The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Le Car Electrique Is at the Forefront of an Automobile Fashion
If state environmental regulators have their way, Southern California--the great heartland of the automobile--will soon be home to the reborn electric car. So it came as something of a surprise that among the stars of the 12th International Electric Vehicle Symposium, held here this year, were a massive contingent of experts from . . . France.
A test under way in the small city of La Rochelle, 300 miles southwest of Paris, has yielded spectacular results. Jean-Yves Helmer, executive managing director of the automotive division of PSA Peugeot Citroen, said that French drivers have been profoundly touched by the small battery-driven cars known, in all languages, as EVs.
“The EV changed my life,” one French driver told researchers, according to the elegantly straight-faced Helmer. Even the less-emotional apparently appreciate benefits such as home charging, dependable starting no matter what the weather, and the calm of le silence on the road. The cars also help with the congenital national problem of aggressive driving, making city streets safer.
The French have discovered “a different kind of driving pleasure,” Helmer averred.
Economics help, too. France is fertile country for electric vehicles because most of its electricity is derived from cheap nuclear power, while gasoline costs more than three times the U.S. price. The French also live mostly in dense cities, with short commutes.
La Rochelle’s success has prompted 80 other French cities to sign up for the experience, and the French government has announced that it will spur EV production by subsidizing the higher cost of the electric cars (they now cost about $12,000, up to $4,000 more than an equivalent gasoline car).
Helmer says that EVs could be part of a strategy Peugeot is pondering for a possible re-entry of the U.S. market, from which French car makers retreated in 1991.
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Japanese car makers, who don’t need to worry about U.S. market re-entry but do need to worry--and soon--about California clean-air mandates, were also out in force at the show. All four of the Japanese auto makers that must offer emission-free cars as 2% of their showroom fleets by 1998--the same standard U.S. auto companies must meet--showed prototypes, some for the first time in the U.S.
The cars--mostly small station wagons that are used for deliveries in Tokyo--perform flawlessly around a parking-lot test course.
But despite widespread rumors that the Japanese car makers would announce provocative strategies to meet the California mandate, they used a joint press conference to recount the history of electric car research in their island nation.
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The 1998 mandate is looming like a specter for all the major auto makers, who for all practical purposes must decide what to do in the next several months. If they are going to manufacture their own vehicles--instead of meeting the California requirement by, say, purchasing and marketing cars built by a handful of small electric car makers--the big companies have only 2 1/2 years before electric cars must be rolling off the assembly line--an extremely tight schedule for the automotive world.
John Wallace, Ford Motor Co. director of electric vehicle programs and chairman of the symposium, lamented the state of electric car technology--particularly the batteries. Though he praises the electric car as “an industry being born,” for him and all the other big car makers, it is being born too soon.
To meet the 1998 deadline, Ford should be going to “primary prototype . . . in a very few months,” Wallace said. But he hasn’t yet found an “acceptable” battery maker, vital to building the prototype.
“I’m more conservative than many people,” Wallace said wearily. “It has to do with actually having to make the automobile.”
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Still, there were optimists aplenty at the show, and lots of evidence that electric car technology is moving ahead rapidly:
* An electric school bus from the Antelope Valley was the oversized star of the show. Built by Blue Bird Corp. and Westinghouse Electronic Systems, and paid for by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, it has been hauling school kids around the Southern California desert for almost six months. Antelope Valley Schools chief executive Ken McCoy reports lower maintenance, improved safety and low fuel costs.
* Solectria Corp., an ambitious Massachusetts car converter, unveiled the Sunrise, designed to be built in the automotive version of a micro-brewery. One of the small plants is planned for California, and Solectria hopes to sell the car for under $20,000.
* AC Propulsion, the small Southern California company run by engineer Alan Cocconi, an electric car wizard, is showing off a 200-horsepower EV--easily the muscle car of the show. It can do zero-to-60 in 6.2 seconds, which would be impressive even for a gasoline-powered car. When an engineer with one of the Big Three hit the accelerator during a test-drive, her startled response was a well-known expletive.
