PostatMay 12 2008 01:15 PM by
Angus MacKenzie One of America's most enduring conspiracy theories, right up there with Roswell and the Grassy Knoll, is that Big Auto conspired with Big Oil to kill the electric car. The mass reclamation of leased EV1s that ended GM's troubled electric-car program (as chronicled in filmmaker Chris Paine's disingenuous documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?") was all the most rabid theorists needed to prove their point.
GM didn't kill the electric car. Big Oil didn't kill the electric car. The EV1 was dead on arrival.
Back in the early 1990s, I attended an electric-vehicle conference where one of the speakers was a Hughes Aircraft vice president called Howard Wilson. Hughes had been acquired by GM in 1985 for $5.7 billion at the urging of chairman Roger B. Smith, who somehow reasoned a company that built rockets might have some useful technology to transfer to a company that built Chevys. Wilson was the man Hughes put in charge of figuring out exactly what those technology transfers might be.
Wilson had worked on the GM Sunraycer, the solar-powered car that drove 1867 miles across Australia on the energy equivalent of five gallons of gas. But he was at the conference to talk about GM's electric-car program, which was then taking shape back in Detroit.
GM's electric car was based on the Impact concept unveiled by Roger Smith at the Los Angeles auto show in January 1990. Smith was anxious to prove his expensive Hughes acquisition actually delivered technology transfer to the auto industry, even though Hughes technology used in the car was minimal. The Impact, like the Sunraycer, was largely done by engineers at AeroVironment, the blue-sky engineering shop run by Paul MacCready in California's San Gabriel valley. To everyone's surprise Smith announced GM would build a production version.
Apparently encouraged by Smith's commitment to the Impact, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced in September that year plans to mandate that two percent of all cars sold in the state by 1998 would be zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) -- to all intents and purposes, electric vehicles. Only problem was, electric vehicles were a long, long way from being viable alternatives to conventional gas-powered cars for L.A. commuters. And Howard Wilson knew it.
The problem, as always, was the battery. "Scientifically [battery] storage is all right," wrote Thomas Edison in 1883, "but commercially, as absolute a failure as one can imagine." More than a century later, nothing had changed.
For reasons of durability and reliability, the GM team had decided to stick with tried and true lead-acid batteries for the EV1. A battery is merely an energy storage device, not a source of energy. Even today, a kilogram of the very best performing lead-acid battery can store barely 0.4 percent the energy contained in a kilogram of gasoline. (By way of comparison, a kilogram of the latest, most efficient lithium-ion batteries, can only store about 1.2 percent the energy contained a kilogram of gasoline.)
The 2970-lb EV1 needed 1175-lb of lead-acid battery to go just 90 miles on the highway, and 70 miles in the city -- and could manage those distances only because the rest of the car had been carefully (and expensively) optimized for light weight, reduced aerodynamic drag, and had one of the most efficient and sophisticated electric powertrains in existence.
Howard Wilson was painfully aware of the EV1's shortcomings when we spoke at that EV conference, well before the car's launch. "What I'd really like to do," he said, "is install a small gas turbine engine that could run at a constant speed to provide the electricity for the motors." Wilson was, in effect, proposing a hybrid that made the most of the astonishing efficiencies built into the EV1's basic design to compensate for the pitiful energy density of the lead-acid battery pack.
The reason he wanted to use a gas turbine was that it could be made to run on anything from gasoline to cooking oil, and running at a constant speed would reduce emissions surges caused by the need to throttle up the engine to overcome load. "The emissions would be tiny," said Wilson, "but we can't do it because the CARB mandate insists on zero emissions."
A hybrid along these lines, which would have had decent range, and not be dependent on being plugged in to a charger for hours at a time, might have made an ultra-low emission -- and therefore ultra-fuel efficient -- commuter car a lot more attractive to a lot more L.A. commuters, although it's far from clear demand would've been enough to bring the price of the vehicle down to more realistic levels (the EV1 reportedly cost GM $80,000 each to build).
In the end, though, the price wasn't an issue. The reality is the EV1 was hostage to a technology the engineers knew from the get-go just wasn't able to do the job Roger Smith and the California Air Resources Board believed it could. That's what killed the electric car.