Paris Pursues Electric Car Sharing

Autolib imagined. Credit: Paris City Hall, 2008

The concept of selling mobility on demand rather than cars themselves may be finally gaining some traction. Remember the stackable urban rental cars proposed by GM-funded researchers at MIT last fall?

Well, Paris is working hard to make that vision a reality. The French capital is gearing up to offer the auto equivalent of Vélib, a distributed bicycle-rental scheme that provides more than 20,000 bikes at more than 1,400 sites across the city and the suburbs. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced in June that the city will place 4,000 small electric cars at 700 Autolib pickup points around Paris and the suburbs starting in 2010. And according to business daily Les Echos (story en français), train giant SNCF is vying to operate the Autolib points out of its train stations, which are distributed across and around Paris.

And now, the city may finally have a solution to a potential game-killing problem: the uneven distribution of vehicles as cars pile up at popular destinations. Parisians are well aware of this problem. By midmorning, for example, as Vélib stations at the periphery of the city empty out and those downtown jam up, it's not unusual to see trucks redistributing the bikes to counter the tide. That's easy enough with bicycles but harder to envision with even small electric vehicles.

The city's solution? According to a leaked document reported by auto-news website Caradisiac (again, story en français), the plan is to simply have users declare their destination upon checking out a car. In response, the system will determine the closest Autolib point with a free spot for drop-off and reserve that space. No news on solving another potential problem for Paris's Autolib scheme: the name. Lyon, which beat Paris to the bike-share program with its own vélo'v, already sports a conventional car-share program called Autolib.

Could a similar scheme work in the U.S.? Issues of Forbes magazine that will appear on newsstands next week tout the MIT City Car concept as the embodiment of a new car-sharing direction for troubled automakers. City Car codesigner Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group adds to the drumbeat in a recent editorial for architecture website BD. "People don't want cars, they want personal mobility," writes Mitchell. He argues that, rather than bailing out car firms, governments should be radically rethinking urban transport around ultralightweight battery electric vehicles (EVs). To provide mobility most efficiently, says Mitchell, we should

. . . organise urban electric cars in mobility-on-demand systems like the Vélib bicycle system in Paris. Racks of public-use cars would be provided at closely spaced sites across the service area. If you want to go somewhere, you walk to a nearby rack, swipe a card, pick up a car, drive it to a rack near your destination, and drop it off.

Why A123 Didn't Get the Volt Contract

GM's new electric car, the Volt. Credit: GM

There's still no official word (it's expected by the end of the year), but it looks as though A123 Systems, a company based on a remarkable new battery chemistry formulated at MIT, won't be supplying the batteries for the first generation of GM's new electric car, the Volt. The contract, according to a couple of news reports released in recent weeks, will go to LG Chem, a Korean company.

GM had considered A123, a startup with no large-scale experience manufacturing automotive batteries, in part because A123 had developed a novel battery chemistry that produced very powerful, safe, and long-lasting batteries. So, why didn't the company get the contract?

First, some background on why A123 was in the running in the first place. A123 replaced the cobalt-oxide-based electrodes of conventional lithium-ion batteries with new nanostructured iron-phosphate electrodes. These phosphates are inherently safer than the cobalt-oxide-based chemistries, which have been known to suddenly burst into flames, destroying laptops and cell phones in the process and leading to massive recalls. The conventional cobalt materials also don't last very long--that's why laptop batteries have to be replaced every couple of years. The capacity of A123's batteries, in contrast, doesn't fade much with use. Safe, long-lasting batteries are essential in cars, where they're expected to survive abusive conditions for a decade or more. Ultimately, cost is the biggest issue, and A123 has advantages in this area as well. Safer materials ultimately reduce costs by decreasing the need for redundant safety systems (such as those used in the Tesla Roadster). What's more, longer-lasting materials reduce the need to oversize the batteries to make up for fading capacity over their lifetime--something else that reduces costs. Finally, by replacing cobalt with iron, A123 also reduced the cost of materials.

LG Chem uses a manganese-oxide-based electrode, which is less inherently safe than A123's phosphate-based materials. The company uses other modifications to the cells, including a novel separator between the positive and negative electrodes, to make up for this.

Here are some guesses about why A123 didn't get the contract (if indeed it didn't).

GM may be betting that LG Chem is more likely to supply packs on time. LG Chem is a bigger and older company than A123, a startup founded in 2005, and it has more manufacturing capacity. What's more, Continental, which packaged hundreds of A123's battery cells into a large battery pack, was late delivering packs to GM for testing. Getting the Volt out on time is a big deal for the cash-strapped automaker, which is counting on the Volt to change its image and help turn around its sales. After disclosing that only one of the two battery companies would get the Volt contract, GM vice chair Bob Lutz has reportedly explained that "we feel that at this point we have a lower risk with the one company."

Chem's battery pack might be cheaper. There are a couple of reasons why the many cost-saving features of A123's batteries may not have led to a lower-cost battery pack. First, while replacing cobalt with iron reduces materials costs, working with nanoscale powders is very difficult and can add to processing costs.

Second, the design of the Volt may not take best advantage of A123's cells. The Volt design calls for far more battery cells than are actually needed to supply the car's 40-mile electric range. The pack has a capacity of 16 kilowatt-hours, or 2.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. In comparison, Tesla Motors is selling an electric car that gets 220 miles on a 53 kilowatt-hour pack, or more than four miles per kilowatt-hour. A direct comparison between the two isn't possible because they use different battery chemistries and have vehicles that don't weigh the same, and because the Volt is designed to operate like a hybrid after the first 40 miles, which requires keeping some battery charge in reserve. But the difference shouldn't be this much. According to one GM engineer, 12 kilowatt-hours should be plenty of energy. The extra four are essentially for insurance against battery degradation, so that at the end of a decade, the Volt still gets 40 miles out of the battery. A123's batteries may not need this kind of insurance, since they are so stable. That stability could make it possible to use fewer batteries than is possible with other chemistries, cutting costs. But GM requires A123 to supply the extra cells anyway. That could be wise, since better tests are needed to guarantee battery lifetimes, but the result is that the potential of A123's innovations isn't being exploited, so the packs are likely more expensive than they need to be.

Not getting the contract, which is reported to be for 50,000 battery packs, can't be good news for A123. But it's not the end for the company. It is still in the running for the next-generation Volt. What's more, the company is working on batteries for 18 other vehicles.

Killing the Gas Guzzlers in Australia

Better Place (formerly Project Better Place), a company that plans to develop electric-car infrastructures for Israel and Denmark, has now announced plans to do the same in a much bigger country: Australia. The plan is to eventually make it unnecessary for Australia to import any oil.

If it succeeds there, the company's model could work in parts of the United States, too, such as the West Coast or the cities from Boston to Washington on the East Coast.

Better Place has proposed ways to overcome the limitations of today's technology for electric vehicles--namely, the cost and recharge times of batteries. To keep down initial costs for customers, the company plans to sell cars in much the way that mobile-phone companies sell phones: with a subsidized low cost and a monthly plan. For the cars, the plan will pay for miles of driving, not minutes of talk time. The company also plans to install networks of charging stations, so that drivers can keep their cars topped off during the day, and battery swap stations along highways, where drivers can exchange a depleted battery for a charged one on long trips.

The plan seemed to make sense for Israel and Denmark, relatively small countries where such networks could be easily installed and where government policies heavily favor electric cars. But Better Place's CEO, Shai Agassi, has said that it could work in the United States as well. (See this video.) Rather than connect the whole country, however, the plan would be to connect certain urban centers, such as those from Boston to Washington, DC, or from Los Angeles to Seattle. Government policies would still be needed to make the plan economical.

In the announcement of the Australia deal, Agassi emphasized that if the system can work in Australia, which has more car ownership per capita than the United States, it could work in the United States.

Not everyone is so optimistic.

Financial Crisis Zaps Electric-Car Startup

Speedy electric: Tesla's Roadster, an electric car that reaches 60 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Credit: Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley startup that sells a high-performance electric sports car, is feeling pressure from the ongoing financial crisis. It announced on Wednesday that it is closing an engineering facility in Michigan, laying off an unspecified number of workers, and delaying its next vehicle, a long-anticipated luxury sedan, while it waits on government loans to provide new funding. In addition, Tesla's CEO is being replaced by Elon Musk, Tesla's chairman and a leading investor, whose money nearly single-handedly got the company off the ground. Now the company, instead of pushing full speed ahead on developing new cars, will focus on making itself profitable by selling its sports car and motor and battery technology.

That's bad news for people who had hoped that the company would eventually produce an electric car they could afford. Tesla got attention because of its sports car, a powerful car that is fun to drive and helped change the image of electric vehicles. But the $109,000 vehicle is beyond the reach of most people. Much of the appeal of the company has been its long-term goal of making electric vehicles affordable. The proposed luxury sedan, with a price tag of $60,000, would be a significant step in that direction, but the cutbacks at the company raise questions about whether it will be able to meet its long-term goal. Tesla's sedan was originally to have gone into production in 2009. But that's been pushed back to mid-2011 at the soonest. That's after GM is to come out with an electric sedan of its own, the Volt, which is supposed to cost about $40,000. And several other automakers will be launching electric vehicles in roughly the same time frame. With a late start on a production sedan, will Tesla be able to go toe-to-toe with the big carmakers? Will it become "one of the great car companies of the 21st century," as Musk hopes? Or will it, as now seems likely, remain a boutique car company, selling specialty vehicles to the relative few?

To be sure, this isn't the first time that Tesla has seen sharp cutbacks. The company, founded in 2003, is already on its fourth CEO. At the beginning of this year, it reportedly laid off about 10 percent of its workforce in what former CEO Martin Eberhard is said to have called a "bloodbath." It's also faced delays before, particularly when it had problems with the transmission on its sports car. And yet the company continues to plug along. The late-coming sports car has nevertheless sold out and has a long waiting list. And Musk, who has considerable personal financial resources, has said he will do whatever it takes to ensure that the company will have enough capital. It's certainly far too early to write the company off.

Credit: Tesla Motors

What Credit Crunch?

The severe credit crisis rippling through the markets didn't stop GridPoint--an Arlington, VA, startup that makes software for smart management of the power grid--from securing $120 million in equity financing, announced yesterday. "Really high quality deals will continue to get funded, despite the current turmoil," Peter Corsell, the company's president and CEO (and a member of this year's TR35), told me at a smart-grid conference in Washington, D.C. He said the money will be used to acquire other startups, starting with V2Green, a company that makes smart-grid software for recharging plug-in hybrids and other electric vehicles. GridPoint is a key player in an effort to upgrade the power grid in Boulder, CO, working with utilities including Duke Energy and Xcel Energy. GridPoint's software provides utilities and consumers a Web-based portal to manage and control electrical demand; it can do things like shut off electric water heaters and pool pumps temporarily in times of high demand. To date, GridPoint has raised more than $220 million.

The Real Scoop on Plug-in Hybrids

I was happy to see an article attempting to help readers understand hybrids and plug-in hybrids in the widely read magazine Condé Nast Traveler last week. These vehicles have the potential to dramatically reduce petroleum consumption, but of course the only way they'll catch on is if people know about them.

I wasn't as happy after I read the article.

No, today's hybrids cannot drive 30 miles on electricity alone. They're designed to go only a couple of miles before the gasoline engine kicks on.

No, we do not need a new kind of battery to make plug-in hybrids work. Kits exist today for converting conventional hybrids into plug-in hybrids (it can be done in about two hours). The major automakers have higher standards for plug-in batteries, but GM engineers say that they already have the batteries they need. The challenge now is incorporating them into big battery packs. But that's been done before with other batteries, and GM engineers say that they'll have the new packs ready for testing this year. By 2010, GM aims to have the packs in production vehicles. (See "Electric Cars 2.0.")

And no, plug-in hybrids won't cause blackouts. There's plenty of excess electricity capacity at night, when most people will be plugging them in. Indeed, eventually plug-in hybrids could be used to prevent blackouts. (See "How Plug-in Hybrids Will Save the Grid.")

But here's the biggest problem with the article. It defines a plug-in hybrid as "a hybrid you have to recharge just like an electric car." This is exactly wrong, and it is just what automakers are concerned that people will think. One reason people haven't adopted electric cars is because their limited range and long charging times make long trips difficult. (One electric-car champion boasted to me that he takes road trips all the time in his electric car. But he has to hunt down RV parks and take two-hour breaks along the way for recharging.) The whole point of a plug-in hybrid is to get around this problem.

Plugging in a plug-in hybrid is strictly optional. If you plug it in to recharge the battery, you can drive to work and back using electricity alone, which will save you money and reduce carbon emissions. (See "Plug-in Hybrids Get Green Grades.") You can also make the first miles of a road trip using electricity alone. But if you prefer not to plug it in, or if an outlet isn't handy, the car simply runs on gasoline. Indeed, a plug-in hybrid can get much better range than a conventional gasoline car because it uses gasoline more efficiently. GM's Volt plug-in is to have a 600-mile range using gasoline, with 40 miles more if you happen to plug it in.