Posted on 12/03/2012 1:55:45 AM PST by neverdem
Exactly two years ago, in November 2010, the Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn assured reporters that his auto alliance would sell half a million electric vehicles a year by the end of 2013. In 2011, it sold just short of 10,000 electrics, but in April 2012 Ghosn still claimed that the 2012 sales would double to 20,000. On November 15, he had to give up and admit that, after selling less than 7,000 vehicles, the 2012 target cannot be reached. That is just the latest in a less than electrifying saga of modern electric vehicles (this qualification is needed because more than a century ago, before the 1908 Model T, there was a similarly misplaced euphoria).
In contrast, General Motor’s (GM) Volt had a record month this October, with 2,961 vehicles sold, but that is only relatively good news. Chevrolet’s plan was to build 10,000 Volts in 2011, but actual sales that year were 7,671; in March 2012, poor sales forced the company to idle Volt production for five weeks. Sales then picked up and reached a record of 2,500 units in August (a strong month for all car sales), but by September 17 weak sales forced the company to shut down its Volt assembly plant in Detroit-Hamtramck for the second time in 2012 (for four weeks). After a strong October, the total for 2012 will surpass 20,000 vehicles — less than half of the targeted total of 45,000 cars set by GM and still only about 0.15 percent of the total estimated12.8 million vehicles sold in 2012.
And it is all rather expensive — energy consultants estimate that GM’s costs for designing, tooling, and production (but excluding all marketing) are about $80,000 for a vehicle that sells, after a rebate of $7,500, for about $32,000. Costs per vehicle will fall as the production volume goes up, but GM may face years of losses before it starts making any money on a car that was to be a game-changer. And, of course, Volt is not a true electric car; it is merely an extended-range electric vehicle with a standard gasoline engine.
And another extended-range electric vehicle, the high-end Fisker Karma, has fared much worse. Consumer Reports found the $107,000 car, developed with a $529 million loan from the U.S. government and built in Finland, is full of design flaws and did not recommend its purchase. The car’s battery failed during the Consumer Reports test drive and Fisker subsequently replaced all of its 2012 Karma batteries. Then, on October 16, the manufacturer of the substandard lithium-ion battery used in the Karma, A123 Systems, (recipient of a U.S. federal grant worth $249 million in 2009) filed for bankruptcy. And another American true electric car has not done any better: Tesla’s deliveries for 2012 were cut from 5,000 to 2,700–3,250, due to production problems.
I do not see how other major competitors can succeed where Toyota refuses to even tread.
Perhaps most tellingly, in September, just a few days before Toyota’s mini-electric eQ city car was to make its debut at the Paris Motor Show, the company announced that it was cancelling its plans to mass produce the vehicle. According to Takeshi Uchiyamada, the company’s vice-chairman, “The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge.” If a company that has been in the forefront of innovative design, high-quality production, and consumer satisfaction and that in 2012 reclaimed its title as the world’s largest carmaker (lost in the wake of the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake) comes to such a conclusion, I do not see how other major competitors can succeed where Toyota refuses to even tread. Toyota said it will concentrate instead on hybrid models, but even that has not been going well: Toyota planned to sell 40,000 plug-in hybrids in Japan this year, but fewer than 9,000 were sold by October.
Technical success of electrics comes down, most fundamentally, to batteries. The lithium-ion battery, with its many flaws, is still the only relatively lightweight commercial option and Edison’s dream of a perfect car battery is now more than a century old. Bold plans come and go: a 1980 report on the introduction of electric vehicles in the United States predicted 1–2 million units in sales by 1985 and as many 11–13 million fully electric cars by the year 2000. But by the end of 2012, the United States had about 50,000 electrics on the road, no more than 0.03 percent of all light-duty vehicles licensed to operate in the country. Undaunted, a campaigning President Obama did not repeal his 2011 State of the Union goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015.
Clearly, electric hopes never die — but electric realities keep intervening. Motor Trend’s 2013 car of the year is the Tesla Model S, which sells (depending on performance options and after a $7,500 rebate) for between $49,900 and $97,900. Ready to forecast sales of 50,000 units for next year?
Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.
Image by Darren Wamboldt / Bergman Group
And at least 75% of the Volt sales are government fleet sales.
So those should be chopped out of the counting as those aren’t in consumer hands on the roads being used but sitting in a government fleet park collecting pigeon poo.
Then you have the cars “sold” from one dealership to another to boost numbers.
Anyone know the solid numbers on either of the above?
***we will see a re-emergence of steam vehicles even if they burn cord wood before we will se an all electric utopia.***
Kind of like the old Stanley Steamer?
I remember seeing a made-for-tv movie on the life of Howard Hughes.
In one scene he has his engineers build a car run on steam, but they don’t have enough space for the pressurized steam so they place pressurized containers in the door panels.
Hughes is not happy with the design. He takes a long pipe wrench and says to the engineer,
“Think of this wrench as a Chevy heading straight for your car!”
He then throws the wrench at the steam auto door and pow! scalding steam everywhere! The occupants would have been boiled alive.
Why not just build a car that runs on “Producer gas”? The Russians used them back in WWII.
It is a wood stove, using a smothered fire that burns carbon monoxide and smoke.
Light the stove, suck off the gas, run it into the engine and it runs the piston engine.
I looked into this back when CARTER the INCOMPETENT was occupying the WH. Don’t know how it would work with today’s non-carburated autos.
***Back in the 60s & 70s, I knew several farmers who converted their pick ups to N.G.,***
Back in the 1960s and early 70s, where I worked the company ran it’s fleet of trucks on propane. It worked well, slow on the acceleration, but then the company also operated it’s own propane company for farmers so it got it’s propane at wholesale prices.
I haven’t seen a propane truck in years!
The laws of physics keep interfering with the dreams of government officials and story-book liberals.
Reading these figures of how many “Volts” have been sold, I keep wondering how many of those were bought by our goverment, whether state or federal. I recall some fed announcement of huge numbers being bought by the US, my recollection is on the order of 20,000, but that may not be accurate. I also recall that NYState announced it was purchasing some huge number, I believe in the thousand range. There is also a niggle in my brain about some cities joining the waste of taxpayer dollars...
All in all, I bet that at least half of the small number sold were bought by various governments. I have never seen one of these on the road.
“If you own an electric car, what do you do? You can’t walk somewhere and get a can of electricity to bring back to your vehicle.”
-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—
Put the battery in a wheel barrow and take it over to the electricity generating plant, wait ten hours and start back with the wheelbarrow?
“And at least 75% of the Volt sales are government fleet sales.” ... that is what I thought, too, and just wrote a comment to that effect above. I sure would love to know how many of them were bought by fed,state,and local governments...
Or shuffled from dealership to dealership and listed as a ‘sale’.
Consider automobiles using electric propulsion:
Strengths Include:
Weaknesses Include:
As the article states, the real drawback to electric vehicle acceptance in the marketplace IS THE BATTERY. Currently (no pun intended) there are some promising avenues of investigation (non-hyped ones, solid) that might get conventional lead-acid batteries to the point where a car could have a 250-300 mile range. An electric vehicle with that sort of range would largely erase the complaints of most folks, unless you were a travelling salesman. Upping the storage capacity for conventional batteries using advanced manufacturing techniques only increases the cost of the batteries in a way the manufacturer can control, as long the the batteries are not themselves made from exotic and expensive materials.
Another avenue rarely mentioned is the standardization of automobile battery packs, and a rapid way to swap them. You no doubt have many battery powered devices in your homes, using AAA, AA, C, D or other standardized sizes. You probably have electric drills and saws too. When such devices exhaust their batteries, you generally simply swap the battery quickly and continue working, while the spent batteries are either recharged or disposed of. No one caterwauls about how long it takes to recharge their electric drill (unless they fail to have a couple of packs to swap). The same thing could be done with cars, just imagine something like a "Quick Oil Change" station, where you drive your car over a pit to have your oil changed. Instead, your standard auto battery pack is removed from the bottom of the car, and a new one snapped in place, probably in about 5 minutes. This would be a comparable amount of time to filling your tank, and would be similar to swapping propane tanks, with deposits and such.
I have no problem with a free and open market working out possible solutions to these and other weaknesses to electric cars. I am not interested in the Fed Govt subsidizing them on my dime. If I wish to experiment, I will do it with my own money, and if you wish to, you should do it with yours.
The Volt is actually a very fine piece of machinery, it is just very expensive, and suitable for a narrow range of deployment. I would not buy one unless it was about 20K cheaper, and that is not about to happen any time soon.
Someone earlier commented that the Sandy victims would not be considering electric cars now. I'll play devil's advocate here and offer a counter argument:
If I were to be living in some sort of "post apocalyptic disaster" world, I might very well consider an electric vehicle, in that it would be FAR EASIER for me to rig up something to produce ELECTRICITY, then it would would be for me to try to REFINE GASOLINE. If my transportation runs on gas, I would have to find a supply of it ready made, as I could not concoct it on my own. I can however, imagine several ways to "McGuyver" a simple generator to charge my car periodically, even if slowly, so I could use it from time to time.
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Chevy Volt....a 20K car attached to a 20K 500lbs 1-gallon “gas” tank...
Full disclosure; I offer this with no opinion; it just looks cool.
Has anyone pointed out what happened to Volt sales in November?
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The nickel cadmium (NiCd) battery has memory effect, but the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery, used in such things as cordless drills, does not suffer from this effect. The lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery also does not suffer from the memory effect. It does suffer from the effects of age. Many manufacturers remain silent about this issue. After one year, whether these batteries are used or not, they will suffer a deterioration in capacity due to the development of internal resistance due to the chemical composition of the battery.
I lived in Fairbanks in the middle 70s. We had natural gas taxis and city buses back then. All of them had big colorful stickers on them to remind the driver NOT to put gasoline or diesel into them.
Why waste energy with the conversion to electric?
Just put a suitable transmission behind the turbine.
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