How to charge?
While carmakers seek government assistance for recharging infrastructure, the potentially bigger issue of affordability raises new concerns on the eve of Australia’s first electric vehicle. Byron Mathioudakis explains
2009 may well be remembered as the year when electric vehicles (EVs) came of age. While Australian motorists cannot as yet lease – or buy – a full EV, many manufacturers used the year’s various motor shows like the Geneva, Frankfurt and Tokyo events to roll out near-production prototypes or ‘just around the corner’ concept cars to whet appetites and test public opinion.
From Audi to Volvo, virtually everybody flagged an EV of some description and degree of probability, as part of a bigger picture of zero emission sustainable transport solutions that will ultimately lead to the hydrogen fuel cell car.
Renault-Nissan president Carlos Ghosn summed up all the latest EV activity at Tokyo last October: “In the face of real world challenges,” he said, “Nissan is bringing real solutions. The time is now for zero emissions. Sustainable mobility is within our grasp.”
The future is now
The difference between pre- and post-2009 is that EVs are transitioning from being simply shiny concepts glistening beneath the unnaturally bright lights of the Swiss, German and Japanese exhibition halls to production reality.
For the first time, some carmakers have commenced an open dialogue about their real-world costs – and how they plan to mobilise people into affordable EV motoring within the next 12 months.
Indeed, at least 10 EVs are expected to land in Australia by the end of 2012, with the Mitsubishi i-MiEV leading the vanguard by March.
Nissan’s all-electric Leaf and General Motors’ Volt range-extending EV (using a back-up internal combustion engine when the lithium ion battery pack’s 100km charge extinguishes) are also high profile debutants, and are due here in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
But at an estimated $40,000 to $60,000 a pop (and even more if you add some of the luxury features many buyers expect these days), going electric won’t be cheap.
And unlike in most other mature markets, Australia’s federal government has not as yet provided financial incentives to facilitate the education, uptake and infrastructure that electric vehicles require.
By contrast, the British government announced in late November that it is pumping $A55 million into providing the necessary EV charging facilities. And many other countries are following suit.
For Australia, then, leasing to fleets is the only obvious solution – at least in these early pioneer days. A “handful” of the Mitsubishis will arrive by the end of the first quarter of 2010, with the first few to go out as short-term loan vehicles, as a toe-in-the-water exercise for both the company and potential users, a spokesperson revealed.
Basically, if you are one of the fleet companies to raise a hand, an i-MiEV will be free for a week or two, or even up to a month.
As supply increases towards the latter part of 2010 (i-MiEV demand around the world has been strong, particularly in markets where government incentives have encouraged fleets to take the plunge), an as-yet undisclosed leasing arrangement will then take over, or so Mitsubishi Motors Australia hopes.
The i-MiEV’s appeal to fleets, the company believes, is underscored by its electric motor, which takes up to eight hours to recharge fully from a household power outlet or only 45 minutes to replenish about 80 per cent capacity using a fast charger. The car will top 130km/h and should last between 90km and 130km between re-charges, depending on how the car is driven.
Meanwhile, Nissan Australia’s all-electric Leaf will be a much more structured proposition from the outset, according to CEO Dan Thompson.
Due in 2011, the Corolla-sized five-door hatchback – complete with a 160km range – will be available for lease via the company’s in-house Nissan Financial Services department.
The agreement, Thompson explains to ABA, is over a carefully monitored set period so Nissan can assess and address many of the nascent issues expected with EV technology take-up, including battery life, residual values and redundancy issues as newer-generation battery technologies emerge.
Nevertheless, he promises that the Leaf’s monthly repayments and running costs should be on a par with an equivalently sized and specified Corolla-sized hatchback.
Initially, the Nissan EV will be leased to fleet customers through car rental giant Europcar, which issued a statement during 2009 saying that it will commit to leasing the Leaf via selected metropolitan outlets in Australia and New Zealand.
Europcar expects up to 50 vehicles to be available in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland from 2011, and is party to an agreement with the global Nissan-Renault alliance that will see the installation of recharging stations at the rental fi rm’s larger outlets.
But Dan Thompson admits that the Leaf will need proper recharging infrastructure to be in place if it has any chance of being a success with both fleet and private buyers in Australia, and that government assistance is absolutely essential to see the EV plan through. “Nissan wants to deliver an EV that isn’t a premium priced proposition that instantly becomes a niche product,” he reveals.
“Our mission is to get the cost of this technology down to that level, and that the government puts down an appropriate level of incentives, and then obviously pricing the vehicle to where it needs to be to get mass-market acceptance.
“So the challenge for us now is to get that lease payment down to what the lease payment would be for an equivalently specced hatch with an internal-combustion engine.”
Thompson adds that Nissan Finance would own the car at the end of the lease period.
“That’s why, from my perspective, we are looking at the leasing model, so when the customer hands back the first-generation EV after four or five years we can say: ‘You should have this new one with a new-generation battery with better range and better performance and whatever else…’
“It’s a whole new frontier for Nissan,” concludes Thompson. “It’s a whole new frontier for the automotive industry.”
Plug-in Prius plans
Toyota, on the other hand, is keeping its Prius III Plug-In Hybrid business model a tightly guarded secret, with no plans for Australia as yet.
However, it is following BMW’s lead with the Mini ‘E’ EV in leasing 500 vehicles to fleet and other customers in Japan, Europe and North America as part of fi eld testing for the Plug-In’s lithium-ion battery.
The regular Prius Hybrid currently available in Australia still uses the older and less-efficient nickel-metal hydride battery pack, with a range of about 2km at 50km/h as opposed to the Plug-In’s claimed 20km at up to 100km/h.
Like the GM Volt that Holden has promised for 2012, it will be a range-extender hybrid, retaining the internal combustion engine to overcome ‘range anxiety’ – the fear of what to do when the battery pack runs dry.
Expect to see the Prius Plug-In Hybrid in about 2012. Of course, at prices considerably north of the existing Prius Hybrid i-Tech’s $53,500-plus, don’t count on Toyota emulating Nissan Australia’s leasing model. Holden has also yet to reveal the Volt’s pricing/leasing nuts and bolts, but you can count on fleet-leasing deals to dominate come 2012.
Grid locked
Experts are divided as to what the net gain will be (if any) for EVs in states where coal-based power stations supply the electricity grid. Victoria’s heavy reliance on brown coal for example – thought to be one of the most greenhouse-gas intensive methods of power supply – has led to claims that pollution will actually increase with the coming tide of EVs, with exhaust emissions migrating from the car’s tailpipe to the power station’s smoke stacks.
Others point to the government’s billion-dollar investment in the de-carbonisation of the electricity grid (that includes carbon capture technologies) to neutralise the effect of brown coal use.
The advent of ‘green electricity’ options to supply both businesses and consumer households for a small tariff increase further decreases the likelihood of increased brown-coal output.
Senior research fellow at the Curtin University of Technology, Dr Andrew Simpson, stated at the Intelligent Transport Systems Summit in Melbourne last November that the total increase in electricity generation might only be in the vicinity of five per cent.
“There is a huge amount of excess capacity in the grid today, and studies have shown that we could electrify pretty much the whole vehicle fleet using that excess energy capacity,” Dr Simpson believes.
Nissan Australia head Dan Thompson goes further by encouraging a shift towards renewable energy production in Australia: “Certainly if it is brown coal or dirty coal, that is an issue. We are pushing for and encouraging renewable energy (from the government side),” he confirms.
“Consumers in Australia today have the option to purchase green power and the premium is not that significant.
“(But) it’s still a big challenge for governments in Australia, as opposed to our friends across the pond in New Zealand, where most of their energy is generated using renewable (resources).”
Electricity vs Hydrogen
Since the 1980s we’ve been told that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) will herald a new dawn of pollution-free motoring whereby only water vapours exit the ‘exhaust’ pipe.
Indeed, many of the world’s largest manufacturers including Honda, BMW, Toyota, Mazda, Ford, Daimler, Hyundai, and General Motors, are on the homestretch, with hundreds of working prototypes already built between them. They say that viable FCVs are on track for an early 2020s rollout – or thereabouts.
However, the Intelligent Transport Systems Summit in Melbourne in November heard that electricity has already beaten hydrogen as the foremost alternative to fossil fuels on the world automotive stage – in the short to mid-term at least. According to senior research fellow at the Curtin University of Technology, Dr Andrew Simpson, up to 40 full hybrid plug-in EVs are on the carmakers’ drawing boards for release by the end of 2012.
He added that within five years, more than one million EVs will be sold globally every year, making up about five per cent of total vehicle production, while by 2030 they will dominate.
The reason for this hive of activity, he stated, is that EVs will help car manufacturers “get to zero emissions much faster” than FCVs could.
Underlining this is the fact that in the last decade, lithium-ion battery performance – just like in your mobile phone and laptop – has multiplied in terms of efficiency and longevity while costs have plummeted by three quarters. Furthermore, basic electricity infrastructure is already in place while hydrogen’s – which includes the transportation, storage and mass availability of an element that is extremely volatile in its compressed state – is still in its infancy.
Today’s only real commercially ‘available’ FCV is the $660 per month Honda Clarity, a US and Japan-only experimental lease car with a sky-high unit price, and only a tiny sample of the public are eligible to take advantage of it. The company’s stated goal of offering ‘affordable’ FCVs by 2018 will still translate into an $80,000 vehicle in today’s money.
So while it’s true that pollution-free hydrogen must eventually take command as the fuel of tomorrow, the here and now is electric.
