Why can’t someone build an electric car that doesn’t cost $100,000?
“I think it’s a shame that, given the energy situation we find ourselves in, that the most energy efficient car you can buy today is equivalent to a 1922 Austin 7 (which got around 50 mpg),” says Woodside resident Ian Wright, who plans to build high-performance all-electric cars and sell them for $100,000.
If his plans go well, he says he may build slower models, but finding a better, cheaper battery is a tough nut to crack.
He noted President Bush’s call in his State of the Union speech to end the nation’s “addiction” to oil.
“We are addicted to oil,” says Mr. Wright. “It is dangerous, we need to do something, and I’m doing something about it.”
Meanwhile, he says, the future belongs to hybrids and their cousins, plug-in hybrids, that allow local trips on an electric motor alone.
Professor and electric-car historian Michael Brian Schiffer of the University of Arizona agrees. “There would have to be a miracle battery to allow an all-electric car to be practical.”
On its Web site, General Motors reports that ” hybrid and fuel cell technologies … hold much greater mass-market appeal” than all-electric cars such as GM’s defunct EV1, a car that could go “55 to 95 miles (on) a 5 to 6 hour charge.”
The EV1 “was an excellent car,” says Palo Alto resident David Cole, who is active in electric vehicle circles and owns an electrified MG that runs on 12 car batteries that must be replaced every three years.
GM gave up too soon, he says. Advances in battery technology need persistence in order to build large enough markets to create economies of scale, he says.
Hydrogen fuel-cells are a fashionable future alternative to gasoline, but everyone interviewed for this story said the low power of hydrogen, the energy needed to purify and transport it, and the carbon dioxide produced by the process all combine to undermine its advantages.
