DO ELECTRIC CARS REALLY HAVE THE POWER OF CHANGE?
We want to save the planet while staying affordably mobile, but Australia faces special challenges. NEIL DOWLING reports.
IT’S BEEN CALLED the disruption of the century, but the explosion of interest in the electric car is neither disruptive nor the last word in new-age mobility. It is merely the harbinger of a flood of new technology that will rush the personal transport market as quickly as the silicon chip transformed the way we communicate.
Enveloped by fears of planet warming attributed to fossil fuel combustion, and with the backdrop of a planet rapidly depleting its oil reserves, global automotive business has plugged in and switched on the age-old electric vehicle (EV) and turned off interest in cars that use oil.
Diesel cars will be banned this year in selected European cities, among them Bonn and Cologne in Germany and London in the UK. Petrol and diesel car sales will end in Norway in 2025 and in Sweden and Denmark five years later. Volvo says it will end diesel and petrol production this year (making only EVS and hybrids).
Is this now the end of a century-long passion with the freedom of movement?
Maybe not. But it will have a different face. You can buy electric vehicles that run partly on fuel (hybrids), plug in to electricity mains while running on petrol or diesel (plug-in hybrids) to add some fuel-free kilometres, or pure electric vehicles that run singularly and silently on batteries.
Twenty years ago, the alternative personal vehicle fuels were liquified petroleum gas (LPG), petrol diluted with sustainable ethanol, and hybrids led by the Toyota Prius. Spoiler alert: the hybrids won.
A decade ago, car manufacturers were intensely interested in battery EVS, showing commercial viability with the Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi I-MIEV and Tesla Model S. Battery EVS were flagged as the next personal mobility power plant until parallel development with fuel-cell EVS started to show production potential.
The global interest on the march away from fossil fuel vehicles now focuses on the pure EVS – battery and fuel cell – but progress to the showroom is slow.
Currently, Australians have a small choice of pure EVS: the recently-launched Hyundai Ioniq (also in hybrid and plugin); two models from US EV champion Tesla; the BMW i3 and the sportier (and at $300,000-plus, very expensive) i8 coupe; Renault Zoe hatchback and the Kangoo commercial van; and Jaguar’s I-pace SUV.
Tesla is the car company that has done the most this century for promoting EVS as a viable and stylish alternative to conventionally-powered vehicles.
Clever marketing, a sprinkle of hype, and the lure of cars that are fast – very fast actually – and silent carries all the ingredients to attract wealthy buyers who want something technologically ahead of the field.
Tesla’s founder and former chairman, Elon Musk, said the car he created was disruptive and would change the market, and while the basics of the vehicle are not revolutionary, he is right in the fact it has changed the public perception of EVS.
Rival car firms watched while Tesla moved to a three-model range and sold 201,627 cars in the US, only 20,000 fewer than Audi’s 20 models achieved in the same market last year. Also in 2018, Tesla dominated the US EV sector with a 56% grip on the total sales volume of 361,307 units.
Those figures alone show the potential of EVS and the shifting ability of buyers to embrace electricity as their new fuel of choice.
The industry faces a lot of pain before the skies become completely clear, however. The EV market in the US in 2018 was 81% up on 2017 but its share of total vehicle sales is tiny – only 2.1%. In Australia, pure EV sales accounted for only about 400 units in 2018, representing 0.035% of the total vehicle market. Combining EVS with plug-in electric vehicles and hybrids improves the data a bit, with the share rising to a more optimistic 1.4% – clearly showing we have a long way to go to shake the petrol-diesel fuel addiction.
There are a few factors slowing the potential growth.
• Limited EV choices. Australia has about 350 models of cars and SUVS (and thousands of variants in trim, engines and so on) from 64 manufacturers. There are eight EV models.
• “Range anxiety” (a new one for psychologists), indicating owner concern about running out of electric charge and being taken home on the back of a flat-bed truck. EV range is, however, improving and most are above 300 kilometres before needing a – time consuming – recharge.
• No incentive. Yes, never again going to a petrol bowser and paying yo-yo prices is a great incentive but carmakers (weirdly, not buyers) want subsidies or financial incentives to get people into their vehicles. Other markets have
Tesla EVS were the early pace setters. CREDIT: DREW ANGERER / GETTY IMAGES
varying degrees of attractive reasons to buy an EV.
• Recharge hassle. Some prospective owners may not have easy access to a charging point (off-street home parking, for example) or don’t want the plug-in-and-wait procedure. They may also be regular country or holiday motorists who want range and convenience above even any expected benefits to the planet.
• Cost. The cheapest EV in Australia is the Hyundai Ioniq EV at $44,990 plus on-road costs. It is also available – same body and equipment – as a hybrid for $11,000 less. The disparity may be hard to justify for many buyers seeking an economical family car.
Manufacturers of EVS say taxpayer subsidies are necessary to create the impetus to guide buyers away from fossilfuel vehicles, but the federal government isn’t interested in subsidising EVS for the wealthier buyers to enjoy.
Cosmos is aware that some form of subsidy was recently put to the federal government by companies including Mercedes-benz (which releases a new EV SUV later this year), Audi (also to launch new EVS) and Nissan (a new Leaf coming).
In an interview early in 2019, Kia Australia chief operating officer Damien Meredith said the company would not seek government financial assistance – and did not believe it was necessary – ahead of its launch of the Niro EV later this year.
Some markets in Europe are rich in subsidies or concessions, including no registration or duty on the car purchase, access to freeway express lanes, or free parking and charging in cities.
In China – the world’s biggest carmaker with almost 500 EV manufacturers and EV sales (cars, trucks and buses) of about one million in 2018 – the manufacturers receive government trade credits while their buyers get subsidies ranging in 2019 from $3000 to $10,000 per vehicle, with new EV prices starting at about $38,000.
The subsidies are down by up to 60% on 2018 as China believes it has successfully kick-started the EV market and expects momentum to continue to grow away from petrol-diesel cars and commercial vehicles.
EVS not only offer reduced emissions – though consideration also must be given to whole-of-life production of the car – they also are a direct route to autonomous vehicles. Electric cars can be controlled far more efficiently and effectively by outside sources (onboard or remote) than a conventional petrol-diesel one
Electronics can start, drive, steer and brake a car while avoiding accidents and communicating with other vehicles and traffic-control infrastructure. It’s one of the reasons why electrically-assisted power steering became so widespread in a matter of years and why more companies are adopting “drive-by-wire” strategies, in which there is no mechanical link between the steering wheel and wheels.
The next step into autonomous cars starts in Australia this year with Bosch preparing road trials in Victoria that will take three years of work to produce systems to be integrated in future cars.
The system, which can be implemented in EV, hybrid, diesel and petrol-powered cars, is aimed at fully-automated driving on highways and freeways, targeting the huge five-to-one ratio fatalities on country Victorian roads.
While all this is going on in the background, Australia’s energy pricing and supply concerns may have an impact on a future generation of Ev-owning citizens.
If the current sales level of about 750,000 new passenger vehicles a year is transferred to EVS, sourcing electricity will become a major problem.
Three carmakers interviewed for this article were reluctant to introduce their EVS into Australia – particularly Victoria – for a number of reasons, including our ability to produce sufficient electricity to cope with expected increases in EV sales.
Although 4300 MW of large-scale wind and solar capacity has been added in Australia since 2014 (and the pace of growth is increasing), a similar amount has been lost over that period through the retirement of coal-fired generators such as Victoria’s Hazelwood power station and Alinta’s Northern power station in South Australia. AGL Energy’s Liddell power station in NSW is to be retired in 2022.
ENGIE, Origin Energy and AGL Energy all have indicated they will make no further investment in coal plants.
But there is hope. The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) says forecast power shortages over 2017-18 were averted by generation businesses returning mothballed plant to service, increased wind, hydro and rooftop solar PV generation, new plant and battery projects in South Australia, and a relatively mild summer.
Perhaps these are signs that this is the end of the car as we knew it and the beginning of a new way of travel, where the personal element is replaced for the masses by community travel and the car as an asset becomes only for the wealthy. Just like the turn of the 20th century.