Are Electric Vehicles a Niche Market?
Here’s an article on emerging battery technologies that will greatly improve the calculus under which electric vehicles will be adopted into the mainstream, focusing on the work IBM is doing in lithium-air. After some level of technical analysis, the author notes:
IBM’s admission that the eventual return on its investment in lithium-air will be at least a decade away is significant for competitors and for governments’ electrification policies alike.
IBM has no anti-EV or pro-oil bias in believing that a tenfold energy density improvement is essential for the widespread take-up of EVs. It has no reason to either minimise or exaggerate the challenges ahead for lithium-air.
So, pending any surprise advances, EVs seem likely to remain short-range, niche vehicles for the next decade or more.
I can’t speak to any bias IBM may have, but I think they’re completely incorrect in suggesting that a ten-fold improvement in energy density is required to bringing EVs into the mainstream. A garden-variety battery electric vehicle like a Nissan LEAF offers its driver a 100-mile range. Who in blazes wants to drive a car 1000 miles on a charge?
Let’s not lose sight of the big picture here. There are 25 million multi-car households in the US alone where one of the vehicles drives less than 40 miles a day. In fact, 78% of American drivers commute less than 40 miles per day. My point is that you can call that a “niche vehicle” if you want, but it’s a heck of a big niche. It’s precisely like saying you’re addressing the niche market of American males six-foot two inches tall or shorter.
Craig,
Most of those multi-car households have one SUV or pickup truck and one large vehicle. Why?
Why would the majority of households, when determining the vehicle they wish to purchase in a time of high gasoline prices, choose an SUV? The answer is: versatility.
The more options that a person might have with their purchased vehicle, the more they will like it. The less options, the less they would like it.
If I were to purchase a Nissan Leaf (for our single-car household), and an errand needed to be run after church on a Sunday in the summer, we wouldn’t be able to run that errand. Between a round trip to church and lunch with family we will have driven 50+ miles. The Leaf can only travel ~62 miles with the air conditioner on full blast. That means that on any given Sunday (or Wednesday) I would be extremely inconvenienced by owning a Leaf instead of a real car.
I only commute 5 miles to work, but I zip home for lunch as well, for a total of 20 miles/day. If there was an event downtown that my wife and I wanted to attend… we couldn’t go in either the summer or the winter, because that would require another 50 miles round trip, and that would take us past a safe margin (~62 miles) for constant air conditioner use AND that would put us exactly at the safe level for driving with the heater at full power (~75 miles).
The Leaf is a car that does not fulfill the requirements of a vehicle: to get you where you want to go when you want to go there. So in order to own a Leaf I have to buy another whole car!!!
The exact same calculation will and must occur in a two-car household if family or business requires one member of the house to leave town (which of course also cannot be done in an EV).
Niche is a completely valid market expression for an expensive vehicle that one understands at the point of purchase cannot be used in thousands of conceivable cases in which a vehicle will be needed.
For some situations, the Leaf would make sense, but it is a niche car for the reasons stated by Mr. Doty. For people who do a lot of city driving but would never need to exceed the range of the Leaf, getting a Leaf could be a very reasonable thing to do. For many families with two or more cars, it would be very reasonable if one were a Leaf.
One of the problems of owning multiple cars is getting ripped off by the insurance company. If a single person has two cars or if a family has more cars than drivers, there is still only a minor discount on the additional car even though the exposure of the insurance company is only slightly increased by the additional car since it would be impossible to drive all the cars at the same time.
If it were not for the unreasonable increase in insurance costs, more people might buy a Leaf to use for most of their driving and use the gasoline-burning car only when they had to drive beyond the range of the Leaf.
http://boulderionics.com/
Glen, your reasoning assumes that there will not be the ability to charge that vehicle at work or church.
According to the Nissan website
“Starting from a depleted battery, about 20 hours at 110-120V (depending on amperage), approximately 7 hours at 208-240V (depending on amperage) and about 30 minutes at 480V (quick-charging station).”
At 110V that is a charging rate of 3.1 miles per hour.
At 208-240 that is 8.8 miles per hour.
At 480 that is less than a church service or lunch time or even the time it would probably take to come home, kiss your wife, change your clothes for the trip to town and go to the bathroom and that’s from a dead battery.
You would theoretically be arriving home with a vehicle that had charged at work and only be down by 5 miles worth of charge. Even at 208-240 you could almost top it off in 30 minutes.
If Nissan and other electric vehicle manufacturers were smart they would put a charging recepticle at each end of the car and charging stations could be put on light posts. On street parking would have 2 stations on each pole. Parking lot light posts could have 4 stations on each pole in the middle of the lot and 2 on poles at the edge of the lot.
When Gasoline vehicles were first introduced there were not gas stations on every corner. As a country we will have to make adjustments for electric cars also. Charging at destinations will help relieve range anxiety. You still won’t be able to use them for cross country trips but daily driving will be much easier. I also envision vehicle body panels made out of PV for charging while it is sitting anywhere there is sun. It wouldn’t make a big difference but it would help and hopefully panel efficiency improves and it makes a bigger diffference. The top floor of a parking garage could also be covered with PV to assist in charging the electric vehicles parked there.
If you had a family that had one short commuter and one long commuter, that family could get a Leaf and a Volt or plug in Prius and be set.
Sorry Frank, I have no solution for your problem. Insurance companies suck and that is all there is to it. My solution is to own ancient vehicles and carry minimum insurance. Fortunately one of those vehicles burns 100% biodiesel and that is what 3/4 or more of my yearly miles gets driven on. That won’t work for new electric or hybrid vehiicles though. However I don’t know any family that don’t already own at least 2 vehicles.
Brian,
Probably quick charging would significantly shorten the life of the battery. How fast it could be recharged without shortening its life I don’t know, but I’d guess that charging in two hours wouldn’t shorten the life. However, it may not be necessary to recharge the battery completely if the trip would be only slightly beyond the range. Sometimes a 25% recharge would be sufficient.
Decisions on purchasing electric cars have to be made taking into account what charging facilities are available right now.
Regarding the number of cars owned, it would be good to improve city planning and public transportation so that families would need only one car. But not everyone lives in a family. Those of us who are single are definitely penalized for owning more than one car. I own one car and two motorcycles, and so far as I’m concerned, I’m being ripped off by the insurance company. Owning a cheap used car would save only on the liability coverage, not on collision coverage. Also, cheap used cars would probably be less fuel efficient. If insurance regulations were changed so that owning more vehicles than can be driven simultaneously would result in a very substantial discount, then people would be more likely to buy an electric car just for short trips and the other vehicle(s) would be used only when the electric car wouldn’t do the job. That’s a matter for state insurance laws.
I agree about quick charging but I don’t know enough about the charging profiles of the batteries they are using. I will have to do some reading up on that. Quick charging a FLA battery at that rate would kill it in short order. The Leaf does come with a cord for the 120V charging which I get the impression can be plugged into any outlet but I can’t verify for sure. Adding these outlets to existing light poles would not be much effort. Poles can also be purchased with outlets built right in from the start for replacement or new build.
The Leaf has an app to see where charging is available near your current location.
AS far as infrastructure, public transit is not good in my immediate area. I stand a better chance of seeing a horse and buggy than a bus or hummer. If I drive half an hour I can get to trains into Philadelphia. When I do go in I use the trains whenever I can but parking during a weekday is terrible. They do come out further but after 6:00PM the service out here is really curtailed.
Part of the cost of insurance for me is the number of miles traveled on each car and since I spread out the miles over 3 cars that is pretty low. I also manage to avoid emissions inspection because the gas burners go less than 5K miles per year. Altogether I pay about $1200 for 2 people driving 3 cars. None of them sit for more than 6 months so I can’t take them down for part of the year as there is a minimum 6 month down time.
Don’t get the impression I am advocating heavily for electric vehicles above all else but I do believe that even in their current state they can be useful and building up charging infrastructure will not be a waste because batteries will get better and range will become more extended. Perhaps the most important thing will be to have a uniform national charging station standard so all electric and plug in hybrids will be able to use all charging stations. 120V and 240V are standard and common outlets which can be built into light poles and usually exist at workplaces already. 480 is not as common and might only be available at highway rest stops. A family might easily blow 30 minutes for a rest stop which would be enough time in the case of the Leaf for a full charge from dead flat. That would still be an hour or so of driving and 1/2 hour of rest stop. I usually drive much longer than that before stopping and will drive up to 3 hours before stopping and have gone as much as 5 hours non stop. I will say that I think Momentum Dynamics wireless charging arrangement will help quite a bit. Being able to just park over a charger and have the car automatically begin charging will make adoption much simpler.
Brian,
Adding outlets to light poles would be easy except that metering would be required. However, I assume that there would be some practical method to provide for metering; probably a meter could be activated via a credit or debit card.
One would think that an electric car could include a built-in charger which could operate from either 120 or 240 volts, up to 20 amperes. The voltage could be sensed automatically, but the driver would have to select the maximum current available from the outlet which would probably be 12.5 amperes or 20 amperes. The charger would have to handle only a maximum of 20 X 240 = 4800 watts, so the charger wouldn’t have to be very bulky. For faster charging, some other provision would have to be used, probably with the charger not in the car.
Wireless charging would have its advantages, but probably efficiency would be somewhat lower.
An electric car could use today’s battery technology then be upgraded to a more advanced battery technology when it becomes available. I also think that a battery exchange system could be used if there were only a very few battery configurations.
Just how common electric vehicles will become is impossible to predict. I’d guess that they will coexist with fuel burning vehicles running on a synthetic fuel. Even now, electric vehicles would make good sense in some situations. As I pointed out in another thread, at some airports large busses are used to transport passengers from the terminal to airplanes. The distances are very short, the speeds are low, and the busses spend more time loading and unloading passengers than they do driving, so there would be plenty of time to recharge between short trips. Garbage trucks are another possibility. In fact, there are many good applications for electric vehicles, even with today’s battery technology.