April 21, 2009

The government last week proposed a £5,000 incentive to purchase an electric car.  This is the most eye grabbing part of their commitment to cleaning up UK transport system and shows once again, their lack of thought about and understanding of the issues that are at hand. 

The issues that they are trying to overcome can really be broken down into one goal, for two reasons.  We need to use less fuel in our motoring; to create less pollution and to make the remaining fuel we have last longer.  The use of battery operated cars seems to have become the favourite among decision makers of the world, but could this be a case of putting all of your eggs in one basket?  It’s had extensive investment from the Japanese giants Honda and Toyota and with their hybrid cars is starting to show a return on that investment, but is it the best way to reduce our emissions and consumption?

The problems that cars powered by electricity alone fall two broad divisions; ability and desire.  The ability to provide an electric car that is comparable to a conventionally powered engine still seems to be some way off.  Also regardless of practicality, people don’t really want one.  Say electric vehicle to people and they automatically think "milk float", and there’s no desire to drive one of those! 
This lack of appetite from the motoring public is why Business Secretary Lord Mandelson was rolled out saying: "When people see the electric car - the speed, the lack of noise - they are going to fall in love with it."  Only time will tell if they can sell it but the government have a mountain to climb in persuading the motoring public to put the fuel pump down.

Even if the government can make the electric car look and feel glamorous they still have to convince the buying public that they are going to last.  People are simply not buying anything at the moment.  They’re putting off big purchases just to see if the prices are at the bottom yet.  As the cars are not proven it’s likely that people in large numbers will wait to see how a new product performs over time before committing large amounts of money towards their purchase.  If people are not buying new, traditionally powered cars at the moment, it seems blindly optimistic to expect that they will embrace new and unproven technology in mass numbers.

If we look at what the government is proposing it’s certainly significant, committing to set aside £250 million to the project.  But that even large level of investment looks like it will yield little fruit.  As RAC spokesman Stephen Glaister pointed out: "If the whole £250m were divided up so £5,000 is allocated per person, this would only put an extra 50,000 electric cars on the road - out of an annual total of some 2.7 million cars sold in the UK,".  Add to this the infrastructure that’s needed to make these electric cars practical; charging points and places to refuel, and the money set aside looks paltry, certainly not enough to accomplish what it’s attempting.

If the electric car seems like an expensive red herring what other options do we have open to explore?  Many cars are now offering much more impressive economy figures than in previous years.  BMW offer a good example of this, their 320d model returns 58 mpg on the combined cycle, compared with the 65 mpg that the Toyota Prius boasts.  If we look at this in greater detail we can see that the 320d returns 68 mpg on the extra urban part of its fuel cycle, compared to the 67 mpg of the Prius, so over long journeys you’d find slightly better fuel economy from the German model. 

Obviously the Prius has both battery and petrol motors to drive it so we’re not really comparing like for like, but when you consider the time and effort that has been spent to get the Prius to where it is today it gives a good indication of the size of task the government are trying to achieve, and why it is fanciful to think that they’re going to accomplish it.  If conventionally powered cars offer similar fuel economy to hybrid motors, with better performance what is the benefit of the hybrid?

Aside their performance, two of the main issues that need to be overcome for battery powered cars are that of charging the battery and the amount of driving that can be done on one full charge.  The current limit seems to be 40-60 miles on a charge and this can often take several hours.  This means that you can’t drive long distances in an electric car.  Which in turn means that we can’t expect regular car drivers to make the trade over to an electric only vehicle as it’s not practical.

The UK offers other solutions which the government may be able to find better returns from.  The car maker Trident developed a roadster last year which offered supercar performance with city car economy.  The Iceni uses a big diesel engine which it runs at very low revs and puts that output through a torque multiplication system.  Using this existing technology it’s able to return 108 mpg (no that’s not a misprint), at 30 mph and still boast 0-60 in 4 seconds and a 200 mph top speed.

There are other, again British, companies that are offering viable products to help squeeze more work from the increasingly finite fuel reserves.  One such company is ITM power who specialise in the use of hydrogen as a fuel.  ITM has developed a hydrogen kit that can be used with a petrol engine to power a car using hydrogen as a fuel.  The advantage with burning hydrogen as the combustible in an engine is that the only by product from the combustion process is water. 

ITM estimate the cost of converting your car to running dual petrol and hydrogen at £1000, but they are not available on general sale at the moment.  They have been developed with a 25-30 mile tank, but this tank is an off the peg model, that hasn’t been designed for purpose, so they’re confident of offering a longer range with any further development of the product.

The problem of converting water to Hydrogen does to some extent mirror that of charging a battery pack from the national grid, in that it’s no greener a solution if the power is generated from a coal fired power station.  ITM do offer a solar powered charging option but that presents an extra cost.  All this doesn't take into account the fact that driving the car would feel the same using hydrogen instead of petrol as a combustible, so the culture shift would be smaller, making it easier for the motoring public to swallow.

This highlights the confused nature of the proposals.  Do the government really think that buying an extra car for those short journeys into town, but keeping your bigger, more practical car for the weekend is going to be a ‘green’ use of resources?  The battery option is surely not just a case of putting all of our eggs in one basket but putting them in the wrong basket completely.  Given the drive to convince motorists that really an electric car is OK to drive surely it would be easier to invest in technology that would make better use of what we currently use?  It’s a smaller culture shift.

If we took the £250 million sum being talked about and offered 500,000 car owners the option of a half price conversion if they committed to purchase a home charging station.  Then maybe offered a scheme where they were compelled to donate spare hydrogen generated over night into a pool of hydrogen that other users could access then it would further incentivise people to take the scheme on.  The resulting investment could help ITM develop a longer range tank with maybe 150 miles of hydrogen in.  This would give motorists the option of the first 150 miles both fuel cost and emissions free, every day, which would see the costs of running a car plummet and the amount of fuel used drop similarly.

500,000 cars converted to run most of their miles on Hydrogen represents nearly 20% of the nation’s cars and the hydrogen pool would be an effective way to make people feel part of a cultural change.  It’s certainly likely to do more than spending hours waiting a charging station in one of the few towns and cities that offer them trying to get your car ready to get you home.  Also if there was a pool of cheap or free hydrogen for those that have converted their cars at the full price of £1000 then it’s hard not to see more people taking it on.

The combustible hydrogen solution looks to be the easiest to sell to the public, but would render diesel cars somewhat obsolete as they wouldn’t be able to use the hydrogen technology.  But if we were able to produce diesel cars that offered 100 mpg around town then they would be cheap to run and offer low emissions.  This revolution could even see a move back to diesel being primarily used for industrial and work vehicles with petrol and hydrogen taking on domestic motoring.  The industrial and work vehicles could use torque multiplication technology to see them achieving more from their power, cutting both costs and emissions.

This definitely looks to be a more likely way to see a culture shift towards a low carbon economy, without forcing change upon motorists.  It coerces drivers into using the new technology and rewards them by reducing their motoring costs.  Surely that’s the best way to affect a change on motoring culture and get us on the road to a low carbon transport network.

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