7th
#ElectricCar — A Recent History
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, electric vehicles (EVs) were all the rage.
If you could afford them.
Then as now, mass adoption was hindered by battery availability, performance, range and price. Henry Ford and his assembly line focused their engineering might on the internal combustion engine and the rest is history.
One hundred years later, EVs are back. Over the past year, three major automakers—Mitsubishi, Nissan and Ford—have committed to put more than a token pilot test fleet on American roads.
But supply constraints still stand in the way. Let’s explore.
Tesla, the speciality manufacturer from California, placed its luxe, all-electric Roadster in limited production in 2008 to rave reviews. Its rocket-like performance and style won wide praise. But the price, pushing well past six figures, made the Tesla Roadster a millionaire’s toy.
The U.S. Federal Government buoyed the flagging efforts of electric vehicle manufacturers by creating what amounts to a $7,500 Federal Income Tax credit for most 100% electric vehicles. This benefit puts a midsize electric vehicle within the budget of most middle class families—if you consider total cost of ownership.
This is non-trivial. An electric car’s monthly loan payment may be $200 or $300 more per month versus a similarly-sized conventional vehicle. The fact that we Americans pour at least that much money down our gas caps is, counterintuitively, easy to overlook. As we become more sophisticated consumers—the total cost of ownership will need to be carefully calculated and better explained to the masses.
Mitsubishi
Several voices in the blogosphere note that there is room in the market for a smaller, more economical all-electric car. Mitsubishi intends to fill that niche with its i series, which, starting at around $30,000 runs about $10,000 less than the pack.
Its modestly-sized, four-seat, rear motor, rear-wheel drive configuration are key differentiators helping keep the i’s center-of-gravity, and price, low. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in “early 2012” but that date may slip.
Nissan
Nissan began shipping limited quantities of its 100-mile range Nissan Leaf in Q4 2010. Californians and a small number of Tennesseans were abuzz, and the rest of the world waited. And waited. And waited.
The “reservation list” mounted. This just to get onto yet another waiting list, Nissan’s $99 refundable deposit queue, itself the gateway to actually placing a custom order in advance of buying the car for real. More about this process in a future post.
Cars started really rolling off the assembly line in early 2011 at Nissan’s plant in Oppama, Japan, when a major earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck, closing the plant for weeks.
In late summer 2011, Nissan began opening its reservation list past a handful of initial test markets to several dozen U.S. states. Still quantities are limited, and delivery times extend upwards of four months as of this writing.
A Smyrna, Tennessee-based plant is scheduled for a late-2012 opening that intends to more than triple Nissan’s Leaf-building capacity.
Ford
In January 2011, Ford revealed the long-awaited Ford Focus Electric, a re-imagining of their popular compact. Underscoring the point of technology in the announcement, Ford unveiled its entrant at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas rather than the Detroit Auto Show the following week—a first for a Big Three automaker.
The Focus Electric, at the time of its formal announcement in late 2010 was expected to be widely available in its 19 launch markets by the end of 2011, and nationally in 2012. As of this writing in November 2011, only a handful have been delivered in “preliminary markets” of New York Metro and California.
This week Ford finally announced its pricing on the Focus Electric—the first mainstream EV with a list price of $40,000.
Looking back now at Ford’s big splash 10 months ago, it’s easy to imagine that the lonely Focus EV prototype on the CES stage with CEO Alan Malally limped its way to the main stage just as Preston Tucker’s eponymous sedan did in Jeff Bridge’s 1988 period piece.
But looking back through my notes and photography more critically, Ford was saying something more than simply, here’s our new electric car.
Instead, it was: here is our Ford Focus re-imagined with six different flavors of drivetrains—all designed to be shipped to any market in the world. That’s a first.
And while 100% plug-ins are beginning to steal some spotlight from hybrids, what is abundantly clear is that alternative fuels—in many different varieties—will be the market reality for the foreseeable future.
So What?
In 2011, most discussions concerning the practical choice of owning an electric car centered on the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt: a plug-in hybrid with a 30-or-so mile electric range and a standard four-cylinder engine to get you the rest of the way. This was the default conversation because, as the story above illustrates, it was the only game in town, and for most, it was only an academic question at that. The comparison between these two vehicles was as much a discussion of their drivetrain’s strengths and limitations than anything qualitative about the cars in the usual sense.
In discussing the state of affairs on EV’s battery range, I described in a prior post the feature you didn’t realize you pay for (TFYDRYPF). These first entrants to the 100% electric race—the i, Leaf, and Focus Electric—won’t win the Cannonball Run, but trips to work and the supermarket are surely within their economical and comfortable reach.
Despite the hype, the consumer excitement and the long lines, manufacturers struggle to get out of the starting gates. Was this modest proposition more than the auto industry could reasonably pull off?
Looking ahead in this series, we’ll spend more time discussing the specifics of actually buying one of these vehicles and dive into the subtle societal changes afoot to accommodate these new wheels.
This is the second in a series on the state of electric vehicles in 2011.
« Part 1 of the Electric Car Series: “On the Bleeding Edge”
Part 3 of the Electric Car Series: “Nissan Leaf Test Drive” »
Part 4 of the Electric Car Series: “Charged Up” »
Part 5 of the Electric Car Series: “Mindfulness” »
Part 6 of the Electric Car Series: “Difficult Conversations” »
Part 7 of the Electric Car Series: “Secret Message: Like Really Cheap Gas” »
Part 8 of the Electric Car Series: “Getting Legislative” »
