Life & Style | Motoring
Energy security concerns boost electric vehicles
US advocates hope Obama will push for innovation in automobile sector.
- By Sheila McNulty, Financial Times
- Published: 23:51 December 21, 2008
Dale Brooks' garage houses a vehicle that is testament to stalled innovation. His 1980, white Jet Electrica, with 21 batteries under the hood, was made for the US Department of Energy. Black lettering on the car's side notes that this was an "electric vehicle demonstration project''.
The car, made from a gutted Dodge Omni, can travel up to 70 miles per hour for 70 miles before recharging. It was never mass-produced.
Instead, Brooks, president of the Houston Electric Auto Association, has had to turn to China and Canada to buy his electric cars.
He comments: "Unfortunately, everybody in the world except Detroit is making these.''
Yet as General Motors and Chrysler line up for a government bailout, electric car devotees believe their time has come.
Moves to limit carbon dioxide emissions have acquired a new focus amid fears about energy security that pushed petrol prices to record levels this year. Supporters of electric cars hope Barack Obama, the president-elect, will make a requirement to innovate part of the terms of any further bailout and hopes are high that automakers will be obliged to develop the least-energy-intensive vehicles possible.
"The electric car is inevitable,'' says Marc Geller, vice-chairman of the Electric Automobile Association, and a growing number of Americans seem to agree.
In the past two years, EAA membership has more than doubled, from about 700 members to 2,000.
Plug In America, an electric vehicle advocacy group, has gone from zero to 10,000 members. Even in Houston, energy capital of the world, there are 55 members.
Richard Ehrlich opened the city's first all-electric car dealership, Houston Electric Cars, in August and has sold six cars, the Canadian "Zenn" models, at prices ranging from $17,000 (Dh62,560) to $20,000.
No-frills
He also sells the no-frills "Sky," assembled in the US from Chinese parts, which starts at less than $10,000. And he will shortly start selling a convertible, the Chinese Benjy, priced in the mid-teens.
An obsolete US law restricts neighbourhood electric vehicles to 25 miles an hour in those states that do not adopt their own law, which means buyers must confine themselves to neighbourhood driving.
Houston, America's fourth most populous city, is a sprawling highway town, with speed limits of up to 70 miles an hour. A new state law is to be passed to allow electric vehicles to travel up to 35 miles per hour, but that is still a barrier to mass sales.
Ehrlich is undeterred, noting Houston's highways can be bypassed on city streets: "I think there is a market out there. There are five million people in the greater Houston area; somewhere there have got to be people who care passionately about the environment."
He notes even hybrids emit large amounts of CO2; the only carbon-free vehicles are all-electric, powered off the grid for less than 2 cents per mile.
Victorian-era
"This is Victorian-era technology," Brooks insists.
Indeed, the wives of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison both drove electric cars.
The invention of the electric starter motor, however, meant petrolcars did not have to be cranked. They were faster to refuel, and many bought petrol vehicles when they traded in their horses.
California air-quality regulators began requiring carmakers to produce a limited number of electric cars in the late 1990s, but by the early 2000s the big companies had killed the mandate, and the roughly 6,000 electric vehicles produced in those years were withdrawn from the market and most were scrapped.
Only a few remain on the roads today.
Concerns about energy security amid global warming have led the big auto-makers to announce plans to build electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids.
GM and Nissan have set 2010 for production targets.
"They could make these yesterday," Brooks says. "They could stamp them out if they had to."
If the industry bailout goes through, the majors might be forced to do so.
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