Let’s Zap the Electric Car

A noiseless, energy-efficient vehicle with no complicated moving parts? That’s un-American! We’ll stick with gas, thank you very much.
By Brian O’Connor

Gary Henriksen has no idea who he’s talking to. He’s on the phone with me, dropping science like Einstein, explaining how passivation film in a lithium-ion battery protects the electrodes. Obviously, Henriksen, who manages the Battery Technology Department at the Argonne National Lab in Illinois, is unaware that I am a lithium-ion ignoramus, and my knowledge of AC or DC goes no further than a discussion of Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson.

But I can’t blame Henriksen for his ignorance of my ignorance. He works, after all, at a governmentfunded lab teeming with true believers in the future of the electric car. In other words, he hobnobs among enablers for a technology with an abundance of shortcomings—and a decidedly unpatriotic hue.

For the record, I love a high-powered electric vehicle—on the golf course. But for the open road, I say gas me up, and with ample reason. First of all, electric vehicles, or EVs, possess limited range, and nothing is more un-American than limited range. Like the song says, “Don’t fence me in.” A song, it just so happens, that is based on a poem written by an engineer in the Department of Highways in Helena, Montana. True story. “Let me ride through the wide open country that I love.” Have we forgotten how the Federal Highway System fueled this country’s postwar prosperity and world supremacy? Why we now aspire to be Liechtenstein—as the EV proponents would have us be—eludes me.

Another strikingly un-American trait of the EV is the noise it makes—or rather, fails to make. An EV is silent: no roar, no rumble. Where’s the fun in that? It’s totally testosterone-free, like a huge vibrator gliding on four wheels, threatening both our male potency and our sensibility as a nation founded on vociferous, loud protest.

Then there’s this: The engine has no belts, plugs, transmission, or pistons—EV repairs are limited to windshield wipers, brakes, and a few motor bearings. This—if real Americans let down their guard enough to allow it to come to pass—would eliminate the simple yet ennoblingly masculine act of popping the hood. How many life lessons did you absorb as your dad handed you the Quaker State?

Despite all of these acutely worrying possibilities, the Detroit auto industry, along with a handful of deep-pocketed start-up companies, is moving ahead with plans to develop EVs. As evidenced by this past January’s North American International Auto Show—which was swarming with ruddy-faced execs in JCPenney suits, wagging their voltaic wares and slathering green gook on everyone within arm’s reach—it’s now all about the winds of change: carbon-footprint this, renewable-energy that, get a grip on smart grid, down with oil. Down with oil? It was quite alarming, I tell you. Do they think we’re in Iraq for the kebab?

At the heart of this hysteria is an unprecedented rush, a bowlegged sprint among car makers to be the first to market with an EV. Among the Big Three, GM leads the pack, in Pentecostal verve, at least, having pulled all-nighters for two years to produce Detroit’s most hyped entity since Eminem. Although their Chevy Volt is neither pure EV nor standard hybrid (it qualifies as an extended-range EV, or a plug-in hybrid), its energy source has stirred great curiosity. It’s the same lithium-ion battery that powers your cellphone, only there’s 400 pounds more of it. When this battery loses 70 percent of its juice (its range is 40 miles), a backup gas engine awakens to offer assistance, but not to power the wheels, as in a standard hybrid—instead, it recharges the battery.

Range limitation is not this outsize battery’s only drawback. “It’s an expensive component,” says Greg Ciesel, the Volt program director, who estimates the cost of their lithium-ion battery to be near $10,000. “We’re seeking ways to produce it affordably on a mass scale.” Ciesel also says that when the four-seat Volt debuts in late 2010, drivers can expect to go from zero to 60 in nine seconds and top out at more than 100 miles per hour. Okay, so it’s not all NPR and chardonnay with this thing, but still, without the accompanying engine roar, isn’t the Volt kind of a neutered beast?

It may be, but Ford’s anticipated entry into the EV field, a Focus-size lithium ion–powered EV, is downright mythical at this point. It’s supposedly due in 2011, and touted to have a range of 100 miles per charge, but until a national electric-grid infrastructure exists, which will annex public space for EV charging stations in mall parking lots and McDonald’s, you won’t find Ford going gaga about green cars. The company’s director of communications, Jennifer Moore, echoed this attitude when she said simply, “It’s going to take time.” Yeah, we’re not holding our breath, okay, Ford? You’d think the $15 billion this company hemorrhaged last year would be better spent building a new oil refinery in South Dakota. But no, they’re looking for a swollen wall socket to plug their EVs into.

You know who’s a little closer to a marketable EV? The Japanese—no shocker there. They’re always several clicks ahead when it comes to emerging technology, something I’m reminded of whenever some drunkard croaks a Coldplay tune into a karaoke machine. But what gives them the edge here is their belief that the key to winning the EV race exists in battery refinements—that is to say, designing modules with higher density and lower weight. In the United States, private funding of battery development has ballooned from $4.3 million in 2002 to more than $200 million last year. But the Japanese are way ahead in this research, for a simple reason: While Detroit gargled oil in the early 1990s, Japanese automakers immersed themselves in car-battery research, subsidized by the Japanese government. As a result, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan own their battery technology, unlike the American companies, which use third parties to produce their batteries. Nissan was one of the first to dabble with lithium—the lightest and most energetic of materials on the periodic chart—and its research will bear fruit in late 2010 when it starts mass-producing a yet-to-be-named five passenger
EV with a range of 100 miles per charge.

“It’s designed to address what we call ‘range anxiety,’ ” says Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning. “People are always asking about the EV and the ‘what if?’ scenario: ‘What if I don’t have enough juice to get home?’ But 72 percent of the population drives fewer than 40 miles per day, and 98 percent drive fewer than 100 miles a day, so we’ve got the market covered.”

What if you don’t have enough juice to get home? Hey, shoulda thought of that before you bought a glorified golf cart to use on the great open road. And what if, Mr. Perry, I want to take a family trip to the Grand Canyon, or Mount Rushmore, or that Corn Palace thing in South Dakota? Why do you hate America, Mr. Perry?

He didn’t answer these questions—mainly because I didn’t actually ask them—but he did say, om i nously, “Others may be claiming things based on a bench test, but we’re already on the assembly line.”

Chilling words indeed, but as a small consolation, Nissan’s Japanese rival, Toyota, is not only years away from introducing an EV with a lithium-ion battery (2012, Toyota says) but also—surprisingly for a company that was the first to betray the gasoline engine and introduce a hybrid—it doesn’t see electric-only as the ultimate goal. “Toyota sees the EV as one of many platforms,” says Jana Hartline, Toyota’s environmental communications manager. “Electric is not the answer; it’s just not.”

Hallelujah, Ms. Hartline! And God bless you.

By betting a trunkload of venture capital that electric is the answer, Northern California’s Tesla Motors hopes to reduce your carbon footprint and boost your sex life. Fat chance, I say. The Roadster—a sleek, all-electric carbon-fiber sports car that can supposedly hit 120-plus miles per hour, with a range of 220 miles per charge (we’ll believe it when we see it)—aims to shatter any lingering perception that an EV is better suited for gated communities than the two-lane blacktop. Its 950-pound lithium-celled battery persuades even a petrol partisan like me to concede one point: An electric motor provides superior acceleration—zero to 60 in less than four seconds. Just ask George Clooney, Matt Damon, or David Letterman, each of whom is currently driving one of the 200 Roadsters already on the road. Sounds great, right? But there’s its $109,000 sticker price to—bam!—send it right back behind the diamond-encrusted bars of the gated community.

Tesla claims to have a solution: the planned 2011 rollout of its Model S, a four-door sedan EV with a base price of—get in line, proles—$57,400 (less if you deduct the $7,500 federal tax credit on EVs that began in January). It plans on producing 20,000 of these annually, to reduce the economy of scale on its lithium-ion battery, so coveted by Chrysler that the company purchased it from Tesla for its own Roadster-like knockoff, the Dodge Circuit EV, expected in the not-too-distant future.

Chrysler may have some unknowns, but here is, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, a very clear and present “known known”: Companies are entering the EV game from every corner. BMW expects to introduce 500 Mini Cooper hybrids late this year. Available in October is the Aptera 2E from California, a three-wheel, pod-looking thing designed as a commuter option. A Chinese company, BYD, claims its EV gets 250 miles per charge, but no one’s seen it.

Frankly, I don’t want to. I want to turn the clock back to an earlier time. A simpler time. The year 1993, to be exact, when gas cost 99 cents a gallon and SUVs the size of Sherman tanks roared over our highways. And I see a loophole: While every car company waits to see if EVs can go mass-market, scant attention has been paid to where the lithium batteries will go when they die. Currently, according to Argonne Lab’s Henriksen, there is no recycling research under way to recover used lithium. “We’re looking at targets for plug-in hybrid batteries at 5,000 deep discharge cycles,” he says, calling me from his office as I’m rumbling into New York City in my Hummer, “with a 60 percent swing.”

I have no idea what this means, but that 60 percent swing sounds like a chink in the EV armor to me. My eyeballs roll to the back of my head as I motor through the traffic, my V-8 unleashing its deafening roar, my tailpipe spewing nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide, as I both savor my lifestyle and contemplate a way to preserve it.