ARE MASS MARKET “TOTAL ELECTRIC” CARS ALWAYS VAPORWARE?

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At the Wall Street Jounrnal’s March 2009 ECO:nomics conference, Ford Motor Company boss Alan Mulally proclaimed "In 10 years, 12 years, you are going to see a major portion of our portfolio move to electric vehicles."


Some automotive journalists are skeptical of this claim. Veteran auto journalist Jerry Flint, for one.

In an insightful piece at Forbes.com entitled “The Myth Of The Electric Car” Jerry Flint recounts earlier top-level prognostications about the Electr-o-matic Fords in your future.

In 1966, FoMoCo. “Whiz Kid” Arjay Miller announced “Ford would be fully producing an electric car in five to 10 years.”

When Flint cornered a FoMoCo executive on Miller’s claim years later, the Glass Houser replied "Jerry, you've misunderstood. That's a running target. It's always five to 10 years away."

Flint opines that “There still are three obvious problems with the dream of an electric car. Range. Recharging time. Battery cost.”

Flint is also skeptical about the cost and life-span of quick-charging batteries with sufficient amperage for an electric car.

As anyone knows who has ever seen engineering students hack together a Formula SAE-based “Formula Hybrid” racer or one of the “FutureTrucks” for the old Department of Energy-sponsored competition, there are no shortage of schemes for electrification.

The real problems are: (a) getting down the price point to mass market viability; and (b) making the technology daily-driver safe, transparent, and practical.

Currently, production of electrified vehicles is more about making an aspirational statement than generating a profit. The bean counters say that virtually none of the electrified vehicles on the market are profitable.

Obviously, dramatic increases in energy costs could affect operational viability. But as we’ve seen in recent years, such price spikes kill the economy and the overall demand for new vehicles.

Still some hybridization is inevitable as Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards are jacked up to 35 m.p.g. or beyond and if we’re to avoid a fleet of sluggish 1-1.5 liter "huggable, smiley" microcars. And hybridization is perhaps the only way to preserve traditional high-performance and sports cars in a world gone mad over the anthropogenic “climate change religion.”

So Flint is partially right.

He’s right that pure, interstate-cruising “Reddy Kilowatt” electromobiles are still impractical as mass market products . . . and despite all of the Teslas and Chang'an Ben Bens and GM EV-1s and the speculations of Neil Young, the five-to-ten year moving target will likely remain.

Certainly a small niche of “true believers” will be willing to put up with the “range, recharging time, and battery cost” of silent, undiluted “Willie Wiredhand” motoring.
But 99% of us won’t.

Barring some technological breakthrough or a further financial collapse, “mild” electrical assist of internal combustion powerplants – avoiding the limits of “range, recharging time, and battery cost” – is certainly something that will necessarily follow Mulally’s timetable.

Most certainly, if electric Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) are perfected in motorsports, such systems will likely trickle down to street vehicles. Hopefully, Ford Racing will be searching out opportunities for motorsports development of such systems and will influence sanctioning bodies to legalize KERS and "electric nitrous."

The open question is can Ford make enough money building doing that? Or is profitability another one of those five-to-ten year moving targets?