In Search Of The Flux Capacitor

Electric cars go back to the future

“The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine
into a car, why not do it with some style?”

- Doc Brown (inventor), 1985

[For a slideshow presentation, click here]

By Daniel Simpson

LONDON, 14 July – Once upon a time, most electric vehicles were milk floats or golf carts and the future was a coffin called the Sinclair C5. It all looked so much brighter 100 years ago.

Back at the dawn of motoring, before cheap oil from Texas and Henry Ford’s production lines, half the cars in America were electric. There was no need to wrestle with hand cranks or gear sticks and nowhere much to drive except round town. By the turn of the 20th century, New York taxis were powered by batteries, which weighed in at more than half a tonne and had to be swapped using hydraulic lifts. Then along came automatic starters, and suburbia and interstate highways. Unfettered by limits on range, and turbo-charged by plummeting prices, internal combustion engines won. Nothing much would change for generations; until now.

Having recently killed the electric car, General Motors could yet become its saviour. Its “new” kind of hybrid, called the Volt, revives an old design by Ferdinand Porsche: a petrol-driven generator that keeps the battery charged for longer trips. For wealthier drivers, the loser of a long-forgotten “battle of the currents” is reincarnate in a roadster that burns off Ferraris. Named after the marginalised genius Nikola Tesla, and powered by a polyphase induction motor that Tesla pioneered, this Lotus knockoff packed with laptop batteries redefines what electric cars can do, travelling 200-plus miles on a single charge. But a price tag just shy of six figures means it won’t change the mass market yet. Absent cheaper, lighter and more powerful battery packs, the only affordable options have been bug-like, low-range and slower than buses, though they’re nippy enough to whirr past cyclists at the lights.

The next few years could change everything, however. Britain’s prime minister says he wants to see the back of pure-petroleum models by 2020, with government incentives to support a switchover. The newest of the pure electric models are getting faster and going further, with 100 mile ranges on the horizon, at less outlandish prices. While some expect battery capacity to double in the coming decade, the weight of cells could also halve, making high-end performance more affordable. The soaring price of oil is focusing minds, both on its scarcity and environmental impact, and above all on the cost of filling a tank. After decades of dependence on this concentrated and user-friendly fuel, Europe’s biggest carmakers now say the future is electric, and their Japanese counterparts agree, as increasingly do die-hards in Detroit. Like GM, the highest profile convert in America, they’re mostly planning hybrids that can plug into the regular mains, but still hold range-extending tanks of liquid fuel.

For now, that’s the variant that drivers seem likeliest to buy, apart from those who run multiple vehicles. Who would trade in the family saloon for a two-seater smaller than a Smart, but which still costs more than a regular hatchback, let alone a £130,000 sports car, like the soon-to-be-produced electric Lightning, or its marginally cheaper Tesla rival? Even plug-ins like the Volt, which GM plans to unveil at its centenary in September, are being touted at over $40,000, which would probably mean making them at a loss. To some, they’re the worst of all worlds: substandard electric cars that still burn fossil fuels. To others, they’re a step in the right direction, cutting emissions and running costs, and developing the infrastructure needed for wholesale electrification, from charging points and (ideally renewable) power sources to subsidies and financing models that offset the higher up-front prices for battery vehicles.

Though less encumbered these days by the “burden of history”, to cite the title of an academic survey of Big Oil and big automakers and their coinciding interest, the “better battery bugaboo” still stalks the industry. Whatever the reality, success is always perceived to be “just around the corner”, says the author of this study, David Kirsch, and claims of breakthroughs should be scrutinised sceptically. That said, radical changes seem to have started, in the minds of consumers as much as elsewhere. Their readiness to go electric, even with the existing limitations, is harder than ever to predict, as is the staying power of hybrids in the longer term. It’s also far from clear who’ll profit. Investment is pouring into drive-train and battery development, but many carmakers feel hamstrung by lack of funds. There are also potential bottlenecks in supplies of parts and raw materials, were production to ramp up significantly. Now that the big manufacturers are getting serious about plug-in hybrids, and the pure electric future they seem to presage, can startups realistically compete?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” says Martin Eberhard, who founded Tesla Motors, but was forced out in a bust-up with its principal backer, the Silicon Valley financier Elon Musk. “The public’s position on cars is right now in flux, and it will be in flux for the next five or ten years,” Eberhard says. “Five years ago the guy who drove a Prius was a weirdo; today that’s very mainstream and the guy who has the SUV is wondering how the hell he’s going to unload it.” None of this guarantees a rosy future for anyone, however. Forget the forecasts of bankruptcy at General Motors, which is offloading Hummers and anything else it can flog. The same fate could befall the industry’s new darlings, or up and coming wannabes, like the Norwegian-based Th!nk, which started life as an offshoot of Ford and now boasts a Porsche-designed prototype called an Ox. “Th!nk is, of course, like Tesla, a fledgling company and the viability of both is certainly questionable,” Eberhard warns. “There’s lots of opportunities to screw up, and I’ve seen both companies screw up a few times already.”

I AM THE RESURRECTION

Tesla’s mission from the outset was to sidestep the traps of recent history. Almost every new venture since the 70s had tried, according to Eberhard, to achieve too much. They tended to be run by idealists who wanted to make cars that met everyone’s needs, but wound up satisfying no one. Tesla’s objective was different, says Glyn Owen, the company’s general manager and a long-time employee of Lotus, whose factory and expertise are vital Tesla components. “This car is partly a marketing tool,” he says, during a tour of the production line, where squat Tesla Roadsters are built alongside the Lotus Elises from which their chassis derives. “It’s proof of a concept and a way of generating interest,” Owen says. “But to really make a difference, we have to scale up drastically.” For that, he concedes, the company needs a partner. It’s already putting out feelers, trading battery expertise with Daimler, and Eberhard talks about Tata as a possible predator. For now, production languishes in single figures, after problems with carbon-fibre, a doomed two-gear transmission and modifications to fit a bigger motor, along with other tweaks like a lowered doorsill to accommodate Elon Musk’s wife.

Nevertheless, the impact has already been huge, both in the media and on “Maximum Bob” Lutz, a cigar-chomping former fighter pilot, who was hired at the start of the decade to revive the fortunes of General Motors. “When Tesla announced they were building a car,” Lutz says, “that kind of tore it for me. I thought, ‘If some little West Coast outfit can do this, we can no longer stand by.’” The Volt concept that GM paraded at last year’s Detroit motor show was a revelation: this year there were dozens like it, and companies from Volkswagen to Mercedes are all talking about launching plug-ins in 2010, when GM’s Volt is due to debut. “Some people said it was a fake, a PR exercise,” Lutz reflects. “We said: ‘We’ll show ‘em’.”

Sceptics had good grounds to be suspicious. Three years earlier, GM crushed an entire fleet of electric cars in the Arizona desert, ignoring pleas from drivers to let them buy them. “What we really need,” fumed a Business Week reader last month, in response to a gushing feature about GM’s plans, “are small electric vehicles that can go 50 to 60 miles on an overnight charge.” For a handful of years, however, that’s exactly what GM manufactured. Its legendary EV1s might have looked like Ford Capris with the back end of an old-school Citroen. But by the time that GM scrapped them, their nickel-metal hydride batteries were capable of triple-digit mileage. The car, based on a prototype called the Impact, was descended from a model that GM built to win a solar-powered race across Australia. Before entering production, a modified EV1 set a land speed record for electric cars, notching up 183 miles per hour. The company leased out hundreds of vehicles between 1996 and the end of its testing programme in 2003. “I’m saving America,” by driving one, Tom Hanks shouted on late-night TV. Mel Gibson likened the EV1 to a Batmobile whooshing out of the Batcave, but that wasn’t enough to keep it alive. There weren’t enough buyers to make it viable, GM claimed, and no amount of pressure could convince the company otherwise, not even all the people on its waiting list.

Bosses had blown a billion dollars on “proving” electric vehicles (EVs) couldn’t work, largely to fob off Californian regulators, who seemed all too happy to collude. In 2003, they in turn scrapped the mandate forcing carmakers to roll out electric models. Instead, the Air Resources Board chose to side with advocates of hydrogen fuel cells, which are widely derided as “the technology of the future… and always will be.” As if to prove that point, car company lobbyists have just watered down the watered down rules: there’s now no requirement to put fixed numbers of fuel-cell vehicles on the roads, which according to Martin Eberhard was the only reason Honda started leasing its FCX Clarity this summer.

Whatever GM’s reasons for not wanting the EV1 to succeed (and critics say much of it comes down to turkeys not voting for Christmas, whether that’s lost trade in parts, servicing and dealership, or cannibalising profitable gas-guzzlers), one look at its adverts is enough to see why it didn’t seduce car-buffs. It did nothing to refute Jay Leno’s view that most “electric cars were driven by people with earth shoes.” You could barely make out a vehicle in the EV1 print ads, let alone someone desirable draped over it, or driving it, or generally in its vicinity. Instead there were abstract layouts and taglines about the future having arrived, but no answers to the obvious questions like “how far, how fast and how much,” laments Chelsea Sexton, who worked on the EV1, then got fired when it was ditched. “Even with the anaemic marketing we had,” Sexton says, it wasn’t destined to fail. “They just had to build us more cars.” It was an ironic flashback to an earlier generation, when the Tennessee Valley Authority tried promoting electric cars in response to the 1970s oil shocks. At one point someone planned a race between Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “I realised we’d get a lot of national publicity,” says David Freeman, an adviser to the Carter administration, “but there weren’t any cars in the showrooms.” This time that wasn’t because they didn’t exist.

“GM realizes they made a serious miscalculation when they killed the EV1,” says Bill Moore, the editor of EVWorld and also an industry consultant. “The only real question is whether the Volt is too little, too late.” GM insists it isn’t, although sales goals are fairly modest: just 60,000 by 2012. Lutz is still adamant times have changed. “Within a few years we hope to be producing hundreds of thousands,” he says, calling the Volt’s plug-in concept “the reinvention of the automobile”. Even so, it’s still not top of his list of priorities: the ultimate goal is to go fully electric. Chelsea Sexton’s glad to hear it, though she’s a vocal supporter of the Volt, despite being “the last person you’d expect to be praising GM, but they are the most aggressive right now about actually doing and not just talking.” Nevertheless, if you gave her millions of dollars to spend tomorrow, she says, “I would probably invest it in batteries.”

I GOT THE POWER

Jay Leno’s voluminous garage suggests why. “I have a 1909 Baker Electric,” boasts the coiffed comedian, who’s as renowned for his car collection as his Woganesque humour. “That goes 110 miles on a single charge.” What’s more, it still works. “I have never done any maintenance,” he insists, “other than maybe greasing the wheel hubs.” To consumers reared on built-in obsolescence, to say nothing of the business plans depending on it, this can come as a shock. “You don’t do anything,” Leno repeats. “You plug it in, charge it and drive it. The motor is virtually maintenance-free.” Apart from the Tesla, which makes similar boast about servicing, there are few cars in production or in the pipeline that can match the Baker’s mileage, even if they could run it off the road. The Th!nk City, for example, due like half a dozen other mini EVs to hit U.S. tarmac by 2010, claims to get 124 miles per charge, though it would be less if you drove flat out at 60 mph.

Not much had changed in battery technology when the EV1 was launched. Its lead acid cells used 100-year-old science and although fairly effective they were heavy and far from ideal. The nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH) replacements weren’t particularly light either, but performance improved quite a bit and some Japanese cars still use something similar. Switching to lithium cells helped shrink mobile phones and the same principle delivers cars more power from less weight, although the Tesla Roadster’s half-tonne bulk in the boot does have the advantage of generating more downforce, which comes in handy when navigating tight corners. The obstacle for many years was lithium’s reactivity, which is why it can store so much energy. It’s enough to “incinerate anybody in the car,” warns Barrie Lawson of Axeon, a Dundee-based battery maker that’s joined up with Allied Vehicles to launch electric taxis in London. “That’s always been the great fear.”

In the case of the Tesla, which has passed U.S. crash tests, there are 6,831 little cells to worry about, lined up in 11 separate sheets and grounded in a gloopy substance to keep them apart. Even if one blows it won’t affect the others, the company says, so there’s nothing to worry about when driving. Even if you crash, and a battery’s broken up, an open circuit cuts its current instantly, says Barrie Lawson. Still, a spate of spontaneous laptop combustion spread panic among carmakers. Manufacturing safety checks have been tightened, and Toyota postponed plans to introduce new battery chemistry for the Prius. Lawson cautions against reading too much into this, stressing that the danger from electric parts dislodged in an accident would be “no worse than spilling a tank of petrol.” Moreover, he says, “if someone came along today and proposed that you carry this highly inflammable stuff around just with a tank with a thin steel wall around it, they would say you were crazy.”

Martin Eberhard concurs. “To me it’s actually quite amazing that you can take a relatively small car, smack it into a truck at you know, 50 or 75 miles an hour and the gasoline tank doesn’t just explode all over the place every time.” Thankfully the same seems to be true for the Tesla, although rival carmakers still make scoffing noises about the number of volatile batteries joined together. In one sense they sort of have a point: the greater the number of cells, the harder it is to ensure that they hold a full charge without them automatically defaulting to the storage capacity of the weakest in the series, which weakens further every time you load it to below maximum. “We’ve got 72 cells in our battery pack,” says Greg Starns, the head of software development at Frazer-Nash Research, another firm which plans to launch electric taxis in London this year. “And we’re doing everything we can to make that fewer.”

The problem is called equalisation and the solution a battery management system, or interface, which every EV needs to run effectively. The Tesla’s was “a huge challenge”, says Owen, though he claims it’s no longer a concern – the car will load up from its wall-mounted three-phase charger in just three or four hours. Sceptics crunching these numbers say that it might take more than five times longer, at best, using a regular plug socket, but Tesla says an overnight charge is still doable. Nevertheless, this battery set up alone costs between $20-30,000, which is what American consumers are used to paying for a mid-range SUV. Put it in a heavier car, like Tesla’s new Model S sedan (which may turn out to be a four-door hatchback if rumours are true), and performance would suffer. Even that vehicle, due in 2010, is expected to sell for somewhere above $60,000. A mass-market model at half that price is still just the stuff of Tesla fantasy, although it’s talked about as next on the to do list.

“It all comes back to the battery,” says Bill Reinert, of Toyota’s U.S. Advanced Technology Group. “If you want to run longer and further on electric power alone, it means a bigger battery, it means charging a battery more fully and discharging it more completely. And it means provisions for cooling or ventilation in order to give the batteries longer life.” That means choosing what you want and what you’re willing to give up, in terms of space, weight and convenience as well as price. Glyn Owen expects batteries to go like microchips, though his EV version of Moore’s law is a more conservative 10-year forecast of doubled power and halved size. “There’s room for at least another doubling of capacity,” agrees Martin Eberhard, who still holds a chunk of Tesla stock, if not management responsibility for talking up the company’s prospects. Barrie Lawson isn’t convinced. “There’s nothing going to come along and make the battery half the size in the near future,” he says. “There’s no huge breakthroughs on the horizon that will make a big impact on the chemistry but there are many variations on the chemistry to optimise the battery performance.”

It’s a question of “flavours of lithium”, to use Lawson’s favoured phrase. Crudely simplified, batteries use lithium in its ionic form (which means stripping the atoms of an electron to make them positive). When the cell’s fully charged, these ions congregate around its anode, which is usually made of graphite. During use, ions migrate within the battery to the other electrode, the cathode, and negatively charged electrons pass between the two via an external circuit that drives the motor. Electrodes are where it gets interesting.

Early cathodes were made of expensive, and scarce, cobalt oxide. Manganese oxide is getting popular now, but more attention has been focused on iron phosphate, which has less of a tendency to overheat. Making lithium cobalt (shorthand for nickel cobalt aluminium cathodes) safer cut its range by 30 percent, Lawson says, so it’s all a question of balancing different priorities. Switching from carbon anodes to lithium titanate allows for faster charging at lower temperatures but available voltage drops by a third or more. Lithium iron phosphate cathodes don’t offer the same speedy charging benefits but they do allow for usage across a wider range of charge; between 10 and 100 percent of capacity, as opposed to between 30 and 70 in most batteries, to minimise the danger of side-effects. Lithium iron phosphate comes cheap and although its performance isn’t as good at lower temperatures, and isn’t always so easy to monitor, it’s the option of choice for many plug-in hybrids, including the Volt.

After five years of mugging up on batteries for Tesla, Martin Eberhard isn’t convinced. “I’m actually fairly pessimistic about lithium iron phosphate,” he says, although he expects it to be a short-lived hit. “They’re already approaching the theoretical limit of the electro-chemistry.” Lithium manganese has more potential, he argues, when you start tinkering with its crystal structure, and the surface area on which ions gather, increasing potential capacity. The key to this is nanotechnology, which can also help speed up charging times. Altairnano, whose batteries are used in the Lightning, claims it’s working towards a 10-minute charge time, from 480-volt outlets that could be placed in a roadside service station. Other researchers say it can be done even quicker, but there’s a risk of overheating. Gerbrand Ceder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs a project to find new combinations of materials that can address this problem. His team has modified a lithium iron phosphate battery to make it a quarter the average weight, and way faster to charge. “We can take all the power in or out of our battery in 10 seconds,” Ceder says. “You put that in a Prius and it accelerates like a Ferrari.”

That’s all still stuck in the lab, though perhaps not for long. What’s already in productive use is extended longevity. A123 Systems pioneered this with a battery that, as Eberhard puts it, “although lower charged, went much, much more cycles, and the rate of loss of capacity with each charge cycle was fairly low. But today, if you look at Sony’s iron phosphate, and some of the others like Sanyo, they’re already a better battery than the A123.” This is the source of his projection for manganese. “If you could take a lithium manganese cell,” he says, “and without increasing its capacity at all, just simply increase its cycle life by a factor of two, you’d have made a phenomenally good battery.” One way or another, he thinks it’s inevitable. “Capacity of batteries for the same volume and the same mass has increased historically 8 percent per year; that’s been true for 25 years now,” he says. Cost per cell has dropped in the same time frame by around five percent a year, though it’s stabilised since 2006 because of surging demand. “I’m optimistic that, over time, the batteries will get cheaper, and will get higher capacity in the same volume,” Eberhard concludes. “The venture community here in this country has been investing like crazy in battery technologies.”

Then there are design issues to consider: flat or prismatic being better for saving space (which matters more in a car than in a truck), while the winding cylindrical variant can in theory store more energy, but allows for less space between cells, decreasing its advantage. In any case prismatic batteries come in multiple forms: stacked as plates (which maximises energy), wound around like a Swiss roll (which cuts cost) or packed in a pouch (which is cheaper still but more vulnerable to damage, so has to be more densely packed). It’s all about priorities again: “The best battery for the Tesla is not the same as the best battery for the Volt,” Eberhard says. “When people say what’s the best battery, I would ask ‘for what’?”

Whatever you want to do with batteries, you’d be hard pressed to do it outside China. There are at least 100 manufacturers of lithium cells there, Lawson says, and some say more like 4,000, though most of these are just wholesale traders. “Only about half a dozen or a dozen are any good,” he says. “And there’s no loyalty in China. Everyone in that industry knows each other and they’re switching firms all the time and taking the technology with them.” All of which may help drive improvements, but you need to know where you’re buying, he cautions, having written a guide to the pitfalls. “It’s no use expecting support from any of these companies unless you turn up at their door with a multi million dollar purchase order,” this document stresses. “You will be competing for their manufacturing capacity with the world’s major battery consumers. Orders under $100,000 are a nuisance.”

Competition and capacity are tight enough to squeeze the industry’s growth prospects, just as DRAM bottlenecks once held up PC development. While some question how much lithium there is in the world, battery companies say it’s just a question of recovering more of it. “We know it’s very abundant and it’s even in the sea,” says Charles Gassenheimer, the CEO of EnerDel. “Maybe we’ll have to figure out how to extract the lithium from seawater.” Other raw materials are required in greater quantities anyway; lithium’s a relatively minor ingredient. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be problems. “If this market goes to a trillion dollars a year there will be bottlenecks,” Gassenheimer scoffs. Even the most ambitious forecasts are around a 20th of that, but a more realistic prospect does worry him. Like all the major battery makers he’s talking to all the big car companies and they all have the same question: “Can you get us scale?” To which he says: “I can’t get you scale until I build capacity,” which he can’t do “until I have a volume order,” which won’t come without proof of scale. The solution? Either “the federal government gets involved”, or “the car companies kick in some money”. Otherwise there’s a shortage in the offing, though Gassenheimer sees another reason not to worry: he thinks conversion of the world’s cars to electric power will take at least 30 years.

PLUG-IN OR COP OUT?

For all the attention lavished on Toyota’s Prius, it’s not the world’s most fuel-efficient car. “I get better mileage in my M5 BMW diesel,” says Greg Starns at Frazer-Nash. Until now, the better-performing diesels have seemed the best bet for drivers anxious to cut costs, yet concerned about limited EV range. Rising prices for liquid fuels have changed the equation, if not yet driving habits, which means people still prize freedom over weaning themselves off petroleum. “The U.S. is 3,000 miles wide with huge tracts of sparsely populated land,” notes Sherry Boschert, a journalist and pro-EV activist, who’s notched up 66,000 gasoline-free miles in the past six years. What’s more, “our mass transit system sucks.” Since most car-owners live in suburbs, their vehicle is essential to daily life. Yet statistics show they don’t drive as far as they sometimes think. Existing EV range is adequate for around four out of five trips. A Department of Transport survey in the 1990s found that half of all motorists in the U.S. travelled 25 miles a day or less, and 80 percent drove fewer than 50, well within the single-charge range of the earliest General Motors EV1. Last year, the average U.S. trip was 9.9 miles and the average daily drive was 32.7. In Britain, the figures were more like 8 miles a trip and 10 a day. The median (which isn’t published) would probably be even lower still.

“The mass market won’t always be wary of full EVs,” says Boschert, who’s written a book to entice people to buy one and formed a campaign group to lobby companies and lawmakers. “That wariness is more a figment of the automakers’ imagination than reality. Tons of people would buy an EV right now if one was available. We hear from them all the time.” Some of them have already, and they report fascinated interest from passers by. Todd Poelstra’s all-electric Zap Xebra has a number of obvious drawbacks: it only does a couple of dozen miles and the top speed is limited to 25 mph in many states, because it’s technically classed as a motorbike. Oh, and it’s only got three wheels. And it comes in “look at me” lime green, which mightn’t be quite so bad if it didn’t look so much like a 21st century Reliant Robin. Yet when someone passes him in the car park shouting “Right on!”, Poelstra tells an American radio reporter that this sort of thing is a daily occurrence. “We’ve had our picture taken countless times,” he says. “Every time we park, somebody wants to talk about the car.”

Fewer than 1,000 Zap Xebras have been sold in the U.S., which is roughly the number of EVs trundling around London, most of which are Indian-made Reva G-Wizes, though there’s increasing competition from the more attractive Mega (made by a company called No Internal Combustion Engine: NICE). From roughly $12,000 for the Xebra to £12,000 for the Mega, independence from fossil fuels is both affordable and available in multiple options (assuming you don’t burn coal or natural gas to power the grid that charges them). But you’d have to pay as much again for a battery that goes 100 miles, which is partly why people are holding off.

Yet offer them the chance to do most of their trips on electric power, without removing the option of filling up for longer journeys, and everything changes drastically. “This is not a pipe dream,” says MIT’s Gerbrand Ceder. “The battery technology is there to make this happen. GM, Volvo, Mercedes, Nissan – they’re all working on it.” Companies are falling all over each other to talk up plug-ins and with fuel economy requirements getting tougher, it’s little surprise that one survey (by Roland Berger and J.D. Power) forecasts half of Europe’s cars could be hybrids by as early as 2015 (though what proportion would be plug-ins isn’t clear). This outcome is no less likely across the Atlantic, even if later. “The plug-in concept is so important because driving patterns in the U.S. support it,” Ceder says. “With even a 20-mile range, you can do 50 percent of all your driving.”

From an efficiency point of view it’s a no-brainer. While there’s no liquid fuel that’s as densely packed as oil or LPG, the internal combustion engine’s bad at exploiting it. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, less than 20 percent of petrol propels a vehicle; the rest just gets wasted as heat. In electric motors, by contrast, 86 percent of the energy converts to power. Traditional hybrids like the Prius save fuel by shutting down the engine when stationary or moving slowly, recovering energy for future use through regenerative braking (which captures kinetic energy from the engine, turning it into a generator as it slows), and reducing the engine’s size to run it more efficiently by combining it with computer-controlled battery power.

Plug-in hybrids are different: they run on batteries all the time if you stay in range, which most drivers already would on their daily commute (assuming the cars live up to promises). Effectively, they’re EVs with insurance, which is why the verdict of Paul Nieuwenhuis, an automotive expert at Cardiff business school, is almost universal: “The plug-in hybrid will be the winner,” he says, “although I also forecast an increase in battery EV demand.” Others expect the former to fuel the latter. “Give the worldwide consumer five years of driving a plug-in hybrid,” says Martin Eberhard, “and some of those drivers will realise that they actually never use the range extender, and the next car they buy won’t need it.”

Not everyone’s so sure, including some major manufacturers. No one’s actually built a plug-in hybrid yet; the concept only exists because of home-made hacks for existing cars like Priuses. The fundamental drawback is fitting two substandard drive-trains to every vehicle: an engine that no longer works at peak efficiency (the aim of the Prius-style hybrid) and a battery that can’t take you far enough to ditch the engine. That means lugging it around without using it most of the time, along with all the additional bits of kit to run it smoothly. And when you’re forced to switch to petrol you’ve got a useless electric powertrain weighing you down and an under-capacity engine having to pull it.

Although campaigners have slated Ford for pouring scorn on plug-in hybrids, it’s probably just being franker than most of its rivals. “We are working on the technology,” a spokesman says, “but we have to determine: how well does this hold up in the real world?” Defending the decision to hold off for the time being (a launch “between 2012 and 2020” is the closest the company gets to making a commitment), Ford’s manager in charge of energy storage is even blunter: “If customers aren’t buying them, we’re not making them,” Ted Miller says. “If there’s going to be a true plug-in hybrid market, we’re going to be there. It’s just that that’s a huge commitment to actually go to production.”

This is the sort of thing weighing on Sherry Boschert when she asks if carmakers will really deliver. “I’d like to believe they’ll give us plug-in vehicles, but until I can go out and buy one, I’m still sceptical.” Another campaigner is more forthright. “The corporations are sitting, wishing this whole friggin’ thing to go away,” says this publicity-hungry activist. But who is he? Ralph Nader? Michael Moore? No. It’s the former Chairman of Intel, Andy Grove, who says this reflects “exactly what the computer companies’ attitude was to personal computers.” Based on this analogy, by which hobbyists have to show bosses there’s really a market, Grove is lobbying the government to help retrofit America’s least fuel-efficient vehicles, starting with 80 million gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs. Unsurprisingly, the companies remain to be convinced, not least GM, which sells many thousands of these vehicles every year and spends millions on dreaming up new ones, though they never seem to get much more efficient. “We strongly discourage consumers from retrofitting vehicles,” a GM spokesman says. Fancy that.

Nevertheless, it’s largely making the Volt because of what conversions have proved can be done. It’s not quite as simple as buying a generator and bolting it onto your Prius, but it’s not all that far off: the first plug-in “Prius+” was developed by two Californian activists, who, in the words of one, Felix Kramer, simply “figured out how to hack it.” There was an unmarked button on the car that allowed drivers to switch to all-electric mode for the car’s one-mile capacity, but it was disabled on U.S. models because of complicated emissions-testing rules. Crowdsourcing help from dozens of engineers over the Internet, Kramer and his friend Ron Gremban retrofitted a car to go 10 miles on nothing but battery power. “It’s not that big a leap in technology,” one of their backers said at the time. “This isn’t rocket science.” The trouble is that you invalidate the warranty, and the liability for meeting emissions laws. Undeterred, companies in the U.S. now offer retrofits for all kinds of models, but a pure electric conversion can cost over $30,000. Even a plug-in hybrid kit, available from A123, will set you back $10,000. In the UK, a company called Liberty offers revamped Range Rovers for £95,000, with promised range of 200 miles and performance on a par with standard versions.

It all gets positive media coverage, but plenty in the industry aren’t so sure. “You can’t make a real company out of converting somebody’s cars,” Martin Eberhard says, mainly because of the liability implications. “In this country, an automotive manufacturer is required by law to warrant the entire emission system of the car for 100,000 miles, and it’s probably the same where you are. And once you change the electronics, the computer that’s controlling all that, Toyota is off the hook, and suddenly you are on the hook; you are liable. So, you can do that for your car and mine and your friends’, but if you make a business out of it, you’ve got a problem.” Whether this is really true remains to be seen. If not, it could cannibalise demand.

SHYSTERS AND VAPOURWARE

Since leaving Tesla earlier this year, Eberhard’s been weighing up three business plans. One seems to involve doing as he thinks Tesla ought to: going into business with a mainstream carmaker. The next is to help make the grid work more intelligently to meet demand from plug-ins. But his favourite seems to be another way of helping hybrids take off: developing a solid oxide fuel cell. Rather than using a three-cylinder engine to turn liquid fuel into electricity, this device does it electrochemically, which makes the process more efficient. There’s a drawback, however: it has to run at almost 100 degrees Celsius, so you need a way to keep it cool. “That’s not insurmountable,” Eberhard says, but it’s yet to be surmounted.

The world of EVs and hybrids is awash with new ideas and expectations, many of which may not amount to much. Spotting the ones that will is much easier said than done, particularly in the field of energy storage. But whichever technological variant takes off, and whatever the incentives that back it, the batteries and power management systems will be similar, at least for now. One company that aims to change that is the Canadian carmaker ZENN (which stands for Zero Emissions No Noise). Its cityZENN model, an upgrade supposedly capable of 80 mph and 250 miles of range, is due to launch at the end of next year, ideally powered by something called an EEStor. This “game-changing energy storage technology is in the advanced stages of commercialisation,” the company claims, but no one’s actually verified that yet. Nevertheless, ZENN’s raving about its supercapacitor as “THE key enabler of many clean technologies today: renewable energy; grid load-levelling; consumer electronics and security applications.” It’s like a battery, but it isn’t, and if it delivers on the hype, five-minute charges could be with us within months. ZENN owns shares in EEStor, and is first in line to use it, but considering the supposed potential, the fact it hasn’t upped its stake suggests things aren’t quite so simple. If they’re not, the cityZENN would launch powered by lithium-ion.

Capacitors are just glorified batteries, but they’re touted with the sort of reverence that used to be reserved for hydrogen. As for that great hope, the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, has six words for anyone who thinks it still should be: “Forget hydrogen, forget hydrogen, forget hydrogen,” he says. It’s easy to see why. One of the major drawbacks is hydrogen’s density. Although it’s got phenomenal amounts of energy per unit mass, it has to be compressed to reach manageable volumes, a process which gobbles up energy in its own right. And even then it’s only going to take you 100 miles or so as things stand, which is no further than a decent battery pack. Boost the storage capacity and everything changes, but this has been the story for 30 years now, and it’s always still not quite around the corner. That pretty much sums things up for drivers too: there’s no nationwide hydrogen distribution network to fill up with. And even if there were, which would mean building many thousands of outlets, where would you actually get the hydrogen from? Whether it’s water or natural gas, you’ve got to use a lot of energy to do it, which is why so many are sceptical – compared to how people talked it up just a few years back, hydrogen’s come down to earth with quite a bump.

These days, it’s being laughed off like the water car, which is a bit rich because hydrogen’s problem is commercial, as opposed to physical, viability. And even then, says Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, there’s still a transitional role for fuel-cell hybrids. Others aren’t so sure, and they’re not at all convinced by Honda’s efforts to prove Lovins right, especially its decision to give an FCX Clarity to Jamie Lee Curtis. “If Honda is desperate enough to foist an uncertain technology on a celeb who no longer attracts the limelight,” says Top Gear journalist Matt Master, “it illustrates one unhappy fact: whatever our transport solutions are, they are still far enough off that absolutely everyone is hedging their bets.”

One man who isn’t is Shai Agassi, until recently a high-flier at the software company SAP, until someone challenged him to put up or shut up about electrifying transport. In response, he quit his job and set up Project Better Place, a venture in search of a new name as well as a new kind of business model. To start with, he dismissed conventional wisdom. The problem’s not with lack of battery capacity, he argues, “the Achilles heel is a lack of infrastructure.” The reason people don’t buy electric cars is because they don’t see how they can charge them as easily as filling up a tank with petrol. After ruling out hydrogen and biofuels as alternatives that could scale “to a point where you can drive 700 million cars off it,” he settled on building charging points; hundreds of thousands of them. And to get around the issue of charging time he has another radically simple solution: swapping batteries like the old New York taxis did.

“I think it’s a bad idea,” says Martin Eberhard. “The technology for batteries is a very, very fast moving arena still and making swappable batteries forces standardisation. It’s too early. The technology is changing, the voltage of the battery, the charging rate of the battery, the charging technique of the battery, the physical size of the battery, the inner connector of the battery, communications with the battery, all of these are moving targets.” So when would it make sense to think about standardising, in his view? “Just about the time that swapping batteries doesn’t make sense anymore because the battery packs are big enough.”

Agassi begs to differ. “We need standards,” he says. “Not in terms of size, but with connectors.” Even so, he’s designed his swap stations, which can supposedly switch a battery in less than five minutes, to have easily replaceable connectors in case standardisation fails. The next problem Eberhard highlights is harder to deal with. The expensive thing with a battery pack is the container, not the contents, and every time you use the container it wears down slightly, so a battery back that’s been used a hundred times will offer shorter range than one that’s never been used. “Your car’s performance will radically vary depending on what battery pack is in it at that particular moment,” he says. “If you own it, you’re much more likely to take care of it,” but that’s the opposite of the Project Better Place pricing model.

Instead buyers will be paying for their cars like mobile phones, which is Agassi’s way of defraying the punitive up-front cost of buying an EV. “The more you commit, the more of a rebate you get on day one,” he says. “You’d pay a certain fee for miles but the cost of the car would be subsidised and in some cases you’d be getting it for free.” It’s easy to grasp and will make immediate sense to most consumers, but Eberhard thinks it stinks. “It will just piss off the buyer,” he argues, because most pay for electricity already, and they’ll mostly charge their vehicles at home. “If I put solar panels on my roof,” adds Eberhard, who’s done just that and says he generates enough power to charge a car each night and run his home, “it’s my goddamn electricity, I’ll go and put it in my car, I don’t feel I should pay him anything.”

Perhaps there’s room for both, argues EVWorld’s Bill Moore, who’s just commissioned a study which found PV panels and EVs to be a “very affordable” match. “It’s the choice between renting a flat and buying a home,” he says. Different models appeal to different people, but either way some kind of subsidy is probably needed to kickstart the market. In Agassi’s case, he’s started by signing up governments, with his native Israel and similarly sized Denmark first up. He’s raised $200 million of equity for each project, with further debt issuance planned, and he expects his warchest to swell to several billion by the end of the year. Next year he aims to have 1,000 cars on Israeli roads and charging infrastructure in place. Production cars, built by Renault-Nissan, will follow in 2010, with mass production in 2011 and a target of three-quarters of a million vehicles. Agassi says Renault has promised him as many cars as he can take, and they’re custom building them to make battery swaps simple.

Even so, Eberhard’s not convinced. Tesla’s battery pack was “built to squeeze in the space.” When designing the Roadster, “we figured out all the available volume for the battery pack and then we basically filled it like water with battery,” he says. “The battery pack is the single most expensive and most dangerous component of the car, no question about it. And for that reason, it needs to be very rigidly installed in the car so that bad things don’t happen in a crash. Rigidly installed and highly protected. And the question is, you know, can they make a system like that, that can be realistically removed and replaced in a reasonable amount of time, and where I can ensure that even with idiots at the changing stations that it gets installed correctly every time?” And there’s more. “The hardest part for us in making our car pass crash standards was making a the battery pack safe, no question about it. We were beefing up the brackets and holders so they would stay put and do what they are supposed to do in a crash and if you add on top of that the requirement that it can be quickly and easily removed and replaced, it’s tricky.”

Still, there are other elements to Agassi’s plan. “We want to spur an industry that will continue to build green power plants,” he says. In Denmark, for example, he’s teamed up with a wind company to provide the energy his cars will draw from the grid. And he also wants to use them to make it more efficient. “50,000 cars represent a gigawatt of added standby power,” he says. That means extra generation capacity at peak demand. Software will also play a part in regulating the energy flow into cars, which will pull into car parks with charging points, as well as the other options for refuelling. “You’re not going to see all the cars start charging because they all got to work at the same time,” he says. Instead the system will learn from your driving patterns how urgently you need power, minimising the strain on resources.

This “smart grid” technology is essential if plug-ins aren’t to wreak havoc, and managing cars could turn out to be its killer application, though DC networks linking solar and wind farms would come a close second. Cars themselves could be fitted with solar panels too: Toyota is doing this on the Prius, though at present they’re just a gimmick to charge your iPod. For now things are manageable enough, thinks Martin Eberhard, though there’s plenty of investment required. “With no upgrade to the grid whatsoever,” he says, “we could have roughly 40 percent of American drivers powering their cars from electricity that is charged at night.” His new business plan focuses on a vital question for the future: how to prioritise which appliances draw power when. There’s an enormous amount you can teach the grid about what’s needed where and that will be the key to making it work on clean energy. Otherwise there’ll be a need to keep expanding capacity exponentially, since the grid has to be able to deal with peak demand, which for now would mean burning more fossil fuels. Even if it did though, that would still generate fewer emissions than burning them in petrol engines.

TORQUE OF THE TOWN

The bigger concern for car buyers, however, is still where they’ll be able to charge up, as well as how long it might take. With plug-ins, a label that covers pure EVs as well as hybrids, their big advantage is also the biggest headache. You get to plug them in. But you have to plug them in. And if you don’t have a garage at home, this is a serious problem: hanging extension cables out the windows of apartment blocks isn’t really a viable option. Eberhard says this is simple to resolve, as does Agassi, who’s about to confront it: you just need to tear up the streets and install vast numbers of charging pylons. Elektromotive, a Brighton-based company which maintains a couple of dozen of them in London, hasn’t really considered how to meet demand for more yet. And nor has the government, despite its call for a switch to plug-ins. But the problem’s not a big one in theory, provided someone stumps up the cash.

It’s unlikely, however, that a current perk for Londoners will survive. On payment of a £75 fee, which gets you a connection cable worth almost as much, and two keys to use the “JuicePoints” run by Westminster Council, EV drivers can charge up as often as they like for no fee. Since U.S. drivers say it costs them $10 a month to run low-speed cars, this isn’t all that great a deal in the end. But one that certainly was has been prematurely axed, at least from the perspective of EV campaigners. From next year, there’ll be no more free parking for the few hundred electric cars that enter the City of London each day, although other boroughs will continue to offer it. The freebie was “too popular,” officials say, which is an odd way of putting it given the onus on councils to cut pollution and promote more sustainable transport. But there’s still no road tax to pay, or daily congestion charge, and if you roll into Mayfair every morning, the savings on offer at Park Lane Masterpark mean it all adds up to a car paying for itself inside a year. This does mean that most buyers are well off, however, since they’re the ones who gain most from the current incentives. “These are usually someone’s third or fourth vehicle,” says Izzy Wells of NICE. “By and large it’s people working for hedge funds, that sort of thing. They’re doing it for financial reasons, not environmental ones.”

On a bigger scale, state subsidies can do more than help the environment. They could also wean America off foreign oil, and the resource-related conflict this entails, were either to be a priority for policymakers. Agassi says they should be. By his calculation, investing a sixth of a country’s oil imports in EV infrastructure makes mass electrification viable. In the U.S. case that would be $100 billion. The cost of generating 50 years of renewable power for 200 million cars would be $500 billion, he estimates, which means half a century of clean-conscience driving for the cost of one year’s imported crude. It’s certainly a catchy pitch. For now the Chinese are making the running, banning petrol motorbikes from several cities. Perhaps that will catch on quicker, though a plan to slap higher charges on the most polluting cars in London seems to have died before coming to life. A consortium of lobbyists led by Porsche has succeeded in getting the proposal quashed.

Since most of the EVs in cities are still low-speed “neighbourhood” cars, wouldn’t it make more sense to use the torque power of electric motors to drive trucks? Emissions from surface transport are up to a quarter of the Western world’s total, and much of that’s down to road haulage. The problem, as ever, is one of batteries: the weight and volume required for freight transport would be prohibitive, as well as uneconomic, though as prices drop in the coming years this ought to change. There is a growing market for mid-sized trucks, produced by Modec and Smith Electric in the UK, although the latter seems to have run into difficulties. The shares of its parent, Tanfield Group, lost 97 percent of their value the other week. A drop-off in orders caused the company to shelve plans for a dedicated EV factory and expansion into the United States. “The enquiry level and the number of new customers initiating trials are buoyant,” a spokesman said. “However we anticipate that due to the economic climate and the trading conditions our customers are experiencing, it will take longer for these trials to convert into volume orders.”

The final frontier to broach is the racetrack. After back-to-back wins for diesel-powered Audis at Le Mans, there’s talk of a diesel hybrid entering the 24-hour race soon. But what about an all-electric model? Once again it’s a battery issue, though if Shai Agassi’s “pit-stop” plan can work, it ought to be replicable with expert crews. Despite the Tesla’s zip, Glyn Owen says his company’s got nothing on its mind right now except getting its Roadster to buyers. After all the hold-ups and in-fighting, the popular “Truth About Cars” blog is already 11 posts into a series called “Tesla Death Watch”. Its latest goes straight for the jugular: “The fact that Tesla Chairman Elon Musk owns a solar power and space launch company is, at least potentially, a perfect trifecta,” it says, linking to a Newsweek story full of “co- and tri-branded crap” about power for cars that aren’t being made yet. “When Musk finally announces that Space X will be launching solar panels into orbit to beam juice to a million gen3 EVs,” bitches the author, “he’ll square the circle.” Until then, it’s all just another trip “in Tesla’s spinning teacups.”

Hence Owen’s reticence about gearing up for racing, which is a shame, because the Roadster’s like a rollercoaster with stabilisers, even in its abortive twin-speed version. That ships locked in top gear, and starved of torque (though all seven of the people who own one can trade them in for single-speed models when they finally leave the factory), but it still shifts fast enough to mess up your face, even if you don’t prang a passing farmhand. Round Norfolk’s rolling lanes, I’m far too terrified to let rip towards its top speed, although there are some whippy overtaking manoeuvres that get Owen clutching his doorhandle. Braving the A11, we’re hampered by the sudden appearance of a police car, which gets me easing off excessively on the gas, still marvelling that we’re in the same gear I used to ease around the car park. It’s like having a dimmer switch instead of an accelerator. The rev counter’s utterly superfluous though. First, I defy anyone to red-line it. And, more importantly, it just mirrors the speedometer, which by now has caught Owen’s attention. “Step on it a bit,” he urges. “You’ve got a lorry trying to pass you.”

“In the real world,” mused Jay Leno, after his own trip in Tesla’s “proper sports car”, “most of the fun is between 40 and 80 mph, which is where you put your foot on it.” I try that again, and feel like a schoolboy strapped to a bomb. Fast cars really aren’t my thing, though I drive slow ones like a homicidal maniac. Still, I’m inclined to agree with Leno: “The Tesla shows sports cars can be electrifying. The sports car needn’t die once oil runs out.” To my amazement he even goes further. “If you dropped somebody in from another planet and said, this one with the petrol engine or this one with an electric motor, well, they’d probably say the Tesla.” In which case, why isn’t he saying so on Top Gear, giving Clarkson what for and his Russian fans serious eye candy? Perhaps that will soon be upon us.

The shifts in the past couple of years have been seismic. Though both Tesla and the Volt have hogged the headlines, there are many, many others doing similar things. Subaru, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Think, Tesla, and a dozen or so smaller start-ups are all launching all-electric vehicles in the next 12 to 48 months. Some of those also plan plug-in hybrids, and in VW’s case the German state might also get closely involved. But for all the recent buzz, EV’s still don’t get much traction with proper petrolheads. Lewis Hamilton says he’d drive an electric car, “but I don’t feel I particularly need to go out and buy one.” As for winning an electric Grand Prix, you’ve got to be joking. “Motor racing is all about the sound, all about the noise, all about the smell of the fuel – all about the whole atmosphere,” Hamilton says. “If you have electric cars you won’t even have no atmosphere.”

So where does this leave us? In the midst of a paradigm shift, says Bill Moore, whose editorship of EVWorld has taken him from fringe crank status to mainstream auto industry consultancy. “For the next 20 years,” he concludes, “EVs are going to still be expensive things that only the rich can afford,” though he hopes to see people prove him wrong. In the meantime, the average driver’s habits will have to change, using scooters for errands instead of cars, and bicycles or legs for shorter trips. “Then one day,” Moore predicts, “someone will blow the whole thing wide open by inventing the equivalent of the Model T.”

This time round, that’s less likely to be a vehicle than a pricing plan, a charging network or the battery that changes what’s possible, even if it can’t deliver 1.21 gigawatts of time travel.