ELECTRIC CARS: Electrically-powered vehicles are beginning to come of age but is plugging into the national grid really the best way to keep us motoring? asks MICHAEL McALEER
THE PROMISE for Ireland has been made: 10 per cent of the Irish vehicle fleet will be electric by 2020. Businesses can now write off 100 per cent of the cost of electric vehicles. A new age of transport is dawning and the Irish are in the vanguard.
Cynics will scoff. The very limited selection of electric cars on offer, their limited distance range and the lack of public access to recharging points may lead some to believe it's a publicity stunt.
Yet alongside a definite PR agenda lies some smart reasoning. For a start, while we would no doubt like to portray ourselves as pioneers, leading the way for those oil-addled car giants to a cleaner future, the move towards electric vehicles has been afoot for some time.
The car industry is all too aware of the limitations for the current fossil-fuel addiction. Several options have been proposed but the competitive nature of the business has meant that getting everyone to agree on a single strategy has been difficult to say the least. It has been further hindered by demands of investors and shareholders for immediate returns.
This has forced car firms to juggle long-term research projects with short-term profit-driven basic powertrain production. It was this pursuit of short-term gain that saw US car giants Ford, General Motors and Chrysler being caught out by the rapid changes in consumer demand. Left with forecourts full of so-called "gas-guzzlers", the end result was three red-faced executives pleading with the US Congress last month for a €25 billion Government bailout.
As the new era in powertrains slowly dawns, it's as if the car industry is going back to its roots. Small engineering workshops are crafting electric cars with mixed results. The build quality of most of these is not on par with regular cars, but the engineering is innovative.
Now the big brands are ready to enter the fray. Two short-term alternatives are offered: first there was the petrol-electric hybrids - where battery power generated from either spare energy from the engine or regenerative braking was on tap to lower fuel consumption. The Prius is the icon of this format. Sadly it has never really managed to cut serious fuel consumption on long distance journeys.
More recently there have been biofuels, which, while not necessarily recording better fuel consumption figures, at least lower carbon emissions. However, the backlash over the usage of arable land and some food sources for fuel has turned many off the fuel, while most scientists suggest it was never a viable long-term overall solution.
So we now find ourselves back to taking electricity from the national grid. The problems here are pretty self-evident and are merely pushed up the food chain to the electricity supplier. For all the public support, wind energy and other green energy formats are still in relative infancy.
On a practical level, battery technology has been very slow to meet the standards of functionality customers demand. The vehicles on display at the aforementioned announcement last week offer ranges of just 80km on a six to eight hour charge. That's impractical for many motorists.
General Motors is still hoping to launch its plug-in/petrol-hybrid model, the Chevrolet Volt, by 2010. The Volt will have a range of 40 miles before needing a recharge. However, a small petrol engine will be used to recharge the batteries as they run down. It's this approach - using smaller petrol motors to recharge batteries - that seems to offer the best medium-term solution and better range.
The most likely long-term option, according to powertrain engineers, remains hydrogen. It can be converted to power through a regular combustion system or into electric power via an electrochemical conversion in a fuel-cell. The only emissions is water.
The benefits of hydrogen technology over regular plug-in electric vehicles is that it offers the same green credentials, but a far greater range. Filling up a car with hydrogen is only slightly more complicated than a regular petrol model, as we experienced recently when testing a hydrogen-powered BMW 7 Series.
The big benefit, however, is the range of, for example, the latest Honda FC-X Clarity hydrogen test cars. These are large family cars that can run 450km on a full tank. And that range is constantly improving.
Before we get too taken in by the hydrogen revolution, however, hydrogen comes with its own serious hurdles to conquer. Costs are excessive for the technology in question, though they are dropping, while the infrastructure is not in place to provide this fuel to the masses.
Critics claim the monumental cost of any infrastructural change as being the main reason why the hydrogen economy will never come to pass. Even advocates doubt we will see this in place for at least 30 years or more. So for now the future seems to centre on a plug-in format, most probably supported by a smaller fossil-fuelled engine as back-up. Any future success depends on battery technology.
That's where the next big innovation needs to come to make the electric car truly the transport of the future.
