Could The Electric Car Save Us?

(CBS)  Let's face it: Gasoline-powered cars are a gigantic problem. They pollute, they keep us dependent on foreign oil, and when gas prices go up, they cost a fortune to drive. But what's the alternative?

The problem is, oil is found only where on earth God put it, and He happened to put a lot of it in the Middle East.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran is a correspondent for The Economist and coauthor of "Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future." He's heard the sales pitches for every solution under the sun - like ethanol derived from corn.

"I like the idea that farmers are growing energy that powers our cars," President George W. Bush said in a speech last March.

But Vaitheeswaran says that it actually requires more fossil fuels to create enough ethanol to take the place of a gallon of gasoline than the gasoline itself would need.

He has also heard about hydrogen, but says it is expensive to make and difficult to distribute.

"You can't just pull up at the Exxon station and say, 'Fill her up with hydrogen,'" he told CBS News correspondent David Pogue.

But a better solution might be ready to roll sooner than you think:

"Electric cars could be a game changer," Vaitheeswaran said.

Toyota's Prius is a half-electric car and cracked the top ten cars sold in America this summer. It's a hybrid, so it has both an electric motor and a gas engine. At low speeds, the electric motor provides all the power, you're not using any gas. When you need more power, the gas engine kicks in as well, and then when you're slowing down and braking, the power from the wheels is reclaimed and stored in the battery. All told, the Prius gets 45 to 50 miles per gallon of gas, but it is still using gas.

But the public's perception of the electric car is about to get a big makeover, and it's going to start with the Tesla electric roadster. It goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. You plug it at night, and the next day it can go 200 miles on a charge. There's no gas tank, no tailpipe, no oil changes and certainly no boredom.

Not bad for a car company that's based in Silicon Valley.

Martin Eberhard co-founded Tesla Motors with a bunch of software and engineering experts who had no car-design experience. As a result, Eberhard says they weren't held back by conventional wisdom.

"I thought we should build a car that's actually better than those gasoline cars, a car that people want to drive," he said. "So that it doesn't require some great leap of altruism on the part of everybody suddenly to break our addiction to oil."

Electric cars don't produce any pollution or greenhouse gases, but some worry that they will shift the pollution to the power plants that burn coal when making electricity.

"If you do the math, you'll find that an electric car, even if you use coal to make the electricity, produces less pollution per mile than burning gasoline in the best gasoline-powered car," Eberhard said.

But if you do a little more math, you might get a little electric-car sticker shock. This radical innovation doesn't come cheap. The Tesla starts at $98,000. At this price it compares comparably favorably with sports cars that have this kind of performance.

Actually, the Tesla handles like a sports car and can go quite fast.

It's selling fast, too. The first 570 Tesla roadsters have already sold out, and there's a one-year waiting list. Fortunately, not all Tesla Motors cars will cost so much; the roadster is just an opening move.

"With that progress, then we consider the next car," Eberhard said. "Then we look for a car that's in the $50,000 range that can seat, you know, five adults, as our next model."

So why does it take a Silicon Valley startup to reinvent the electric car? Why can't Detroit do it? Actually, it can. Bob Lutz is vice chairman for Product Development at General Motors. The Chevy Volt electric is his baby and it won't cost $100,000.

"My personal target still is to bring this car into the market at, you know, nicely below $30,000," Lutz said.

The Volt can run for 40 miles on a battery charge, which GM says is enough daily range for 82 percent of the population. But for longer trips, the Volt also has a tiny engine (either gas or ethanol, or hydrogen) that recharges the battery as you drive.

"That engine never drives the car," Lutz said. "It's not hooked up to the wheels. Think of it as a portable generator that gets your battery back up."

The car is almost an inside-out traditional hybrid. Instead of a battery helping out the gas engine, the gas engine helps out the battery.

But skeptics like Vijay Vaitheeswaran may have a hard time believing that these cars are the solutions.

"I would watch very carefully what GM actually does," he said. "The country saw a small moment of hope, you know, for electric cars for zero emission vehicles in the '90s, when California saw GM produce the most aerodynamic production car ever made. It was called the EV1. And it was very popular amongst those who could get their hands on it."

You can see the end of that sad story in the documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Filmmaker Chris Paine was the director.

"In the 1990s, California told car companies that they had to put electric cars on the road," he said. "It took about eight years for a variety of industry interests to kill these mandates. And as soon as they killed them, the car companies took the cars back and destroyed them. And people were very upset about it. In General Motors' case, they took the cars out to Arizona and they secretly crushed them all."

Today, Bob Lutz admits that crushing the EV-1s may not have been the best way to conclude that experiment.

"Now, it turns out that from a PR standpoint probably the dumbest move we ever made," Lutz said. "It was done for all the right legal reasons, but PR-wise it was dumb. So, now I'm getting e-mails saying, 'I hope you rot in hell.'"

But Lutz says that this time, GM is dead serious about the electric car.

"I mean, this car means more to me than anything else I've had anything to do with in the 42 years that I've been in the business," he said. "I think this is because it's transformational. It's all new, which is why it just truly excites us."

Tesla and GM both face the same technological roadblock: coming up with a safe, powerful, long-life battery.

"This is what the battery box looks like if you pulled it out of the car," Eberhard said. "And what's inside here is a system built around standard lithium ion batteries. So if you broke open the battery pack on your laptop computer, you'd find a set of these inside - 6,831 of these."

Scrappy little Tesla Motors may hope to save money and development time by adapting off-the-shelf battery parts. General Motors, though, has the mass market to think about, so they're developing a new lithium-ion battery for the Volt from the ground up - a huge, international, multimillion-dollar effort in labs like GM's battery testing lab, where Denis Gray is the director. The lab tests prototypes from the two engineering firms that are working on the Volt battery.

"Some of us replace our cell phones, our Blackberries, every year because a new model comes out or we've gotta change the battery," Gray said. "I can't do that when it comes to vehicles. Customers won't be very happy with me if I change it after six months."

The entire Chevy Volt project hinges on Gray's ability to lick the battery problem.

"Bob Lutz, Rick Wagoner, they're constantly asking how are we doing? Are we making the progress that we need?" Gray said.

In other words, if Gray's team doesn't come through, then there will be no Volt.

"The problem is nobody has done a lithium ion battery pack this big," Lutz said. "And we say it's the big unknown because it is. But our battery suppliers say, 'Hey. Stop saying that. We're telling you the battery's gonna be okay.'"

So who killed the electric car? Nobody, yet. In fact, just about everyone's excited by the possibilities - even Vijay Vaitheeswaran.

"I think it's a real grassroots revolution," he said. "Could be the next big grassroots revolution in American politics. What I call the great awakening of America to climate change and oil addiction."

Chris Paine is excited; in fact, he's making a sequel to his movie.

"The next film is, 'Who Saved the Electric Car?'" he said.

The first Teslas will hit the streets this fall. And if the battery gods smile on GM, Bob Lutz's Chevy Volt will be joining it in two years.

"Will it live up to its promise of 40-plus mile electric range?" Lutz said. "Will the battery last ten years? Can we bring it in at a price that most people could afford? If the answer is 'yes' to all that, then I think the future for electrics is absolutely unlimited."

[lwsterrittt]

Indeed-do the numbers. Efficiency of power plant (any fuel): 45%; efficiency of electric grid: 60%; efficiency of AC/DC converter: 85%; efficiency of charging Li ion battery: 85%; efficiency of electric motor: 85%; End-to-end efficiency: 16.6% Efficiency of modern clean diesel: 48% Duh!

[ginabecker]

Here's reality, you conspiracy theorists: Nobody killed the electric car. If somebody could invent a good electric car, it'd be on the market. The technology isn't as glorious and obvious as you think.

I've worked for "big oil," and I assure you these companies, especially the largest of these companies, are filled with intelligent, good scientists and engineers, many with PhDs, who are thrilled by discovery and invention. They are environmentalists in the true sense, the honest sense, daring to stand up against the latest environmentalists fads. The management are often scientists and engineers. They're not the cartoon evil buffoons that Hollywood and Big Media try to portray them as. These companies make money by being the best at converting petroleum into products as energy-efficiently as humanly possible. They have to be big, because that's absolutely required to be energy-efficient. Many have spent millions already investigating biofuels from more angles than the government and its scientists have ever imagined, and if they'd found something that made sense they would have developed and marketed it. No doubt.

So all you backseat activists, get in the driver's seat, quit whining, go get science and engineering degrees, and do something useful with your time. Learn for yourselves what the real technical challenges are and work to solve them.

Why electric cars? Why not electric highways or rails, eliminating the need for cars to carry around their own tanks of enormous expensive batteries (which are energy intensive to produce)?

[jwhou]

What kind of alternative fuel expert wouldn't mention Fischer Tropsch synthetic fuels and other thrird and fourth generation bio-fuels?

Whole scale technology change such as a change to electric or to hydrogen cars accelerates the need for the manufacturing of new vehicles which dramatically increases the carbon footprint of such activities, the construction of supporting infrastructure also has an environmental impact.

The best alternatives do not increase the need for manufacturing or construction requirements hence should work with existing vehicles and infrastructure. FT synthesis can synthesize gasoline and diesel from carbon monoxide and hydrogen which can be acquired by gasifying just about anything that burns or even directly from CO2 and H2O as Sandia Labs has done with their CR5 program. Entire countries have run on FT synthesized fuels, countries like WWII Germany and embargoed South Africa. The US Airforce uses synthetic jet fuel and the oil companies are mixing synthetic diesel into the refined diesel in order to bring the sulfur levels down to federal requirements. The DoD awarded a contract to Diversified Energy and Velocys to provide biomass gasifiers and FT reactors for converting waste to diesel on military camps.

This fellow isn't an expert if all he's looked at is corn ethanol and electric vehicles. This article is absurdly limited in focus and essentially just presents a superficial point of view, most likely the uninformed opinion of the journalist with only incidental quotations to lend credence

[acampbell333]

WP.... Thanks for your feedback on ZAP. Not only do I work for ZAP, but I am a XEBRA customer and can attest that I''ve never felt tippy and that the vehicle works perfectly for my commute, about 10 miles. Wouldn''t it be great to have another model with a single wheel in the rear... hmm? We actually have been studying the Corbin Sparrow and the Swatchmobile at our HQs. The XEBRA was a really simple idea to be quick and affordable to market now. I think it was a smart because today it is the only production vehicle available that can travel faster than 25 MPH. As far as the tree planting, all the trees planted have been done through hard labor and personal donations. Perhaps you would care to plant a tree for our campaign against global warming?

[ksjeff-2009]

The oil companies will delay development of alternative energy cars until they squeeze the very last drop of oil out of the ground and screw the public out of it''s last 10 cents.

[eshloush]

I think the entire body of the car should consist of solar battery cells coupled with gas when there is no sunshine, and there should be an emergency battery to be able to carry the car 20 miles

[billdale]

acampbell31:

I have mixed feelings on Zap. My greatest hope is that they''ll be able to produce the Zap-X Crossover soon, which I think is the best Zap has to offer... it''s criticized sometimes for hub motors, and I understand why, but there are great tradeoffs with hub motors-- huge weight and space savings, ultra simple, great redundancy, etc., but Zap needs to learn to answer email and calls.

I wish Zap would stop marketing those 3-wheelers. They are not popular, they look unstable (if you''re gonna make a 3-wheeler, the single wheel should be in the BACK for stability in braking and turns).

The problem with cars like the Xebra is that it creates the false impression that EVs are underpowered and compromising. If SUVs are the most popular cars sold today, it will be very difficult to sell a car the size of a bath tub no matter how efficient it is.

Another problem with Zap is that they need to get their priorities in order... if they have profits, they need to put it into their business rather than planting trees, which does not move the business forward.

I wish Zap well.

[acampbell333]

There is more going on in the world of electric cars than just with GM and Tesla and you don''t have to wait. I work for ZAP who is selling electric cars and trucks today. These are 40 MPH vehicles for about $10,000 and we have other vehicles coming with more range and speeed. But we now have dealers with parts, service and financing. We also sell 15 models of EVs, from cars, trucks, scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, ATVs, dirt bikes... so there are many ways to work or play and not use gas. Since 1994, ZAP has delivered more than 100,000 EVs to 75 countries.

[albizzia]

Great show by CBS and David Pogue. Congrats.

It''s ironic that "three-o-six" would put down electrics, yet thinks "Hydrogen is the best bet". The cheapest source of H2 is from steam reformed natural gas, which would use more natural gas and produces more CO2 per mile than burning compressed natural gas in a car!

As for water electrolysis from "environmentally clean" sources, the combination of electrolysis and fuel cells is at best 30% efficient, less if you subtract the energy needed to compress or liquify bulky H2 gas. Compare that to 85% efficiency for charger and batteries. We now have a limited supply of clean electricity, and would need 2 to 3 times as much electricity, and 2 to 3 times as many expensive environmentally clean power plants, if we chose H2 by electrolysis over the battery electric option.

Using electrolysis to produce H2 for internal combustion engine vehicles is even more foolish, as overall efficiency is under 10%, and driving range on a tank of bulky H2 fuel can be less than the per-charge range of a good battery electric car!

Oh, and if "three-o-six" thinks electric prices are "not all that stable", just compare it to gasoline prices...

[v_1618]

INSANE .. NOW EVERYBODY HAS TO BUY EXPENSIVE CARS FOR THE POLLUTE OIL.. COME ON.. I''VE A BETTER IDEA GET DOWN OF THE STUPID CARS ALL OVER THE WORLD HOW SOUNDS THAT... NO MORE CARS IN THIS WORLD ...