Electric Vehicles Fall Drastically Short of Obama's 1 Million Goal

The Obama administration invested $2.4 billion as part of its goal of putting one million electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2015. But that effort has, in part, stalled.

Nothing is more emblematic of the industry's troubles than the Fisker Karma. In 2010, Fisker got a $529-million taxpayer loan to build a luxury electric sports car.

But the government cut off the loan to Fisker after $193 million when Fisker failed to meet its ambitious sales and production goals. Then, a Consumer Reports test dealt the Karma another blow.

"It is low. It is sleek. It is sensuous," the Consumer Reports' video narrator says.

"It's also broken," the narrator adds as a clip of the Fisker Karma being towed on a flatbed airs.

Fisker blamed the car's lithium ion battery, which happened to be made by another government loan recipient, A123 Systems.

A123 got a $249-million taxpayer loan. This year's first-quarter losses totaled $125 million.

"We can replace our dependence on oil with biofuels and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015," Obama said in January 2011.

To get to one million, the White House pinned its hopes on 11 models of electric vehicles -- including the Karma. Our CBS News investigation found that six of the 11 -- Ford Focus, Ford Transit Connect, Fisker Nina/Atlantic, Tesla Model S, Tesla Roadster and Think City -- either haven't made their first delivery or are already out of business.

Others aren't even close to the government's 2015 projections. For example, 36,000 Fisker Karmas and 505,000 Chevy Volts were supposed to be made. But current projections slash the Karma's 2015 number in half to 18,000 and put the Volt at one-eighth of the...

Once out of warranty, the ONLY place they can still be serviced is the dealer.

That's the fate of all high-tech gadgets. Can anyone but Apple fix your iPhone, for example?

The reason is that we are moving toward (or are already with) proprietary technologies. I had to throw an LCD TV out that failed (ViewSonic) even though I have the skill to repair it... if only I had the parts and the technical documentation on how to do it. Most of the stuff out there comes with no such documentation, and once it fails your only resort is the manufacturer. As a simple proof, try to repair an LED alarm clock with burned out segments. Those LEDs are nearly custom made, in Asia, and they ship them here only in finished devices. [This is a real example; some older HP test equipment uses those LEDs and it's tough to find spare parts.]

The time of carburetor cars is long gone, chased away by many reasons, among which are government requirements on emissions. You are already not allowed to mess with parameters of the engine control unit in your car, even if you know what you are doing (about 100% of the population do not; those who do are the rounding error.)

But it must be said that Toyota has a nice program where you can either subscribe to access to all their technical information (for a yearly fee, if you are a garage) or you can buy access for 1 day for something like $10. Anyone can buy access for 24 hours and download as much as his Internet connection allows.

Battery replacement is the real issue, and costs around $2,200.

NiMH batteries for Prius and like hybrids, as practice shows, are very reliable. Barring random factory defects, they actually work for the guaranteed period of time.

You probably noticed that in my list I haven't really mentioned savings on fuel. This is because, just as you say, it is far from obvious if you save or lose money on that deal. We do not know if a war breaks out in Persian Gulf tomorrow and gas prices go through the roof; or perhaps Obama loses his programming and allows unlimited drilling and pipelines and all, crashing the oil prices. Guessing that is pointless, and so is investing money into such a thing. My list contains only tangible advantages that are real from the first day of owning the car. It is up to each person individually to tell if they justify the higher price of a hybrid.

I do not know when or if any computer control issues with hybrids will show up. But I am an engineer who works with exactly such computers (embedded systems) for a very long time, so I do not think that anything terrible can happen that can't be fixed by reflashing the controller. There is no magic in those devices; I make similar things for a living. An upgrade is nearly free; your cell phone was probably upgraded over the air by your cellular provider at least once and you may not even know about it.

High RPM, cold unlubricated start sounds like trouble to me.

I'm not a specialist on engines, but here is what I believe to know. The RPM as such is not a problem for the engine as long as the oil pressure is present. But if you use the classical starter, it's too slow and the oil pressure hasn't built up yet. A classical engine starts without oil, but a hybrid's ICE starts at full oil pressure.

When you start a standard car the starter motor cannot spin the engine even to the idling speed; it can't spin it more than 10% of that speed. This means that you have very few ignitions per second - and accordingly low power output. That power output is supposed to accelerate the engine to the idle speed. This is hard to do if the engine is cold - or if it is very cold, as in winter. Starting at faster RPM gives you more power right off the bat.

Another reason is that as the classical engine is started it self-accelerates. There is no control over the process; it is unstable and it is self-governing. This results in an aggressive spin-up while the oil pressure (that is produced by the same engine) is still low. This is not helping. In a hybrid like Prius the engine speed is ramped up by the M/G, under control. Then the ignition is enabled and the engine starts running on its own... at the same speed! There are no jolts or anything. But that's not all. The car starts drawing power from the engine - and that is done at the same speed that the engine is currently operating. This is possible because of this complex electric CVT. As result the engine is started smoothly. This makes engine's life much easier.

There are other advantages. For example, a classical car has a moving gear that connects the starter engine. This engagement takes time, and when your battery gets low it starts failing first. A hybrid engine has a permanent connection to its "starter," and that motor is powerful enough to start anything in any weather, backed by the main traction battery.

By the way, Prius could start the engine at any speed, all the way down to zero RPM if that would be of any advantage. (They could even spin it backwards; that's a side effect of the reverse "gear.") But Toyota engineers picked the starting speed that is very close to the idle speed. I'm sure they know a bit more about cars than we both combined :-)

Or, for example, consider the electrical issues. The classical starter motor, however weak in comparison to the ICE, still presents a massive electrical load. When you start the car all lights dim. The battery is connected with thick cables, but that's not enough. There are resistances that you cannot remove (such as the internal resistance of the battery, which increases as the battery ages.) The 12V battery is an obsolete starting technology; it's with us only because it is legacy. No electrical engineer today would do it this way - a low voltage battery, thick copper cables, hundreds of amperes of current, a primitive DC brushed motor - you must be kidding. We have technology today to do whatever we want with our electric machines; a simplistic series machine is more than a century old, and it is not used pretty much anywhere else for many reasons (reason #1: contacts are bad for you.) Your computer has fans that use far more advanced motors, for example (they have electronic controllers, and integrated tachometers, they have no brushes and they are EMI-clean.)

As you can see, a gas-electric hybrid is nothing but a seriously improved classical car. However you can always go too far and invent a pure EV; that does not work yet because our technology hasn't progressed past burning of hydrocarbons. It's very hard to invent something that is as efficient as gasoline. A molecule of gasoline contains a lot of energy; no battery can match it so far. Probably a chemical battery cannot even exist that comes close; I'm not a chemist, but there are certain laws of nature that define how much energy you can store in a molecule. In my personal opinion we need to go past chemistry directly to nuclear physics to get an energy source that is comparable to a tank of gas. This is why I'm so skeptical about modern EVs (but not hybrids.) In my opinion, if a car costs far more than the average it must present very good reasons why the customer should go out and buy it. The more the cost difference is, the better arguments should the car have. Hybrids like Prius and Honda Insight and a few other are kind of there. Plenty of people buy them, even though Obama never sat in a Prius. However few people buy Volt and Leaf because for their sky-high prices those cars should fly. But they don't. They are less useful than a plain vanilla, beaten up, $2K Honda Accord because they can leave you stranded. That's the worst offense that any car can commit. Well, Volt will not leave you stranded because the car carries its own gas-driven generator :-) An EV and a little trailer to charge it :-)

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