GM Unveils an Advanced Electric Passenger Car
General Motors Corp., hoping to steal a lead in the race to develop lower-emissions vehicles, Wednesday unveiled a prototype electric passenger car that can go 124 miles on a single charge and even outrace some internal combustion vehicles.
The Impact, a teardrop-shaped two-seat car, has a top speed of 75 m.p.h. and would place GM “on the cutting edge of technology,” GM Chairman Roger B. Smith said at a news conference in Los Angeles.
The sleek car, powered by 32 10-volt lead-acid batteries, was designed from the ground up as a practical electric car for the consumer market, Smith said. In that, it differs from other electrical vehicles under development, which are essentially converted delivery vans intended for commercial fleets.
He maintained that the Impact is “producible” as currently designed, although production will depend on its meeting federal safety standards, consumer acceptance of an electric car and financial feasibility.
“There are no yet-to-be-solved secrets,” Smith said. “The thing is its marketability . . . . We want an electric car that’s producible, that can handle itself on the highway and that can meet the federal standards out there and that is a marketable product. We believe we’ve accomplished two-thirds of that.”
The soonest that GM would go into production is 1993 or 1994, said John S. Zwerner, executive director of GM’s advanced product engineering department.
“The public generally perceives electric vehicles as slow-moving golf carts,” Zwerner said. “The Impact absolutely shatters that perception.”
Observers, including state and local air quality officials, praised the new car, which was designed and engineered mainly in Southern California.
“This is certainly as advanced as anything I’m aware of,” said Arnold Fickett, a vice president of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute, funded by the electrical utility industry. “It’s a giant step forward.”
GM engineers borrowed from a prototype GM solar vehicle, the Sunraycer, to give the Impact a lightweight, aerodynamic design and improvements in motor and controls that partly account for the car’s range, speed and acceleration: 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 8 seconds. A GM video showed the Impact out-accelerating Mazda Miata and Nissan 300ZX sports cars.
GM said it uses about a third of the energy of a conventional car.
Smith refused to estimate how much the car would cost if it went into production, except to say that it would be priced competitively with other cars. He refused also to say how much GM spent developing it.
Some industry observers said they do not see a big consumer demand for the cars, short of federal or state requirements.
“I think, in a free market situation, with no market incentives, electrically powered cars would have no impact,” said Chris Cedergren, a senior automotive analyst with J. D. Power & Associates, an Agoura Hills auto market research firm. “They would have to be forced on consumers.”
Smith admitted that the car has drawbacks. For one thing, at current gasoline prices and electricity rates, the car would cost about twice as much to operate as a conventional auto: about $70 a month, compared to $40 a month for a gasoline-engine auto driven 10,000 miles a year.
That is mainly because of the batteries’ relatively short life. An Impact owner would need to replace the battery pack every 20,000 miles at a cost of roughly $1,500. The electricity to run the car would cost about $5 to $12 a month, Smith added.
Expected improvements in battery design in the next three to four years could extend battery life to 50,000 miles, which would make monthly operating costs competitive with those of conventional autos, Smith added.
Unlike electric vehicles that use exotic nickel-iron or sodium-sulfur batteries as power sources, the Impact uses lead-acid batteries, whose 870 pounds account for about 30% of the car’s total weight.
But improvements in battery design eliminate the need to add water and also overcome some of the traditional drawbacks of electric vehicles: low speed, short range and the relatively long time it takes to recharge.
The average electric vehicle now has a top speed of 50 to 70 m.p.h. and a range of 60 to 100 miles. It typically takes up to 12 hours to recharge an existing electric vehicle.
But GM said the Impact can be charged halfway in as little as half an hour and almost fully recharged in six, simply by plugging the vehicle into a home circuit.
Eventually, Smith said, he foresees recharging circuits being placed around cities, much as some Canadian cities put outlets at parking meters to power engine warmers.
Because the Impact is designed as a consumer car rather than as a fleet vehicle, it would have a much broader market than electric vans--a necessity for mass production of a new vehicle, analysts said.
GM would have to sell more than 100,000 Impacts a year to make production feasible. The market for vans converted to electric power from gasoline engines may be fewer than 20,000 a year, observers said.
Proposed federal and local clean air standards may spur acceptance of electric vehicles generally because they are virtually pollution-free.
The California Air Resources Board is considering a proposal to require that 15% of new vehicles sold by the year 2003 be so-called ultra-low-emission vehicles, which would include electrics.
“There’s definitely a need for alternative fuels, and this shows that the kind of standards that the Air Resources Board is working on are feasible and realistic,” said Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board. “It’s consistent with the kinds of emissions standards that we are developing for the future.”
Electric vehicles would, in effect, transfer pollution from cars to the power plants that produce the electricity for the vehicles. But that would still result in pollution reductions of up to 90%, said Tom Eichhorn, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Management District, because of greater efficiency at the power plants.
It is unlikely that new power plants would need to be built, at least in the near future, to meet demand from such vehicles. Electrical utilities such as Southern California Edison have enough excess capacity to power electrical vehicles, especially if most recharging occurs at night--typically a utility’s period of lowest usage, said Lawrence Hamlin, manager of research at Edison.
GM is not the only company working on electric vehicles. The Electric Power Research Institute has worked with both GM and Chrysler to develop electric-powered vans for eventual production. Ford Motor Co. is developing its own electric-powered van.
GENERAL MOTORS’ IMPACT
Power: Two electric AC motors, one for each of the front wheels.
Battery pack: 32 10-volt lead-acid batteries, total weight 870 lbs. Can be recharged in about six hours on ordinary household current.
Acceleration: from 0-60 m.p.h. in eight seconds. On the highway, can accelerate from 30-60 m.p.h. in 4.6 seconds.
Range: 124 miles on one charge.
Cooling system: Fan-assisted flow-through air cooling.
Tires: Special low-resistance tires, inflated to 65 psi (double the inflation of ordinary tires).
Weight: 2,200 lbs.
