Are Plug-in Electric Cars the Answer?

With gas prices surging, and global demand unlikely to abate, GM is pushing hard to get it's Volt plug-in out the door. Still several years away, there are R&D challenges to overcome, like the fact that traditional headlights and taillights draw too much power.

The Volt will be able to travel 40 miles after a 6 hour charge. That means it can only be used by a homeowner with access to electricity where the car is parked overnight. If you have an apartment or park in a city deck it will not be an option. In Atlanta, where I live, the distances are sprawling, and the traffic an abomination. Drivers are careful not to let their gas tanks get very low as a lengthy traffic delay is always possible. After the Volt battery system is exhausted, a small gasoline engine engages to run the car and recharge the batteries.

The rumored price of the Volt has risen to $45,000 - and GM will probably still lose money with every unit. There is already an all electric plug-in car available on a limited basis in California. It has greater range than the Volt but costs more than $100,000.

Are electric plug-in cars green? It all depends on where you get the electricity. 51% of the electricity in this country comes from coal-fired plants. These plants are being retrofitted to be cleaner, but there currently is no available technology to reduce carbon emissions.

With today's highly advanced automotive emission systems cars are amazingly clean. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to argue that running cars on coal generated electricity is cleaner than running cars on gasoline given the state of technology for both fuels. There is a technology with the ability to provide baseline electric power to the grid with zero emissions: nuclear. If we aggressively build out our nuclear power capabilities we can dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions.

What we need, for now, is not the Volt. We need the next generation of Prius. Toyota has it right. Combine a much smaller gasoline engine with supplemental electric power for much greater gas mileage, range, and no coal (instead of an all electric car with a small backup gasoline engine). This is technology that can be maximized for today with great effect. The Prius gets ~48 MPG highway and a little less, but not dramatically less, for city driving. In contrast a BMW 530, with a 3.0 liter engine, gets about 29 MPG highway.

There have been a flurry of recent announcements about companies gearing up to use lithium-ion batteries for electric plug-in cars. These batteries get quite hot. They sometimes catch on fire. In my Dell PC, the battery no longer holds a useful charge after about 1 year. The replacement cost to power my small laptop: $110 (plus shipping). Now scale that up for an automobile.

We are a long way from a pure plug-in. But if we follow Toyota’s example we can make real measurable progress right now.