The Myth of the EV Future
What's New: Fast Forward 2020: The Myth of the EV Future - Feature
When are vehicles going to go fully electric? Not too soon.
February 2010
The Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car looks about as ballistic as a poached egg and feels as quick as a prostate exam. It weighs about 2300 pounds and goes 45 miles on a charge if you drive like a typical American—that is, primarily on freeways. It’ll whisper along a bit farther on city streets, when it can better recharge its 16-kWh lithium-ion battery pack through regenerative braking. It’s sold in Japan in tiny numbers, mainly to utility company fleets, and will come to the U.S. in the fall of 2011. If this is the future of motoring, at least it looks like a good, healthy breakfast.
Remember that silly question “Who killed the electric car?” Who cares anymore? Electrics are back, and they look fab. More and more poached eggs with batteries the size of steamer trunks and electric motors instead of engines are spinning on auto-show display stands. They’re running up and down Los Angeles freeways pretending to be normal cars, and they’re softly humming in the night, sucking spare kilowatts off an aging electric grid. Lots of real, green money is already being exchanged for Tesla’s randy roadster, and Nissan will hit the market later this year with the Leaf, which doesn’t look like deciduous foliage so much as a Nissan Versa with paunch. Ford has built a one-off electric Focus, and Tesla is using a half-billion-dollar federal loan to noodle out the many technical knots in the design of its Model S, an electric luxury sedan said to go up to 300 miles on a charge and cost less than $55,000.
If you’re the type who scans only headlines, you can’t be blamed for believing that all cars will soon be of the plug-in variety. But here are a few reasons why that won’t happen, at least not before your breakfast gets cold.
For a while yet, all electric cars will be way too expensive. The i-MiEV will run roughly $30,000 to $40,000, or about twice what a gas-powered version would. A Tesla costs $110,000 to start. Although rumor places the Leaf’s price at $25,000, the battery pack will likely be leased separately, and the real price might be closer to $40,000 before tax-credit discounts. That’s for a car that is basically a $15,000 Hertz economy unit with a $25,000 battery pack. Wouldn’t you rather buy it with a $1200 gasoline engine instead? One that can be fully refueled in five minutes instead of eight hours? Most people would.
Consider one problem with massive electrification: A mammoth global industrial complex supremely efficient at producing 50-to-60-million light vehicles with internal-combustion engines every year would have to be largely scrapped, replaced by one comparatively clueless about making cars with electric motors and batteries. Such huge, entrenched efficiencies don’t go away quietly.
Even hybrids, for all the praise they receive, currently amount to less than five percent of monthly U.S. new car sales. This is not a take rate that encourages automakers to scrap their massive investment in the development and production of internal-combustion engines. Electric vehicles face a classic chicken-and-poached-egg conundrum: Low volumes ensure that the price of electric-vehicle components, from batteries to transformers to drive motors, will remain prohibitively high. In turn, that depresses demand, which then discourages automakers from committing billions to developing dedicated electric-vehicle platforms; such dedicated platforms would better demonstrate an EV’s full potential than today's meager offerings, which are all derived from existing production-car architecture. Men and women might be strolling on Mars before the industry can build an electric car that is price competitive with a petroleum burner. And that’s if it can do it at all.
Battery technology is the major choke point, still awaiting the gotta-have-it breakthrough that will allow electrics to achieve the kind of cost-to-performance ratio required by the mainstream. Rolled up in barrel-shaped cells or, better yet, laid out in sheets where the voltage-sapping heat can be better dispelled, lithium ion is today’s “it” chemistry. Lithium ion offers high power density, manageable operating temperatures, and easy rechargeability. Lithium is, to use the parlance, so hot right now.
However, lithium's development into useful battery material has been—and continues to be—glacially slow, taking the past 40 years to reach a weight-cost-power ratio that is still just a dim flicker compared with that of oil-based fuels. And we can only expect an 8-to-10-percent increase in storage capacity—and commensurate drop in cost—per year.
Besides, batteries aren't like fuel tanks; they can't be topped off full or drained of the last drop. To ensure battery longevity, they can’t be fully charged or fully discharged, leaving the top and bottom 25 percent or so of charge capacity as a sort of necessary ullage. That means you're paying for—and lugging around—battery capacity that can’t be used. It’s expensive capacity, too. The latest estimates put one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of battery at about $1000, which means the Tesla’s 53-kWh pack—worth about $53,000—is toting around $26,500 of unusable zap. Factor in that 8-to-10-percent improvement over a decade, and the Tesla’s battery pack will still cost about $20,000 in 2020.
And there are more sinister problems with batteries. Like oil, lithium threatens to cause geopolitical headaches in the future.
About half of the known lithium reserves lie under salt flats in Bolivia, where the locals are already being fitted for sheik’s garb. Even if more is found, such intensely localized concentrations promise political and ecological trouble as the world races to grab its share. Are electric vehicles really that progressive if you have to pay off dictators and dig up pristine landscapes to power them?
Lithium is recyclable, but the infrastructure to do so is almost nonexistent. The process is also fussy—the batteries must first be chilled to minus-325 degrees Fahrenheit to make them inert. And it could get trickier as battery formulations become more exotic to reach power targets.
To charge a lithium-ion battery, you need electricity. Executives at the local Los Angeles electric utility, Southern California Edison—no doubt the nation’s first utility that will face large numbers of EVs—tell us that they’re readying the system to service up to 400,000 electric vehicles by 2020. Generation is not a problem—the utility currently produces 22,000 megawatts (about 16 percent of which comes from wind and solar power) and has up to 8000 to spare, mainly at night when power demand is low but capacity necessarily remains high to ensure grid stability.
The problem isn’t with power transmission, either. Edison says its desert-spanning trunk lines have plenty of capacity. The issue is with local distribution. Edison sizes its neighborhood transformers for the number of houses they serve, which is generally a stable quantity. However, electric vehicles are such power suckers that each one added to the neighborhood is the equivalent of hooking up an entirely new residence—its lights, furnace, air conditioner, washer and dryer, TVs, sex toys, everything—to the local line. If you and your four neighbors decide to buy EVs all at once, Edison fears there could be transformer explosions.
A public-awareness campaign is aimed at getting EV buyers to alert the utility before they bring their new juice hogs home so Edison can evaluate and upgrade the local power supply as necessary. Also, the utility is encouraging nighttime charging with a plan for favorable rates and developing “smart” meters that can tell the difference between an electric car’s nocturnal recharging and a particularly feisty three-way up in the bedroom and charge the bill accordingly. Although the rest of the country will have to follow suit in this major upgrade of our electric infrastructure if EVs are to displace the internal-combustion engine, emissions from power plants are another topic entirely.
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