Are Electric Cars The Real Silver Bullets?

Is the electric car really the silver bullet that it’s made out to be?

I’ll have to reserve judgment on the Mahindra Reva e20 till I spend a week living with it over the coming month. On the face of it, though, it seems like a quite an achievement for Chetan Maini and his team. At 6 lakhs, however, it isn’t exactly going to cause sleepless nights for your local Maruti dealer. It really does need a Government subsidy for it to have any kind of impact whatsoever in the domestic market.

Having said that, though, various governments in the West – city, as well as State – provide any number of subsidies and concessions to encourage the sale of EV’s, but they just don’t seem to yield the kind of results that are expected. A few years ago, it was projected that we’d be tripping over power cords connected to EV’s parked at every street corner, but that simply isn’t the case. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, envisioned one million EV’s in Germany by 2020. President Obama projected that the same ambitious number would be battling for space on the American interstates by 2015. But both targets are way off the mark. In fact, French component manufacturer, Valeo, expects EV’s to comprise just 2% of the total market by 2020. And that’s if battery technology improves drastically from where it is today.

EV’s use lithium-ion batteries – much like the ones found in your cellphone. And they’re simply far too expensive to be used en mass. Plus, as we saw with the Boeing Dreamliner fleet, which was recently grounded, temperature management is key when attempting to extract high doses of energy from lithium-ion battery packs. Just think of how hot your cell phone or laptop gets while it’s charging. So, when you put hundreds of lithium-ion cells together to power a vehicle, temperature management is crucial – and this adds cost, complexity, and weight. Moreover lithium, by itself, is a rare earth metal.

So, if you take into account the environmental impact of sourcing the materials to create these battery packs, transporting them to the place of manufacture and then to the point-of-sale, and add to that the extra energy and resources required to assemble these machines versus traditional cars in the first place, not to mention the process required to recycle them at the end of life, the environmental impact over an EV’s lifecycle is likely to be greater than that of a regular automobile. Now add to that the fact that the electricity that you use to charge EV’s is largely generated by burning fossil fuels to begin with, and you’re no better off than when you started.

From a customers perspective, add range anxiety to the mix, which is greatly impacted by weather and road conditions that are out of their control, then take away many of the creature comforts that they find in a normal car – and, suddenly, the argument for EV’s doesn’t seem to be so compelling anymore. As a result, consumers aren’t exactly lining up at dealerships for EV’s. To make matters worse, most manufacturers are making massive losses on each EV sold in the first place.

Reducing CO2 emissions is imperative, no question, but it needs a more holistic approach. We need to continue to explore the various technology alternatives, while also working towards the next breakthrough in battery technology.

The first step is to continue to make vehicles lighter using materials like aluminum. More importantly, though, the internal combustion engine has a lot of life left in it yet. The current trend of reducing engine size, and adding features like direct injection and turbocharging, while also putting in mild hybrid elements such as brake energy regeneration, are already leading to improvements to the tune of 30% in fuel economy and emissions – which is massive. So, while we wait for the next silver bullet, lets not be so quick to dismiss the technology that’s treated us so well for the past century or so.