First Fuel for Electric Cars Must Be Clearer Thinking
The questions are big and blunt. Are prospects for electric cars real--or just a scheme of regulation-happy bureaucrats and subsidy-seeking academics? And are government mandates, such as California’s requirement that roughly 25,000 electric vehicles be on its streets by 1998, the best way to spur development of technology and industry?
Conversely, are Detroit’s Big Three automobile makers--those wonderful folks who brought you industrial decline--simply dragging their feet in their open ridicule of electric cars and opposition to California’s mandate? Or do they have a point?
The answers to those questions are not simple.
Yes, prospects for electric cars are real, but the California mandate is criticized even by engineers and scientists favorably disposed to electric vehicles.
Yes, Detroit executives are shamelessly misleading in their dismissals of electric vehicle technology as difficult and impractical, although they do have a point that the 1998 deadline for commercial sales of electric cars may distort development as much as encourage it.
The matter is pressing. This week, 13 Northeastern states will meet in Hartford, Conn., to consider whether they should adopt the California mandate, which requires that 2% of the vehicles sold in the state in 1998 have zero emissions of pollutants. As a practical matter, that means electric cars or trucks, because natural gas-powered vehicles, though clean, do emit some pollutants.
Stakes are high for Detroit. Virtually nationwide mandates that target 1998 would mean that car makers would have to recast a portion of their production in a big hurry.
So there’s much to decide about cars and cities. But before we can make judgments, we need to know what stage the technology has reached. And we need to think about the implications: Should drivers, who prize the flexibility of automobile use, share any of the blame--and cost--for the pollution caused by car emissions?
The technical obstacle to electric cars is that it’s hard to come up with a compact battery that will power a car the way gasoline does. One of the best experimental cars, the General Motors Impact, can go 90 miles before recharging, 70 miles in city driving. Ford’s Ecostar electric van can go 100 miles.
Auto companies project unreal prices for such vehicles--$100,000 minimum. The companies say they actually would charge $25,000 and add $50 or more on to the price of their other cars to make up the difference.
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Entrepreneurs do things a bit more cheaply. Alan Cocconi played a key role in the development of GM’s Impact and now has his own six-person firm, AC Propulsion Co., in San Dimas. He has developed a car that can go on 120 miles and recharge in an hour and a half, plugged into a normal outlet in your garage.
Yet Cocconi’s vehicle costs $70,000. Hoping to see it produced for less, he has licensed the technology to Magnetek, a Santa Monica maker of electrical equipment.
Cocconi--conceding that batteries won’t really improve much--favors a hybrid vehicle, with an electric motor for town and a gasoline engine for the open road. But Dennis Wilkie, director of Ford’s electric vehicle program says that putting two engines in one car tends to compound the difficulties.
The true hope for electric vehicles is the fuel cell, which combines the qualities of a battery and an engine, allowing much greater power. A hydrogen fuel cell being developed at UC Davis should be commercial in 10 to 15 years, says chief researcher Mark Delucchi. That’s not long for technological development but puts success well past the 1998 mandate deadline.
So should the mandate be postponed? No, says Dan Sperling, director of UC Davis’ Institute for Transportation Studies. The mandate spurs progress by assuring entrepreneurs a market, Sperling says. And indeed there is a lot of entrepreneurial research under way on aspects of electrical propulsion.
But counting on a government-decreed market is not the soundest reason for going into business. And Lee Schipper, head of International Energy Studies at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory--and a supporter of electric cars--says the mandate simply won’t work. “You can’t legislate behavior,” he says. “People won’t be forced to buy or drive a slow-moving or limited vehicle.”
It’s likely that California’s mandate, and those of others states, will be diluted or delayed. The short-run solution for cleaner air will be to use a mix of low emissions vehicles, powered by electricity or natural gas, for buses and delivery vans, while development continues on fuel cells and other clean-fuel technology.
It’s important to press on. When states from the Pacific to Atlantic are determined to do something about car emissions--which cause two-thirds of all air pollution--a great new market is dawning for non-polluting transportation. It’s sure to be a global market too, from smoggy Sao Paulo today to car-choked Shanghai tomorrow.
And there will be competition for global leadership. Japanese auto makers on the whole seem no more eager for change than Detroit’s, but Honda is making impressive efforts in electric vehicles.
The low price of oil is the economic obstacle to electric cars. With abundant cheap gas, Americans ask, “Why should we pay more to drive our cars and trucks?”
But why shouldn’t you? “Our problem is that we are afraid to charge ourselves the price of pollution,” says Schipper.
The health cost of air pollution is conservatively estimated at $30 billion a year by Lester Lave of Carnegie-Mellon University. Logically, to begin paying for pollution, 30 cents a gallon should be added to the price of each of the roughly 100 billion gallons of gasoline sold each year.
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Other nations pay for clean air, after all. Cities such as Zurich, Switzerland, charge $20 an hour to park cars, effectively forcing the use of public transit.
We in America prefer the flexibility of cars to public transit, which costs billions of dollars to build anyway. So we must think of going electric if we want both mobility and clean air--and we must think of how to pay for it.
If Americans were willing to pay for electric cars, then entrepreneurs could confidently develop technology for a real market--and Detroit’s car makers would have to vigorously pursue electric car development.
We would have a new world industry and clean air too. For now we have mostly big questions.
