Better batteries won’t solve range fears
Electric vehicles are on the wrong road writes David Booth.
For just for a moment, let’s pretend we’re really serious about this electric vehicle thing, that Tony Seba — the Stanford University economist who predicts that within eight short years we won’t be able to buy a gasolinefuelled automobile anywhere in the world — isn’t on drugs.
And that maybe, just maybe, the latest study by McKinsey et al (Electrifying insights: How automakers can drive electrified vehicle sales and profitability) is based on sound data. The study claims — with perhaps a little more veracity than Seba — EVs will be price competitive with conventional cars by somewhere around 2030. Will that be enough for McKinsey’s promises — or Seba’s fantasies — to bear fruit?
The evidence, for the most part, says no.
First, consider this: According to Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, Canadians purchased 3,990 battery-powered electrical vehicles in 2015. In 2016, we bought 4,382. That means 392 more people opted to go fully electric in 2016 than in 2015, a not-insignificant 10 per cent increase. During the same time period, however, we bought 27,003 more pickups and 11,820 more large SUVs.
Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not saying Canadians bought 27,003 pickups and 11,820 large SUVs in 2016, but that we bought 27,003 more pickups and 11,820
more large SUVs last year compared with 2015. Yes, despite the headlines trumpeting the arrival of the electric-car revolution, for every Canadian converting to driving electric, we are buying almost 100 more gas-guzzling, emissions-belching trucks and large SUVs.
If voting with one’s wallet be the measure of changing consumption, then buying almost 100 more SUVs and pickups for every extra electric car in a single year hints that Canadians at least (the numbers aren’t any better for our American cousins, mind you) are not getting the message.
This will all be solved, says the McKinsey study, when the price of batteries hits about $100 per kilowatt hour. And this will happen somewhere between 2020 (says Elon Musk) and 2030 (says McKinsey), at which point battery-powered cars will be cost competitive — or even cheaper! — than their fossil-fuelled, internally combusting equivalent.
More importantly, say Seba, McKinsey et al, such cheap batteries will end range anxiety, which all the protagonists say is the main reason for the poor sales success of electric cars.
EV manufacturers will then be able to load enough lithium-ions into products to extend their range to 300 kilometres and beyond while still being cost competitive with fossil fuel-powered cars. This, say they all, spells the doom of internal combustion.
Not quite so quickly, I suspect. What all these studies fail to account for — as, indeed, have all EV protagonists since the dawn of our supposed electric revolution — is that range anxiety is a two-pronged affair. What consumers, used to the convenience of gasoline-fuelled cars, want is to be able to drive 300 km and be able to recharge their batteries in the same three minutes or so that they can refuel their current car.
The industry continues to pooh-pooh this contention. But there’s a reason — beyond just initial sticker shock — that McKinsey’s own study shows that while more than 20 per cent of new-car shoppers think about buying a battery-powered electric car, fewer than 0.5 per cent actually do.
There are, however, solutions. Probably the most promising is under-road wireless charging — originally detailed in this column in 2015 — that uses dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) to recharge electric cars as they drive.
Renault recently explained how it sees dynamic charging as the future of range anxietyfree electrical motoring. As Eric Feunteun, Renault’s electric vehicle program director, says, “This technology is really at the heart of bringing electric cars from the second car of the household to the first car of the household.”
And, according to Highways England’s recent feasibility study (Powering electric vehicles on England’s major roads), the price of building such a road-based infrastructure is going down, the latest estimate about £375,000 (about $650,000 in our currently devalued Canbucks) per kilometre.
As expensive as that is, consider this: If instead of loading every one of our new EVs with the 80 or more kilowatt hours of lithium ion needed to get to those 300 km of range, what if just 30 kWh were employed to fill our typical daily urban driving needs? McKinsey notes that the next generation of EV buyers — “mainstream mobility seekers” as the management consulting giant calls them — claim to need but 40 km of range in typical daily use; their range anxiety stems from those rare days when they travel out of town.
Even at the (hopelessly?) optimistic price of $100/kWh, that’s a cost saving of $5,000 per car for every one of the 26 or so million cars now prowling Canadian roads. That $130-billion reduction in new car costs would be enough to convert about 200,000 km of roadway to wireless charging.
There are roughly 38,000 km of paved freeways in Canada’s National Highway System. Even accounting for the fact that not all of our secondary roads are included, building wireless roadways could completely eliminate range anxiety, still allow EV owners the convenience of recharging at home and also save consumers some serious moolah in the long run.
Nor is wireless charging the only electric solution more convenient than ginormous lithium-ion batteries. Professors at Purdue University say they have perfected a system claimed to use “fluid electrolytes to reenergize spent battery fluids.” In layman’s terms, EVs could be recharged by pumping them full of a water/ethanol solution in much the same way current cars are refuelled with gasoline.
Indeed, the authors of the IFBattery innovation — Eric Nauman and John Cushman — posit that their “instantly rechargeable” cars could be refuelled at the same fuel station that is now pumping gasoline. And, perhaps best of all, the discharged fluids could “be sent in bulk to solar farms, wind turbine installations or hydroelectric plants for re-charging and reused many times.”
In other words, we could have dramatically reduced recharging times and emissions-free recycling.
I’d like to end this week’s diatribe on a personal note. Every time I write anything condemning the current EV agenda, I am castigated as being both anti-environmental and anti-electric. In truth, I am not against electric vehicles, only bad engineering. Relying on increasingly large lithium-ion batteries to assuage range anxiety is not a practical long-term solution to eliminating greenhouse gases. And building an infrastructure to service them when there are quicker and more efficient recharging models available is a monumental waste of money.
Electric-powered automobiles are not a bad idea; pure batterypowered EVs are.