Last week’s EV Battery Tech 2010 conference left delegates optimistic about electric vehicles (EVs). It also offered a serious reality check and raised more questions than answers. Clearly, there is much to be done to create a viable, sustainable mass market for EVs.
Bringing EVs to market is the easy bit. Sales of the Mitsubishi iMiEV begin this year, along with the rebadged Peugeot iOn and Citroen C-Zero, and the Nissan Leaf is just around the corner. There is already significant interest and demand for these EVs. According to Ayoul Grouvel, head of EVs at PSA, 9,000 people (all private customers, not fleet) pre-registered interest in the C-Zero and iOn without any marketing.
The issue, therefore, is how to make EVs a mass-market product. In terms of forecasting EV sales, any guess is as good as another. According to Lew Fulton of the International Energy Agency (IEA), using figures from the IEA’s “Electric and Plug-in Hybrid Vehicle Roadmap October 2009”, four million EVs and plug-in hybrids will be sold worldwide by 2020 based on government targets as of September 2009. However, Germany is targeting one million EV sales by 2020 and France is targeting double that by the same date. Factor in China and four million units falls way short of the mark. GM Europe president Nick Reilly believes 20% of all cars will be electric or hybrid by 2020. PSA agrees. Renault is targeting up to three million EVs by 2016, and six million by 2020.
Unless OEMs can launch EVs at a loss alongside government incentives to jump-start the market, EVs will be a hard sell over efficient, small, internal combustion-engined (ICE) cars. Interestingly, PSA’s Ayoul Grouvel foresees total cost of ownership (TCO) parity between ICEs and EVs in 2012/13. Whilst some OEMs, such as Renault and PSA, include incentives in their EV business model, others, like GM, do not.
The high price of EVs is due to costly lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries, which cost as much as a small ICE car. For this reason, battery leasing makes sense. As one OEM speaker pointed out in confidence to AutomotiveWorld.com, what incentive is there for EV drivers who own their batteries to buy a replacement battery when for the same price they can buy a small ICE car?
“Second life” strategies established now will avoid mountains of partially-depleted EV batteries. Jerry Hardcastle, VP For Vehicle Design And Development at Nissan, outlined Nissan’s “4R” strategy, which defines how it will reuse, resell, refabricate or recycle second life EV batteries.
Battery material sourcing is crucial to a sustainable EV industry. As James Hayter of Western Lithium pointed out, “…lithium is one of the most important raw materials in EVs.” Western Lithium is currently developing one of the largest known lithium deposits in Nevada. At the other end of the sourcing spectrum is Recupyl SAS, whose president, Dr Farouk Tedjar, described the company’s “urban mining” strategy to recover materials from old mobile telephones, televisions and computer monitors. According to Dr Tedjar, 120,000t/year of consumer batteries can provide 24,000t of zinc, 20,000t of manganese and 18,000t of steel per year.
Despite the industry’s pursuit of li-ion batteries, delegates learned that li-ion technology can only be improved upon by a factor of two, creating a need for new and alternative energy storage options. Revolt Technology’s rechargeable zinc air battery technology offers considerable potential, but it remains a long way from mass-market usage.
The issue of user-monitoring is both interesting and contentious. OEMs plan to monitor EV batteries to understand EV driving and charging habits. TH!NK’s MindBox provides in-use data, analyzed alongside laboratory data. PSA, too, will use a battery monitoring system to analyze driving styles. The question is, how far can battery monitoring go before it becomes a deterrent for potential buyers concerned about being monitored?
The issue of safety offers up a whole new conference possibility. Do EVs comply with existing safety legislation and testing? Does existing safety testing and legislation apply to EVs? Do emergency services know where major power cables are located inside EVs? TÜV SÜD Automotive thinks not, and that new standards, new tests and safety education are required.
GM’s EV strategy is based on making EVs relevant and capable of being a family’s primary vehicle. To achieve this, there is much to be done.
