Recently a friend sent a write up about Tesla Motors. Tesla is a glamorous American company promoted by Elon Musk, of the improbably exotic name, to make glamorous and sexy electric cars. Musk made his megabucks when Pay-Pal was sold to eBay. Tesla gets him the admiration of the greenerati, the glitterati, the literati, the chatterati and the ignoranti.
Closer home, in Bangalore, Reva Electric Car Co. has mounted a mis-shapen plastic biscuit box on a golf cart and are touting it world-wide as an electric car. The Maini family, promoters of Reva, have been dining out on it for years now. In Europe the Reva is classified as a quadricycle and enjoys all kinds of fiscal and operational incentives. In India it just gets occasional press coverage.
Since so many otherwise sensible people suspend thinking just to be on the correct side of socially and politically sensitive subjects, and some have even bought them, I thought I should put down some real hard facts about electric cars. No opinions.
1. Electric cars, electric car companies, electric car designers and finally electric car entrepreneurs are not about cars. They are all about battery technology. More accurately, about storage battery technology.
2. EC's run on storage batteries. In simple words, put in X kw into a magic box. Put the box and an electric motor in a chamber on wheels. Draw power from the box to drive the motor to turn the wheels. What you get from the box is Y kw. This is inevitably less than X and depends on battery efficiency in absorption, sustainment and discharge.
3. No one has yet got a battery design which begins to be viable even at reasonably large volumes, say 5% of all cars. At least not without major state subsidies and a complete disregard by the customer of personal cost benefit analysis of ownership and running costs.
4. The second element of an EC is the electric motor. A lot of incremental work is happening but no one is even talking about making great breakthroughs in motor technology.
5. The third element is the chamber-on-wheels or the car itself. Here many improvements happen regularly or await commercialisation pending the car makers' idea of customer acceptance. Traditional car makers have been working forever on new materials, fabrication techniques, friction reduction, safety factors, chamber design, drive transmission and braking systems etc. Most of these, as also peripherals and accessories, are independent of the motive force. When developments occur, they benefit cars of all types.
6. Finally, the ultimate deal buster – the electric car by itself is not the solution to anything. Electric power has to be generated somewhere. Much of it comes from pollution spewing coal burning plants. The best of coal plants are worse than the best of internal combustion engines. Much worse after the cost of transmission, transmission losses and factor Y mentioned above in battery loss is taken into account. A smaller portion of grid power is produced also by ecology destroying hydropower plants or potentially earth destroying nuclear technologies. Some power is, of course, also generated by petro-product plants, rather like the old car that you drive around.
Apart from power generation issues, providing the logistics and creating the infrastructure for wide-spread recharge facilities 'away from home' and 'at home' could be a nightmare. No sensible estimates exist of costs and resources needed.
There are also, of course, largely unexplored, but major pollution issues with fabrication, transportation, usage and disposal of storage batteries. I could write a book on the subject but enough said.
All said and done, Electric cars are nowhere near being viable or anywhere near as green as they are made out to be. I would very much like someone to come up with solutions. Some day soon.
Closer home, in Bangalore, Reva Electric Car Co. has mounted a mis-shapen plastic biscuit box on a golf cart and are touting it world-wide as an electric car. The Maini family, promoters of Reva, have been dining out on it for years now. In Europe the Reva is classified as a quadricycle and enjoys all kinds of fiscal and operational incentives. In India it just gets occasional press coverage.
Since so many otherwise sensible people suspend thinking just to be on the correct side of socially and politically sensitive subjects, and some have even bought them, I thought I should put down some real hard facts about electric cars. No opinions.
1. Electric cars, electric car companies, electric car designers and finally electric car entrepreneurs are not about cars. They are all about battery technology. More accurately, about storage battery technology.
2. EC's run on storage batteries. In simple words, put in X kw into a magic box. Put the box and an electric motor in a chamber on wheels. Draw power from the box to drive the motor to turn the wheels. What you get from the box is Y kw. This is inevitably less than X and depends on battery efficiency in absorption, sustainment and discharge.
3. No one has yet got a battery design which begins to be viable even at reasonably large volumes, say 5% of all cars. At least not without major state subsidies and a complete disregard by the customer of personal cost benefit analysis of ownership and running costs.
4. The second element of an EC is the electric motor. A lot of incremental work is happening but no one is even talking about making great breakthroughs in motor technology.
5. The third element is the chamber-on-wheels or the car itself. Here many improvements happen regularly or await commercialisation pending the car makers' idea of customer acceptance. Traditional car makers have been working forever on new materials, fabrication techniques, friction reduction, safety factors, chamber design, drive transmission and braking systems etc. Most of these, as also peripherals and accessories, are independent of the motive force. When developments occur, they benefit cars of all types.
6. Finally, the ultimate deal buster – the electric car by itself is not the solution to anything. Electric power has to be generated somewhere. Much of it comes from pollution spewing coal burning plants. The best of coal plants are worse than the best of internal combustion engines. Much worse after the cost of transmission, transmission losses and factor Y mentioned above in battery loss is taken into account. A smaller portion of grid power is produced also by ecology destroying hydropower plants or potentially earth destroying nuclear technologies. Some power is, of course, also generated by petro-product plants, rather like the old car that you drive around.
Apart from power generation issues, providing the logistics and creating the infrastructure for wide-spread recharge facilities 'away from home' and 'at home' could be a nightmare. No sensible estimates exist of costs and resources needed.
There are also, of course, largely unexplored, but major pollution issues with fabrication, transportation, usage and disposal of storage batteries. I could write a book on the subject but enough said.
All said and done, Electric cars are nowhere near being viable or anywhere near as green as they are made out to be. I would very much like someone to come up with solutions. Some day soon.
