A Japanese trade fair shows the motor industry is steering with extreme caution towards new fuel, writes MICHAEL McALEER
LAST DECEMBER Fiat Group chief executive Sergio Marchionne predicted that by the end of this global recession only six car firms would stand tall in the mainstream market – the others would have gone to the scrapyard. It seems a plausible argument, particularly as his statement coincided with the former goliaths of the US car industry, General Motors and Chrysler, seeking bankruptcy protection.
Yet, not everyone agrees with his global consolidation model. Toyota’s recently appointed president, Akio Toyoda, believes it ignores the numerous electric car start-ups in the market. Speaking at the opening of the Tokyo Motor Show last week, he said the industry is changing, but not simply through consolidation. The advent of the electric car may well herald several new car giants in the future.
After a century of independent transportation courtesy of the oil-burning internal combustion engine, a new source of energy is required for the industry in the long term. Car firms have dabbled in alternatives for several years. Now they are gambling on an electric future. Later this week, ESB chief executive Padraig McManus will join his European counterparts in presenting to the European Commission an infrastructure model designed to support the supply of electricity to the mainstream vehicle market across the Continent. It’s a major advance in the delivery of the Government target for 10 per cent of our vehicle fleet to be electrically powered by 2020. That means 230,000 electric vehicles on our roads within the next 11 years.
It’s an ambitious goal, considering that most of the mainstream brands don’t have any such vehicles on sale at the moment, and seem unlikely to offer them until 2011 at the earliest. There are several small electric cars for sale here, but the scale of their operations pale in comparison to the car giants. They’re not really in a position to service the mainstream market in terms of volume.
At the Tokyo Motor Show, every stand boasted some form of plug-in electric concept. Whatever sleek new metal was on show invariably came with an electric power lead attached. Yet, before the dream is realised on dealer forecourts, some significant hurdles need to be overcome. The issue of creating a plug-in infrastructure is only one.
The greatest limitation holding up electric cars remains their battery range. Using the latest lithium-ion batteries, most of the advanced electric concept cars on test tracks today are still only capable of delivering on average 70km on a single charge – one-tenth of the distance you get in an average family car between refuelling. And, unlike a five-minute stopover at a filling station, recharging the batteries can take between 30 minutes (for a quick top-up) and overnight (for a full charge).
There is also the issue of cost. Lithium is a finite resource, and already under increasing demand for use in battery packs for other electric devices such as mobiles and laptops. The current car battery packs are heavy and bulky, and while car firms could increase the range with larger packs, invariably this means sacrificing space in the car. There has also been some concerns about lithium batteries overheating – one of the key reasons car firms have been loath to rush into mainstream production until they are guaranteed their expensively marketed new models won’t start smouldering when they take to the roads.
The good news is that the engineers are confident that some form of Moore’s law for computer hardware – which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months – will apply to the electric car’s development. They point to the massive advances in mobile phone and laptop computing, where battery size and range were major inhibitors in the early days of their developments. Whether these achievements will be reached within the same timeframe outlined by the Government remains to be seen. Admittedly, it’s not just our administration that believes 2020 will herald a new dawn for the electric car. Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Renault and Nissan, has a similarly ambitious timeframe for such vehicles. He has promised to have some models on sale at prices competitive with their petrol and diesel equivalents within the next two years. He plans to overcome the current cost issue surrounding the batteries by organising a system of selling the car but leasing the batteries. “At the end of its productive life inside the vehicle, our high-performance lithium-ion battery will still retain 70-80 per cent of its capacity. A second life exists for the battery as a power back-up, emergency power supply or home storage unit for electric or solar energy,” he said last week. The plan is to charge customers for the 30 per cent usage during the leasing process.
While we wait for a motoring version of Moore’s law to apply to the electric car in time for the mass sale of such vehicles and a time when one in 10 cars will be electric, not everyone is convinced a goal of 10 per cent of vehicles running solely on electricity is possible by 2020.
“Such targets seem very difficult to materialise,” says Takeshi Uchiyamada, executive vice president of Toyota. “We are often asked about what we see as the next generation of motor vehicles, but before you discuss the vehicles, you really need to decide the fuel.” The options are not only electric, but also biofuel and hydrogen. While biofuels have fallen out of favour of late, hydrogen remains a long-term potential alternative, given its better range and the similarity in terms of infrastructure to the current refuelling model for petrol and diesel. Costs and questions over safety are the main hurdles to its mainstream introduction, however.
For Toyota, the world’s largest car firm is keeping its options open. It has advocated the hybrid model for several years now, with a system that allows cars to run on either petrol or electric power, depending on the circumstances. At present, the electric power stored in the battery is generated from either the engine or resistance created during braking, and not from the mains supply. That will change in the coming years as it adds a plug-in option to its Prius model. That means owners can call upon the regular engine or a battery electric mode that’s charged both from the engine and braking, but also from the household mains.
It’s a similar approach to that being taken by General Motors, which will offer a plug-in electric family car, the Opel Ampera, in the next two years. It is powered by a lithium battery that is recharged by a small petrol engine when the household electric charge runs down. That means it can run for 60km on its plug-in charge, but 500km with the support of the small engine.
The key feature for both of these firms is that electric power is used to reduce the use of the combustion engine rather than replace it outright. For the time being at least, electric cars might well take to our streets and plug-in points may start to feature along our road networks, but the oil-burning engine will still feature in some guise. With the biggest-growing markets for car sales being China, India and increasingly Africa, the chance of introducing these buyers to electric cars largely depends on making them practical for distances longer than the short commutes in most western communities. Fossil fuels remain the easiest and most flexible option in these more demanding conditions.
After a century of evolution, the motor industry is undergoing something of a revolution in terms of its power supply. If electric power proves to be a false dawn, it will be a costly exercise for both the industry and the governments that support it with infrastructural spend.
If hydrogen proves a more viable option in the not-too-distant future, the buzz over electric vehicles may seem like a massive distraction. That could well spell the end of the road for some of the current car firms. For the car executives, investing in the right power source for future cars is proving to be the ultimate decision. It’s this decision, rather than surviving the latest recession, that will determine the number of competing brands that will drive the motor industry in the next century.
