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From the popular media these days, electric vehicles are all the rage. Nary a week passes without the president of the United States cutting a ribbon at a new battery maker or EV facility.
So is the battle won? Is it now just a matter of a short time until we can all go to the showroom and drive away in our gas-free, pollution-free, high performance car?
Well, not quite.
Ask most American elite about hybrid cars and you will likely hear them say how amazing it is that the hybrid has been so successful. Ask the marketing team at Toyota and you will hear the same thing. And that should not be surprising -- after all, a decade ago hybrids could be measured in the hundreds, today there are millions of them.
But ask a climatologist, or a balance of trade economist, and they will tell you that they have not yet seen hybrids make any impact on the emissions profile of the U.S., or on the trade deficit, roughly half of which is accountable to oil importation. How come? Because though there may be millions of hybrids on the road, there are still hundreds of millions of cars in the U.S. -- roughly 250 million to be precise.
The lesson is this: We should not be distracted by the hoopla, we should focus on a single criteria -- and that criteria should be, are we moving the needle on oil use and attendant emissions or not? In order for us to answer that question in the affirmative a decade from now, several things have to change.
First, we need to move from a “hybrid" mindset, in which double-digit efficiency gains are celebrated, to a culture that says no amount of oil is acceptable. That means going all-electric.
Second, we need a much greater rate of penetration. Rather than hybrids, think iTunes. Ask any group of young people today when they last bought a music CD and you will likely get a quizzical look. A decade ago, acquisition of music was synonymous with CD purchases. What happened? A more convenient and less expensive platform was created -- and people migrated to it en masse.
That is what we have to do with cars, and that is what Better Place is building in several countries around the world. With the current set of incentives in the U.S., electric cars should have no trouble doing what hybrids did -- gaining 2 percent market share in a decade.
Next Page: Making electric cars less expensive.
battery management/ ownership / zero oil combustion
truely moving the fossel fuel usage to zero is the goal but the battery and electric car is not a resolution if the production loss / stroage loss and the energy production is still in the HC+O2 = h2o + co2 + heat energy. While PBP and Toyota are working on stop gaps, Who is working on a true fix?
Batteries for Electric Cars
You guys are looking at the battery as a part. If I'm not mistaken, Better Place is thinking of their product as miles driven, rather than a capital expense.
You buy gasoline a tank at a time, and you're subject to whatever the going rate for gas is. But a Better Place customer will sign up for a certain number of miles (or kilowatts?) and pay it over time, just like a cell phone customer does with his phone.
Think of it as a consumable rather than a capital item!
Battery exchange
To integrate a program like that with warranties and manufacturers and and and would be a huge task that would surely add to the cost. "Duracell" would end up getting the exclusive contract for GM EV's and the price would surely go up. "Energizer" would ink a deal with Nissan and their price would go up. Adding another layer wont help in this case at all. Interesting idea but an EV isnt like a grill, you cant just trade out tanks (or batteries) at Lowes.
Typical Better Place Nonsense
Leasing a battery does not make it cheaper, in fact it makes it more expensive. This is pretty simple economics at work here.
If you have a choice of buying or leasing, buying is always cheaper. You might still prefer leasing for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't make it cheaper.
If you want to buy an EV, go ahead an buy it. If you want to lease an EV, go ahead and lease it. But why would you buy the car but lease the battery? It make no sense.
By the way, did you notice the lack of any numbers in this article? What is the cost of a better place car, or lease of the battery? Silence. They say it is cheaper, but offer no evidence that this is the case.