Electric cars: A grassroots movement is building hybrid petrol-electric cars that can be recharged from the mains. Why?

Economist
June 8, 2006

WITH a licence plate that reads “I00 MPG”, Greg
Hanssen is used to his car attracting attention.
Even so, he seemed especially pleased by the
crowd that gathered around his modified Toyota
Prius at a hotel parking lot in San Diego, during
a recent conference held there by the Society of
Automotive Engineers. They poked at various parts
of the car with vigour, and positively gushed
when he opened the back to reveal what any punter
would have described as an ordinary-looking electrical plug.


Such enthusiasm is surprising, since automotive
engineers are a hard bunch to impress. The
technologies involved in cars have been refined
countless times since the first
internal-combustion engine appeared over a
century ago. It would take a pretty big
breakthrough to take their breath away today. And
yet that is what happened in San Diego, at a
conference devoted to hybrid cars.


Hybrid technology, pioneered by Toyota with its
Prius, combines the usual petrol engine with an
electric motor and battery that never need to be
plugged in. The resulting gain in fuel economy is
impressive: the Prius achieves over 40 miles per
gallon, perhaps 20% more than it would without
hybridisation. But the gathered petrol-heads,
almost all of them men, yawned through
presentations on various aspects of hybrids until
the final topic: “plug-ins”. As experts described
efforts to connect hybrids to the electrical
grid, those in the audience scribbled furiously
and asked eager questions. And when Mr Hanssen, a
plug-in pioneer, was pointed out in the audience,
the room gave him an ovation. Why all the hoopla,
when his big idea—plugging the car into the mains
for recharging—seems to some people to be a big step backward?


Electric sceptics
For one thing, say the sceptics, plugging in will
be expensive and will stress the already
overloaded power grid. Actually, that is
unlikely. Because drivers will mostly plug in
their cars overnight, they will benefit from
cheaper off-peak power rates. In America, using
cheap electricity to power cars can reduce the
cost per mile by 75% compared with petrol (or
even more, given current high petrol prices). The
savings are even greater in Europe, which has
high petrol taxes. True, if many drivers plugged
in during the day it would raise peak demand, but
software in the cars could prevent daytime charging.


Sceptics also argue that electric cars are
misleadingly clean: they are “pollute somewhere
else” machines, they scoff. While running on
battery power they produce no tailpipe emissions
but, critics note, the coal-intensive grid
electricity they use surely produces more
greenhouse gases than a petrol engine does.
Again, that turns out to be wrong: studies by
California's Air Resources Board confirm that
generating the electricity to power cars in
pure-electric mode produces only about half of
the greenhouse gases of typical petrol vehicles.
This assumes the power grid is half coal-fired,
as America's is today. As the grid “decarbonises”
over time, such emissions will fall.


Fine, but surely few people want a car you have
to keep plugging in—what happens when the battery
runs out? According to Bill Reinert of Toyota,
one of the great advantages of the Prius
electrical system—in which the battery is charged
by the petrol engine and using energy recaptured
during braking—is the fact that you never need to
plug it in and that it never runs out of juice.
That is far more convenient for drivers, insists
Toyota, which has opposed the idea of plug-ins.


But Mr Hanssen notes that even if the battery
pack in his modified Prius goes flat, it simply
switches over to the petrol engine, just as a
normal Prius does. The difference is that his car
can go much further on battery power alone. That
is because he has replaced the original
nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery with a
higher-capacity lithium-ion battery, and has
hacked the control software to prevent the petrol
engine kicking in until the car is moving at high
speed. As a result, his modified Prius can travel
over 30 miles in all-electric mode, compared with
a mile or so for a standard Prius.


Toyota did not provide the software source code,
but Mr Hanssen and his colleagues at EnergyCS, a
firm outside Los Angeles, managed to trick the
Prius's computer into thinking that his giant
battery is really a factory-installed battery
that mysteriously happens to be full of charge
much of the time. Even when the petrol engine
kicks in (as the master computer requires on all
Prius cars at higher speeds), electric power is
still blended in to improve fuel economy and
provides up to 75% of the total power at 55mph.


Riding with Mr Hanssen from San Diego to Los
Angeles in his hacked Prius, your correspondent
saw the other reason he is a hero to the
engineers. The detailed diagnostics screen on his
dashboard verified that his licence plate does
not lie: his car really does achieve 100mpg.
Given that the average fuel economy of new
American vehicles is less than 30mpg, that is quite an achievement.


EnergyCS has handled the conversion of around
half a dozen Prius cars already. With the help of
Clean Tech, a systems integration firm, it plans
to offer plug-in retrofits to the general public
this year for around $12,000. The company hopes
to plug in Europeans through Amberjac, its
European partner. It may find a receptive
audience: Priuses in Europe already have a button
allowing drivers to go into all-electric mode for
brief periods. (The button is not wired up in
American Priuses, though it can be activated.)


Blame it on the hydrogen
EnergyCS is at the forefront of a clean-car
revolution, but it is not alone. A motley crew of
hackers, entrepreneurs and idealists has sprung
up to boost the nascent technology of plug-in
hybrids. Most of these enthusiasts are in, or
from, California—not surprising, given the
state's greenery and its love of electric cars.
Curiously, another common thread is a passionate
hatred for hydrogen fuel cells.


As a forthcoming documentary film “Who Killed the
Electric Car?” (released later this month) makes
clear, this crowd does not blame the failure in
the 1990s of battery cars—such as GM's EV1, the
most aerodynamic production car ever made—on the
limitations of battery technology or a lack of
customer interest. Chelsea Sexton, a former
marketer of EV1 cars and a star of the film,
typifies the view of the plug-in crowd when she
blames gullible regulators and cynical carmakers
for abandoning electric cars for the distant
dream of hydrogen. Inspired by the hacking of
Priuses, various lobbying groups have sprung up
hoping to entice manufacturers to produce
plug-ins and to push politicians to support them.
Ms Sexton, for example, now helps run Plug In
America, a group that includes Jim Woolsey, a former head of the CIA.


Felix Kramer runs the California Cars Initiative
(CalCars), a non-profit advocacy group that
promotes plug-ins. With help from EnergyCS, his
outfit created the first plug-in Prius—though it
used cheap lead-acid batteries, which are much
heavier and shorter-lived than lithium-ion ones.
During Earth Day celebrations in April, Ron
Gremban, CalCars' technology guru, led a group
that converted a Prius into a plug-in in three
days, while the public watched. In co-ordination
with the Electric Auto Association, CalCars now
plans to release a free “open source” version of its conversion instructions.


Plug-In Partners, which counts many electric
utilities and green groups as members, is
drumming up “pre-orders” for fleets of plug-in
vehicles to prove that demand for them really
exists. That is important not only because
carmakers are notoriously risk-averse (given the
huge sunk costs of existing capital stock).
Battery enthusiasts whisper darkly that the car
companies never wanted battery cars to succeed,
and so lied about a lack of consumer demand. Ms
Sexton and other former insiders point to long
waiting lists they say were ignored by the big
car companies, who chose instead to shut down
their electric programmes and to crush most of those electric cars.


All this talk of the obstinacy and ruthlessness
of Detroit comes as no surprise to Andrew Frank,
an engineering professor at the University of
California at Davis. The oil shocks of the 1970s
inspired him, he says, to pursue technologies to
make a big car capable of 100mpg. For three
decades, he has been advocating hybrid
technology—and seemingly getting nowhere with the big car manufacturers.


And yet Dr Frank has persevered. Visitors to his
lab today find a plug-in Ford Explorer
sports-utility vehicle (SUV) equipped with a
giant 16 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery designed for
long range—a conventional Prius battery has a
capacity of 1.3kWh. He has replaced the original
3.5-litre internal-combustion engine with a
frugal 1.9-litre version, thus boosting fuel
economy, but the added kick from the electric
motor means this SUV can still accelerate to
60mph faster than an ordinary Explorer. He has
made similar modifications to a Mercury saloon,
so it can travel 40 miles in all-electric mode
and achieve an astounding 200mpg.


Dr Frank draws inspiration from “The Great Race”,
a film from 1965 in which the offbeat Professor
Fate takes on a conventional challenger in an
automobile race. Team Fate, as Dr Frank's
researchers are called, has won a number of
contests with its hybrid vehicles—as the black
victory banners depicting skulls and crossbones
(Professor Fate's insignia) on the lab's walls
attest. “In the movie the professor is really
wacky,” jokes one of his students, “and that's right on the money.”


Dr Frank seems comfortable with his image as the
absent-minded professor. “I've been Professor
Fate a long time,” he says with a smile. Even
when he got somewhere with the big car firms, he
thinks he got cheated. He showed off his
technology years ago to visitors from Toyota. At
the time they expressed no interest, he says, but
he was struck by the similarity of the Prius technology later unveiled.


Hymotion, a Canadian firm, has also converted a
Prius into a plug-in. Rather than retrofitting
cars on-site, this firm has developed a modular
kit that is intended to be installed (in just two
hours, supposedly) by authorised garages around
North America. Ricardo Bazzarrella, Hymotion's
president, hopes his kit will fall in price from
$12,000 today to $6,500 by 2008. He plans to
develop similar kits for the hybrid versions of
the popular Ford Escape SUV and the bestselling
Toyota Camry saloon. “Every new hybrid that comes
out, we're looking to make into a plug-in,” he says.


Entrepreneurs and academics are not the only ones
plugging in. The Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI), the research arm of America's
power utilities, has joined up with
DaimlerChrysler for a trial in which over two
dozen of its Sprinter vans will be converted into
plug-ins. It expects them to be used primarily as
fleet vehicles, such as delivery trucks, that
return to a depot for recharging every night.


The plug-in crowd may be paranoid and
conspiratorial, but it is nevertheless effective.
Thanks to its efforts, the number of vehicles
converted to plug-in status seems likely to soar
from a handful today to hundreds within a year.
And if, as plug-in advocates hope, some of the
big carmakers develop official, commercial
versions of these plug-in vehicles, then this
niche technology could hit the big time over the next few years.


Enough juice?
Grand ambitions are fine, but there is still one
snag that could yet keep plug-ins from hitting
the big time: batteries. Energy storage has long
been the Achilles heel of electric cars. Have
batteries really become cheap, reliable and
compact enough? The answer is a definite maybe.
Earlier versions of electric cars (such as the
ill-fated EV1) used lead-acid batteries. This old
technology is cheap and safe, but cannot compete
with newer technologies on weight, range and
life. With the first-ever hacked Prius, CalCars
found that its 135kg lead-acid battery provided
barely 10 miles of all-electric range, performed
poorly at lower temperatures and wore out within a year.


“A motley crew of hackers, entrepreneurs and
idealists has sprung up to boost the nascent
technology of plug-in hybrids.”Hope springs
eternal, however. Firefly, a firm spun off from
Caterpillar, an industrial-machinery giant, has
developed a radical new approach to lead-acid
batteries. The firm replaces the conventional
lead plates with graphite foam, which carries a
slurry of chemically active materials. The foam
increases the area of contact between the
electrodes and the active chemicals, and greatly
reduces the problem of corrosion. The firm claims
that this new approach reduces weight and matches
the performance of NiMH at one-fifth of the cost.
It hopes to apply this technology to hybrid-car batteries.


It sounds promising, but has yet to be proven in
the field. In contrast, NiMH batteries are
battle-tested and safe (unlike some
lithium-battery technologies, which have an
unpleasant tendency to explode). Toyota's
conventional Prius has a NiMH pack that weighs
35kg or so and costs around $1,600. Putting NiMH
batteries into a plug-in Prius, as CalCars has
done with the help of Electro Energy, a
battery-maker, means carrying a lot more weight
around. Such a battery costs around $5,000 and
weighs 180kg—though CalCars hopes to reduce that
weight by half with its next prototype. Stan
Ovshinksy, who pioneered the NiMH battery, says
he has now come up with a radical improvement on
that technology that would be perfect for plug-in
cars—if only his firm ECD Ovonics (partly
controlled by Chevron, an oil giant) would let him go ahead.


Yet the future may belong to lithium technology
after all. One reason, says Menahem Anderman of
Advanced Automotive Batteries, a consultancy, is
that recent increases in the price of nickel and
cobalt have limited the opportunity for further
cost reduction of NiMH and made lithium
batteries, which have traditionally been far more
expensive, more competitive. Alan Mumby of
Johnson Controls, a big car-parts supplier,
agrees. His firm has recently entered into a
joint venture with Saft, a French battery giant,
to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars.
Mr Mumby maintains that “the lithium-ion battery
both delivers and accepts power very readily,
making it ideal for hybrids with regenerative
braking. Lithium-ion technology is the wave of
the future.” Lithium also has the crucial
advantages of low size and weight. Hymotion's
production-ready battery kits, due later this
year, will feature lithium-ion batteries weighing
just 70kg but delivering an all-electric range of 25-30 miles.


Dead end or stepping-stone?
Even if the battery woes that have long
bedevilled electric cars can be solved, however,
such progress may yet prove a stepping-stone to
hydrogen—the bête noire of the electric-car
crowd. “Long term, plug-ins with fuel cells may
be the ideal vehicles,” says Mr Graham of the
EPRI. Dr Frank agrees, noting that the
hybridisation would mean cars would need less
hydrogen on board, and smaller (and thus cheaper)
fuel cells. Dr Ovshinsky even stood up after the
New York premiere of “Who Killed the Electric
Car?” to lecture the film's director and audience
that batteries and hydrogen can work smoothly together.


CAPTION: The Prius hackers get to work
Everyone is agreed on the need for better
batteries, however. And A123 Systems, a spin-off
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
is now promoting a new lithium battery technology
which combines a novel lithium-ion phosphate
chemistry with nanoscale materials that increase
the surface area of the electrodes. Although it
is still unproven in hybrid cars, even the
sceptical Dr Anderman thinks this chemical
cocktail is “considerably less volatile” than
conventional lithium approaches; furthermore, it
has potential for lower cost and long life.
A123's batteries can already be found in some
Black & Decker power tools, where they deliver
two to three times the run-time and peak power as
rival batteries. A123 plans to supply Hymotion
with batteries for plug-ins, and says it has the
manufacturing capacity to make 10,000 such batteries a year.


Given that there are only a handful of plug-in
cars on the road today, that figure sounds rather
ambitious. Even so, the lesson offered by
Professor Fate is that thinking big can
eventually pay off. “The automobile business is a
gigantic battleship, and after 30 years I may
have moved it an inch,” reflects Dr Frank. That
inch may yet grow to a mile. If the EPRI trial of
plug-in Sprinter vans ends successfully, says Mr
Graham, DaimlerChrysler is likely to produce a
commercial version. Having long been dismissive
of plug-ins, Toyota has confirmed that it is now
seriously working on a plug-in Prius. Even Ford's
boss, Bill Ford, has made encouraging noises
about plug-in hybrids. Rising fuel prices and
improving battery technology only strengthen the
case for them. “This is here-and-now technology,”
says Dr Frank with some satisfaction.