August
17
Texas Teen Builds His Own Electric Car on $10,000 Budget
This fall, Texas teenager Lucas Laborde will be driving to school in an electric car he built himself. The 17 year old spent last summer converting a conventional gas-powered car to run on batteries. Total cost? Around $10,000.
Lukes EV is based on a kit car, known as a Bradley GT II, which his father bought on eBay for just $5000 splashing out a further $5700 on electric conversion parts and batteries. The rest was left up to Lukes ingenuity and technical know-how.
After 150 hours of work, Luke had hooked up eight 80-pound lead-acid batteries in the space left after removing the fuel tank, as well as several other creative locations. He finished up with an EV capable of travelling 40 miles between charges, a top speed of 45mph, (more than enough for the local school run), and heaps of low-end torque. As Luke told reporters, it has a lot of power.
The car isnt without a few quirks though; the weight of the batteries has caused the fiberglas body to twist slightly, meaning that the gull-wing doors dont completely close. However, by using his own initiative, and making use of widely available existing components, Luke Laborde has put many global car companies to shame by creating a working, highway-ready EV, in far less time and on a much lower budget.
October
12
Discord Over Regulation of Car Charging
With electric cars set to hit the mass market next year, a skirmish is breaking out in California over who will control the states electric vehicle infrastructure.
A battle is brewing in California over how to provide juice for electric vehicles.
The California Public Utilities Commission will write the rules of the electric road and is just starting to grapple with the complex regulatory issues surrounding the integration of battery-powered cars into the states electrical grid.
One of the biggest questions is whether to regulate Better Place, Coulomb Technologies and other companies that plan to sell electricity to drivers through a network of battery-charging stations.
Californias three big investor-owned utilities have split over the issue.
The commission should establish its authority to regulate third-party providers of electricity for electric vehicles, Christopher Warner, an attorney for Pacific Gas & Electric, wrote in a filing with the utilities commission. Managing the increased electricity consumption and load attributable to electric vehicles in order to avoid adverse impacts on the safety and reliability of the electric grid may be one of the most difficult management challenges that electric utilities will face.
Southern California Edison, meanwhile, urged the commission to move cautiously, calibrating any regulation to the specific business models of the companies.
San Diego Gas & Electric said the commission did not have the right to regulate companies like Better Place.
Not surprisingly, Better Place, based in Palo Alt, Calif., echoed that view, arguing that a heavy regulatory hand could stifle innovation and scare off investors. At the early stages of this industry, we encourage the commission to set rules that do not foreclose new business models, Jason Wolf, a Better Place executive, wrote in a filing with the commission.
A coalition of environmental groups that includes the Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth wrote that the commission had authority over companies like Better Pace but should avoid stifling this emerging market with inapplicable or burdensome requirements.
The utilities commission does not regulate municipal-owned utilities, which will set their own rules for private electric car-charging networks.
One of Californias biggest public utilities, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, has asserted that it has exclusive jurisdiction over third-party electric vehicle service providers within its service territory and that there is no commercial space for companies like Better Place to sell electricity at retail rates.
Better Place and other electric car start-ups will also have to do battle with long-entrenched consumer advocacy groups that are often at odds with utilities and the commission.
The Utility Reform Network, for instance, has pushed the commission to go slow, allowing only the installation of 110-volt charging stations, rather than higher-voltage equipment that would charge electric car batteries much more quickly.
July
30
GENERAL MOTORS introduced America to the Chevrolet Volt at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show as a low-slung concept car that would someday be the future of motorized transportation. It would go 40 miles on battery power alone, promised G.M., after which it would create its own electricity with a gas engine. Three and a half years and one government-assisted bankruptcy later G.M. is bringing a Volt to market that makes good on those two promises. The problem is, well, everything else.
For starters, G.M.s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volts development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.
In short, the Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy. And though President Obamas task force reported in 2009 that the Volt will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term, it didnt cancel the project.
Nor did the government or G.M. decide to sell the Volt at a loss, which, paradoxically, might have been the best hope for making it profitable. Consider the Prius. Back in 1997, Toyota began selling the high-tech, first-of-its-kind car in Japan for about $17,000, even though each model cost $32,000 to build.
By taking a loss on the first several years of Prius production, Toyota was able to hold its price steady, and then sell the gas-sippers in huge numbers when oil prices soared. Today a Prius costs roughly the same in inflation-adjusted dollars as those 1997 models did, and it has become the best-selling Toyota in the United States after the evergreen Camry and Corolla.
Instead of following Toyotas model, G.M. decided to make the Volt more affordable by offering a $350-a-month lease over 36 months. But that offer allows only 12,000 miles per year, or about 33 miles per day. Assuming you charged your Volt every evening, giving you 40 miles of battery power, and wanted to keep below the mileage limit, you would rarely use its expensive range-extending gas engine. No wonder the Volts main competition, the Nissan Leaf, forgoes the additional combustion engine and ends up costing $8,000 less as a result.
In the industry, some suspect that G.M. and the Obama administration decided against selling the Volt at a loss because they want the company to appear profitable before its long-awaited initial stock offering, which is likely to take place next month. For taxpayers, that approach might have made sense if the government planned on selling its entire 61 percent stake in G.M. But the administration has said it will sell only enough equity in the public offering to relinquish its controlling stake in G.M. Thus the government will remain exposed to the companys (and the Volts) long-term fate.
So the future of General Motors (and the $50 billion taxpayer investment in it) now depends on a vehicle that costs $41,000 but offers the performance and interior space of a $15,000 economy car. The company is moving forward on a second generation of Volts aimed at eliminating the initial models considerable shortcomings. (In truth, the first-generation Volt was as good as written off inside G.M., which decided to cut its 2011 production volume to a mere 10,000 units rather than the initial plan for 60,000.) Yet G.M. seemingly has no plan for turning its low-volume eco-flagship into a mass-market icon like the Prius.
Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volts Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for retooling its plants, and youve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.
In the end, making the bailout work whatever the cost is the only good reason for buying a Volt. The car is not just an environmental hair shirt (a charge leveled at the Prius early in its existence), it is an act of political self-denial as well.
If G.M. were honest, it would market the car as a personal donation for, and vote of confidence in, the auto bailout. Unfortunately, thats not the kind of cross-branding that will make the Volt a runaway success.
Edward Niedermeyer is the editor of the Web site The Truth About Cars.
