Let’s say for ease of calculation that diesel costs £6 a gallon. That £87 then equates to 14.5 gallons. Let’s also say we had an economical diesel saloon – a Passat BlueMotion – returning an easy 45mpg. Those 14.5 gallons would take us 650 miles or so a month, or 7830 miles a year. The diesel car is cheaper to run, then, or covers more miles for your money, than the EV.

Or does it? No, it doesn’t, because the Fluence ZE has free car tax and much cheaper servicing costs, so in fact I’d say they’re about the same. But it’s clearly apparent that electric cars don’t equate to free motoring.

But things get interesting if you sign up to do more miles in your Fluence ZE. If you want to do 9000 miles a year, the batteries will cost you £81 a month, plus your charging costs go up too. I’ll skip the interim calculations this time, but the bottom line is that the diesel car will still do more miles for the same money – 9625 of them - but the gap is closing.

Up your battery lease mileage to 12,000 and the Fluence ZE noses ahead – the diesel saloon will only cover 11,395 miles for the same money, with extra tax and servicing costs along the way. At 15,000 miles per year, the Fluence is further ahead still, with our 45mpg diesel trailing at 13,160 miles.

The differences in cost aren’t huge, though. In fact, they’re much less than I would have imagined had I not done the sums. Of course with the Fluence ZE – as with all other pure battery EVs – come the associated headaches of range, charging times and battery life, although Renault’s lease scheme should address the last one of those with replacement batteries should the charge capacity of yours drop below 75 per cent of their original capacity.

But it would also appear that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want to carry yourself and a passenger or two around in the comfort and privacy of your own tin box, it’s going to take a set amount of energy to do it, and that energy is going to cost you what would appear to be a pretty much set amount of money. Unless, of course, I’ve got my sums wrong.

Why electric tech needs time

Jim Holder — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:51:40 GMT

I know what you’re going to say, so I’ll say it myself: I’m in danger of turning into an apologist for electric cars, given my previous defence of their slow sales so far and what I’m about to write.

So let me get this cleared up first: I’m not blinded by the science, and I’m not interested in foisting an expensive technology on people who don’t need it. But I do believe in giving progressive technology an airing, and I do believe in promoting rather than knocking something that’s new.

I’ve argued before that people need to give electric vehicles more time before they start slating them, and now I’m more certain than ever that that is true.

Why? Because in the first eight months of this year 837 pure electric vehicles were registered in the UK, including 499 Nissan Leafs.

The most interesting comparison of these seemingly slight numbers is with the initial Toyota Prius sales, from the first eight months it was on the market. Guess what? Just 424 Prius’s were registered in that time period.

My conclusion? New technology is both relatively expensive and takes time to be accepted. Today, Prius (rightly or wrongly) is almost a watch-word for eco-motoring. The UK public have embraced it, buying almost 50,000 models, Toyota is about to build a range of cars under the Prius banner and Prius-style technology is appearing in cars from virtually every manufacturer looking to lower emissions outputs.

What do you think?

Leaf it out, are you having a laugh?

Steve Sutcliffe — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:53:00 GMT

Got to admit that I was a little bit shocked (no pun intended; well, not really – although it did make me titter for about five one-hundredths of a second) to read that the new Nissan Leaf’s batteries will “last for over 10 years, but there may be a gradual loss of capacity of 30 per cent or more depending on driving dynamics".

Which to me sounds like; don’t be surprised if your shiny new Leaf is good for not much in 10 years’ time if you drive it with any form of gusto.

Eh? What sort of an incentive to invest in the future is that? The Leaf costs 31 grand (alright £26k thanks to the generosity of our beloved government, which runs out next March by the way, at which point you’ll be asked to cough the full £30,990).

Which means it’s hardly a yesterday’s newspaper kind of product. Yet as it stands, anyone who’s bold enough to part with their hard earned folding to put a Leaf on their drive can bank on throwing it away in 500 weeks’ time.

Can you imagine thinking the same way about a Porsche Boxster that you’d bought in 2001? “Sorry dear, it’s 2011 now, I’m just off to take the Boxster – which can now no longer pull the skin off a rice pudding, I’m afraid – to the local scrap heap. Might get fifty quid for it. Hopefully.’

I know we all need to pull together to help save the planet, and ourselves, from impending doom and all that. And I appreciate that cars like the Leaf should be applauded for pioneering a way forwards etc.

But how and why do they expect us to buy into an idea, which, ultimately, seems so wasteful? Or am I missing something here (as usual)? In which case, forgive me and carry on with your day.

RAC future car challenge

Hilton Holloway — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:48:00 GMT

There has to be an exceptionally good reason for me to be anywhere but under the duvet at 7.00am on a Saturday morning, but the Brighton-to-London Future cars run was one of the few.

I was offered the chance to drive Mercedes’ fuel-cell powered B-Class F-Cell on the 57-mile run from the south coast to Pall Mall in central London. The Merc was one of 64 alternatively fuelled cars on the run, a spread of vehicles that ran from production models such as the Golf BlueMotion and Focus Econetic, to Tesla roadsters, electric taxis, Gordon Murray’s tiny T.25, Nissan’s Leaf and Tata’s battery-powered Indica.

I’ve driven the B-Class F-Cell before, but there’s no need to get used to it, because it barely differs from the production B-Class. Just slot the gearlever and we were off. The rev counter has been replaced by a meter which shows both fuel use and energy recovery. So the key was to keep the needle as close to zero as possible, and get it to swing down into energy recovery as often as possible.

Heading north up the A23 I was, like the other drivers, keen to keep acceleration to a minimum and we soon had a queue of cars behind us, even at this early hour. Switching to rural roads helped, but I found I couldn’t achieve much in the way of regeneration because the F-Cell doesn’t have an automatic coasting mode, so lifting off the accelerator tends to result in rapid slowing.

The Saturday morning traffic between Croydon and Brixton was terrible, but, thanks to my extra-light pedalling, the on-board fuel monitor had clicked below the magic ‘1kg of hydrogen per 100km’ which Mercedes’ fuel cell guru Reinhold Schamm had told me would be optimal.

The run, including a 20min stop (and quick chat with the Mayor of Crawley) took over four hours, but we finished at Pall Mall with just 0.97kg of Hydrogen split into electricity and water. The F-Cell was quiet and comfortable (though it steamed up a bit with the climate control turned off) and felt completely production ready.

Amazingly, we won the Fuel Cell class, beating the Honda FCX and Toyota Highlander SUV. Reinhold Schamm was beside himself with joy, so the RAC trophy will be in the fuel cell engineers’ Stuttgart meeting room by the time you read this.

The future cars and veteran cars were lined up together in Regent Street, which made for an arresting sight. At the end of the event I wandered off on foot and ran across a 1895 Benz Victoria, which the owner and mechanic were attempting to re-start in the middle of Piccadilly. The 4hp, one-cylinder car was eventually coaxed into shuddering life and it shot off down the bus lane.

To step out of such an advanced 2010 Mercedes only to immediately encounter its 115-year-old direct predecessor capped an extraordinary day and was a graphic reminder of the billions of unsung man hours that have gone into securing the great freedom of personal transport.

London's Hydrogen Economy seems ambitious

Hilton Holloway — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:06:34 GMT

There are a lot of smug people in the capital but surely none could have been any smugger than me at eight o’clock this morning.

The German equivalent of the AA rolled up my street and rolled out Honda’s FCX hydrogen-powered fuel cell car for its debut tackling the Great British Rush Hour.

My job was to drive the FCX through the morning traffic to the Greater London Authority building by Tower Bridge. Once there, Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor for policing and chair of the London Hydrogen Partnership, would be waiting for a quick steer.

Aside from the sheer ease and blood-pressure lowering effortlessness of steering the FCX between hundreds of hammering cyclists, this car is a superb package. Huge cabin space, a great view forward and cool dash design. If this were the next Accord, it’d be a runaway success.

Kit Malthouse says he wants to see London shifting to Hydrogen Economy. It’ll be a hell of challenge. The project kicks off with six hydrogen fuel stations and a full-time hydrogen bus route (the RV1, if you’re interested).

The most obvious candidate for hydrogen power is the ancient London Black Cab. Although only prototype has been built, Mayor Boris Johnson wants all taxis to be ‘emissions free’ by 2020.

I wonder about this brave new world. Honda has spent zillions and many years getting the outstanding FCX to this point – it is indistinguishable from a production car, even though just 200 are being released to the public.

Is it that easy to engineer useable, long-term, hydrogen-powered buses and taxis with a fraction of the development budget? And even if a decent Hydrogen re-fueling network can be established, from where will the UK get the Hydrogen?

As someone who spends too much time breathing London’s polluted air, I would like have seen London’s politicians developing an intermediate strategy, probably using natural gas for taxis and buses – as they do in many European cities. It’s a strategy that could also be used in the rest of the UK.

Betting the capital’s health on being able to get from a tired old diesel economy to a shiny new hydrogen economy in one giant leap seems rather ambitious.

What's undermining the electric car adventure?

Hilton Holloway — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:20:00 GMT

With the axe being taken to the country’s spending, it’s no surprise that the coalition government is reversing on the promises of its predecessor to underpin the electric car industry with grants and tax breaks.

The huge investment in electric tech has been spurred by the great CO2 panic. And electric cars don’t emit CO2, do they? Well, not locally. But that’s not strictly relevant because CO2 is not locally harmful.

Research carried out by BMW and the Technical University of Munich suggests that where in Europe you recharge your electric car makes a huge difference to its overall CO2 emissions, depending on how the electricity is generated.

Recharge in hydroelectric-intensive Norway and the CO2 emitted when fully charging a battery is nearly zero. Charge up in nuclear power-friendly France and the CO2 is between 35 and 50g/km; charge via a coal-fired power station and the CO2 equivalent is around 130g/km.

Across Europe, the average CO2 emitted when recharging an electric car was calculated to be between 90 and 130g/km.

So why bother, when you can buy a car today that easily beats those figures?

Advocates of electric vehicles say they expect the rising price of oil over the next decade to start to balance out the purchase and running costs of electric and fossil fuel-powered cars.

But who is going to pay a premium for an electric car with a short range? And how long will governments continue to subsidise the production and purchase of electric cars?

The even more stringent fuel economy regulations currently being written into EU law could, ultimately, undermine the whole electric car adventure.

Hydrogen's 'chicken or the egg' situation

Mark Tisshaw — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:43:07 GMT

You may have read earlier this week about London’s plans to launch hydrogen fuel cell powered black cabs in the capital by 2012.

On the face of it, the project sounds brilliant: cleaner air, lower running costs and no compromise on interior space or exterior design.

But the project faces two major hurdles: creating the infrastructure and convincing the cabbies to go for it. As London’s deputy mayor Kit Malthouse described it, both hydrogen and electric cars are at a ‘which comes first, the chicken or the egg’ stage.

The first problem is beginning to be tackled. Two hydrogen-recharging points will be installed by City Hall this year with a further four to follow in 2011.

These are to support the five hydrogen buses that will run on London’s streets from later this year, but taxi drivers will also gain access to them should they opt in for the hydrogen taxi trials.

But winning the taxi drivers over will be far more difficult.

“We need to get a fleet of owner drivers involved,” said Maganese Bronze’s John Russell, the firm that makes black cabs.

“For this to have a smooth entry to market, we need to make this not a financial burden to owners.”

Boris Johnson’s promise that all of the capital’s taxis must be tailpipe emissions free by 2020 should eventually force the hand of both City Hall (to create a larger, usable network) and the taxi drivers (to buy or convert their taxis so they are still be able to run a business).

If the network is there for the taxi drivers to use, then there is less risk for drivers to invest in a hydrogen taxi. After all, their taxi is their livelihood.

I saw the taxi and must admit to being impressed. Asides from the stickers, there are no visual differences and, crucially, no compromises on interior space.

I’m still not fully sold on electric cars until the limits on range and charging times can be overcome. The hydrogen taxi has a 250-mile range and can be recharged in five minutes; that sounds much more sensible to me.

Technorati Tags: hydrogen, taxi, London black cab, Lotus Engineering

Renault makes electric cars look easy

Steve Cropley — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:25:00 GMT

You can’t come back from a day spent driving three disparate battery-powered Renaults without having your ideas changed quite a bit.

Sure, we’ve known for at least a year about the French company’s determination to be first with a range of pure electric models cars (Renault bosses want four on the market by the end of 2012) but it’s still highly instructive to actually slide your backside behind the wheels of these machines, and feel the actual thrust of their engines.

First impression? This thing is genuine. We really will be driving cars like this in a few years’ time, and despite what many people think, the fun of driving will still be there. Just modified a bit. Even in this tentative early form the Twizy, Renault’s four-wheeled rollerskate, has terrific steering, a great natural driving position, awesome stability and a general zip about to its character that makes you want to escape the Renault boundaries and stick it briskly up the Champs Elysees.

The bigger cars, Zoe and Fluence, have a smoothness and grace about their low-speed performance that gives their departure from rest the same sort of polish as a Mercedes S-class. And they feel so strong as they accelerate away from rest.

There’s enormous potential here: by the time the industry’s best dynamics experts get to work on what Ford calls the “driving quality” of these cars, they’ll be deeply impressive. My only concern is for the absence of gearchanging, but this kind of thinking hardly makes sense, given that I’ve enjoyed increasingly refined automatics for years, and – right now – I’m having a good time driving a Honda Insight, complete with CVT.

Another impression? Strikes me the central job of making a vehicle work with battery-electric power — whether a new design or an adaptation of an existing model — is easy meat for today’s motor industry. At the Renault Technocentre outside Paris, where we were allowed to try Zoe, Twizy and Fluence, nobody bothered to boast about the complexity of their electric powertrains. Compared with conquering the technical intricacies (and labyrinthine regulations) that surround diesel and petrol engine design, it’s child’s play.

The scary thing is the infrastructure that’s going to be needed. Renault foresees worldwide networks of fast-charging stations and ‘Quickdrop’ battery exchange facilities (which, it says, will look rather like roadside car washes). It must all be do-able, I suppose, because by the ‘20s we managed to cover the Western world with petrol filling stations fast enough for Henry Ford to build two million Model Ts a year.

But it still looks daunting, given the convergence that’s going to be needed among dozens of manufacturers concerning voltages, plug sizes, battery specifications, charging methods, cruising ranges and many, many more intricate details. Maybe I’m just being defeatist. But I’m increasingly sure that designing, building and driving these electric cars is going to be the easy bit.

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