Electric dreams
Venessa Lee Today Online 19 Sep 09'
CHARGING an electric car is not unlike charging a mobile phone: Stick the plug into the wall socket and wait for the bars on the battery gauge to fill out nicely.
Using a household outlet, it takes about eight hours to fully charge the electric car prototype that I test drove recently.
Low-emission, battery-powered electric cars have been touted by some as the car for the near-future, with 2020 posited in some quarters as the beginning of the electric wave.
Auto-makers and governments have invested in these virtuously green vehicles with an eye on reducing the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. However, there are kinks to be ironed out, as I found out for myself.
The all-electric prototype I drove, which is powered entirely by lithium-ion batteries, accelerated at the lightest touch. With its tight turning circle, parking was easy. So was scaling slopes, though Mount Faber isn't ideal for a test drive up slopes. (Perhaps we need a higher iconic hill.)
Battery-powered cars are known to be more silent than petrol-driven ones with combustion engines. Mine made the most attractive little sounds, somewhere between a hum and a breeze. In contrast to conventional cars, it moved as quietly as a ninja, a difference that was all the more marked when I drove briefly alongside a revving Ferrari and later, a diesel taxi.
The intoxicating new-car smell may have got to me, but I was finding the electric car a dream to drive. It was a good-looker too, with its futuristic blunt contours and minimalist fixtures.
Eat my sparks, gas-guzzlers.
From my starting point at Alexandra Road, I'd driven around Mount Faber, Tanglin and Holland Village before I decided to head to Changi Airport to test how far I could go on the car's fully charged battery.
The manufacturer's rep told me that it could theoretically do 160km when fully charged, but the reality was more modest since everything in the car was powered by its battery, including the air-conditioning and radio. Anywhere between 90km and 100km was more likely.
I decided to drive from Changi to Tuas.
Along the PIE towards Tuas, however, before the Toa Payoh exit, I realised that there were only three of 16 bars left on the battery gauge, indicating that it was time to recharge the battery.
This called for drastic measures.
I switched off the air-con and soldiered on in the sticky heat.
I was forced, however, to turn back at the Dunearn Road (City) exit of the PIE and make my way down Bukit Timah Road. Near Eng Neo Avenue, I found that there was only one battery bar left. The digital odometer showed that I'd travelled 87.5km.
I decided to head to Holland Village and rely on the kindness of strangers.
This didn't work out so well..
I pulled up at a coffee shop at Holland Village with the battery completely flat. According to the distance display, I'd travelled 91km. I asked a man at the zichar stall if I could recharge the car using the electrical outlets at the coffee shop.
He said this would trip the system and, looking at the 10 plugs and switches on the wall, I was inclined to agree. I called for help and a tow truck soon came along.
BETTING ON ELECTRIC CARS
It was a somewhat ignominious ending, but the episode also illustrated the thorny issue of battery technology for the electric vehicle industry.
Limited range, high costs and long recharging times characterise present car batteries. Electric cars generally run between 60km and 200km on a single charge, while taking anywhere between two and seven hours to fully recharge.
But even as researchers work on improving battery technology, car-makers are racing to get electric vehicles on to the roads.
Nearly all major auto-makers had at least one electric model on display at the 63rd Frankfurt Auto Show this week. Renault introduced no fewer than four electric models. Volkswagen AG will put its new E-Up! electric car into production in 2013.
In August, Nissan Motor in Japan unveiled the Leaf, an electric car set to go into mass production for a global market in 2012. In June, Mitsubishi Motors started leasing its electric vehicle, the ¥4,599,000 ($71,300) i-MiEV, in Japan.
According to The Economist, over the next 40 years, the global fleet of passenger cars is expected to quadruple to nearly 3 billion, with profound implications on the climate change issue. Governments worldwide have invested in electrified vehicles as part of an environmentally-conscious strategy.
Such investments can also serve other ends such as reducing urban pollution, creating clean-energy jobs and decreasing a dependence on imported oil, as in the case of China, which seeks to be one of the leading producers of hybrid, as well as all-electric vehicles within three years.
In Germany, the government proposes spending some ?500 million ($1.04 billion) on a plan that aims to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2020.
President Barack Obama has committed US$42.4 billion ($60 billion) in federal grants to develop next-generation electric vehicles and batteries in the US.
Domestic chargers are not the only way to charge electric vehicles; street-level charging devices are another way.
More generally, analysts have long contended that a roadblock to the deployment of electric cars has been the lack of infrastructure to ensure they can be charged anywhere, at home, at the office or at stations in the city or along a highway.
Building that infrastructure could cost billions of dollars and stakeholders have stressed the need for government support in the early days.
"We think the potential is beyond but it's going to depend not so much on the technology but on how governments, mayors, presidents and governors are willing to push this technology," said Renault-Nissan's chief executive Carlos Ghosn.
He added that car-makers had little choice but to make the shift, given that oil prices would probably go up and emissions regulations would likely get stricter. He has forecast that 10 per cent of vehicles would be electric globally by 2020.
Not all auto-makers are convinced of the potential of electric cars, given the variety of power sources for cars available. All-electric cars are still much more expensive than petrol-electric hybrids, which match battery power with combustion engines, for instance.
The high cost of batteries is seen as prohibitive and analysts say it will take at least a decade to see if electric cars can keep pace with, or surpass, petrol-powered automobiles.
Audi of America president Johan de Nysschen recently called General Motors' Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid "a car for idiots".
"No one is going to pay a US$15,000 premium for a car that competes with a Corolla. So there are not enough idiots who will buy it," he said.
The trick apparently is whether to place your bets on electric technology improving, and fast. With Israel one of the early enthusiasts of electric cars, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi is reported to have said that the industry will take off in just a few years, just like mobile phone technology did.
Mr Agassi told the Knowledge@Wharton series: "We will have a billion electric cars on the road sometime around 2025 because we will have a billion people driving and there's no way they can be driving gasoline cars ...
"If you think of an industry that will make a billion of something, with an average price of US$20,000, you're looking at a $20 trillion industry rising up from nothing today within a span of 10 to 15 years."
